Meditation on Synthesis

My Personal Elevator Pitch for the Unified Theory of Knowledge

Here’s my personal (ie. not final nor absolute) pitch for the beauty of the Unified Theory of Knowledge.

It reconciles Epicureanism and Stoicism, while providing a rigorous, scientific ontology that welcomes the accoutrements of any individual religio-spiritual practice.

In short, it’s what I’ve been looking for for a decade. Yes, it helps the primate self to account for basic comforts, and our sense of well-being and belonging is best attended to by cultivating strong inter-personal connections with a coterie of trusted close ones. That said, it is impossible to tune or drop out of the larger socio-political world, and we do need individual virtue to build character and withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

My religio-spiritual practices which come from Buddhism, TM, and Ortho-Catholicism are very useful to me — but the ontologies and epistemologies initially provided by the specialists in those faiths do not have the advantage of post-Newtonian understandings about the nature of the physical universe (genetics/DNA, the periodic table, cellular biology, etc.).

There is no reason to give them up, but they can be understood in a greater scientific framework which does not need to be hostile to them. The sensibilities can be synthesized, if via sincere irony.

Please look forward to more on this, including several very useful concepts and techniques, in posts to come.

Affectionately,

Aaron