You might also enjoy my blog: https://philosophybear.substack.com/ and my subreddit: r/philosophybear LIVE MORE LIVES THAN ONE The best essays of Philosophy Bear AKA de Pony Sum, 2018–2021—revised and updated This is open beta 0.1.6—I'm looking for comments and criticism of: -Style -Grammar -Font -Formatting -Argument -Article selection -Anything else you like If you’re not already subscribed—consider subscribing to my free Substack: https://philosophybear.substack.com/ You might also enjoy my blog: https://philosophybear.substack.com/ and my subreddit: r/philosophybear Table of Contents Table of Contents 3 Preface 5 PART 1: YEARNING 6 Oh death, where is the antidote for thy sting? Or: Prolegomena to a new philosophy of the Common Task 7 Perspectival fever: On being shot through with philosophical desire 16 “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” as a rejection of all law and politics 22 On Klutzes 33 Existential tragedies—a partial list of the fundamental complaints of being a person. 37 Artificial intelligence dreams images to accompany Sufjan Stevens lyrics 39 The Culture novels and the deaestheticization of politics 47 Try to always be kind because you never know when you’re incompetent 50 300 Arguments: A commentary 52 Brief Reflections 65 The questions that haunt me at 3 in the morning 67 Autopsy on a dream 73 PART 2: LATE SOCIETY 77 Yvne: The forgotten opposite of envy 78 On critical social-technological points 79 The paranoid style in petit-bourgeois politics 81 Twitter is a reverse panopticon: The internal agent 83 The paradox of high expectations: The more you demand, the less you get 86 Movements are always a distorted lens on the ideas they embody 88 Notes: on Michael Sandel’s “The Tyranny of Meritocracy” 95 PART 3: OBSESSIONS AND COMPULSIONS 104 Harm OCD, a brief introduction 105 Everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you 111 Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the origins of religion 121 Lessons I squeezed from a lifelong severe mental illness 130 My method for dealing with anxiety 135 OCD, mental illness and "cancel culture" 139 PART 4: HOW DID THE LOVE OF WISDOM COME TO THIS? 149 Meeting Nietzsche at the limits of rationality and the limits of Analytic Philosophy 150 Four parts of belief 160 A sketch of a layered solution to the interpersonal comparison problem 163 Recent advances in Natural Language Processing—Some Woolly speculations 180 The Paradox of the Crowd 184 You might also enjoy my blog: https://philosophybear.substack.com/ and my subreddit: r/philosophybear Why I left philosophy 186 Against Libertarian Criticisms of Redistribution 192 Pt 1: Non Aggression tells us nothing about the morality of redistribution 192 Pt II: History and Property Rights 194 Through-going subjective Bayesianism as a solution to the problem of scepticism 198 Carving up the philosophical terrain around personal identity a little differently 200 Paradox of the book and the robot 202 New thought experiments for the backyard metaphysician to try at home 202 Conservation of moral status under misfortune 204 How to do things to words: mapping a post-analytic philosophy of concepts and intuitions 207 PART 5: MORALISM, IDENTITARIANISM AND OTHER MALADIES 219 Ugly, self-centred conversations 220 Mistaken Identity and misunderstood interests: Haider and identity politics 221 On the perils of contrasting niceness with kindness 226 PART 6: FOR THE LEFT 230 Money and the Sceptic: A social-epistemological case for taking arguments for redistribution more seriously 231 Everything is negotiable on the right (and left) 232 A katana, an iron bar, and prison 234 Should you care about that issue? 240 Thinking about political persuasion from a left-Wing point of view 240 I don’t know how to tell you that politics is about murder 251 A brief note on the disposability ideology 255 For communism and against foreclosure on the future 256 The egalitarian past (and future?) of politics 259 PART 7: POETRY 262 Deadwater 263 You might also enjoy my blog: https://philosophybear.substack.com/ and my subreddit: r/philosophybear Preface Hello and welcome to “Live more lives than one”- a collection of my essays. This book doesn’t need to be read in order. The best way to start is to proceed to the table of contents, find something that interests you, and skip to it. Sometimes writing my essays feels like casting off my thoughts, just as rats are cast off a sinking ship. Sometimes I just hope that my gifts intermingle with my weaknesses (intellectual, moral, emotional, aesthetic) to make something interesting by accident, a kind of literary Miller-Urey experiment. Sometimes I reread my writing and I feel amazed that the son of a chef and a hospital trolley lady managed to write such pretentious twattery—a true pathbreaker for working-class wankers. And then, after I finish soothing my self-feeling, I tell myself to stop thinking about me and think instead about something that might do some good. The book is free, but it took a lot of effort to make. If you get anything out of it, I’d ask that you do one of: 1. Chip in for its advertising— https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/Livemorelivesthanone 2. Share it! Facebook, Twitter, email, Whatsapp, Reddit and many more- all great places to send it. Dedications: To those who have helped this project along (in alphabetical order): Amanda, Ben, Chris, Dad, Julia, Kieran, Laurence, Michael, Michael, Morgan, Mum, Nina, Riki, Ryan, Scott, Tzvi and Yitzi, as well as all my other friends who played some role in this, and to all others who I owe gratitude- I do not think you will ever know who you are, but maybe that’s okay. Also to Paul Ignacio- a graphic designer who did the cover at a very reasonable cost and, very, very much thanks to the online readers who proofread. You might also enjoy my blog: https://philosophybear.substack.com/ and my subreddit: r/philosophybear PART 1: YEARNING You might also enjoy my blog: https://philosophybear.substack.com/ and my subreddit: r/philosophybear Oh death, where is the antidote for thy sting? Or: Prolegomena to a new philosophy of the Common Task It’s about 2012. A friend of mine, about 30 years old, has just died of sepsis. I loved him, and he has been annihilated. I’m standing talking with another friend of mine who was also close to the deceased. A thought occurs to me. “Do you think we’ll ever be able to fix it?” “You mean feel better? That will come with time.” “No, I mean bring him back from the dead with technology.” My friend looked at me in puzzlement and sympathy, thought for a moment, and said “No, I don’t think so.” In the past when loved ones had died I had imagined death as a vast granite barrier which my hands could make no mark on. But what if we could find a ram powerful enough that the wall of Hades couldn’t prevail against it? The thought seemed stupid, yet the future is long and holds many technological wonders. How could I be so confident there was no hope? A hundred years ago an eccentric, perhaps insane, Russian philosopher named Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov suggested—on the basis of scant to no evidence—that such a thing might be possible. I want to emphasise that I am not suffering from psychosis, so I do not really hold that the idea I describe here is viable. Yet I can’t help but play with it and ponder it. Didn’t we get where we are in part through mad dreams? To cheat a little with metaphors, maybe you need a vantage point some distance from what is possible to see the full scope of possibility. I have a fantasy. I mean this entirely seriously when I say that I think it is among the greatest fantasies ever conceived. There is little vanity here because it is not my fantasy alone. What if we could redeem all of history—I really mean all of it. Give every story a happy ending by bringing the dead back to life. Not just slow or stop the advance of death, but reclaim each territory it has seized from us, and so, at least in a sense, correct every injustice there ever was? My fantasy is a very old fantasy. It is essentially the fantasy of universal salvation. I’m an atheist, but it is typically a religious fantasy. It receives expression in Mahayana Buddhism and scattered forms of Christianity and Islam. I would bet good money that someone in the Jewish tradition has articulated it, but I haven’t found a reference yet. I’m sure it can be found in many other places besides. Apparently it’s currently a hot topic in Christian theology (or at least the Protestant strand thereof). You can even find a trace of it in the Bible: You might also enjoy my blog: https://philosophybear.substack.com/ and my subreddit: r/philosophybear “On this mountain, He will swallow up the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; He will swallow up death forever. The Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from every face and remove the disgrace of His people from the whole earth.” Emphasis is mine. Generally speaking, the vision has been a supernaturalist one. In the absence of the supernatural it seems likely that people dissolve at death, with no directions about how to put them back together again retained in some secret archive. At least if the ancient philosopher Epicurus is any guide, this is what naturalists have believed since there were naturalists.