The high-dimensional middle
From the fourth episode of The Portal, some quotes from Eric Weinstein:
I caucus, if you will, with the pro-choice community,
But
my real position is: a plague on both your houses.
I’m not pro-choice to the extent that I’m willing to call a child four minutes before its birth ‘fetal tissue’. Nor am I pro-life to the extent that I’m going to call a blastosphere a ‘baby’. Both of those seem patently insane to me.
But
if people see that I caucus pro-choice, then they say, okay, you’re willing to sit with somebody who’s willing to terminate a third trimester pregnancy frivolously because they’re ideologically committed to it. Ergo, you’re evil, ergo we can no longer be friends.
That’s silly.
my key point is, look, I’ll drop these people in a heartbeat if you give me some nuanced room in which to maneuver. Let’s talk about the neural tube formation. Let’s talk about what we think of as life…
nowhere do I get to discuss Carnegie stages in embryonic development, which would be sort of a more scientific approach to what quality of life is it that we’re trying to preserve.
Stepping back,
a lot of what The Portal is about, is we’ve got to break out of this enforced conversation of morons, to some place where we can actually potentially get enough resolution to say, oh, here’s what I’m really about.
About that middle…
Yeah, I don’t think it’s at the middle. I mean, I really think, and for those of you who are watching, rather than listening, I think that there’s this very flat, low dimensional plane where these positions live. And that what we’re calling the middle is not the thing between these. It’s in a higher dimensional space that combines these crappy low resolution, moronic positions, and it projects to the middle, but it isn’t the middle.
Whatever we call it,
One thing that I’m fascinated by, and maybe we’ll come back to this, is what is the force that makes the middle so difficult to hold. That pushes more and more people towards either being sort of what I’ve termed troglodytes or dupes.