Aliens, Seatbelts, and the Coronavirus
There is always a gray zone between anxiety and wise precaution.
Capitalism can collapse but doesn’t have to inevitably like Marx thought.
After a few hours, the adults finish their intricate sand-city.
If you want democracy to survive and Capitalism to be its best form, then you should defend beauty.
Language is the culprit.
Hope Entails Expectation, but Expectation isn’t Hope
Mess with fire as little as you can.
Markets, law, and government all have a similar problem.
Ideas define practicality.
MAD Capitalism and Mixed Market Rationality
It’s rational to be invincible, but what if invincibility only benefits you?
If you skip the old books and go straight to the breaking news, it will probably just break you.
You Couldn’t Have Been Listening if You Don’t Think Like Me
If someone doesn’t change their views into yours, they must be closed-minded.
If you can’t tell if it’s true, ask whom it will help (but don’t assume that’s easy to determine).
School can train us to “always” wait for our feeling of being reasonable to be confirmed.
You are born in a theater and have never been outside...
If We Think for Ourselves Without Falsification, We’ll Probably Go Crazy.
Both crazy people and geniuses think for themselves. The difference is that a crazy person tries to verify their crazy ideas, while geniuses try to falsify them.
Arguing Hume Through a Wedding Venue
If I believe it’s going to rain today, it is rational for me to bring along my umbrella, but if it doesn’t rain, does that mean I acted illogically?
In Infinite Information Over Enough Time…
All ideas lacking internal contradiction will be discovered, plausible, intellectually dishonest to outright dismiss, and possibly wrong.
On Consciousness, Creativity, and Being
To talk about consciousness is to take your life into your own hands.
We almost always start the debating trying to argue a person "out" of a belief in free will.
Political Packages and Ultimatums
Expand Beyond “Left and Right” to include “Up and Down.”
Growth Can Be When All Ships Rise Together, but What if Growth Stops?
If “What Is the Meaning of My Life?” Doesn’t Work, Try “What Do I Find Beautiful?”
Look at beauty and increase your capacity to experience it. Meaning can be found indirectly.
On “How Do We Escape? by Justin Murphy and Johannes Niederhauser”
Our “towardness” to the world has changed: everything is a potential commodity for our online lives.
The Unexamined Life Isn’t Easy to Live
There’s better life insurance out there.
Story Is The Structure of Life and Fiction
"Fiction" and "false" are not always similes, which adds complexity.
Certainty Entails a Lot of Unintended Consequences
Certainty makes us fearful, fragile, anti-diverse, nihilistic, vulnerable to conspiracies, and hurts democracy.
Anxiety and Schrödinger’s Conceivability Structures
Today, we personally experiencing our lack of omniscience and the impossibility of particularizing general conceivability structures in large systems, and this entails existential consequences.
Memories are the conditions that make thought and finding patterns possible; without them, our lives live through us more than we live our lives.
Phenomenology as a Method for Avoiding Formalism
We need definitions and structures, but how can we create them without risking arbitrary restriction and oppression?
Structural Homomorphism in Argument
Failure to understand the “sharing of argumentative forms” leaves us defenseless against a way our minds seek to trick us.
It might not mean humility.
Short Pieces on Thinking About Thinking
This is a preview list of short pieces I wrote focused on “thinking about thinking,” mental models, epistemology, and the like...
On the Invasion of the Capitol and Our Brains
Why do we believe someone is behind everything?
Is Social Media a Crowded Movie Theater?
If we accept limiting free speech in a crowded space, then we need to have a hard conversation about social media.
Is There Ever Real Progress in Philosophy?
If the Great Conversation never ends, why bother?
Are There No Answers In Philosophy?
We are surrounded by questions we can only answer incompletely,
YouTube is accused of causing radicalization, but is “radicalization” even a useful category?
The problems we need to solve are much deeper.
Why Calls for Unity Don't Work
Until we achieve “substantive democracy,” replace “tolerance” with “humility,” accept possible vulnerability to moral monsters, and accept the impossibility of certainty, calls for unity will feel scripted.
“Talking” is about dinner, what we did today, how we’re feeling, etc. “Metatalking” is about why we thought it was good to do what we did today, why we felt x way when y happened, etc. Relationships, politics, and the like suffer without both.
Is It Good to Want to Be Missed?
Is it good to want people to miss us when we’re gone? Or is that selfish?
On Justification and Consequences to Others
Rationality Is Mostly About Making Good Bets
I Think, Therefore There Is Reason To Think
"That chair," "a chair," and "the idea of that/a chair."
Art Is a Source for Mental Models
Systems Think Before Systematically Thinking
If we work hard with the wrong tool, we won’t get much done.
Reality Handicaps Preventive Measures
It’s improbable humans will take preventive measures, especially if those measures are costly...
Economic Hardship, Resulting Extremism, and Mob Rule
Native Tongues and Native Worldviews
How we don’t fully know a language or fully believe what we have to translate — or at least don’t feel like it.
Why Do Madness and Genius Like to Tango?
Shouldn’t they share an inverse relationship?
We should focus on “being logical” more than “being intelligent.”
Essays
Without creativity, the artifex disappears. Once that occurs, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat must clash.
Inception, Dichotomies, and Freedom
If you claim you are not being incepted, you are only saying that because I claimed that you were.
In teaching theory, we risk rendering theory meaningless.
Metamentality and the Dismodern Self
Descartes famously said "I think; therefore, I am’;" today, it would be more appropriate to say "I think you think I think you think; therefore, I am."
Worry is something other people do. We never worry; we care.
Self-Delusion, the Toward-ness of Evidence, and the Paradox of Judgment
If we judge, we self-delude ourselves into an understanding of the world and those around us that lacks reality, yet the whole reason we judge is to determine what’s real.
Should We Get Rid of the Internet?
People will generate culture even if they aren’t capable, and if society doesn’t equip its citizens properly, the generated culture will be one that dehumanizes and destroys.
On “Integrating People of Color” by Bernard Hankins
Bernard Hankins argues that a nation without imag-i-nation will never cease to be a nation of dis-crim-i-nation
If I am happy, then nothing can take my happiness away. If I feel happy, it will last until I feel sad.
The higher the joy, the less likely there is a bubble in the system.
Off and on, without conscious thought, we cannot help but view everything as a potential tweet, Facebook post, and/or picture.
On Materialism, Purpose, and Discernment
Without purpose, materialism is unavoidable.
In recognizing that we are all (im)moral, we are all better equipped to live with it.
If there is ultimately no way to determine truth, then there is ultimately no way to assure our values won’t turn against us.
Whatever you are thinking about is not what you are thinking about.
If a person allowed others to use a car that the owner knew was unsafe...
What do I say when I say "I love you?"
Discussing that Crazy “A is A” Paper by O.G. Rose
G: Seemed like the paper wanted to say that ontology and logic are always married...
Everyone has a self, and hence all acts are self-ish and no act is totally self-less...
Why does history repeat? Why can art we create feel like a failure? Why...?
What do we say when we say, “I’m certain...?”
We understand what constitutes a cat through the idea of a cat, yet a cat is not its idea...
Why does one person find the case for x compelling while another finds the case against x convincing?
If I look at a window and think about my grandmother, I perceive the window, but I do not think about it.
Rationality is fundamentally incomplete and can only be balanced with a quest.
If I think “I’m hungry,” to say “I’m hungry” is to carry out sensualization.
Words orientate, and relative to that orientation, create/realize the world/future (of a speaker).
How do humans experience thinking? Is it willed or does it just appear?
We Make Our Votes, and Then Our Votes Make Us
We need to stop believing we can determine what people think and who they are based on how they vote.
If x is true but there is no evidence verifying x, then it is irrational, intellectually irresponsible, and correct to believe x.
Breaking up the college monopoly.
On particularity and how ethics without aesthetics is legalistic, inefficient, uninspiring, and risks totalitarianism.
Education can suggest in its medium that an educated person is someone who is good at trivia.
My present choices always redefine “always.”
What do we talk about when we talk about beauty?
Imagine someone will give you $10 for one hour of work. Now imagine that he will give you two hours of work if you agree to be paid $9 an hour...
On the logic and ontology of “ ‘A/(A-isn’t-A)’ is ‘A/(A-isn’t-A)’ (without B).”
Austin Farrer and the Problems of Verifiable Education
A person studies Karl Barth now to determine Barth’s theology, not what Barth was “on” when he wrote his theology and why...
The Protestant Work Ethic” Is Only Half the Story
When lacking sacramental ontology, Protestants are susceptible to being made by their tools.
The Theological Methodologies of Austin Farrer and Metaphor of Tolstoy
How do we know about God, and how do we live out that knowledge?
No one who lacks critical thinking thinks they lack critical thinking, for it takes critical thinking to realize you lack it...
Creative Works
Once upon a time, there was a girl who believed that if she confessed her love to her best friend, her life would leave her body: she would move on.
You touch my lips more than my old wife,
but how could I love you?
Can I join you? I love a porch at night, listening to frogs.
Twenty years after the old man started searching for his son, he received a new lead.
There is a room with a table, over which hangs a bright light. There is a key on the table and a box with a keyhole in the top. The rest of the stage is dark. To the left of the stage, outside the light over the table, stands a scientist in a lab coat.
I’m sorry we’re never going to meet. My hair is long and brown, my body pale and lean, my hands small. Can you see me now? You don’t have a voice, and my voice is strong, but it’s like I have no ears. But I can talk to you...
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The Conflict of Mind: Major: Epistemological Problems
The True Isn't the Rational Book 1
Many of us were taught that if we were intellectually rigorous and honest, we’d approach the truth, but what if it wasn’t so simple? What if we can be wrong because we are intellectually disciplined? The Conflict of Mind will explore this possibility and argue that it is not enough to be a good thinker: we also need the right mental models. But even if our epistemology is advanced, there are problems we cannot escape.
Essays in this collection will explore topics like how what we believe is right is organized by what we believe is true, and yet our capacities to know the truth are essentially limited. We need falsification to think for ourselves without going mad, but not everything true is falsifiable. To avoid repeating history, we need to be motivated to change how we act, but ideas are never as motivational as experiences, and once we begin experiencing a repetition of history, it’s too late. We need philosophy to avoid bigotry and totalitarianism, but philosophy itself can become a source of bigotry and totalitarianism.
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To live with a brain is to live with a problem, and if we solve the problem, we’ll lose our minds. The brain is a challenge that must instead be managed—learning how to manage it will require our very best. The hope of these essays is to help.
For those who would like to contribute but not through Amazon, please consider donating after sampling the book here. All reviews would be a great help.
Belonging Again (Nonfiction Book)
With the decline of religion, what can provide people with the same sense of “belonging” to a community and to a story bigger than themselves?
Feeling at peace could be a sign of "the banality of evil."
Both Arendt’s “banality of evil” and Hunter’s “character” require community. Community is what makes possible both Hitler and Bonhoeffer.
There are now more modes of belief than ever: the skepticism and enlightenment that were supposed to free individuals from belief helped multiply beliefs.
Isn’t modern life, with all its existential anxiety, the loss of absolutism, Pluralism, and fragmentation, preferable to Nazi Germany and “the banality of evil?"
Identity requires allowances and restrictions, but restrictions risk injustice.
While at the University of Virginia, Rose spent several years working collaboratively with other artists at Eunoia, a creative community Rose helped develop in Charlottesville, Virginia. Rose now lives on a farm, manages a wedding venue named Mead Lake, operates Frozen Glory Photography, and teaches piano using visuals from Rose's Pattern Method.
A finalist for the 2020 UNO Press Lab Prize, Rose writes pieces interested in irony, misinterpretation, the subtle distinction between delusions and visions, and trade-offs between competing goods. Rose's creative works appear in The Write Launch, Allegory Ridge, Streetlight Magazine, Ponder Review, the Iowa Review website, The William and Mary Review, Assure Press, Toho, and Poydras Review.
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https://o-g-rose-writing.medium.com/
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