I’m interested in some feedback on this, my statement of purpose for application to the Objectivist Academic Centre. It’s not finished, so the end is not intended to be a conclusion. Tips, pointers, advice, all welcome.
Emily Dickinson wrote that "the brain is wider than
the sky", referring to its ability to engage the
broadest abstraction and the most minuscule concrete.
The mechanism of this, the most marvelous machine in
the universe, has remained entirely unclear until
very recently in human history – and even now, the
veil is only beginning to be lifted. The nature of
the human brain and the human mind in turn is the key
to unlocking both our own natures, allowing humans to
reach the fullest heights of our potential, and the
nature of intelligence itself, allowing us to build
better machines which can accomplish more for human
ends. The field of cognitive science, as an
interdisciplinary field combining philosophy and
psychology, is the root of all answers to the problem
of how to live on Earth. An objective knowledge of
what human beings are and how they must live is
necessary to determining how those goals must be
accomplished. It is with this fervent belief that I
have chosen to make cognitive science my subject of
study in university, and pursue a career in writing
and research in this area.
The mind is the end to which all actions aim, whether
that aim is creation or destruction. A human can
choose actions that strengthen, train and nurture his
or her mind or she can choose actions that degrade
and malnourish her mind – it is a strict dichotomy:
one cannot avoid one outcome or the other. Having a
mind is like the Red Queen’s race, in which one must
run to stay in place. Without constant production,
discipline and effort, the brain stagnates and fails.
I choose to run. I choose creation, and I choose to
fight to rescue the mind from those who would deny
its existence, cripple its functioning or diminish
its importance, whether in religion and mysticism, in
the scheme of “behavioural economics,” or in
environmentalist nihilism. The ideas of Ayn Rand and
her intellectual heirs are the only rational means
available to conquer the fear, darkness and
uncertainty of mind-denial and flood it with the
light of consciousness.
The OAC will be the education I never had, and may
never otherwise have due to my attendance in public
schools and a fully collectivist-altruist university.
I am paying for a degree to learn the tools of my
trade, to learn how experts in this field think so
that I can separate the wheat from the chaff – but
to learn the task of separating wheat from chaff, I
require instruction that no university I know of can
give.