About Sean

The unexamined life is not worth living.

—Socrates

What do I see myself as? A questioner of everything I can, a thinker, a debater. At seventeen, I'm presently studying for my A-levels in Further Maths, Philosophy, History and Physics. The former stands up a little longer in the face of scepticism and the second has made me an utter sceptic myself, so I have mostly lost faith in the latter two for their clutching at the straws of empirical knowledge. Tradionally the scientist and logical thinker I have taken a nose dive of late into the depths of confusion over the fact that actually only philosophy looks at the fundamental questions and everything else seems to be based on so many assumptions. At some level of course, so are philosophy and maths. But at least they try.

I'm not sure that anyone has successfully worked out what the meaning of life is yet and it is of course possible that there isn't one. But it seems to me that if there is, we should find out, as it could be quite important. Thus my view is that humanity should strive ever towards further knowledge and understanding and evaluation of our thoughts in order to try and work out this meaning of lack thereof. Along the way there are many mistakes that we can correct. To this end I am a liberal, democratic socialist. The fact that globally one's ability to make money defines one's quality of life and worth goes against pretty much any ethical principle ever written. But above all I aim to be as open-minded as possible and engage in debate wherever possible to try and work out what might be (closer to being) right.

In terms of this apparently material world that my senses are continually telling me about, I'm interested in computing, competitive debating, change ringing (learner), reading (when I have time, which is rarely) and gaming - the latter referring to video games and proper table-top roleplaying. I'm a volunteer for the Wikimedia Foundation, freenode and (sporadically) Oxfam. I also run a web hosting service for charity. I'm very much interested in people as they often know things I don't and might well send my thoughts somewhere interesting. I avoid unfair discrimination because what I'm interested in is the contents of peoples' heads and what comes out of their mouths, not what they look like or where they come from. I prefer to be a cynic because in the modern world there is far too much positivism, but as a friend says this may just be a cunning facade...