About

I’m a Norwegian philosophy student currently working on a Master’s thesis about skepticism and how it (in my opinion) can be circumvented completely and in a satisfactory way if we start with fictionalism as a foundation and enter the frame of a speculative system I call transcendental virtualism. This is supposed to be sort of an update of Kant’s transcendental idealism, where the differences from Kant are provided mostly by a meditation on computationalism. This is where the name virtualism comes from as well; it refers to the thought that mind is to be understood as some sort of virtuality generated somehow by the biological machine in one’s head.

I won’t elaborate further on the theoretical issues here, as I have made several attempts at that in posts (search: virtualism).

Virtualism (or whatever I’ll end up calling it) is my main interest, but I like to go sightseeing in most other philosophical landscapes as well. The deeply fictionalist position I’ve come to take has among its benefits that it enables me to appreciate elements in all kinds of philosophies, not only the few that I strictly agree with (which, if the threshold of strictness is high enough, is none). The history of philosophy — which I once thought of as a desert capable of teaching me nothing but errors and wishful illusionism — now appears to me as a pleasant arboretum, a manifest topological map of speculative structures of thought.

What I want to do is suggest that the trees displayed in this arboretum aren’t separate species but parts of a single universal whole, one unfathomably large tree of all possible thought. This metaphor is weak, in the sense that its possible to interpret it in a trivial way. Some words on the relation between this tree and reality are needed. This post should be good enough for now.

Contact me at gormroedder*gmail*com.