the indulgence + guilt of mind-play

For a while now I have suspected that I know nothing, that none of my knowledge maps onto the real world. Through computer science and philosophy I inspect only schema that other humans have constructed.



I am quite concerned about my base processes; I am afraid that I have delighted too long in language games. This feeling has become more keen during a math and philosophy summer school; I've sampled thoughts on formal verification (principle of explosion!), paradoxes of positive/negative introspection (infinite ingress of meta-statements), modal logic, Arrow‘s impossibility theorem, dimensionality reduction of politics to find Condorcet winners, and perverse auctions. I feel awed by my peers; I find the material challenging and surface-level tantalizing - so many new Google search terms + mental models. There are so many things to know in the world, and you could infinitely be in a mode of mental play for the sake of play, and be satisfied.



Spending several hours everyday in this context has made my sense of urgency unbearably strong. What about the beating hearts that will one day cease to beat? What about the artificial intelligences we will soon be able to bring about? What about the massive revolution of joy that new general purpose technologies could spark? What questions are we all missing?