Microscopes, vision, and nebulosity

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:...

December 28, 2021

A first pass at David Chapman's metarationality

[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)....

November 13, 2021