Stop! Ontology time!

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been writing about philosophy. This led to the single most dramatic drop in the number of subscribers to this blog, but no matter: I’m doing this in part to repent. In my younger years, I bought into the techno-rationalist dogma of the SF Bay Area; with time, I’ve come to realize that the ideology has fueled many toxic behaviors in our industry. Now, I just want get the word out that philosophy is interesting and goes beyond what’s peddled on LessWrong and Hacker News.One of the core tenets of tech rationalism is the rejection of metaphysics. In particular, the movement frequently explains subjective selfhood and free will as delusions of biological automatons. As I argued before, the approach seems self-defeating: these notions originate from perceptual experience, just as the laws of physics do. To reject some perceptions and take others as axioms is an aesthetic choice, but not a privileged theory of reality. There’s also something funny about the…