I was playing around with a handheld microscope recently and I felt like it gave me an intuitive picture of Chapman’s 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 pen’s ink and the shapes of the letters are pretty well-defined. But upon closer look, that’s not true:...
There’s a certain class of bodily actions that I feel especially grateful for, and that I’ve been noticing more and more recently. I’ll call them unconscious subroutines—little functions, procedures, or actions that your brain and body carry out with next to no involvement from your conscious self. I’m not talking about totally unconscious behaviors like your heartbeat, or the defenses of your immune system, although those are cool too. I’m talking about behaviors that are sort of at the boundary of the conscious and unconscious....
Observation is theory-laden One of Deutsch and Popper’s oft-quoted phrases is that ‘observation is theory laden’.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 ’there is a table over there’ assumes a whole collection of theories about tables, spatial positioning, and existence. Even a more hard-nosed statement like ‘a copper atom weighs 63....
This is an outgrowth of A first pass at David Chapman’s metarationality. In Abstract Reasoning as Emergent from Concrete Activity, David Chapman quotes a summary article about the “E-approaches” in the cognitive sciences: E-approaches propose that cognition depends on embodied engagements in the world. They rethink the alternative, ‘sandwich’ 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....
[The philosophical meat of this article is under the section “Current threads and questions”. Feel free to skip to that.] This tweet has had a big impact on my life: 🧵 Trying to Figure Out Where @DavidDeutschOxf's Critical Rationalism and @Meaningness's Meta-rationality Disagree (for the very small niche of people that find this interesting) — Jake Orthwein (@JakeOrthwein) April 24, 2021 When I stumbled upon it, I had spent about a year being deeply entrenched in the philosophical worldviews of critical rationalism, espoused by the physicist David Deutsch (which he had inherited from the philosopher Karl Popper)....
When I was reading The Beginning of Infinity, one of the passages that stood out to me was about contradictions (emphasis mine): Since theories can contradict each other, but there are no contradictions in reality, every problem signals that our knowledge must be flawed or inadequate. Our misconception could be about the reality we are observing or about how our perceptions are related to it, or both. (18) There are no contradictions in reality....
I recently published a substack post on consciousness and am using this to write a few extra notes that I excluded from the article for brevity. My goal with the article was to take the reader on a kind of explanatory journey, which meant that I had to take certain intellectual shortcuts and brush over some nuances. Examples: I start the piece with a materialist paradigm in which it’s “obvious” that chairs and atoms are not conscious....
I want to become more comfortable with publishing bad writing. What is bad writing? I’m not just talking about writing that falls short of the most stringent perfectionist standards. I’ve already been publishing pieces on this blog that fall way short of that. By “bad writing” I really mean writing that’s bad. Writing with typos, sloppy word choice, meandering tangents, weak concluding sentences. The kind of writing that, upon re-reading it a month later, you cringe a little (or a lot) on the inside....
For most of my life I was chasing after “it”. I always thought that I’d find “it” in what I was pursuing at the time—whether it was getting into a particular college, getting a particular job or having a particular crush like me back. What is “it”? It’s hard to put into words, but “it” refers to a feeling of significance, a feeling of having finally arrived, a feeling of deeper and more complete meaning than we tend to find in the drudgery of the everyday....
How is it that we can imagine things that are logically impossible? I’ve always been a little perturbed by this. It was strange to me that we can imagine or even believe things that are logically impossible. It makes sense to me that we can imagine things that are physically impossible. Our imagination is not constrained by the laws of physics. We can imagine physical objects which don’t exist or cannot exist....