A man committed suicide in Harvard Yard a week ago, after uploading a 1905-page book to the web first. Curiously (because he was, like myself, named Mitchell), I first heard about this on the morning I went to post my make-a-deal article; it led me to trim away the more emotive parts of my own, rather shorter message.

Anyway, I have been examining the book and it's very intriguing. If I can sum up his worldview, it is that human values have an evolutionary origin, but Jewish and Anglo-Saxon culture, for specific historical reasons, developed values which biocentrically appear to be anti-evolutionary, but which in fact ultimately issue in the technological, postbiological world of the Singularity. (Eliezer is mentioned a few times, mostly as an opposite extreme to Hugo DeGaris, with Heisman, the author of the book, proposing a synthesis.) Heisman's suicide, meanwhile, is anticipated in the book, where he says that willing death is a way to will truth in a meaningless universe. He equates materialism with objectivity with meaninglessness and nihilism; he considers the desire to live as the ultimate barrier to objectivity, because objectivity implies that life is no better than death, and that nothing is better than anything else.

It seems to me that under different circumstances, he might have written a very similar book, but would instead be alive. I imagine that if the book receives any serious attention, a lot of it will focus on what could have been different - to what extent his suicide was predetermined by his philosophy - but the rest of the book (its "sociobiological" history and its Singularity musings) also contains a lot to ponder.