@AskYatharth I wonder if “God” is a way of non-doing with larger scale intentions. Like, letting Jesus take the wheel. You don’t just trust your gut intuition, but attune to the wisdom of the universal conscience.
@AskYatharth In general I’m very curious how people manage to bring larger scale motivation, perception, direction into the present moment of non-coercive unfolding.
@AskYatharth Institutions are one way, I suppose: the social architecture aligns your daily actions with institutional frames. But that doesn’t seem sufficient.
For years I’ve been fascinated and confused by the issue of what I call “state ontology.” How do nation states exist, how do they affect the existence of other beings, what is their fundamental role? And how do people perceive the state’s being, beyond political opinions?
The pandemic has reinvigorated this question and provided an enormous clue for how to think about it.
Epidemiology, vaccination, border control all seem to show the ontology of the state, although I don’t know what to read to clarify this intuition.
I would like to write something about how I’ve found God to be a very interesting and useful entity to relate to but it’s kind of weird. It started with a book recommended to me about a new metaphor for understanding Aquinas’s modification of Aristotelian virtue ethics
The metaphor is based on the concept “joint attention” from social cognition research which is like the main thing that autistic children won’t do with their parents, the meeting of minds that comes from playing together, looking together at something
As a parent I had never thought much about this phenomenon but immediately when I read about it, I realized how important it is, and I started paying attention to this daily thing of “seeing together” with my toddler son
it seems like a mistake to group "virtue ethics" with theories like utilitarianism and then argue about which one is better
virtue ethics is the study of how excellence is conceived and taught within traditions & communities
it's not a procedure for making decisions
a virtue ethicist could for example take the rationalist effective altruism community as a case study and look at which goods it upholds, which virtues enable attainment of those goods, and how the whole thing functions in practice
that also means looking at how conflicts are negotiated within the community, and which virtues enable efficient and constructive negotiation, which blends into general virtues that apply to community as such
I feel parasocially invested in your well-being as a new free agent, maybe because your presence on the timeline was a joyful inspiration for me, and then I think your abrupt lifestyle change caused challenges to which I relate
and I know you're very interested in well-being and I'm kind of daytime soap operatically curious in your "progress" 😃
I'm also a free agent and I'm dealing with the whole motivation & self-coercion & bossing myself around thing
I'm doing writing coaching with @sashachapin which is really great, also just to have a curious clever chap with whom to talk about the thing I'm trying to write about
taking writing "seriously" like this, I'm also a bit stressed about performing and not wasting my time