1. After a week of debauched merriment, near death experiences, a meeting with a kindred soul and a long and painful journey, I check my blog at the free terminal provided at Changi like a good budget traveller, and what do I see?

   Ontological!

   My blog has set a new record! I am sure this is the first time in its history that a five syllable word has been used!

2. Amit wants to know why I named my blog The Examined Life. It was named after a quote attributed to either Socrates or Plato – “The unexamined life is not worth living”.

   I am sure Nozick also named his book after the same

3. I am still on my break and guestblogging will continue till I choose to return next year. You are all requested to patronise the The Examined Life with the same enthusiasm you’ve been showing.
   

One of the facets of libertarianism is positioning liberty and freedom as “goals” as opposed to mere “means”. This requires a bigger leap of faith than most realize, and that is indeed why the number of libertarians is even fewer than those who watch Fear Factor. Interestingly, many libertarians adopt a switch tactic, and waylaying the axiom of liberty as a goal; argue instead along the lines of liberty being the best means to achieve happiness.
Typically these tend to run weak sometimes.
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When we solve a mathematical problem, the foremost thing to check is do we have the proper mathematical tools (theorems etc.)? If we are solving a differential equation, do we know enough theorems and lemmas and procedures for differential equations?

One can go a level deeper.
Do we have the proper mental tools to solve the mathematical/scientific problems we face? Turns out, we don’t.
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In the last few posts, I have been talking a lot about goals. Goals for humans, for humanity, for nature, for evolution. All and sundry seem to be brimming with goals.
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Distributed computing is a fairly recent “innovation” of humankind. Yet everything
that we see around us would not have been possible without it. Not only is it the most important, it is also the most common thing in nature really.
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In many an earlier post, I have made the statement that “the goal of a society is the maximum satisfaction of its needs and desires.” This is seen as something very obvious, an axiom really. One argues about the best methodology (socialism, capitalism, etc.) to achieve this goal, but not about this goal itself.
I must confess I don’t think much of this goal at all.
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[Previous Episodes: #1, #2,#3, #4]

And then the Engineer showed everyone the Plan. The Plan was very simple, and everyone had a place in it. Everyone would just do what they felt like doing, because the part of the Plan that they were supposed to execute was already within them, the AlGodRhythm had always been inside them. Somehow they had come to believe that they had Consciousness, when in reality they were simply schizophrenics. Somewhere between the Iliad and the Odyssey, the bicameral humanoid brain had developed what it felt was a Consciousness. Until that day, we had all been ant colonies and bee-hives.

After thousands of years, the spiral having turned, they were all going back to The Beginning. The hive was coming back.
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As libertarians, we look upon incentives with a worshipping eye. Perhaps even more than Pavlov might have. And with the same benevolent eye, we view the mechanism that facilitates the giving and receiving of incentives between the teeming individuals of society – the market. Indeed, the Market is the closest to any God for a spiritually-starved libertarian atheist.
Spiritualists, Puritans et al, however, decry this. Crass materialism they call it. They shake their heads at the degradation of a society that considers Markets and Money as the primary driving influences. And with a sigh, they go back to their rosaries.
Actually, I agree with them.
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I am sure some of you noticed that the site was down over the weekend. Here’s the explanation from Vesana.

“We believe the issue was due to the deletion of the log files from the tmp directory- deleting that many small files at once could cause the CPU
spike. [Which caused them to suspend my account as a precautionary measure – Ravi]

Next time you need more space, just ask! We’re a noncommercial project-
we want you to be happy far more than we need another dollar a month.
We’ve “unsuspended” your account and changed your quota to 90MB. You have
our apologies for the delay- please do let us know if you need anything
else.

Though they are a non-commercial project, I am sure they will be happy to have your business to fund their not-for-profit activities. I cannot recommend them highly enough. If you are looking for a host for your blog, look no further than Vesana. They’ve provided the kind of service that gets them an endorsement from me even after my site has been down for two days. Need I say more?

Now I go back to my break.

An important question that a libertarian faces is that of government subsidized science and arts. Recently, for example, the US govt reduced its funding to the NSF (National Science Foundation). Could such activities be completely funded by the private sector? Hardcore libertarians/objectivists like Don Boudreaux, Ayn Rand, et al believe they can be. Worse, they believe it should be.

I do not.
What’s more I believe that libertarians who argue otherwise are not able to conceive the very thing that has given them this prosperity and this leisure to speculate.
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In this post at Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux comments that a belief in the requirement of a central govt for prosperity is equivalent to “sovereign creationism”. Creationism is the ideology that this extremely complex world and universe necessarily has an intelligent designer behind it. This is supposed to be an “alternative theory” to evolution. What Don says is that when people believe that a prosperous society can only be achieved by intelligent design (on part of a sovereign govt) as opposed to a spontaneous order (free markets et al) one is “guilty” of sovereign creationism.

This gels in with our earlier discussion about the differences between conservatives and liberals. Boudreaux argues that liberal atheists are being hypocritical when they ridicule creationism, but advocate social/sovereign creationism. This is a fallacious argument.
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There are some values that run through a culture, values that the culture holds to be very “important”. For example, sexual conservatism is a value that runs through most cultures with a high religious quotient. This post is about a couple of such “values” that the Indian Culture is quite saturated with.
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