Comment:

This is something I think about a lot, as a creator. What's my legacy? How do I influence culture, how do I guide the next generation? If my words are misinterpreted, what happens? How is the world changed, if it turns out that I'm the next Jesus or Isaac Newton or Ayn Rand?

I make little board and card games sometimes, just to suss out a concept, and one that I played with a few years back was a series of little paper slips you could use to generate a whole life philosophy. (It never went anywhere, because while the paper slips generating a philosophy were interesting, I couldn't really work out a way to compel engaging gameplay with them.)

The system had a few starting points (like "Smart" - you inherently have Intelligence), a lot of intermediaries (like "Resourceful" - if you have Intelligence, you can get Wealth) and a few endpoints ("Legacy" - if you have Wealth, Popularity, Power, and Skill, you win at life). The idea being, of course, that you lay the slips out, one thing leading to another and another, until you have just a few starting points that lead to your endpoint, and that's the guiding ethos of your whole life. I found it amusing that you could create a whole movement - a realistic series of precepts by which a human being might choose to orient their life - essentially from chance.

What is your philosophy? If you had to write it out in two or three sentences, what would that look like? If you travelled forward in time and found a group of people living their lives based around those few sentences, would that be a good community? Would it be possible for a fanaticist to take those few sentences and conclude that they justify a campaign of torture, a la the Spanish Inquisition? What if you spilled grape juice on your philosophy, and a few key nouns got garbled - what might arise then?

Transcript:

---------------------------------------------------------------
0107 - 2167/07/06/12:44 - Lee Caldavera's apartment, living room
OT [data connection]: Hey, don't get hung up on whether or not Socrates was "real". What's important to the class - and to history - is the enduring effect they had on how we all think.
Zoa [data connection]: Gotta say, as a fake person myself, I'm kinda in favour of fake people having a large impact on civilization.
LC: Different kind of fake person.
Zoa: I'm aware of the distinction.
----------------------
LC: I wonder how Mezzer Twofeather would feel if one of their students created a philosophy and put their name on it.
Zoa [data connection]: Just curious, how would you feel if Lee and I created a philosophical movement and slapped your name on it post mortem?
OT [data connection]: Is that you asking, or Lee asking?
Zoa [data connection]: Yes.
----------------------
[Rosenthal College, Orb Twofeather's office]
OT [data connection]: Hmm, an intriguing question...
OT [data connection]: (leaving aside the nitpick that, of course, I wouldn't feel anything about it if I were already dead...)
OT [data connection]: I suppose it would depend on what the tenets of Orbism are.
Zoa [data connection]: Well, if we're using your name, presumably we'd be teaching something sphere-based.
OT [data connection]: "Sphere" like the sun and planets, or "sphere" like "sphere of influence"?
----------------------
Zoa [data connection]: Yes.
OT [data connection]: Perhaps Or-bism should have something to do with remembering to use the term "xor" when dealing with an AI...
---------------------------------------------------------------