At the risk of sounding pretentious, I think I need more opportunities to spend time talking with intelligent people about big questions, rather than just reading and thinking about them (and occasionally writing stuff that's tangentially related). I don't know what might be the best forum for this, but I figured this might not be a bad place to start?
So here is a list of some of the especially large questions that have been preoccupying me. They may or may not feed into each other in any way. I don't really expect I'll personally solve any of these, but maybe I'll make some progress, at least. I also want to make sure that I notice if and when someone else solves them - I will be disappointed if nobody gets to the bottom of any of these before I die!
- The nature of the mind and the self (c.f. this blog post about relevant books)
- The roots of our aesthetic sensibilities
- How best to replace/fix capitalism
- How best to fix/replace 'representative' democracy
- The reality underlying the quantum wave function, and how to reconcile quantum entanglement with special relativity
Let me know if you feel like you have any good leads on any of these, if you want me to expand on what I mean, or if you would be interested in discussing them, whether on E2 or in some other venue...