IMMORTALITY AND IDENTITY Was DaVinci an artist or an engineer? Was Spinoza a Phi

IMMORTALITY AND IDENTITY

Was DaVinci an artist or an engineer? Was Spinoza a Philosopher or a Lens Grinder? Was Jefferson a philosopher or a lawyer? What about Thomas Paine?

I don’t mind being positioned as a technology entrepreneur. Or as an analyst of business processes. Or as a software architect – which is what I often did to make money – and I am good at it, in no small part because it is marginally indifferent from the kind of philosophy that I practice. I am not comfortable with the label programmer. My first technical job was as a CTO, and architect of software – very complicated software. I have never really been a programmer in the typical sense of the term – I’m just not that good at it. It requires short term memory and textual precision that is not in my nature – my memory is biased in the long term and synthetic instead. And worse, I find programming nearly as addictive an obsession for my autism as opiates would be for my emotions. It consumes my life.

I have been practicing what we call philosophy since the age of twelve, and written philosophy casually since college and seriously since 2009. And it took the sum total of my life until that point to solve a problem in philosophy worth talking about. My vocation pays for my habits. It has made me wealthy. My vocation supplies emotional gratification from the act of working on a team with others. But in practical terms, since around the age of twelve, vocation has been a means to an end. My avocation is quite different from my vocation. I will not be remembered for the ten companies I have started. There is no immortality there to be had. I will be remembered, if at all, for unifying philosophy (the discipline of speaking truthfully), and Science (the procedural means of warrantying that we speak truthfully) and all the disciplines identity, logic, mathematics, physics, economics, law, and politics into a single language and forever dispelling religio-‘right’ argument, ratio-moral argument, and psychological argument, to the dustbin of intellectual history history.

What I prefer to be known for is something else, yet to come. If I live long enough. We are remembered for our greatest achievement. If we are remembered at all.

Immortality exists. Heaven exists. They are constructed in the memories of living man, transferred between generations, and hosted there as surely as any digitalized representation of our minds, and with far greater influence than we as individuals could have by direct action.

It is the memory of the demonstration of our will that grants us a seat among the heroes. And our heroes are our only true gods – they drive our minds, and as such drive our hands.

Engage in production. Speak the truth. Punish the wicked. Exterminate the evil. Seek to be remembered. By leaving this world a greater place than when you entered it.