Manifesto
The mission is ALWAYS to cultivate a culture of kindess, trust, and free thought.
Preface
Axiom: My philsophy is not mine. Ownership is a weird idea borrowed from trade at the beginning of agriculture and city-states. Ownership of thoughts is no different. After all, are we not the product of our influences; our friends, family, mentors, and for better or worse, our culture - the ideas that were born into us from ages far away and long ago.
I owe a lot to my dear dear friend Dr. Amir Emad Marvasti who, in is home, created a culture of curiosity, conversation and introspection. At “tiny table” thoughts flow like poetry with the wine and ideas are taken with a grain of salt on a tiny tasty bite of musakhan. All in forest of abstract art where the leaves echo with the music of world - new, old, and arcane. Everyone in the numerous pantheon of tiny table has been a teacher and inspiration to me. The list of contributors below is certainly incomplete but I will do my best to cite them as appropriate.
[Amir, Jen, John, Ivan, Yoni, Aryo, Chris, Mira, Darko, Marianna, Celia, Abbas, Arselan, Ida, Jacob, Paulo, Liz, …]
Another great influence is Dr. Ehsan Emad Marvasti, who in the same home, brought the magick of music back to musicians and non-musicians alike. “Tarab” is a democracy of harmony and rhythm, always in the moment and decided by no one. The culture of Tarab does in no way exclude words but here, my influences are frequently taken from that which is not spoken. Again, the list of teachers is numerous. To name a few:
[Ehsan, Behzad, Abbas, Mahdi, John, Jayden, Miles, Sawyer, Ryan, Aaron, Roger, …]
By far my greatest influence, teacher and comrade since 2015 has been my dear dear wife Dr. Cicely Scheiner who has taught me so much about enjoyment, humanity, charity, teaching, learning, and fun to name a few. Sometimes by my side at Tiny table and Tarab, sometimes in her own trenches of research, when we come together in absolute sincerity the perspectives of countless others are transferred back and forth.
Being a direct product of my influences, and as an academic there are so many teachers from natural philosophy that have touched my heart and mind and added dimensions to the parameter space of my world view:
[Josh, Larry, Eduardo, Elena, Matt, Andrew, Costas, Phil, Dick, Candy, Linda, Carl, Albert, Emmy, Annie, Cecilia, Henrietta, Isaac, Roger, James, Georges, Rene, David, Plato, Richard, …]
There are so many that I will fail to mention. In time, you will get your citation. I also want to note that I have and will continue to misinterpret the brilliant perspectives of all of those, alive or long dead, cited or uncited with whom I’ve had the privilege of sharing a moment. It takes an infinite number of symbols or words to share the perspective of one with another.
With all sincerity, below you will find mostly the incoherent ramblings of a fool though I hope that some of them, however foolish, find a home in your mind as an infinitesimal fraction of the beauty of coexistence.
The Hierarchy Problem
In physics the “hierarchy problem” discusses vacuum corrections to the mass of a scalar field like the Higgs boson with quadratic energy scaling. It is quite surprising that summing up quantum corrections up to $10^19$ GeV (the Planck Energy), the vacuum corrections with the “bare” mass of the Higgs bosons cancel to give such a relatively low mass-energy (125 GeV) as if the universe is fine tuned to “fix” the Higgs field. This is not at all the problem I am going to address here, but hope that at some point you find it useful to define the physics problem with the same name.
Here I’d like to discuss the problem of the existence of hierarchy at all in society. I think this was a mistake made in many cultures around the world at the dawn of city-states and the combining of tribes into groups larger than hundreds of individuals. Hierarchy was always a power grab. Regardless of the reasons and whether or not YOU find that the power grab was justified, it was always a means of a few holding greater influence over the many at the expense of others. This was, from the beginning a zero-sum game in the von Neumann and Morganstern sense - a divergence from the Nash equilibrium that we truly seek as a civilization.
Hierarchy inhibits free thought. Many individuals sharing free thoughts is computation. Computations that challenge fixed perspectives and open doors to new questions and new solutions. Free thought is the fruit of humanity it is how we can learn from each other and improve our existence. Free thought is of such great importance that it is worth baking into the foundation of any civilization. Supported by all for the benefit of all.
Academia
What is academia? It is not the university, the research institute, the college or school as we know it. It is the cathedral for the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Ungoverned and ungovernable. No hierarchy, no funding sources, no tenure, no post-tenure review. No endowment, no one endowed. Not beholden to industry or to policy makers. Academia is to be a foundational pillar of democracy - To know. Along with industry - To do. And policy - To not do. But who pays for it? We pay for it because it is valuable to all of us. Academia is part of a loop - providing the knowledge that allows us to make desicions for industry and policy. I’ll see you in Athens.
Properties of Property
Do you own your thoughts? Do you own your ideas? Do you own the land on which you stand? The idea of ownership has colored the way we perceive being so profoundly that few if any of us notice the lens and its implications to the way we speak and think. Even if it is impossible to completely abandon the principle of ownership, I think it is of paramount importance to examine it’s implications thoroughly.
Ask yourself “Who owns an idea?” and survey the ‘answers’ in the world around you. You will find paradoxes hither and yon in laws, policies, dogma, and yourself. At least I have.
Ideas have an existence in and of themselves propagating from person to person, evolving, growing, and dying.
Consequences of a World View
What is in a culture? A tradition? A history? The unquestioned? The unquestionable? Unquestionable - Never shall it be spoken! Are the authors of history the powerful? In some sense, yes. But read between the lines and other stories emerge. These are the most precious stories.
The Culture in Utopia
Trust. Patience. Kindness. Leading to understanding. Be a god in the pantheon and trust in both the wisdom and absurdity of the other gods around you.