art

/Ben

A blog that you share with your friends is a great way to hold yourself accountable, and to invest great ideas in. I’ve joined a street fundraising team to get over my fear of rejection and learned how to text girls better as a result of starting my blog,

http://www.peterjlu.com/2011/07/how-i-text-like-absolute-baller-kind-of.html

So, remember — write the way you think, but also make sure to give yourself the motivation to write in the first place.

Axiomatic Philosophy aims to place Philosophy on the same sort of foundation as mathematics — namely logic and well-defined terminology — rather than human intuition (as is currently the case). The main difference is that said terminology is philosophical rather than mathematical. There are many other complementary techniques, such as describing thought experiments programmatically as to eliminate weasel word-laden English and make literally calculating answers possible via constraint programming, to give but one example. All of this would be written in PHILL — Philosophy Language — currently a subset of Python. Eventually using Haskell would be very interesting, which is at once highly impractical (because Haskell is so inconvenient — imagine your Philosophy professor trying to learn it to keep up with the times!) and highly practical (its functional purity allows for proofs, unlike in object-oriented programming).

I know it’s “crazy.” I’m OK with that.

I estimate that roughly 1/2 of my writings are in digital form; the rest, in various paper notebooks. According to wc (a command line utility — “wc” for “word count”), my digital writings currently consist of 392,392 words — over 1000 pages. In my philosophical prime I often wrote 5-10 pages daily, but significantly less these days (and much more programming).

To “Accidental Genius” I credit much if this prolific-ness. Without so much writing, these thoughts would never have crystallized, and AxP would not exist. Thank you, Mark Levy.

–Steve Phillips
Co-founder of Santa Barbara Hackerspace