https://vegasharmon.com/tags/canon/ Recent content in Canon on Vegas Harmon Hugo en Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-inner-ring-chasing-it-guarantees-you-ll-never-belong/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-inner-ring-chasing-it-guarantees-you-ll-never-belong/ That is my first reason. Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things. My second reason is this. The torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water, is the symbol not of one vice, but of all vices. It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-changing-heaven-keeps-earth-the-same/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-changing-heaven-keeps-earth-the-same/ As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will remain exactly the same. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-grumbler-or-only-a-grumble/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-grumbler-or-only-a-grumble/ The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-stronger-angel-a-fiercer-devil/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-stronger-angel-a-fiercer-devil/ It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/all-hell-is-smaller-than-a-pebble/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/all-hell-is-smaller-than-a-pebble/ ‘Yes. All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/artifacts-are-defined-by-purpose/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/artifacts-are-defined-by-purpose/ What defines a human artifact is its goal or purpose. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/brass-is-mistaken-for-gold/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/brass-is-mistaken-for-gold/ There’s something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there’s also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/capitalism-uncoupled-from-human-values/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/capitalism-uncoupled-from-human-values/ The idea of biological or cultural evolution causing a mass population explosion is a philosophical toy at best. The idea of technology making it possible is both plausible and terrifying. Now we see that “physical limits” segues very naturally into “excess resources” – the ability to create new agents very quickly means that unless everyone can coordinate to ban doing this, the people who do will outcompete the people who don’t until they have reached carrying capacity and everyone is stuck at subsistence level. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/caring-for-proofs-of-god-more-than-god/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/caring-for-proofs-of-god-more-than-god/ There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself… as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist! There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ. Man! Ye see it in smaller matters. Did ye never know a lover of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them? https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/checks-and-balances-or-one-guy-in-charge/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/checks-and-balances-or-one-guy-in-charge/ The United States tries to solve the problem by having multiple levels of government, unbreakable constutitional laws, checks and balances between different branches, and a couple of other hacks. Saudi Arabia uses a different tactic. They just put one guy in charge of everything. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/color-play-is-not-a-finished-work/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/color-play-is-not-a-finished-work/ There’s nothing wrong with [being excited about the interesting contrast of colors]… But that’s the kind of thing you enjoy when playing around with colors on your palette! It is not a finished work of art. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/coordinating-institutions-fall-into-traps-too/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/coordinating-institutions-fall-into-traps-too/ Social codes, gentlemens’ agreements, industrial guilds, criminal organizations, traditions, friendships, schools, corporations, and religions are all coordinating institutions that keep us out of traps by changing our incentives. […] But these institutions not only incentivize others, but are incentivized themselves. These are large organizations made of lots of people who are competing for jobs, status, prestige, et cetera – there’s no reason they should be immune to the same multipolar traps as everyone else, and indeed they aren’t. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/darkness-cannot-infect-our-light/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/darkness-cannot-infect-our-light/ Did you think joy was created to live always under that threat? Always defenseless against those who would rather be miserable than have their self-will crossed? For it was real misery. I know that now. You made yourself really wretched. That you can still do. But you can no longer communicate your wretchedness. Everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness: but your darkness cannot now infect our light. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/did-mind-create-matter/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/did-mind-create-matter/ The core of the evolution controversy can thus be phrased in simple terms: Did mind create matter? Or did matter give rise to mind? https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/eternal-reality-must-be-lived/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/eternal-reality-must-be-lived/ Ye can not know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all acts and events that fill Time, are the definition, and it must be lived. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/faces-full-of-impossibilities/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/faces-full-of-impossibilities/ They were all fixed faces, full not of possibilities but impossibilities… https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/heaven-is-reality-itself/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/heaven-is-reality-itself/ Hell is a state of mind—ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its mind—is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/heaven-works-backwards/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/heaven-works-backwards/ They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/hell-as-endless-quarrelling/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/hell-as-endless-quarrelling/ ‘Not at all,’ said my neighbor. ‘The trouble is that they’re so quarrelsome. As soon as anyone arrives he settles in some street. Before he’s been there twenty-four hours he quarrels with his neighbour. Before the week is over he’s quarrelled so badly that he decides to move. Very likely he finds the next street empty because all the people there have quarrelled with their neighbors—and moved. If so he settles in. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/hell-cannot-veto-heaven/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/hell-cannot-veto-heaven/ ‘The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/hell-or-purgatory-if-you-leave-it/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/hell-or-purgatory-if-you-leave-it/ You have been in Hell: though if you don’t go back you may call it Purgatory. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/i-will-not-call-up-that-which-i-cannot-put-down/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/i-will-not-call-up-that-which-i-cannot-put-down/ But coordination only works when you have 51% or more of the force on the side of the people doing the coordinating, and when you haven’t come up with some brilliant trick to make coordination impossible. The second one first. In the links post before last, I wrote: The latest development in the brave new post-​Bitcoin world is crypto-​equity. At this point I’ve gone from wanting to praise these inventors as bold libertarian heroes to wanting to drag them in front of a blackboard and making them write a hundred times “I WILL NOT CALL UP THAT WHICH I CANNOT PUT DOWN” https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/inability-does-not-erase-obligation/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/inability-does-not-erase-obligation/ Our complete inability to do what is right does not erase our obligation to do what is right. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/is-your-walled-garden-part-of-the-cosmos/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/is-your-walled-garden-part-of-the-cosmos/ Warg talks about trying to avoid “a future of meaningless gleaming techno-​progress burning the cosmos”. Do you really think your walled garden will be able to ride this out? Hint: is it part of the cosmos? Yeah, you’re kind of screwed. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/learning-as-ever-richer-mnemonic-devices/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/learning-as-ever-richer-mnemonic-devices/ Learning can be seen as a process of acquiring smarter and richer mnemonic devices to represent information, encoding similar information, into patterns, organization principles, and rules which represent even material we have never before encountered, but which is like what we do know, and thus can be recognized or remembered. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/love-as-the-craving-to-be-loved/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/love-as-the-craving-to-be-loved/ But what we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/multipolar-traps-and-the-science-god/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/multipolar-traps-and-the-science-god/ The modern research community knows they aren’t producing the best science they could be. There’s lots of publication bias, statistics are done in a confusing and misleading way out of sheer inertia, and replications often happen very late or not at all. And sometimes someone will say something like “I can’t believe people are too dumb to fix Science. All we would have to do is require early registration of studies to avoid publication bias, turn this new and powerful statistical technique into the new standard, and accord higher status to scientists who do replication experiments. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/multipolar-traps-as-technology-approaches-infinity/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/multipolar-traps-as-technology-approaches-infinity/ The limit of multipolar traps as technology approaches infinity is “very bad”. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/natural-affection-unconverted/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/natural-affection-unconverted/ ‘What you have seen in the Guthries is what natural affection turns to in the end if it will not be converted.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/natural-love-must-be-buried-to-rise/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/natural-love-must-be-buried-to-rise/ Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/natural-theology-rests-on-what-we-know/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/natural-theology-rests-on-what-we-know/ Natural theology is not based on what we do not know. It is based on what we do know about living things. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/nick-land-and-summoning-demon-gods/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/nick-land-and-summoning-demon-gods/ As far as I can tell from reading his blog, Nick Land is the guy in that terrifying border region where he is smart enough to figure out several important arcane principles about summoning demon gods, but not quite smart enough to figure out the most important such principle, which is NEVER DO THAT. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/no-need-for-one-another/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/no-need-for-one-another/ We shall have no need for one another now: we can begin to love truly. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/no-needs-no-community/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/no-needs-no-community/ What’s the trouble about this place? Not that people are quarrelsome—that’s only human nature and was always the same even on Earth. The trouble is that they have no Needs. You get everything you want (not very good quality, of course) by just imagining it. That’s why it never costs any trouble to move to another street or build another house. In other words, there’s no proper economic basis for any community life. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/nothing-can-be-yours-by-nature/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/nothing-can-be-yours-by-nature/ ‘He will be, Pam. Everything will be yours. God Himself will be yours. But not that way. Nothing can be yours by nature.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/only-the-greatest-can-descend-into-hell/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/only-the-greatest-can-descend-into-hell/ ‘Only the Greatest of all can make Himself small enough to enter Hell. For the higher a thing is, the lower it can descend—a man can sympathise with a horse but a horse cannot sympathize with a rat. Only One has descended into Hell.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/reality-is-harsh-to-the-feet-of-shadows/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/reality-is-harsh-to-the-feet-of-shadows/ Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come? https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/seeking-recognition-and-appreciation/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/seeking-recognition-and-appreciation/ He felt quite certain that he was going where, at last, his finely critical spirit would no longer be outraged by an uncongenial environment—where he would find ‘Recognition’ and ‘Appreciation.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-critic-left-with-only-self-conceit/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-critic-left-with-only-self-conceit/ But he was at least intelligent: one could get some criticism worth hearing from him, even if he was a failure on the creative side. But now he seems to have nothing left but his self-conceit. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-extraordinary-concentration-of-einstein-and-aquinas/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-extraordinary-concentration-of-einstein-and-aquinas/ In both [descriptions of Einstein and Aquinas], one gets a vivid sense of extraordinary concentration on problems to the exclusion of most daily routine. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-fact-value-split/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-fact-value-split/ Thus was born the fact/value split—the idea that humans can have genuine knowledge only in the realm of empirical facts. Morality was reduced to subjective preferences. The term values means literally whatever the individual happens to value. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-final-state-cannot-be-answered/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-final-state-cannot-be-answered/ But if you are trying to leap on into eternity, if ye are trying to see the final state of all things as it will be (for so ye must speak) when there are no more possibilities left but only the Real, then ye ask what cannot be answered to mortal ears. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-fish-farm-race-to-the-bottom/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-fish-farm-race-to-the-bottom/ As a thought experiment, let’s consider aquaculture (fish farming) in a lake. Imagine a lake with a thousand identical fish farms owned by a thousand competing companies. Each fish farm earns a profit of $1000/month. For a while, all is well. But each fish farm produces waste, which fouls the water in the lake. Let’s say each fish farm produces enough pollution to lower productivity in the lake by $1/month. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-grumble-going-on-like-a-machine/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-grumble-going-on-like-a-machine/ Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-telos-of-man-and-capturing-gnon/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-telos-of-man-and-capturing-gnon/ And then there’s us. Man has his own telos, when he is allowed the security to act and the clarity to reason out the consequences of his actions. When unafflicted by coordination problems and unthreatened by superior forces, able to act as a gardener rather than just another subject of the law of the jungle, he tends to build and guide a wonderful world for himself. He tends to favor good things and avoid bad, to create secure civilizations with polished sidewalks, beautiful art, happy families, and glorious adventures. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-two-tenets-of-true-atheism/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-two-tenets-of-true-atheism/ But for you to make this move would reveal the two fundamental tenets of true atheism. One: There is no God. Two: I hate Him. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-valley-of-the-shadow-of-life/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-valley-of-the-shadow-of-life/ ‘It depends on the way ye’re using the words. If they leave that grey town behind it will not have been Hell. To any that leaves it, it is Purgatory. And perhaps ye had better not call this country Heaven. Not Deep Heaven, ye understand.’ (Here he smiled at me.) ‘Ye can call it the Valley of the Shadow of Life. And yet to those who stay here it will have been Heaven from the first. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/thirst-was-made-for-water/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/thirst-was-made-for-water/ ‘You have gone far wrong. Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/this-is-the-dream-time/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/this-is-the-dream-time/ So I agree with Robin Hanson: This is the dream time. This is a rare confluence of circumstances where the we are unusually safe from multipolar traps, and as such weird things like art and science and philosophy and love can flourish. As technological advance increases, the rare confluence will come to an end. New opportunities to throw values under the bus for increased competitiveness will arise. New ways of copying agents to increase the population will soak up our excess resources and resurrect Malthus’ unquiet spirit. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/thy-will-be-done/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/thy-will-be-done/ There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/time-as-an-inverted-telescope/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/time-as-an-inverted-telescope/ Time is the very lens through which ye see—small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope—something that would be otherwise too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/too-far-off-to-come-to-the-bus-stop/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/too-far-off-to-come-to-the-bus-stop/ They’re so far off by now that they could never think of coming to the bus stop at all. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/two-places-the-river-reaches-the-sea/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/two-places-the-river-reaches-the-sea/ Absent an extraordinary effort to divert it, the river reaches the sea in one of two places. It can end in Eliezer Yudkowsky’s nightmare of a superintelligence optimizing for some random thing (classically paper clips) because we weren’t smart enough to channel its optimization efforts the right way. This is the ultimate trap, the trap that catches the universe. Everything except the one thing being maximized is destroyed utterly in pursuit of the single goal, including all the silly human values. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/we-have-never-lived-anywhere-except-in-heaven/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/we-have-never-lived-anywhere-except-in-heaven/ And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,” and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.