This is the second installment, in which I reveal the hidden connections between Moldbug and Atlantic author Rosie Gray. We discuss memetic mind control, highly improbable cover stories, dubious parental influences, and much much more. Newsletter: https://tinyletter.com/jmrphy Blog: http://jmrphy.net/blog Twitter: http://twitter.com/jmrphy Podcast: http://jmrphy.libsyn.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/otherlifenow/ Periscope: https://www.pscp.tv/jstnmrphy Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jstnmrphy/ ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOta6PJhe2U

I'll give a review of, and some thoughts inspired by, the great book, "Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain" by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. Disclaimer: I don't know much about neuroscience and I will primarily use Damasio's book to suggest many wild extrapolations with highly variable likelihoods of being correct. But I believe some of them will be correct, in ways that are not already widely understood, and I will try to make them fun to listen to (hopefully). This will not be a normal book review or an academic lecture. I'll do a short summary of the book but if you expect a book review or a lecture you will be very disappointed. My only promise is that it will be joyous; other than that I promise nothing on behalf of my insatiable drives to romp through all of my ill-formed and half-baked thoughts, observations, feelings, and conjectures. I am only a moderately intelligent person but I'm in the very highest percentiles of aspect Enthusiasm, which is why I'm experimenting with different platforms, in search of how I can best utilize my particular intellectual and temperamental blessings and curses. Things I will talk about include: anguish as a biological problem, the rationality of religion as an evolved affective technology, why intuitions are the highest form of knowledge (not the lowest as is widely implied today in rationalist circles), why and how secularism or "nontheistic Protestantism" are distinct pathways of affective acceleration, with the former leading to infinite sorrow (tragedy) and the latter leading to infinite joy (glory). In short, the neurobiology of emotion provides some essential coordinates for a rational and materialist understanding of God, ala Spinoza and Damasio, but it seems to me that an accelerationist perspective provides a new urgency and some new accents to Spinoza's political theology. Note that you can click on the button above to receive a reminder when this livestream is beginning. Newsletter: https://tinyletter.com/jmrphy ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AukkehuOhtM