[ExI] Rejecting Socrates/was Re: Libertarianism wins again...

[Anders Sandberg]

We do not know what Socrates himself said, we got it all more or less 
filtered through Plato (the "Socratic problem"). He is mainly important 
because he seems to have set out to do some systematic and 
*constructive* sceptical thinking across epistemology and ethics 
(caricature: the sophists were certainly sceptical, but mostly ended up 
in relativist mist, and the pre-socratics were not very systematical or 
sceptical). I think he was mostly an intellectual gadfly, inspiring 
others and becoming a good symbol for the subsequent schools of 
philosophers.

My own recipe for cultural immortality: find a new important problem, 
make a stab at solving it. Even if you fail you will be a seminal 
character.

John Grigg wrote:
>  
> I fully expect posthumans several millennia from now, to consider the 
> Extropy list as their personal scripture! lol  Please remember that 
> there will be various denominations, ranging from the 
> enlightened Sandbergians, the aesthetically minded Vita-Moreans, and 
> the hard-nosed Clarkites.
Hopefully we can be around to annoy them by holding heretic views. A bit 
like how Marx apparently annoyed some of his followers near the end of 
his life by claiming not to be a marxist.



-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University