The Eternal Questions
I've had a text file by this name sitting on my desktop for a while. It's a big list. Here's an excerpt:
- love and hate. how do you explain them? what inspires them?
- humility and selflessness, and evil, sin, and pride
- knowledge, and wisdom
- what is god? christianity, spinoza/buddhism, hiduism, taoism and pantheism
- faith as something reassuring
- free will and determinism
- redemption and salvation
- suffering and misunderstanding
- epistemology: what is the foundation of logic? does every epistemology making a negative claim contradict itself? what axioms do we start with? do we take in everything, or a subset?
- desire
- can we overcome confirmation bias?
- what can we do? for the starving? the hurt? the egotistical?
- interdependence and independence: is one an illusion?
- do we have an essensce? why do we feel like we do?
- morality/shoulds/"supposed to". origins and humanism
- the nature of time. cosmological origins and the present (is time an illusion?)
- evolution
- the brain and consciousness
- government and anarchy
- originality and newness
- naivete and optimism
- sincerity
- do people change? what causes people to change?
2 comments:
Man, I remember that one time we talked about free will and determinism for hours in the Union. I'm still trying to remember what the crux of your argument was, and what the (admittedly awfully artificial) argument I had for free will and nondeterminism was (all I remember was that it had something to do with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and a certain way of walking that tree).
Yeah, I totally remember that. I still have the drawings in a sketchbook somewhere. I think today my perspective would be something like "We are no different than everything else -- so either believe that everything has free will or nothing has free will."
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