And then there is Pythagoras. The legend is that the founder of theoretical mathematics was so outraged when one of his students, the haplessly gifted Hippasus, discovered irrational numbers that he sent the poor fellow out on a raft to drown, initiating a venerable tradition of professors mistreating their graduate students.

Given cognitive vulnerabilities, it would be convenient to have an arrangement whereby reality could tell us off; and that is precisely what science is. Scientific methodology is the arrangement that allows reality to answer us back.

How can those who possess all knowledge, which must include knowledge of life that is worth living, be interested in using knowledge only for the insignificant aim of making money?

Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.

So dogma, doctrine, unexamined assumptions, that's what it is to be sharing that, the hippies shadow, no way of grounding it to reality. It's where we're just cut off from reality unless we can argue, we can substantiate, we can justify, we can convince each other.

Plato conceived of philosophy as necessarily gregarious rather than solitary. The exposure of presumptions is best done in company, the more argumentative the better.

I like that there are so many different ways of looking at the world and I like all of the particular narratives. In any case we will never all see the same way on these [religious] issues. It's the way liberals and conservatives will never see the same way on individuals whereas it’s different orientations and they go too deep down and when we're dealing with questions that can't be definitively answered by science that's where you're sort of... your orientation swells in to fill up the gaps and so we're never always going to agree.