Quote of the day

Why not experiment with wholesome personal relationships? Some recreational socialising? Maybe. I dabble. I’m a social primate susceptible to peer pressure. No man is an island, etc, even those with a metaphysic evocative of windowless monads. [I fret that the only thing one can ever know is the intrinsic subjective properties of whichever configuration of matter and energy one happens to instantiate. cf. Lockwood.] Sadly, my conspecifics are a dangerous, expensive and tainted source of opioid supply with endogenous habits of their own to feed. Moreover my inferential realism about so-called perception is a deterrent to intimacy: personal relationships become a branch of speculative metaphysics if each virtual world resembles a solipsistic island-universe. Indeed I worry that the closest I come to staying in touch with the real world is eating bits of it: the epistemology of food, so to speak. And germs. If I meet my end under the wheels of the proverbial London bus, my faith in the mind-independent world will be posthumously vindicated. As it happens, I have just finished reading Simon Critchley’s The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008); perhaps my best hope of immortality lies, not churning out philosophical verbiage, but having the equivalent of a tortoise fall on my head. This untimely fate exhausts my knowledge of Aeschylus.

-David Pearce, Diary Update and Idle Musings