Aesthetic values
Clarity: The art of honesty, not in a factual sense but in an archetypal and emotional sense. Not just being honest with your audience but with yourself, your narrative, and your characters
Grace: making high effort seem effortless, the balance of Inspiration and Craft
urgency: write like you have no other choice, and like there's no time to waste
Top three idealist arguments
- Descartes derangement syndrome – strawmen argument about what “dogmatic”/“mechanistic” materialists believe, including: “dead matter”, “billiard balls bumping into each other”,“cold reductionism”
a. This fails. Matter is recursive, vibrant, abornomal, dynamic. No contemporary scientists or philosophers deny this, they just believe the causes are PHYSICAL.
- Argument from Emergence – certain processes or phenomena are “greater than the sum of their parts” (music, chemical reactions, consciousness), this means that it's mind/non physical, right?
a. Based on the track record of science explaining “divine phenomena” (weather, planetary movements, quantum mechanics) that was previously irreducible, it's on the idealist to prove that it IS mental/ideal (which they can't). Even if it is irreducible, there's no reason to believe it's non physical.
- The crisis of the self and the subject – there are obvious cases where the subject and object blur (hive minds, psychedelic experiences, dissasocative identity disorder), how is this possible if there is only matter? Wouldnt this dissolution be observable physically?
a. The most compelling argument I've run into. However, these examples still have observable consequences in the physical world. Additionally, our matter is connected to the world in many ways (heat from the sun, the food we eat)