My main interest right now is to use the core of cognition to talk about the broad range of social shapes that are available to us as a species, or as a part of a broader ecosystem. The shapes of society should help us accomplish what makes a mind worth having, or what makes life worth living. The shapes of society are inherently loopy, as they rest on the beliefs of what we all think about ourselves.

A common theme for me is the concept of "rules," and social shapes as "games." So here I am musing on fugues, and how the rules in a fugue make it beautiful: make the artistry better. When it comes to rules of society, or rules in a game, or rules of nature, or any kind of rules, these musical rules are justified in terms of their ability to bring about greater musical value. These rules make life and mind more brilliant. They contribute to the peaks of the mind, of expression…and I could imagine a small-scale “ruler” such as a music teacher justified in their musical authority to teach me how to compose a fugue. But it wouldn’t be coercive authority. It would be just a higher level of awareness about why the rules exist and how to use them and what the value of them are. This is way different than the justification of large scale "self-justifiathans" as I like to call them. Large coercive rulers are self-justifying. Large territories with coercive rulers (a Leviathan, as Hobbes calls it) bend society to the ruler's maladaptions, and by doing so, create the behavior and the beliefs that justifies their rule-making.

The rules of the fugue lead to what makes life worth living, whereas the rules of the self-justifiathan are just unexamined maladaptations playing out as rules that create more monsters.

Fugue that!