Even in silence you are loved
Just reproducing this brief tweet thread as a blog post. something you realize after sharing things on social media for a while is that the number of people who are impacted by your stuff is a lot bigger than strictly the number of people who actively engage with it (likes, replies, DMs) e.g. I had a friend randomly make a remark about a post of mine that theyād read 8 months ago, and I had no idea this person had ever seen any of my writing!...
Subjectivity as a construct
(Originally written in December 2021.) In a previous post I explored some arguments about whether we have direct access to qualia. I was trying to figure out whether there are entities within our direct experience, and whether that undermines aspects of Deutsch and Popperās philosophy, as well as whether it has implications for which beings are conscious. After writing that post, a remark by Jake Orthwein gave me a subtle but important shift in perspective....
On receiving praise: it's not about you
There are many things that are uncomfortable about writing on the internet. Youāre showing vulnerability to anonymous strangers, exposing yourself to criticism, mockery, scorn, or mere silent judgement. But thereās one part of it that you would expect to be nothing but pleasant: when people tell you that they really like your work. It took me a while to even realize that I felt uncomfortable being praised for my writing, because it still is, on the whole, a great feeling....
Solving the hard problem of consciousness with metaphysics
The idea that the hard problem can be solved with metaphysics has been gelling in my mind for quite a while now. There are three threads Iām exploring that are all landing in the same place. First, thereās Bernardo Kastrupās work. In his theory of analytical idealism, reality is ultimately made of a single, primitive, instinctive mind, and this mind dissociates into a bunch of more complex minds (these are the individual conscious beings that weāre familiar with)....
Pausing in the midst of excitement
I recently thought of a meditation prompt that is fitting in moments of excitement, and potentially in other situations too. Sometimes when I feel really excited about good things going on in my life, itās hard to meditate.¹ I can spend my entire 20-minute session just thinking about all the good things happening, the things Iām looking forward to doing, or the people I enjoy interacting with. While on some level itās fine to spend 20 minutes thinking good thoughts, meditating like this is unhealthy because youāre distracted the entire time....
Questions to ask in the midst of a setback
About a month ago I experienced a setback. It was of the variety trying really hard to make outcome X happen and then not having it happen ā not a huge deal, but still upsetting in the moment. I wrote down this list of thoughts and questions that helped me quite a bit. Isnāt this a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate how awesome you are at taking setbacks, rolling with the punches, plodding on?...
Microscopes, vision, and nebulosity
I was playing around with a handheld microscope recently and I felt like it gave me an intuitive picture of Chapmanās nebulosity idea.¹ The first thing that became obvious is how much grainier reality is than our day-to-day experience suggests. When I write on my notebook with a pen, it feels like the edges of my penās ink and the shapes of the letters are pretty well-defined. But upon closer look, thatās not true:...
In praise of unconscious subroutines
Thereās a certain class of bodily actions that I feel especially grateful for, and that Iāve been noticing more and more recently. Iāll call them unconscious subroutinesālittle functions, procedures, or actions that your brain and body carry out with next to no involvement from your conscious self. Iām not talking about totally unconscious behaviors like your heartbeat, or the defenses of your immune system, although those are cool too. Iām talking about behaviors that are sort of at the boundary of the conscious and unconscious....
Do we experience anything directly?
Observation is theory-laden One of Deutsch and Popperās oft-quoted phrases is that āobservation is theory ladenā.¹ This is a revelatory point about the nature of science: no statement that we can utter, or observation that we can record, is a pure observation statement, completely divorced of all theory. A statement like āthere is a table over thereā assumes a whole collection of theories about tables, spatial positioning, and existence. Even a more hard-nosed statement like āa copper atom weighs 63....
On whether brains are embodied
This is an outgrowth of A first pass at David Chapmanās metarationality. In Abstract Reasoning as Emergent from Concrete Activity, David Chapman quotes a summary article about the āE-approachesā in the cognitive sciences: E-approaches propose that cognition depends on embodied engagements in the world. They rethink the alternative, āsandwichā view of cognition as something pure that can be logically isolated from non-neural activity. Traditionally, cognition is imagined to occur wholly within the brain....