What we’re about
This is a free meetup where we will discuss philosophy, share life experience, and try even sometimes to put it into practice.
One idealistic - and perhaps naive - goal that I have for this group is to create open source software that helps people improve their lives or the lives of those around them.
I'm not stupid enough to suggest that computers know about human life. But I do think that there are times when a person has a million questions that need a million answers - and perhaps a computational philosophy could be a useful mental technology, allowing easier pursuit of human flourishing.
Some examples of interesting philosophy topics we might get into (by no means complete):
- Deleuze: desire, rhizome structures, codes and over-coding, re-/ territorialization
- Badiou: logics of appearing, happiness, metapolitics, multiplicity of ontologies
- Schopenhauer: will and representation
- and many more! the greater the diversity of ideas and their origins, the better!
Some interesting tactics to computerize philosophy!:
- "debuggers for living"
- encodings or representations of value systems
- unsupervised machine learning methods for 'life structure' pattern recognition
- distributed learning algorithms as inspiration for collaborative conversation
- applying game theoretic results to change one's own "meta-game"; perhaps we can take results from game theory to design oneself's behavior
- using category theory (in particular, categories of nets) to model teamwork as a resource flow diagram, where the resources in question are time, attention, and care, for example. Composable diagrams could be used at all scales: from friend groups composed of individuals all the way up to the world as a composition of populations. For more inspiration read [https://necsi.edu/teams-a-manifesto](TEAMS: A MANIFESTO) and this tweet: ["A formalized ingredients list that can go on every product/service and shows the *true* costs/benefits"](A formalized ingredients list that can go on every product/service and shows the true costs/benefits.)
All are welcome! And I believe also all have something to contribute, no matter their background, if they have a willingness to cooperate.
