False Dichotomies (Presentation Slides, German)

«– You’re familiar with heaven and hell, are you not?»
«I’ve heard of ’em.»
«Excellent places both. But essentially — if you pardon the banality of the metaphor — two faces of the same coin. And God flicks the coin and bids each spirit choose. Chains or cherubim. Will you, nill you — but then there are the irreconcilable dead. Those that say no to both. And other souls, for whom hell and heaven offer no fitting harbor. The edge of the coin, sweeting. That is where we sail.»
Bergelmir and Jill Presto in «Lucifer»

This year’s MinD-Akademie had “Kopf oder Zahl” [literally: «head or number», German variant of «heads or tails»] as topic. My first thought was — what about the edge of the coin? Isn’t heads or tails a false dichotomy? After some thinking about it, I came up with a presentation outline — going from false dichotomies to moral false dichotomies (from a false A vs. B via right vs. wrong to good vs. bad). And what to do with people with people who flipped their coin once and are unwilling to change (ideologues).

Presentation was fun — as always. It’s a joy to have an audience that is interested and likes to think. I had some difficulties with the time — I accidentally set the Keynote presenter display time to 45 hours instead of 45 minutes (oops). But it worked out, I think.

Anyway, here are the slides as PDF (in German, 24 MB). Mostly for the people who were in the lecture (there is no explaining text). It’s four slides to one page, but you can zoom into the slides. I should have covered the image copyright by citing the sources, if not, please drop me a line.

Hmmm, I’ll probably revisit the topic again. There’s a lot of potential here.