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I created this newsletter at Substack in order to complement a book I’ve been working on, which is a philosophical, self-help memoir called How to Live Life as a Robot.
As I say in my book proposal:
“How to Live Life as a Robot is a formally ground-breaking, lyrical memoir by a philosophy professor, who lines up for the reader a variety of intellectual amuse-bouche…
You may want to ask: What can I expect? What is an intellectual amuse-bouche anyway?
“Amuse-bouche” is French for appetizer. So, on any given day on this Substack, an intellectual amuse-bouche might be a bite-sized observation, a concise philosophical argument, a counterintuitive truth, a telling historical anecdote, a poetic aphorism, an illuminating psychological insight, an airtight logical syllogism—in short, a pleasing tasty bit for the mind.
I have created this Substack not so much to share excerpts of my book as to explore some of the same topics and themes.
Some examples of an intellectual amuse-bouche include the etymology of the word “robot” (it derives from Old Church Slavic for “slavery”); or a description of a pre-Galilean manual on ballistics, in which the paths of cannonballs were drawn in straight lines not parabolas; or the story of how a box of mirrors was used to cure pain in amputated, phantom limbs—each amuse-bouche has its own inherent interest, which grabs the reader’s attention, and serves as a welcoming entryway into the themes of this newsletter.
Those themes are: the naturalistic worldview, atheism, death, the meaning of life, happiness, eudaemonia, habit formation, anti-procrastination strategies, System 1 versus System 2, post-hoc rationalization, confabulation, the illusion of conscious will, the falsity of libertarian free will, the health of the Enlightenment project and Western liberalism today, utilitarianism, education, free speech, cognitive biases, how to combat conspiracy theory based thinking, political psychology, evolutionary psychology, Nietzsche, Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Maggie Nelson, and much much more.
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I’ll be posting every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and the email newsletter will go out Fridays.
I can promise that you’ll be intellectually stimulated and challenged possibly at a deep level. To paraphrase Nietzsche, you will come away richer, not as if from alien goods, but from having grown deeper into yourself. You will come away newer to yourself, stranger to yourself, broken open, sounded out, more unsure, tenderer, but full of hopes, and with a new will.
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