Existential Comics

If beauty is determined by just counting up the preferences of the population, then all she really needs to do is breed an army of Orcs with a fetish for domineering older women. A simple, elegant solution.

Yes, it is taken as a given that Spinoza could time travel, and yes the point of the comic is that if we worshipped Socrates as a God we would have lightsabers by now.

For Simone Weil, who is the one talking to them, raw force is the main driver of history. It envelops people, nations, society, and swallows them up like a locust swarm from which there is no escape. The very existence of an army dictates that war, and whichever nation is able to be more powerful in pure force dictates the ideology, culture, and society of humanity, not the other way around. For example, if the Nazis had been strong enough to win, it would have become the default ideology. The Romans spread Roman and Greek thought and culture by force. Christianity was largely spread by force as well. If we encounter aliens, it may very well be aliens who spread through force.

The Fermi Paradox is the idea that life in the Universe should be somewhat commonplace, and therefore so should intelligent life. But when we look for signs of it, mostly in the form of radio waves, we find none. So where are they? A common solution put forward at the time was that civilizations who invent radio waves around the same time will invent the atomic bomb and destroy themselves. While it’s probably true about the inventions coinciding, the theory has a few big problems. First, we have to assume all civilizations are violent within themselves. Second, we have to assume the bomb would destroy radio waves forever, which seems strange; you can rebuild civilization. Third, which I think is the most important problem, is that it was obviously an outgrowth of specific human fears about Cold War conflicts at the time the Fermi Paradox came out. Human thought is far too trapped in our own time. Since the Cold War I think we can see a new reason why humans might not expand into the Universe forever. A much more mundane reason. We just don’t want to. It turns out that something strange happens when humans are given a certain amount of freedom over our reproduction, we more or less always choose to not have enough babies to replace ourselves. Basically every country which gets to a certain level of economic development always causes a crash in the number of children. Obviously this isn’t for the reason Schopenhauer might think, in that we genuinely became so enlightened to the human condition of suffering that we became antinatalists (the idea that it is morally wrong to bring new people into existence, because existence totally sucks), but more just that people don’t want to have a bunch of kids, because it is kind of a pain in the ass to raise them. This seems to be almost deterministic, in that regardless of culture, everyone falls below replacement rates when they get comfortable enough and have enough freedom to choose what they want to do. In fact, worldwide bi

Should utilitarians save a drowning child? Push a fat man into a trolley? Kill a man for his organs? No, they get gored by a bull while we all laugh. That's philosophical consistency right there.

Many versions of Batman have a strict "no killing" rule, which is exactly the kind of intuition the Trolley Problem is attacking. Why is it different to actively kill someone vs passively letting five people die? In particular, Batman's version seems to be a sort of "honor code", which something close to a moral system, but it is entirely inward looking. In other words, fulfilling the honor system doesn't do good for the world, it elevates the status of the honorable man. In a sense it's the worst possible way to answer a moral question, "I want to kill the five people because I personally would lose something (my honor)". Also its pretty showy to dress up as a bat. One might even call him a weirdo.

Schopenhauer was a "philosophical skeptic", but not in a "glass half empty" kind of way. He wasn't looking at the things in the world and seeing us as not having enough, but looking at the things we have and saying that they are structurally built in such a way to cause despair. It isn't that the glass is half empty, but that the glass being full contains emptiness within it. It will always be empty in the end, so it doesn't matter how full it is. It always ends the same, with us drinking it and either being bored or wanting more. We can never be satisfied no matter how full the glass is.