The recent conceptual obsession has been the concept of an analogy. Douglas Hofstadter has a book called Surfaces and Essences where he argues that analogy is a crucial capacity in human thought. He claims, in fact, that analogy is the central engine of thought. Let me try to explain how. What is an analogy? It’s basically a connection between concepts. You’re a child who lives in Paris, and you learn that Paris is in France....
There’s a common meditation instruction for working with challenging emotions: “focus on the physical sensations of the emotion without trying to change them.” The idea is to pay close attention to the raw feelings (e.g. sadness, anxiety), rather than the mental stories around them—whether they’re good or bad, why why they arose, or what they say about you. Over time I have shifted my view from thinking (1) this is the best instruction ever, to (2) this is bad because it’s a form of avoidance, to (3) it’s actually mostly good....
Does our mind influence the world, separate from our actions? Usually the way we influence the world is with our physical movements: whether it’s the movement of our hands in manipulating objects, or verbal utterances that influence the movements of others. But does simply paying attention in a particular way change something about the physical world, without you or anyone else actually moving in order to make that change? The answer to this question has to be yes, for reasons that I will explain....
Mechanical neural networks: Architected materials that learn behaviors A synthetic protein-level neural network in mammalian cells A cell signaling model as a trainable neural nanonetwork Single cortical neurons as deep artificial neural networks The neuron computing an XOR function: Dendritic action potentials and computation in human layer 2/3 cortical neurons Gene regulatory networks exhibit several kinds of memory: Quantification of memory in biological and random transcriptional networks Bioelectric networks: the cognitive glue enabling evolutionary scaling from physiology to mind...
my story with new york didn’t exactly have a happy ending. a few months ago I decided to hand off my lease in williamsburg and go nomadic for a while, starting with a few months in san francisco. I wanted my goodbye to new york to feel heartfelt and optimistic, but instead it mostly felt rushed and numb. and in an ideal world, I never would have said goodbye to new york at all....
One of the more viral memes from Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens is a passage early on in the book that describes how “fictions” run our world. He talks about the car company Peugeot, and how when you look closely, it doesn’t really “exist.” Harari says, if Peugeot exists, where is it? You might say “Peugeot is all the people working for it,” but the employees can change entirely over the course of a few decades, and it’s still the same company....
For experiments showing consciousness during non-REM sleep using serial awakenings, see Early-night serial awakenings as a new paradigm for studies on NREM dreaming and Assessing sleep consciousness within subjects using a serial awakening paradigm. For the discussion of dreamless sleep in Indian philosophy, see Evan Thompson’s paper Dreamless Sleep, the Embodied Mind, and Consciousness. For the argument that white dreams might not just be an instance of forgetting but might be reflective of the experience itself, see Jennifer Windt’s paper Just in Time—Dreamless Sleep Experience as Pure Subjective Temporality....
For more writing, see my blog Bits of Wonder. A few months ago I very randomly stumbled upon this book: It’s effectively a compilation of 100 mini-biographies of the most influential scientists in history. Here are my notes and reflections from reading it. Being a revolutionary requires taking serious personal risks. Everyone wants to be a revolutionary but no one wants to embarrass themselves. Historically, making claims that ran counter to received wisdom could land you in serious trouble—we’ve all heard about how Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for arguing that the earth orbits the sun....
This is a citation list accompanying my thread on the planarian worm. A clarification: there are actually hundreds of species of planarians, and despite being closely related, some of them are capable of the full-body regeneration described in the thread, while others have limited regenerative capacity, and still others show no regeneration at all. This divergence is itself a fascinating area of inquiry, as described in Evolutionary dynamics of whole-body regeneration across planarian flatworms....
Posted on my substack. Redirecting you there now…