Some notes so I don't forget.

• On government
  The government has become bloated with powers that aren't necessary for its core function of protecting the rights of citizens. Life, liberty, and property are the fundamental rights that a government should protect. This comes from John Locke's idea that a legitimate government exists to secure a person's existence, autonomy, and the fruits of their labor from infringement by others. However, our government has expanded far beyond these core functions since. Now, our political parties' most emotionally charged arguments are often about things like marriage and politicized education. Rather than focusing on the protection of fundamental rights, the government has become preoccupied with regulating aspects of life that should be left to individuals, and allowing citizens to cast votes based on how they want to regulate those rights for other citizens. This preoccupation with regulating other citizens' behavior has caused the citizenry to forget that the main issue they need to be voting on is how the government protects those rights as times change. Citizens really need to ask themselves when a policy is truly necessary to protect a citizen's rights from the actions of another citizen.
  Deficit spending has allowed citizens to constantly vote yes to policies that they would vote no on if they actually felt they had to pay for them. Who doesn't want free stuff? It encourages politicians to create programs that further burden the government with responsibilities it can't support with its current tax revenue in order to get the votes of citizens who would be benefitting without obvious cost to themselves. This is made worse by the fact that oftentimes these policies are given less attention under the current political climate because of the emotionally charged policies I discussed above. What happens when the government can't borrow as much money because of a lack of investor faith in its ability to pay back its debts? The government will have to raise taxes to support its bloated responsibilities, coming out of the pockets of citizens who didn't understand the costs of the policies they voted for. Or it will have to ruthlessly cut programs that citizens may now depend on.
  Democracy is probably the correct machinery for a government to be responsive to its citizens and change its policies to reflect the will of the people without needing violent revolution. Hopefully the times of having to constantly overthrow governments for the sake of change are behind us. However, we need to seriously assess why the average American feels as though the government isn't responsive to their demands while making sure the government doesn't just hand out benefits in a way that brings hidden or imposed costs on the citizenry.
  I'm not sure how we would go about making these changes in the government. The best would be the opportunity to write a government from scratch, but there are rarely such opportunities. We would somehow have to work within the existing system to make these changes. If we were given the opportunity to write one from scratch, we must understand why the Founding Fathers failed to build in these mechanisms, as I'm sure they were aware of the potential for these problems. There were many debates on the definition of rights, yet the government was still built in a way that allowed for these problems to arise.
• On significance
  Life has no inherent meaning, but moments in our lives can be significant to us because we are human beings who change based on our experiences, and we're capable of perceiving those changes. The universe doesn't care about our experiences, but we do. Searching for experiences that change us in ways that we find significant is a worthwhile pursuit, as well as choosing how we want to change based on our experiences.
• On free will
  On a mechanical level we probably don't have free will, and everything that we do is determined by a complex set of factors beyond our control. My problem with this idea is that it's true, but it's pretty useless as a model of human behavior. It's much more useful to assume that we have free will and make decisions based on that assumption. If we don't, accountability and justice become meaningless and a functional society becomes impossible. For groups of humans to live with each other while not violating each other's rights, an assumption of free will is required. On an individual level, believing that we have free will makes us put more care into our decisions. We probably evolved to believe that we have free will because it is part of a useful, compact model of our behavior.
• On compression
  Somehow the universe has organized itself in a manner that allows for compressed glimpses of its history to be visible to any keen observer. Light from distant stars, fossilized remains, human memories and written records, music, and any object that is perceivable to an observer (like a bottle of soap), are all examples of this. This is remarkable and I don't even know yet how to begin to formulate a useful question on why this is the case. Our ability to predict future states of the universe is similarly fascinating. The fact that the universe even created something capable of observing it is crazy to me. Why doesn't the universe just progress with everything within it indifferent to it? Why isn't it completely chaotic to where the past and future are impossible to glean from the present?
  Recorded history is one of the most important compressed pieces of information we can give to future generations. It will allow them to learn from our mistakes and successes, and allow them to understand the context of their own time. This is also incredibly difficult to do because we must compress billions of lifetimes of experiences and interpretations of those experiences into a form that is digestable by a human mind. Finding a good way to pass down information is a difficult problem worth working on. I want to start by trying to compress just one lifetime (my dad's, he's a great storyteller and has perspectives and values I think are worth preserving).
• On forgiveness
  What's the point of allowing pain from the past to continue to affect you in the present? Take what you learned from the experience and move on. Pain is a great teacher, but holding on to it after you learn just extends your suffering. It's your choice on whether or not you want the person that hurt you to continue to be a part of your life. I personally choose to keep people in my life if I believe they will change for the better. I don't need an apology I just need them to change their behavior. But I don't always choose to keep people in my life because you can take a look at someone's values and their situation and see that they're not likely to change.
• On uncertainty
  Science and philosophy are cool because they taught us that it is okay to sit in uncertainty while simultaneously searching for truth. Just because we don't know everything doesn't mean we have to try to fill in the gaps with assumptions, as assumptions make it harder to find the truth by making you blind to your own ignorance. Having a standard for what we consider to be knowledge and truth helps us to stay grounded in reality. I will admit not everything has an objective truth to find in the first place, but there are at least some things that we can say are objectively true and it is worth searching for them. Searching for the boundary of what can be known is also worthwhile.