The Wayward Axolotl

A YouTube user named “Conundrum” posted a series of questions on the video Efilism: Arguing the Argument . I will answer them here. Each question begins with a quote from me, followed by his questions/criticisms. I will put the quote from me in bold font. Pain is the experience of increased desire. So… when you have a leg blown off by a land mine and you scream from pain, what exactly do you desire, apart from the pain to stop? Desire for what has increased? You don’t desire for the pain to stop. That way of thinking about emotion is fundamentally flawed. It’s a kind of homunculus fallacy. Desire doesn’t start out as being “for” anything. It is preconscious. If you break your leg, the nerves in your leg send information to your brain that simply conveys that something bad happened to your leg. They have location information and they signal “injury”. This then generates the motivation to do something. It’s not the conscious recognition that your leg is broken that ca...

Morality has the following components: Collective values The individual internalization of collective values The assumption that collective values are objective, and thus “moral” A folk theory of morality Individual and collective moral myths To understand morality, you need to understand how those components fit together into a system. In this essay, I will describe each component and how it relates to the others. Collective Values As individuals, we naturally make value judgments about what is good or bad for ourselves. For example, a man might want to marry a beautiful woman. He views that outcome as good for himself. In other words, he values it positively. Individual values define what the individual views as good for himself and bad for himself. Individual values are perspective-dependent. They are tied to the perspective of an individual. Different people make different value judgments. Individual values are often in co...

A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic. — Josef Stalin, paraphrase Over the last week, there have been mass protests and riots in the United States and around the world. Buildings and cars have been burned. Stores have been looted. People have been injured and killed. The reason? A mass delusion. This was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a rational response to real injustice or real social issues. It was a crowd mania. The spark that ignited this insanity was the death of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody, while bystanders filmed his arrest. He was resisting arrest, and he was placed on the ground and pinned down by three officers while a fourth officer kept bystanders away. One officer had a knee on the back of George Floyd’s neck. They kept him pinned down for 8 minutes, even after he had become unresponsive. He appears to have died while pinned down, although not from direct asphyxiation. The death of Geor...

Every now and then, I encounter someone who raises the free will | determinism paradox in a discussion about a choice. It usually goes something like this: Me: We have to make a choice. Either we regulate our population and genome ourselves, or nature will do it for us, with war, disease and famine. Joe Shmoe: Your assumptions are wrong. There is no free will, so we don’t really have a choice. I imagine Joe delivering this brilliant insight with a smug little smile, as if it is the ultimate “gotcha”. In this essay, I will explain why Joe’s comment is an absurd non sequitur. I will also talk more generally about the relationship between free will and determinism. First, what is the point of bringing up the free will | determinism paradox in the middle of a discussion about something else? The real motivation is to derail the discussion, while asserting one’s intellectual superiority. The intended meaning is something like this: You idiots think you have fr...

We need a new religion or ideology that meets the following criteria: It provides a foundation for a sustainable civilization. It provides individuals with a functional way of life. It isn’t fundamentally deceptive. It has a rational, philosophical basis that is accessible to intelligent people. It can be reduced to a few simple ideas that can be understood by ordinary people. It has good memetic properties. To that end, I propose a new ideology organized around two core values, one for the individual and one for the collective: Reproduction: The individual purpose of life is reproduction. In the short term, this means having children. In the long term, it means having many descendants. Civilization: Our collective purpose is perpetuating and advancing our civilization. Our civilization is “us”, but it is not just a collection of individuals. It is a complex system that has biological, cultural and social components. W...

If you make content and put it on the internet, you will get criticism. I divide critics into three categories: Good faith critics: They are polite, and constructive dialogue is possible. Ideological critics: They are rude and aggressive. Constructive dialogue is not possible. They typically insult and run away. Advice trolls: They are explicitly polite but implicitly insulting — passive-aggressive. Constructive dialogue is not possible. They attach like parasites and drain your time and energy. This essay is about the advice troll. The advice troll poses as someone offering constructive criticism, but he is just role-playing as an authority figure. He thinks of himself as an intellectual, but he is too lazy, stupid, and/or cowardly to create content of his own. Instead, he criticizes the work of others. This is a way for him to assert authority. The act of criticizing presupposes that the critic has superior knowledge or intelligence, so by criti...

UBI stands for “Universal Basic Income”. In its simplest form, UBI is a direct payment to every citizen every month. It would (at least in theory) replace other government programs that alleviate poverty, such as means-tested welfare. It is growing in popularity as a political proposal. In this essay, I’m going to make the case against UBI. The basic argument for UBI is that we already agree on the existence of a social safety net, and UBI would be simpler and fairer than existing welfare schemes. As it is typically conceived, UBI would just be a direct payment from the government to all members of a society, without the complex bureaucracy that administers means-tested welfare schemes. Because it would be universal rather than means-tested, it would also eliminate or reduce certain perverse incentives of existing welfare schemes. Let’s consider some of the problems with means-tested welfare scheme. They require means-testing on an individual basis, so they need a bureaucracy to admi...