Rough Draft

Introduction:            If you knew this life would repeat itself for eternity, how would you choose to live it? That is, this life as you live it is repeated forever. This is Nietzsche’s thought experiment called an “Eternal Recurrence”. How one interprets this as positive or negative can give insights into your life. What would you change if you knew this life would repeat as you live it forever? Discussion: “What if a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more…’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’” This is an excerpt from “The Gay Science” by Nietzsche. Here he reimagined the ancient idea of cosmologic recurrence into a philoso...

Introduction: What if the morals that guide us through life are wrong? They could be bathed in cognitive bias, unseen but misguiding our actions. Here I explore an empirical attempt to reconcile that concern and put it to the test with a few thought experiments. Discussion: Cognitive bias can be a tricky thing that can influence the minds of many. When looking at Nazi Germany, they took great care to raise their youth indoctrinated with their values. If the resulting population was allowed to debate and construct the moral values for the society to be built from, what would it look like? I can imagine we would see great tragedy passed as morally acceptable. Does the amount of debate between these indoctrinated youth matter when their core concepts of reality are warped? And how can any of us tell we do not have similar bias to an unknown evil? There must be some other metric we can use to develop these moral values as a society to avoid personal bias. I suggest we lean on Jeremy Bentha...