As a mental exercise, I have tried to answer the question ‘what do I believe’ in the fewest possible words. This is my best attempt to date.

Epistemology, identity and language. Existence is an irrelevant concept, its validity unprovable and utterly insignificant. Nouns (and thus language) are built on convenient euphemisms and abstractions. You never cross the same river twice: the water has changed and so have you. Identity is feigned. Human communication and universal grammar depends on our ability to form and adapt abstractions: people, rivers, nouns. We process these with verbs, and infer them with argument. We build these abstractions into knowledge. Often we don’t correct enough for evolved biases because we’ve evolved not to. The knowledge we create contains a lot of euphemism and abstraction, (and contorts these into a priori truisms) but also bundles up some important, fundamental and a posteriori physical laws. You dropped an apple, it fell: ‘you’ and the ‘apple’ are abstractions, the revealed law is as close as we will get to experiencing truth. It doesn’t matter who senses this truth, or how. Truth is platform-independent.

Philosophy of science. A unified theory of everything may require multiple universes, although the existence of such universes would pose no new practical problems, in the same way as the existence of previous and future timeframes pose no new practical problems. While we work towards a unified theory we should bear in mind that while we travel through time unintentionally we also exist in the past, ‘now’.

Ethics. There are no ethical facts, and so there cannot be ethical knowledge. Statements of right and wrong are statements of strong (‘sanctified’) preference. Pride, joy, guilt and shame exist as evolved responses to guide pro-social behaviour that favours reproduction. These combine with the self-interest of others to set ‘ethical norms’ and outline ‘natural justice’. There is no ‘good life’ in the absence of an objective; there are no ‘inalienable rights’ outside of contract.

Political philosophy. Because of the inter-generational problem, liberty exists only in polities with the right of exit and entry. The availability of new frontiers increases the quantum of liberty in the universe, through competitive bidding – polities need people as much as people need polities. Escape to space is a genetic necessity.

Economics. Markets are an externalisation of the process of human reasoning. They benefit from the same power, speed and logic, but are subject to the same behavioural biases as individuals and crowds.