25 Questions

Why are people always so eager to draw contradistinctions? Why does nobody ever actually appreciate that the world does not break down along our easy conceptual lines? Why does rationality seem to chase human rationality and break its back on every interation? What's up with all the assholes making senseless normative prescriptions? What's up with an overconfident biomedical system that proposes drugs as the answer to everything? Why do people actively ignore the many instances of cognitive dissonance? What is the appeal of getting shit-faced? Why are attitudes so slow to change? Why do we have an iconoclastic machinery steamrolling ancient cultures? Will the iconoclastic machinery last long enough to level the playing field totally? Will artificial intelligence ever have rights? Is it possible for the mind to settle into a metastable arrangement of parallel constraint satisfaction? Why has the history of Western philosophy been one of tendentious debates that could always be reconciled? Why am I always drawn up to conceptual abstractions when it is so much easier to stick to the actual? At what point will death come to take away the workaday grind? At what point will my genetic endowment give up on me as a vehicle for the immortal coils? Should I harness the power of prayer? Should I don the robes of state? Why does the tussling of political leaders seem really, really insignificant? Isn't it the case that they impinge on my life more than the Immortal, Unanswerable questions? Should I hold people to account at all times or should I accept the occasional asseveration? Should I travel? What's the point of strolling in a temple complex when the internet can take me there in my imagination? Why do I even raise the problems? Does a process of random variation and selective retention operate on my own mental constructs?

Consider: "Evolutionists who see no conflict between evolution and their religious beliefs have been careful not to look as closely as we have been looking, or else hold a religious view that gives God what we might call a merely ceremonial role to play."