Letters Remain

Category: philosophy

  • Rules for My Unborn Son

    Like David, I don’t think all of the rules for my unborn son are necessarily ‘good’, but if he followed them all I’d still be happy. 300: Surprise your dad at the office. Trust me, whatever I’m doing is not as important as you. via Link Banana

  • Interviews on Sun Tzu’s Art of War

    Sonshi bills itself as “the original online resource for Sun Tzu’s Art of War“. Of particular note is their collection of columns, essays and interviews featuring—among others—Guy Kawasaki, Josh Waitzkin, and this from Robert Greene, author of 48 Laws of Power and 33 Strategies of War: If I could simplify the whole game of power…

  • The Origins of Progress

    In order to find out what our world will look like in the not so distant future, Kevin Kelly questions what drives progress? What is the origin of our progress? There are several factors but chief among them is the invention of what we loosely call science. The ancient world accumulated many fabulous inventions [that]…

  • Why We Can’t Imagine Death

    Jesse Bering of Scientific American argues that, due to the very nature of our consciousness, almost everyone has a tendency to imagine the mind continuing to exist after the death of the body. People in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to…

  • Blogging the Bible: A Philosophical Primer

    A few years ago I was in a discussion with one of the more intelligent people I have had the pleasure to meet: a Ph.D. philosophy student at the University of Cambridge. Substantial parts of his thesis had to consist of original philosophical ideas, and this meant a large portion of his ‘revision’ consisted of…

  • The Growth of Scientific Knowledge and Scientific Ignorance

    Noting that knowledge is growing at an exponential rate, Kevin Kelly argues that thanks to science, our ignorance is growing exponentially faster. If knowledge is growing exponentially we should be quickly running out of puzzles. Because of our accelerating rate of learning, a few writers declared we must be in the age of “the end…

  • Fight Club’s 8 Rules to Live By

    Simple yet excellent. Lateral Action presents 8 Fight Club quotes everyone (not just ‘creators’) should live by. At its core, Fight Club is about living the life you truly want to live, and the hard path to getting there. Tyler helps the story’s nameless hero (usually referred to as Jack) down that path to enlightenment,…

  • Drugs for Optimising Morality

    This month’s British Journal of Psychiatry has an interesting essay on ‘moral pharmacology’. Mind Hacks picks up the story: [Sean Spence] argues that while most attention has been focused on ‘smart drugs’ and cognitive enhancement, medication is already being subtly used to improve ethical behaviour and we should prepare for a revolution in ‘moral pharmacology’.…

  • Animals Dealing With Death: Just Like Us or Unaware?

    New York Times science journalist, Natalie Angier, tackles the question of how various animals deal with death. Among the social insects, the need for prompt corpse management is considered so pressing that there are dedicated undertakers, workers that within a few minutes of a death will pick up the body and hoist or fly it…

  • Harder Choices Matter Less

    Advice on choosing between two difficult choices, from Overcoming Bias. Well… if you can’t decide between them, they must be around equally appealing, right? Equally balanced pros and cons? So the choice must matter very little – you may as well flip a coin. The alternative is that the pros and cons aren’t equally balanced,…