Worldview
Perspective
I know I was born into certain advantages, and into a narrow view of the world that took me years to question. There are many honest ways to think about truth, relativism, and how a single life sits inside a global one. I care about human flourishing everywhere, not only in the USA, and I think looking out for each other, across borders, is a basic part of being human.
Part of that is personal. My family is from southern Minnesota, on the lands of the Dakota, part of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (Seven Council Fires); Minnesota is also home to the Ojibwe (Anishinaabe). Both are still here, and both were forced from much of that land by an expansion I was raised to celebrate. Naming it plainly is the point: it is why history has to be protected and kept open to everyone, why whitewashing it does real harm, and why I push back on nationalism and want information kept as free of bias as we can manage.
The Social Contract
I think perception, like knowledge, accumulates over time, and that a kind of social contract runs implicitly between us. For people to flourish they need safety and their basic needs met, food, water, shelter, and, because we are social creatures, they also need to communicate and to reach information, which today runs through the internet. But the information within reach right now needs better safeguards:
- - knowledge built from evidence (Locke)
- - inquiry that wins over dogma (Voltaire)
- - power that answers to the people (Rousseau)
- - freedom made real because people have the means to use it (Beauvoir)
I hold that debt with its critique attached: Charles W. Mills showed, in The Racial Contract, how much of the social-contract tradition was written while excluding most of humanity, and any use I make of it has to answer that. I think we owe each other the work of building and sharing what we know, and that is where a chain I keep returning to starts: open information feeds democracy, and democracy is what lets people flourish.
I believe in both a modernist and a postmodernist viewpoint of the truth. So while I believe there is real empirical truth, I also believe that in most human interactions, empirical truth matters less than perspective: the relative truths people actually live in.
Growth is a lifelong project for me. I try to stay open to feedback, and to own it when I am wrong. I do not expect to ever be done.
Ethics, Morality & Boundaries
For me, ethics are contextually and culturally bound, whereas morality is more of a spiritual or internal clock. I set boundaries for how people interact with me and my family, because a boundary is something I can control.
Spirituality
I am an animist. At its simplest that means I see spirit in all things, living or not, and all of us as part of a single connected whole. My strongest influences are Zen Buddhism, especially Thich Nhat Hanh, and my closest association is with Daoism, which is why I joined DaoUSA and the Tai He Dao Ministry. Even so, I struggle to call myself simply a Daoist or a Buddhist, because my beliefs do not fully line up with either; animist is the honest word. My primary connecting belief is in the universal flow, what Daoists call the Dao, while my school of thought and the way I reason and practice sit closer to Zen Buddhism. All of this is personal faith, not a claim about science or evidence.
I was raised Christian Fundamentalist and Baptist, and I have since left that faith behind, once I could see the dangers in how it was taught. Thich Nhat Hanh's Living Buddha, Living Christ helped me find my way from there to here.
Some traditions I do not practice resonate heavily with me, and I hold them with reverence:
- - Ainu: the closest; their sense of kamuy, spirits present throughout the living world as I understand it, comes nearest to my own animism (the Ainu are the Indigenous people of Hokkaidō)
- - Shintō, the Native American traditions of the Minnesota area, and Romani folk traditions: a similar resonance
- - Wider traditions that shaped the thinking I draw on: Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism, Hinduism, and Tibetan and Mahayana Buddhism
My bodhisattva, a figure of compassion to orient by, is Guan Yin, held across Buddhism and Daoism and rooted in the older Indian figure of Avalokiteśvara.
Lifestyle
I want a life built on connection, honesty, and purpose, and I am building it with my spouse, Genesis Wilde.
For a long time I kept people at a distance. I do not want to be that person, and the pull toward an open, honest life is a big part of why information integrity matters so much to me.
Information Advocacy
I treat reliable information as infrastructure, and infrastructure only works while people maintain it. The pillars, the orgs & projects, the products I pay for, and the why behind each: Information Advocacy.
Goals
Next Stage
- - Establish myself in the Mathematics Community and as a Quantum Researcher
- - Do my part to strengthen the social contract that ties open information, democracy, and human flourishing together
- - Working with my Spouse to Establish Local Community Connections
- - Advancements of Mathematics, Quantum, and Scientific study
- - Improving Information Access and Reliability