EP 343 Worldviews: Peter Wang on the Metaphysics of Quality, Sucker’s Bets, and Ofness

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They discuss:

• • Peter’s self-description as “the music in a violin that can kind of hear itself”
  • The “Peter Wang-shaped hole in the universe” thought experiment
  • Subject-object Cartesian dualism as a false alienation
  • Minimum viable metaphysics & atheistic agnosticism
  • Religion as an evolutionary emergent coherence mechanism for human collectives
  • Figure and ground as a metaphysical lens—the anonymous soil that allows religion to sprout
  • The Unix fortune “Man was invented by water to carry itself uphill” & Peter’s teleology origin story
  • Process metaphysics & presentism—”we’re not going anywhere, we’re becoming someone”
  • Pirsig’s metaphysics of quality & the four strata of static patterns of value
  • The intellectual plane vs. the social plane & Ken Wilber’s pre-trans fallacy
  • Defection within collaborative groups as the dynamic all human social systems try to constrain
  • “Death from a Distance”—throwing, beta coalitions & the emergence of a middle class of power
  • Modernity’s shrinking locus of care & the collapse of embedded social context
  • The agglomeration of defectors & how fluid capital enables sociopathic hoarding
  • Money-on-money return as today’s dominant pruning rule
  • Joint attention as a scarce collective resource & social media’s perforation of shared intersubjective infrastructure
  • Human agency & “micro-abdications” as the aggregate source of Moloch / Game A
  • The augmented currency thought experiment—metering human thriving alongside financial returns
  • Broken collective sense-making & the search for dynamic, adaptable values
  • Peter’s secular conception of the sacred—the “eternal golden braid of humanity”
  • “Ofness”—holding both distinctness and belonging to the world…

and much more.

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