A Snapshot of My Belief Structure

  Essay 2: Certainty My mom was a baby whisperer. Whenever we went on international trips as a family, there was usually a baby crying on the flight and my mom could never resist helping their poor mother. My mom held the baby, often even taking the baby back to her seat, and in a matter of minutes the baby was sound asleep. Years ago I wondered how that was possible, to an outsider’s perspective one could hardly tell the difference between what the baby’s mom and my mom did, but in hindsight, it is so obvious. Confidence, that’s the answer. My mom already had three children and was naturally very confident, and the baby could feel that. An issue anyone exposed to babies knows is that the cry of a baby is panic-inducing. Something within humans, more so with women, will always respond to the cry of a baby, it was ingrained in us through evolution. So the natural response of the sleep-deprived, working parent is to figure out what is wrong and make sure the baby stops crying as so...

Essay 1: Needs and Urges If you had to build a comprehensive skeleton of the phenomenological experience of man, where would you begin? What is the one aspect of experience that is so fundamental and indivisible that it can serve as the foundation on which the mind of man can be built? Action? No, any real analysis shows that there are so many components to action that even today we cannot fully account for how we act at all. Perception? Reasoning? Our role in a group? The will to live? No, all of those are derivatives of a more fundamental principle that all of the above share. Many, not least Aristotle in his book “Nicomachean Ethics”, attempted to answer this question. Using Aristotle as an example, his realization that there had to be an answer was built on a paradox. When analyzing any action there always seemed to be a reason why, but then also a reason why for the why, and it was unclear when the regress of “whys” stopped. Why do we wake up early? To get to work. Why do we go ...

Table of Contents Essay 0: An Introduction - December 23, 2024 Essay 1: ~~~~~~~~~ - January 6, 2024(?)

Essay 0: An Introduction Hey everyone, I am Sean, if all goes well you’ll know me nearly as well as I do by the end of this series. That will likely not end up anywhere close to true but I offer you this as my value proposition: I will explain some key nodes in my belief structure, discuss how they can be applied to improve our lives, and create a community of intelligent, philosophy-minded people (and me) to debate the topics and provide new perspectives. If through these debates I leave this experience not agreeing with a single claim I made in any of the coming essays then I am all the better for it. Sounds fair? This first essay will be an introduction, breaking down what the essays are, the rules for each essay, and some musings as to how I will handle the community aspect as it is easily the most important one. Note that I am open to suggestions on all three points and will update the following paragraphs with any changes. Through these essays, I will attempt to convey the un...