Breadcrumbs
November 22, 2021
In my recent writing (e.g. on “the West”) I have promised to return to several points. I’m creating this page to track some of those things. It’s just a list of stuff I’ll write about in the future. I can’t guarantee that it will all make sense yet, and I’ll update it as I go (most likely linking/crossing things off).
As a brief reflection, having written every day of November so far, I do find it hard to keep on top of the direction of the writing. It’s almost as if doing too much cognition prevents metacognition. I feel that it’s hard to keep going at speed and also navigate, so my apologies if I’m not always making sense.
Anyway, here’s the current state of things…
Things I said I’d return to
- 2021-11-08 The Myth of the West IV:
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I said I’d write about Chinese philosophy (A. C. Graham)2021-11-23 Sinitic Syncretism -
I said I’d write about Indian philosophy:
- 2021-11-24 Surendranath Dasgupta
- 2021-11-25 Dasgupta’s description of philosophy in India
- 2021-11-27 Need to revise the above post
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- 2021-11-12 How the West Was Spun More on the imperative to rewrite (personal) history to make everything seem inevitable
- 2021-11-17 Homogenizing Purges: I said I’d write about the evolution of saber-tooth cats.
- 2021-11-20 On Perfection:
- Look at Nietzsche’s distinction between “good and bad” and “good and evil”
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Look at Schopenhauer on perfectionPerfection: A real nuisance - I mentioned that Spinoza’s notion of perfection is related to Vision and Abstraction and to untethering in the world; I need to read them side-by-side and think how.
- Further discuss Spinoza’s dependence on intersubjectivity of author/beholder relationship and “theory of mind.”
- Continue the anti-teleology (Epicurus, Darwin, Kuhn, but also Schopenhauer’s take on Lucretius, Francis Bacon, Spinoza)
- 2021-11-21 More Perfection: I said I’d write about several things:
- Kuhn on Darwin’s removal of teleology.
- Darwin’s use of the word “perfection.”
- 2021-11-25 Indian Philosophy I said I’d discuss how Greek philosophical schools guarded their secrets
- 2021-11-26 The Aphoristic Form
- Connection between the theological and the scientific
- Write about ungulates and domestication
- 2021-11-27 Callisthenes
- A. C. Graham on Chinese excitement about rational debate
- Nietzsche on Socrates
Where I’d like to go
- Kuhn on Renaissance painting as a science (“When Art Was Science”)
- When science was philosophy (demarcation problem)
- Ratcheting effects in hypothesis, Zettelkasten, nature
- Double mistakes (perfection in Spinoza, Schopenhauer)
- Against Kant
- Against time as precondition for experience
- The time before time
- Time as a hack on space
- Einstein’s issue with a priori
- Problem with science depending on the structure of the intuition
- Mnemonics
- Narratives as mnemonics
- When is the first narrative?
- Prehistoric promiscuity
- Uniformitarianism/catastrophism moves from geology to biology (Darwin as geologist)
- Killing the alpha?
- Sous-chefing the alpha
- Revolutions
- Writing kills the animistic gods
- Domestication and culture are both copied from animals, hence animism
- Symbolic animal, webs of significance
- Duhem/Quine: underdetermination of scientific theories
- Croesus, purity of coinage leads to war… Purity leads to thoroughbreds, which leads to the concept of race?
- Where does civilization actually start? Philosophy? Stable states?
- Golden age of barbarians…
- Jaynes, Mcghilchrist, and the function of art/literature to in part defamaliarize words and metaphors.
- The artist and Buddha as cultural therapists, providing defamiliarization practices the improve the likelihood of civilizations identifying and amplifying their degenerates.
- Dependent arising, Darwin’s “disuse,” Hebbian theory
- History of cynicism, skepticism, Pyrrhonism, how it relates to pragmatism
- Pragmatist views of truth (Peirce vs James vs Dewey)
![Bryan Kam](/static/549a11780779b2f7eee8f4c943b6a81f/d24ee/profile-pic.jpg)
I'm Bryan Kam. I'm thinking about complexity and selfhood. Please sign up to my newsletter, follow me on Mastodon, or see more here.