Essays and Thoughts
Attached above is a map I used to conceptualize the problem. This post talks about the left third of the map. To answer the question, What Is Consciousness? It will be well to probe into two questions: What problem(s) is consciousness the solution to? (Which can be rephrased, more dramatically, as, What is the Human … Continue reading The Human Condition and Consciousness
Guilt, I think, is one of the transcendentals of life, what Karl Jaspers calls the Ultimate Situation—what is inescapably thrown with oneself into existence (if I sound too pessimistic, here I write with the irredeemable guilt of spending the last 23 minutes of my life on YouTube watching god-knows-what). It rises out of a natural … Continue reading Guilt
—This was written before sleep in that weird state where nothing is inhibited and word just flows out of one's fingers without regard for its content. Hence the melodrama, and the sense of (false?) pathos in the words. Originally advice to my good friend Josh who has, recently, fallen prey to Football Manager 2021. Extended … Continue reading What is Hell?
David Foster Wallace is the writer of tedium. And this is why, perhaps, he has struck a chord in the modern imagination, gathering such a large cult following (one of whom is yours truly). He sees people engaging in diversions—through drugs, TV, unlimited consumption—and sees again the same people taking an ironic stance towards everything, … Continue reading Tedium & David Foster Wallace
"Better Never to Have Been," is the slogan of anti-natalism. Procreation is immortal and selfish. It is better for the human race to be extinguished. We have a pro-natal bias that has to be corrected (especially in a democracy, because the more people that are born under a certain demographic group the more power they … Continue reading Anti-Natalism
Resentment (or, to be fancy, ressentiment—signifying the technical Nietzschean definition for the term), is a horribly special emotion. If, for Heidegger, authentic boredom and anxiety fundamentally attunes us to the world, then resentment leads us eternally astray. Resentment is anti-life. It denials rather than affirms appearance. It is not hatred, anger, or envy, and differs … Continue reading Ressentiment
Kierkegaard: "Hope is a pretty girl, who slips away from one’s grasp." And again (!), "He who will only hope is cowardly. He who wants only to recollect is a voluptuary. But he who wills repetition, he is a man, and the more emphatically he has endeavoured to understand what this means, the deeper he … Continue reading Hope Contra Kierkegaard
The foremost imagery that I associate with the later Heidegger's analysis of technology is the Mine. A place where the logic of "challenging" nature, measuring the resources available, the most efficient ways to mine, the instrumental value of the stones, thus seeing everything as a "standing reserve" to be used and exhausted, "enframing" nature in … Continue reading Minecraft and Heidegger
The most interesting type of love is the purely formal one. A contentless transcendental object=X that is the condition for the possibility of my elusive desire, of my overwhelming, burning, wrenching, parching, swarming thought about an other, not for any fact, any empirical discovery about them, but about them qua themselves. To love them with … Continue reading Love. Rethought.
(A series of ethical reflections after realizing how incredibly unlikely I am to be where I am) I am fortunate to not have been in the Chinese educational system, designed to produce mandarins. The more I think about it, the more it horrifies me. You are just your score. And your score at a single … Continue reading (Chinese Education)U(Ethical Reflections)
Warren's Brain Dumps 