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“soft consequentialism,”
Morality is like that: we invent the rules, but we invent them for sensible purposes.
Our values have not yet caught up to our best ontology.
We don’t need an immovable place to stand; we need to make our peace with a universe that doesn’t care what we do, and take pride in the fact that we care anyway.
The idea of “Ten Commandments” is a deeply compelling one. It combines two impulses that are ingrained in our nature as human beings: making lists of ten things, and telling other people how to behave.
Ten Considerations:
1. Life Isn’t Forever.
2. Desire Is Built into Life.
3. What Matters Is What Matters to People.
The universe doesn’t care about us, but we care about the universe.
That caring, contained inside us, is the only source of “mattering” in any cosmic sense.
4. We Can Always Do Better.
5. It Pays to Listen.
6. There Is No Natural Way to Be.
7. It Takes All Kinds.
If our lives are to have meaning and purpose, we are going to have to create them. And people are different, so they’re going to create different things.
8. The Universe Is in Our Hands.
9. We Can Do Better Than Happiness.
synchronic meaning and diachronic meaning.
At the end of the day, or the end of your life, it doesn’t matter so much that you were happy much of the time. Wouldn’t you rather have a good story to tell?
10. Reality Guides Us.
“The Only Way,” from the Emerson, Lake & Palmer album Tarkus.
Awe has connotations of reverence: “this fills me with awe and I am not worthy.” Wonder has connotations of curiosity: “this fills me with wonder and I am going to figure it out.” I will take wonder over awe every day.
I always thought it was crucial that different aspects of the world fit together and make sense. Everything we’ve experienced about the universe suggests that it is intelligible: if we try hard enough we can come to understand it.
The important distinction is not between theists and naturalists; it’s between people who care enough about the universe to make a good-faith effort to understand it, and those who fit it into a predetermined box or simply take it for granted. The universe is much bigger than you or me, and the quest to figure it out unites people with a spectrum of substantive beliefs.
an abiding joy in puzzling out the nature of reality.
we all share the same universe, the same laws of nature, and the same fundamental task of creating meaning and of mattering for ourselves and those around us in the brief amount of time we have in the world.
the Feynman path integral for the Core Theory.
fermions and bosons.
the Core Theory underlying our everyday lives is extremely precise, rigid, and well defined.
