Openness in a Closed World: Duties of a Philosopher

Okay, so I consider myself a philosopher. Being a philosopher doesn't just mean being able to speculate or write thought-provoking stuff. Being a philosopher means knowing the discourse surrounding key concepts, concepts with much currency.

A lot of people are discovering writing as a hobby and are exploring new concepts, writing about consciousness, collective intelligence, emergent properties, open innovation, etc. The problem I have with a lot of this writing is that the concepts have not been adequately thought out.

If you're going to take a stab at philosophy, you might want to study the discourse itself. This is by no means easy. It takes time, it requires one to read excessively to keep up-to-date with the philosophical discourse.

Writing a piece on trending topics does not make one a philosopher. I've always been quick to wonder, and I spend much of my time in contemplative moods. I was born to think through tough philsophical problems. I do this for a living.

One trending topic these days is Transmedia Storytelling, i.e. Transmedia Narrative. I've read a few articles on EmoMapping and Narrative Fractals, and I find it rather obscure and nonsensical. By nonsense, I mean a text that is difficult to read and that doesn't make any overt sense. You don't get it right away and when you read further, you're more likely to be more confused than enlightened.

This is not philosophy. I have a distaste for writers who mix physics and spirituality / superstition / religiosity, or those who mix fiction (stories) into a pseudo-scientific discourse. It's a pet peeve of mine. I wish people would do more research, would study the philosophical discourse a little more, and truly, I wish people would develop their concepts a little more.

Another pet peeve is people who post a link to their latest blog entry onto Twitter, and when you take the bait, you wind up on a blog full of mumbojumbo, you wind up reading a text that doesn't make a point, that doesn't give you anything.

I don't like reading for nothing, or wasting my time reading irrelevant nonsense prose. Much of what I am reading these days is nothing more than word-salad: Someone with a pen and paper decides they are going to change the world with their writing, and the writing sucks.

So I called this blog entry Openness in a Closed World, for really, these people who call themselves open-minded are actually closed-minded. They are the people who tell you that you shouldn't have assumptions, they pass it off as wisdom or experience, knowledge, when really they stole the idea from the Four Agreements book on ancient Toltec Wisdom (which is also a bunch of bullshit).

I don't like anything that comes off as New Age. Philosophy is something else, something very different. You have to read books like Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, and you have to try to understsand them, grasp their knowledge. This is by no means easy.. it takes years, decades.

I'm not even all that much of a philosopher, I'm just an average thinker, but I certainly think through my concepts and develop them as much as I can. I don't like David Bohms' pseudo-spiritual quasi-scientific concept of holomovement. It all brings up an image in my mind of Dr. Timothy Leary high on LSD.

If you're smoking weed and writing crapped out nonsense & ancient Toltec wisdom, I don't want to know about it. Get high & write nonsense on your own time, don't try to pass it off as wisdom or philosophy. Philosophy is for philosophers. The layman shouldn't try to pawn off his mutterings as philosophy. Or if you want you can, but don't tell me it's philosophy or wisdom, tell me it's the mutterings of a fool, and don't talk to me about Sentience.. Use layman's terms and tell me you wrote an interesting blog and I will certainly read it. Just don't tell me it's ground-breaking stuff if it really isn't.

I'm only intolerant when it comes to those who pawn off mad scribblings & sick man's theories as genius work or stuff that is philosophically relevant. You have some more reading to do. Tell me it's just something you wrote, that maybe you had fun writing, and I will read it most certainly. And don't tell me not to have assumptions, New Ager. We all make assumptions about the physical world all the time. It's in our nature to do so. I can't accept being less human, and reading your weed-induced jibberjab is dehumanizing to say the least.

Any thoughts or comments on the matter?