I make stuff, it’s what I do.
I’m an explorer of many mediums and I have trouble settling down with one art form. I started with illustration and comics and moved to model building and sculpture, then to doll making and mechanical engineering.
That experimentation eventually lead me to puppetry. It is an art that encompasses all others, synthesizes all my various interests–Drawing, painting, writing, sculpting, carving, film making, acting, engineering, lighting, set design, sound, sewing, fashion, general crafting and most of all, storytelling–all into one place. Puppet shows are a way for me to contain these interests and focus them. The result is a blend of aestheticism and technical pragmatism creating visuals purpose built to convey narrative.
I have a few principle beliefs I live by. People are good.
I think everyone is generally decent, and doing the best they can, and basically good, but working with woefully incomplete information, and less in control than they'd have everyone else imagine. Most everyone believes they have the truth but also knows, on some level, they're 'faking it.'
I do not believe in the concept of evil. Instead I see a spectrum of ill-health in four categories. Mental, physical, perceptivity and wonder. (What some may call 'spiritual' but I think of as a 'capacity for awe') and when a person is unhealthy in several of these categories they may commit acts we call 'evil'. I dismiss the concept of evil because it tends to come with the idea of immutability, as though an 'evil' person is a sculpture carved from stone, instead of an organism which is in constant flux. Health is variable. It changes with conditions.
I believe in 'the benefit of the doubt' or assuming the best possible meaning, especially when online and dealing with text people have written. It's easy to dismiss people if you have categorized them as stupid or 'evil' so I try not to. (and often fail)
I think there are a small handful of people who truly lack empathy and for some reason we seem to want them in positions of great power. Maybe we don't want that responsibility ourselves, but it may be one of the great human flaws of organization. I'm interested in, and concerned by, morality and empathy. Sociopathology in particular.
I'm an epidemiologist
I stole a phrase from Matt Dillahunty who cribbed it from Hume; I wish to believe as many true things and as few false things as humanly possible and I'm comfortable saying 'I don't know the answer, yet' about a great many things. I used to know things I don't believe I know anymore.
I believe everything in the universe is temporary. Including the bad things. Including the good things. And that this is the foundation of meaning. A finite existence is the most important aspect of our experience of the universe.
I'm not invested in Tribalism.
I don't believe group affiliation means anything. Period. Whether it be traits anyone can choose, or traits anyone is born with, or those acquired along the way. Any two people of any group are still two different individuals. These are barely single data-points of commonality among thousands or millions which make up a person.
I don't believe in group, or historical guilt. 'The sins of the father' is not a position with merit, in my mind. We are all born into circumstances beyond our control, with history already in place. We can only move forward from the first point of awareness. I don't believe in 'genetic memory' or ancestor knowledge, but we do have certain instinctual patterns built up and reinforced over millennia.
I also don't subscribe to much in the way of conspiracy, we are all mostly muddling through; but tribalism is real and everyone does it to some degree. It's foolish. We're social animals who look to sort potential collaborators based on whatever superficial associations we can readily identify. Granfaloonery as Vonnegut would say.
Thought is an Emergence Principle.
I believe in evidence, reason and logic but I don't believe any human is free of bias or personal perspective, and certainly not emotion. I see no reason to pretend objectivity.
I've come to entirely discard the notion of free will. There is no rational, or scientific basis for it. As far as I can tell, we are reaction machines, given the illusion of decision making by a post-hoc rationalizing brain generating thought through emergence principles. Memories altered every time we recall them, cells forever dying and being replaced, we are continually new again, reinventing ourselves and constructing artificial continuities.
I don't inherently believe anything exists but I accept that it does. This is Exhilism. What some have dubbed 'Optimistic Nihilism.' I participate in the world as presented to me even if I have no definitive knowledge that it exists at all. If it's a simulation, than I am active in it. It matters to me even if it doesn't to the universe.
Life is nasty, brutish, and short.
I don't believe the universe guarantees any being a 'Right to life' but it does offer a kind of 'right to freedom' insofar as we exist within an ecosystem. In practice this means, I'm vegetarian but not really against the killing of animals. I AM against the stealing of their freedom to live as they would in their natural habitat or as close to it as possible. To this end, I do not eat animals because I am not willing to hunt animals and kill them, out in the wild, where they live.
I have much the same opinion of people. I see little value in prisons. If it is not meant to reform people, then the only purpose is either to warehouse people we are too lazy to reform, or as a means of petty revenge for whatever crime they committed. I see no evidence prisons actually reduce crime. Certainly not as much as an anti-poverty program costing the same amount would.
I believe violence is always a failure. A failure of intellect, or compassion, or patience, or integrity. Violence is the hard way, that feels like the easy way. A temporary solution that always causes more problems than it solves. Violence always escalates and perpetuates more violence. It's only good at starting things, never at ending them. Wars are no exception. Even the 'good' ones.
Without the risk of committing offense, we cannot learn, or think.
I believe in a principle of complete freedom of thought and speech. Even the dumb ideas, and the bad ideas and the hateful ones. It's only through discourse and having our ideas and beliefs challenged can we find out when we're wrong or discover new ideas that change our minds. Silencing any idea is a foolhardy attempt at best. Beliefs can't be eradicated, only hidden. Better to talk them through and dismantle bad ideas. Ideas hidden through fear are also ideas unchallenged, unamended, unexamined.
I believe things must be 'gone through'. There are a million stupid, unnecessary, avoidable and wasteful processes that, nonetheless must be 'gone through' because often the 'wrong way' must be processed before we are ready to do things the 'right way.'
Thank you for your attention.