Inception

In 1990, as I sat in a cinema in Houston viewing the film Jacob's Ladder, I experienced an epiphany. I realized that I needed to make doing the right thing as my primary goal in life. Note that, in that year, I had only just begun my studies of philosophy, and I still thought of the world in terms of right and wrong. Only later would I realize that right and wrong (as well as good and bad) are primitive concepts.

Later I would refine my statement from "doing the right thing" to "doing the rational thing", but even so corrected, that statement of purpose is meaningless without an understanding of what it means to act rationally. It would take me nearly eight years to come up with the underpinnings of a philosophy for describing truly rational behavior, and nearly ten more years to begin to define how to apply those abstract ideas to humanity.

Early on, I was wildly naive about what I could accomplish. Firstly, I thought that I could actually, by myself, create a comprehensive philosophy that would encompass all of the relevant elements of human knowledge and lay out a plan for solving the world's problems. Secondly, I thought that I could use my skill in the area of software development to amass enough wealth that I could foist my ideas on society and influence events. But as the years passed, I realized that I lacked the business skill, the raw engineering talent, and the discipline to ever create a company on the order of a Microsoft. Regardless, I still hoped to publish that comprehensive philosophy and hope that it would influence somebody who would have the resources to start putting the ideas into practice. But I procrastinated, and procrastinated, and procrastinated. Meanwhile, the World Wide Web was changing the way that information is gathered and distributed, and it occurred to me that there is no reason, save for ego, that I have to singlehandedly flesh out my philosophy. No, the rational course of action would be to make use of the Internet and those connected to it to both guide my own research efforts and to fill in areas that I might never otherwise have a chance to complete.




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