This is a summary of the book I’m currently working on that could be used for my PhD thesis, if i decide to go that route. The book is currently a bit over 200 pages. Like most PhD thesis proposals, it’s very esoteric, so if it’s difficult to understand don’t worry. I’ve tried to make it as simple as possible without sacrificing the message.
Proposed PhD Thesis Area:
Cyber-Physical-Social Systems / Human Factors / Philosophy of Technology
Proposed PhD Thesis Summary:
My proposed thesis mobilizes a three-pronged critique of the effects of logical positivism, scientism, behaviorism, libertarian paternalism, surveillance capitalism, Landian accelerationism and the shortcomings of the Principia Mathematica in light of Gödel, Wittgenstein, Derrida, and the post-structuralists, as well as a much needed expansion of the emotionally and culturally myopic lens of Jared Diamond, John Zerzan, and others. This is coupled with a genealogical analysis of America’s hegemonic values and folkways in light of findings from David Hackett Fisher, Max Weber, and De Tocqueville. It then uses the concepts developed by Aldous Huxley, Alfred North Whitehead, Deleuze and Guattari, Terence McKenna, Ray Kurzweil, Jacques Barzun, Joseph Schumpeter, Epicurus, Goethe, Nietzsche, and Renaissance Humanism. It most prominently deals with process philosophy, Freudian sublimation, the accursed share, transhumanism, and emergent system properties. However, these concepts are limited, justifying the need for the development of new concepts such as technological sprawl, two series production-advertising-demand Maslow’s hierarchies as the basis for both production and consumption domestication, extraction, and coercive transhumanism. This is done through a technological determinist lense in tandem with a narrow metaphysics underpinned by Kant’s Prolegomena. Ample data is provided in order to drive support towards a two pronged thesis of (I) a neo-epicureanism, renaissance humanist philosophy, in accordance with longitudinal positive psychology studies, and (II) an outline of an economic framework in a post scarcity economy in accordance with future studies, competitive international forces, and technological teleology.