Somebody once said, “I write to discover what I think.” A cursory DuckDuckGo search did not yield the source of this quote, but it really does encapsulate the main reason why I’ve decided to launch a blog. For a while now, I have been considering the idea of launching a podcast, and although that is still something I would like to do some day, I am highly aware of my limitations in terms of what I know…

Thus, this blog was born.

With this blog, I will have the opportunity to flesh out what I believe to be true morally, philosophically, intellectually, and in many other domains of inquiry. (Of course, the concept of truth can be incredibly difficult to pin down, but I’ll leave that for another time…) By fleshing out those truths as precisely as I can, I am also hoping to show people how to think critically, how to recognize and avoid cognitive biases and, more broadly, how to better make sense of what’s going in the world. Naturally, I’ll also write about other things that interest me that may not directly relate to these kinds of ideas.

I’ve also recently done some research on various podcast hosts including Ezra Klein, Sam Harris, and Sean Carroll, and discovered that they all started off with a blog before having a podcast. Perhaps I should follow suit!

Another reason I launched this blog was to see if I could create a hobby that was useful while also being something that I enjoyed doing. For the former, I’m willing to give this a shot to see how useful something like this can be. As for the latter, writing does give me a deep sense of meaning, and I do thoroughly enjoy structuring my ideas in this fashion. I’ve also been meaning to get into writing somehow, but never knew if I would be good at writing fiction. Maybe for now, this is the right path for me… but never say never!

For a couple of years now, I’ve been listening to various authors and pundits, including but not limited to Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, and Robert Anton Wilson. Although these three have much in common, there are still some marked differences in their various philosophies, but I still learned a lot from each of them.

From Harris, I learned the urgent necessity for human beings to improve the ways in which we have conversations and that safeguarding our civilization and the values we cherish actually hinges on this. It doesn’t only hinge on this, of course, but it definitely is one way we could fail to survive and actualize our full potential as a species. Improving the ways in which we have conversations and converge on opinions by having productive exchanges of ideas is critically important and we all have a clear moral duty to improve in this domain.

From Peterson, I learned a few things, namely that one’s sense of meaning is directly proportional to the responsibility one bears in life, which may be the most important (or at least common) lesson people draw from his lectures and podcasts. I’ve also learned that there are two fundamental worlds we are continually contending with, the world of things best described by science, and the world of experience (or the phenomenological world) best described by stories, particularly mythological stories. These stories contain wisdom that is likely far deeper than we realize, given that the information encoded in them are the result of human beings watching each other act for very long periods of time and then encapsulating those values in stories. At the end of the day, every single one of us embodies a system of belief, whether we are conscious of it or not. Given that some stories we have are thousands of years old, there really is no telling how dense the information is in those stories and to what degree our civilization is grounded in these stories. I believe this is what Peterson means when he refers to the “metaphorical substrate” that our culture is ensconced in.

As for Wilson, I suppose the deepest lesson I learned from him is that we are never truly in contact with “reality” given the fact that we must filter “reality” through our nervous system. Thus, the only claims we should be making about the world should be on our perception of the world, rather than on the world as such. For instance, instead of saying “my friend is happy,” I should be saying “my friend seems happy to me.” (This variation of the English language is called English prime, or E-prime.) This seemingly trivial difference is actually grounded in Alfred Korzybski’s rigorous theory of general semantics and allows us to speak much more precisely about the world we experience.

Anyway, my ultimate goal with this blog (and with my podcast, and with all creative and intellectual endeavors I will undertake throughout my life) is to set as much order as I can from the chaos currently permeating our society. Human beings have been lucky enough to survive in this world for a while now, and it seems to me that we are approaching a highly consequential inflection point in our moral and intellectual evolution, perhaps the most consequential point we have ever crossed… I truly believe that our potential as a species is much higher than most of us imagine it to be and I hope to the core of my being that this blog will contribute to the actualization of that potential.

Until next time!

Jo