Nikola Tesla
1856-1943 · Secular Thought · Renowned
Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor whose motors put alternating current into the electrical grid. A person is an automaton, he wrote, pushed along by outside stimuli with no free will anywhere in the machinery. He expected the soul to end at death and the universe to run forever as a machine, and he made the harnessing of natural forces his program for human progress. Late in life he backed eugenics and hoped one terrible weapon would end war.
Signature
The position Tesla is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Nature
- leans Mastery
- Agency
- Hard Determinism
Positions on the 8 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- leans Mechanistic (18 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Mind
- leans Brain Only (14 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- Nature of Reality
- leans Unity (18 on a 0–100 scale from Unity to Multiplicity)
- Ground of Being
- leans Immanence (13 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Nature
- leans Mastery (11 on a 0–100 scale from Mastery to Harmony)
- War
- leans Pacifism (30 on a 0–100 scale from Pacifism to Militarism)
- Ignorance
- leans Bondage (25 on a 0–100 scale from Bondage to Bliss)
- Allegiance
- leans Global (75 on a 0–100 scale from Local to Global)
12 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Tesla refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Pantheism / Agnosticism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - End of Things
- No End
What is the ultimate end of all things? - Knowledge
- Sense Experience
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Agency
- Hard Determinism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Eternal Cosmos
What is the origin of reality? - Death
- Annihilation
What happens at death? - Human Nature
- Evolved Animal
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- Humanity
What is your primary bond and loyalty?