Posts

Using this as a weekly notepad to document the questions and ideas I’m currently exploring. Connectome-specific harmonic waves By virtue of this Open Theory blog post I learned about Selen Atasoy’s theory of connectome-specific harmonic waves (CSHW), so I’m currently digging deeper into that. Optimistically, the theory provides us with a “new language” for talking about brain states, that’s based on the ideas of brain-wide oscillations and resonance. My (rough) understanding is as follows: every oscillating system has specific resonant frequencies – frequencies at which oscillations achieve the highest amplitude, or something like that....

In this post I explore two questions relating to David Chapman’s idea of nebulosity. The questions are: Why is zooming in relevant? What would a non-nebulous world look like? Why is zooming in relevant? David Chapman claims that the nebulosity of objects is apparent when you look really closely at them. For example: From a distance, clouds can look solid; close-up they are mere fog, which can even be so thin it becomes invisible when you enter it....

Anil Seth’s Being You is hard to review, because he covers astonishingly wide territory in just a few hundred pages. Rather than compiling a systematic summary of everything he says (you can just read the book for that – and I highly recommend you do), I’ll just share the important bits that come to mind. First, we have the hard problem of consciousness, which is where Seth begins. There are many ways to formulate it, but one I’ve taken a liking to lately is this: why is it that when we crack open someone’s skull and look at their brain, we don’t see their inner world?...

For more of my writing, consider subscribing to my substack. Often when I have philosophical conversations with friends I run into this intuition that I think is very obviously wrong but that a lot of people seem to share. People tend to believe that the meaning of life is something that is either perfectly secured by the axioms of a religion, or is completely nonexistent. Either you convince yourself that there is a God who hands down the moral value of everything, who dictates what is right or wrong and imbues the universe with purpose, or it’s all a total wash and we just have to distract ourselves with empty pleasures until we die....

People like to explain success with a single “most important” trait. Alexandr Wang says the most important trait is a bias for action, Paul Graham says it’s being relentlessly resourceful. The trait that has been ringing true for me lately as a key to success is the willingness to not take things for granted. i. levels of reality When I think about what I should or shouldn’t take for granted, I like to break down reality into different layers....

This is the fourteenth post in my series of daily posts for the month of April. To get the best of my writing in your inbox, subscribe to my Substack. one of the things that gets in the way of both my happiness and productivity is that I imagine there is a way of executing things perfectly. it’s essentially a refusal to accept the reality of tradeoffs. there’s some nuance to it though....

This is the thirteenth post in my series of daily posts for the month of April. To get the best of my writing in your inbox, subscribe to my Substack. The kind of writing I enjoy doing most is something I call a “braindump”, where I write a stream of consciousness on whatever ideas call to me at the moment: insights, readings, questions, struggles, and so on. I find such sessions deeply clarifying and fulfilling, often generating new insights or connections I hadn’t thought of between disparate ideas....

When we have an unsolved question in science, sometimes we find a clear answer, but other times we watch the question slowly dissolve before our eyes. A big part of my motivation for studying the brain these last few years has been to find a “robust” theory of the mind and brain: a theory which gives us a clear, unified picture of how the brain works, and precisely how mind and brain come together to generate all the things we’re used to—things like our coherent perception of the world, our ability to communicate via language, our capacity to think, imagine, or conjure new ideas, our capacity to remember and understand events of the past, or to plan and coordinate complex projects....

This post summarizes my independent readings and research into psychology and neuroscience. My initial interest in the mind In the past few years I’ve embarked on a lifelong quest to understand the mind and brain. Starting in the pandemic, I spent the evenings after my day job reading textbooks and papers, and writing the occasional blog post (I wrote this overview of my learnings from reading Bear et al’s Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain)....

This is the tenth post in my series of daily posts for the month of April. To get the best of my writing in your inbox, subscribe to my Substack. I. In 305 to my city, Drake has the following line: tonight was your night go get you some lobsters and shrimp He has an unduly strong emphasis on the shrimp, almost pronouncing it like shrump. I was obsessed with Drake in high school and college so this line stuck with me, and it became an inside joke between me and a close friend....