The three most important feelings that guide human behavior throughout a lifetime are Caring, Trust, & Choice. They form a simple network, built-up from the Affect of the non-conscious mind and express themselves in action, whether for good or bad.
CARE: to feel interest or concern; TRUST: to place confidence in; CHOICE: power of choosing
Whenever one is lost, the others are lost too.
I mention this now as a way of commitment to you: I hope that you CARE enough to keep on reading. I will do my best to explain why these ideas are important enough to CARE about. I hope that you TRUST the sources I use. I will do my best to keep everything strictly cited and always open to criticism. I hope that you CHOOSE to stay until the end, whenever that may be. I will do my best to show you where the disagreement is, surrounding any controversial idea, so that if you lose TRUST, or stop CARING, you may then freely CHOOSE to leave, whenever you like.
This isn’t the Hotel California.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but inspiration comes from many of the following people and their ideas. I include it so that you may get a feel for what comes next:
Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kurt Gödel, Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, Lawrence Kohlberg, Abraham Maslow, George Lakoff, John R. Searle, Douglas Hofstadter, Peter Corning, Antonio Damasio, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Thomas Metzinger, Jaak Panksepp, Donald Hoffman, Leonard Mlodinow, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Robert Sapolsky, Neil Shubin, James Gleick, Martin Nowak, Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein, Steve Stewart-Williams, Jonathan Haidt, Robert Trivers, Jerry Coyne, Frans de Waal, Gad Saad, David Eagleman, Daniel Kahneman, Barbara Tversky, John O. Campbell, D.B. Kelley, Johnjoe McFadden, Gary Cziko, Fritjof Capra, Scott E. Page, Steven Strogatz, John H. Holland, John Gribbon, Carlo Rovelli, Sabine Hossenfelder, Lee Smolin, David Deutsch, Brian Keating, Adam Becker, Nate Silver, Grant Sanderson, Jared Diamond, Vaclav Smil, David Graeber, Niall Ferguson, Yuvial Noah Harari, Peter Zeihan, Garrett Hardin, Albert Ellis, M. Scott Peck, Martin Seligman, Alan Watts, Deepak Chopra, Martin Epstein, Simon Sinek, Steven Pinker, Michael Shermer, Paul Bloom, Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, David Buss, and many more…