Matthew Pirkowski

The human capacity to abstract discrete categories over continuous phenomenon constitutes perhaps our greatest blessing and curse. It at once blesses us with the combinatoric potential we call creativity, and curses us to forever renegotiate the boundaries of the discrete.

The moment our political order internalized the concept of Public Opinion—and therefore sought to instrumentally manipulate said opinion top-down via mass-media-shaped consciousness—marked the end of meaningful democratic representation in America.

This is a deeply unwise frame to take on. People are their whole selves, pre-frontal cortical inhibitions included. Removing that part of the loop, as alcohol does, produces a severely distorted image of a personality. You will get insight into the temperament of their…

It’s Lumpers vs Splitters all the way down.

Convergent reflection of reality's functionally emergent cleavages in no way entails the reality of a Platonic realm––it just demonstrates the tendency of abstractions to converge when they gesture toward the same domain. But that convergence never makes the jump to a realized…

To the extent one naively comes to despise all “hierarchy”, they inadvertently position themselves in opposition to all multi-scale emergent structure, and will therefore act to erode all such emergent societal scaffolding until it crumbles beneath their own feet.

The Active Inference / broader FPAI community understands this, and is well positioned to lead this transition.

Like the Sun, one can’t point directly toward deep truths without blinding those who look. One must use lenses, shadows, and other indirect forms of observation that—in their overall perspectival convergence—catalyze within the mind a synthetic image of the truth in question.

I followed the path of reductive materialism, in the domain of evolutionary biology / psychology, down to its axiomatic grounding, and there discovered questions whose answers were essentially isomorphic to the deep structure of our mythopoetic inheritance.

For fathers, or fathers-yet-to-be: It’s important that the child—especially the son—develop their own identity beyond the identity of the father. This happens while the father lives, but only partially. In a sense, the death of a son’s father constitutes a second birth—one now…

This is a reasonable entry point for those beginning to think through the nature of the male desire for personal immorality. Here are a few other threads to pull, which will take you far deeper into the evolutionary and psychosocial aspects of the behavior.

We are responsible for injecting the existential energy landscape with metastable affordances (local minima). In every case, this requires energetic sacrifice. Absent the capacity for and willingness to sacrifice, all becomes a homogenizing race to the entropic bottom.

We severely underestimate the power of a cultural technology that places the idea of Free Lunches beyond the immanent realm, simultaneously reducing material exposure to the catastrophic side effects of utopianism while still harnessing the motivational potential of the impulse.

On the bright side I now have an embodied intuition for how my cranial nervous system relates to my tongue.