松岡明芳, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
I am embarking on a change of course — or at least a slight course-correction.
When I started this ‘stack I was not entirely clear on its purpose. Many of the posts here are quite experimental.
I’ve had much grander ambitions for my writing and intellectual activities, but I didn’t believe that I’d be able to pursue them until a few years from now, at the very least.
However, writing out the last three weeks worth of posts, and discussing them with the handful of people who were interested, has triggered a whole cascade of thought processes in my mind.
I cannot see the entire path to my end goal (that would probably be impossible for anyone alive in the early twenty-first century), but I can now see a clear path to a whole chain of worthwhile intermediate goals.
One key insight: it is not necessary to completely understand all of the ambitious philosophical and scientific ideas I’ve explored over my past few years of wandering — I only need to identify the essential ideas, their interconnections, and to ensure their connection to observable reality is as clear and comprehensive as possible.
This is still a daunting task, but an achievable one.
My provisional goal is therefore to spend the next one to three months synthesising the various philosophical and scientific threads that I’ve uncovered. These include ideas from Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, Edward O. Wilson, Abraham Maslow, and a few other thinkers. Provisionally, these ideas include: a clear definition of objectivity — the identification of a set of basic philosophical ideas — consilience and the unity of the sciences — self-actualisation and free-thinking — and a few others in that vein.
Even if I strictly limited myself to integrating a very small set of these ideas, I would still be undertaking a colossal task, one that was almost certainly overambitious.
However, my task is different — theoretically harder, but practically easier, as I do not need to define a complete and definitive philosophical integration of the ideas I’m referring to.
My task is different, because my primary goal is not to define the grand integration, but instead to identify the key interconnections between the fundamental ideas I’ve listed, and to more specific ideas and insights from various fields in which I have some specialist knowledge.
Another insight: for those who specialise in mathematics, physics, or similar fields, it is easier to demonstrate exceptional ability at a young age, and thereby embark on a career proportionate to one’s talents. (For example: if a young physicist or mathematician successfully completes some significant research work in their early twenties, and catches the eye of the right mentors, they may well be able to work on hard problems with proper social and institutional support very early on in their careers.)
Mathematics, physics, and similar areas are high-paradigm fields. In such fields, foundational ideas and methodologies are relatively well-understood, and so researchers in those areas can attempt to tackle specific problems from a very young age. (This varies over time — it might be difficult for young physicists today to access the opportunities that somebody like Oppenheimer had — but the basic pattern is still there.)
In the past I was drawn towards relatively low-paradigm fields (like history) and medium-paradigm fields (like entrepreneurship) — where foundational ideas and methodologies are much murkier and more controversial.
It is difficult to make any significant contribution to humanity’s understanding of history, for example, without a deep understanding of human nature, society, and the world, and it is difficult to obtain this understanding before the age of, say, thirty.
Similarly, although people succeed in entrepreneurship in their twenties or even in their late teens, significant entrepreneurial success requires not only technical and creative abilities, but also business savvy and political skills. These cannot be easily acquired without a painful and intense learning period: several years of extreme struggles, along with many humiliating (and often public) intermediate failures before achieving an uncertain success. A fortuitous upbringing — such as growing up surrounded by wealth and by people with significant business experience — as was the case for Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and a few others — might accelerate this learning process. However, even those silver-spooners had to pay their dues.
I seriously considered becoming a startup founder, but eventually decided against it, as the world of high-level entrepreneurship — with venture capital funding and so on — seemed to be a dangerous machine that demanded total commitment. It was not enough to be vaguely interested — I knew that I could not play that game unless I was willing to let it take over my life, and I was not.
After deciding against startups, I also seriously considered studying history at an academic level, but academia held no strong appeal for me. Since the age of twenty-six I’ve held down a “provisional career” as a software developer. This was interesting, creative work, that paid well and gave me the opportunity to work on many worthwhile projects. However, I’ve always known that it was not my dream.
I have many interests in seemingly disparate fields and it’s only very recently that I’ve begun to see a practical route by which they can be interconnected.
Anyway: my task for the next few months will be to begin the process of integrating the most important ideas I’ve discovered, with various significant ideas from my other areas of interest (chiefly history, technology, and “understanding the world”).
This is still a very grandiose idea. So my proximate objective is actually: clarify the exact ideas that I wish to investigate in depth, and outline a provisional set of interconnections between those ideas that I can explore in greater detail.
There’s no way that I can fully interconnect all of the ideas I’m interested in within a few months, but I can begin outlining ways in which they could be interconnected. Practically, this might take the form of writing a series of long-form essays that could form the first-draft for some chapters of a future book.
Writing this all out has resulted in a very weighty article. To sum up all of the above I will ask myself a simple question:
Why am I doing this?
The answer is: because I am convinced that I’ve discovered a set of ideas that are true, good, and important.
Because I believe that to date no-one has offered the world a clear and cohesive perspective on why those ideas are important and how they can be interconnected.
Because I see many, many, intelligent, creative, ambitious people, on Twitter (in the right circles) and elsewhere, who are exploring these ideas tangentially, but remain unaware, or only dimly aware, of vast oceans of discoverable truths that could be explored.
I will write more, tomorrow and over the next few months, on the ideas I’ve referenced above and their interconnections.
My greatest hope is to inspire others to connect these ideas to their own specialist subjects or creative activities. If I can find half-a-dozen fellow travellers, able and willing to embark on similarly ambitious journeys, I will regard this new undertaking as a success.
Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons