What I'm thinking about

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• Bernard Suits (1925–2007)
• Clerestory
• Twitter Spaces
• Infinite regress of production
• Production is autopoietic
• Marx: Imagination and production
• Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677)
• Spinozist determinism
• Anthropocentrism
• The causal trap
• Spinoza extends Cartesian determinism
• Scientism is a form of idealism
• Scientism
• Nietzsche: ‘Scientific’ interpretation as ‘stupidest’
• Empiricism vs dogmatism (~300 BC–)
• Scepticism
• Anti-rationalism
• Antiscientism is necessary for science
• Provenance of “prehistoric” (1836–58)
• Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach
• Jennifer M. Morton (~1980–)
• Philosophical Investigations (1953)
• Philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness
• Philosophy leaves everything as it is
• Philosophy as therapy
• Philosophy is a disease which haunts the mind
• The Pleasure Principle (2019)
• The Descent of Man (1871)
• Mutual Aid (1902)
• Darwin on the origin of conscience
• Darwin argued for altruism
• Senseless suffering is new
• Chronic illness teaches you that pain is meaningless
• You take colonial practices home
• America as temporally inverse Russia
• Moving Up without Losing Your Way (2019)
• Goethe: universal/particular interpenetrate
• Ostracism as social death
• The Story of Philosophy (1926/1933)
• Aristocratic Good
• Consciousness, Culture
• Starvation kills culture
• “Culture as Creative Refusal” (2013)
• Top-down Thinking
• “The Cultural Niche” (2011)
• “Live versus Dead Players” (2018)
• Living tradition of knowledge
• Cultural evolution proceeds without intelligence
• Ennoblement through degeneration
• Nietzsche on cultural aristocracy
• Ajnana (~500 BC)
• Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
• K. N. Jayatilleke (1920–1970)
• Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge (1963)
• Fictionalising philosophy
• Pyrrhonism (360 BC–210 AD) influenced by Ajnana (500 BC)
• The Golden Age of Man
• Schizophrenia and tirelessness
• Fear of death
• The Garden of Eden
• Hesiod on primitive ease of living
• “They lived like gods without sorrow of heart”
• WWR Volume II (1844)
• The Word and the World
• Instrumental inference
• Philosophy uses concepts too widely
• Plato substitutes map for territory
• Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1921)
• Diogenes of Sinope (~404–323 BC)
• Industrial Society and Its Future/Unabomber Manifesto (1971–1995)
• John Dryden (1631–1700)
• The Conquest of Granada (1672)
• Rousseau: No return to state of nature
• The Communist Manifesto (1848)
• Fall of man in Lévi-Strauss
• Kaczynski’s Luddism
• Religions are wrong about the human condition
• Cynic nostalgia for nature
• Noble savage (1609–)
• Buddhism
• Experience vs life sciences
• Buddhism as science
• 2022-06-28 Wings of Desire
• Einstein and Wertheimer
• Max Wertheimer (1880–1943)
• Albert Einstein (1879–1955)
• Einstein: What is thinking?
• University of Ancient Taxila (900 BC–500)
• Feedback on Wings of Desire episode
• HCII.4: “Man: A Social or a Political Animal”
• Animale rationale is a mistranslation of zoon politikon
• Band of brothers kill father
• Shift from household (oikia) to polis
• Plato condemns Empedocles
• Gorgias (~380 BC)
• Plato and Aristotle want design
• Empedocles (494–434 BC)
• Bicameral people buried with food
• Weighted corpses: Exalted and dangerous
• Sextus Empiricus (160–210)
• Scepticism is persuasive
• European freedom is about property
• Mathematics which refer to reality are not certain; mathematics which are certain do not refer to reality
• Mathematics, certainty, and precision
• Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876)
• “The Reaction in Germany” (1842)
• The urge to create is also destructive
• Progress preceded by partial weakening
• Defamiliarisation/Ostrananie
• Language makes the uncommon common
• Creative Destruction
• “The passion for destruction is a creative passion”
• Imagination as antidote to familiar/inauthentic
• Fundamental idea of God
• Montaigne: Atheism is “unnatural and monstrous”
• Arthur Evans (1851–1941)
• Naming the Minoan civilization (1825/1921)
• Victoria Horner (~1979–)
• “Causal knowledge and imitation/emulation in chimpanzees and children” (2005)
• A thought becomes a tool by repeated returns
• A repeated element of thought is a tool/concept
• A concept put into words becomes communicable
• Technicality = number of steps
• Tools intervene between a goal and its realization
• Overimitation in children vs chimps
• Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy (2011)
• Language as cognitive toolkit
• Tools vs ideology
• “Autobiographical Notes” (1946)
• Cumulative Culture (2012)
• “The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation” (2021)
• Sound & Vision: Bicameral to Conscious
• Aphoristic form and rumination
• Tool use precedes language
• Apology for Raymond Sebond (1576)
• Animal tool use
• Diversity of early political forms: “Bold social experiments”
• Diversity of cooperation styles
• Omens and Omen Texts (1500–650 BC)
• The Biology of Desire (2015)
• Interoceptive inference, emotion, and mood
• Emotions are inferences
• Ritual as amplifier of emotion
• Learning usually requires emotion
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
• Esoteric vocabulary/Specialist language
• Mature sciences are inaccessible to laypeople
• Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)
• “The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer” (1865)
• Strength, stability, stupidity
• Duration: Evolution takes time
• Scotistic Reality
• Cultural evolution
• Beliefs, consciousness, persistence, truth
• Fundamentalism, declensionism, startups
• Classical Philosophy
• Divination
• Cleromancy
• I Ching (1000–200 BC)
• Aeschylus: Prometheus as self-knowledge
• Socrates mainly asks about abstract nouns
• “Nostalgia for the Absolute” (1974)
• Simplification
• Dichotomies as source of novelty
• The Map and the Territory
• Athenians use “unduly wide concepts” algebraically, reducing philosophy to reckoning
• Social theory always simplifies
• Plato’s Apology (~399 BC)
• Death may be the greatest good
• Alcohol increases entropy
• “Technology and Magic” (1988)
• Technology of Production
• Ideology has always already interpellated individuals as subjects
• Socially efficacious ritual gestures
• Counterfactuals
• Abduction
• Alfred Gell (1945–1997)
• “Restless corpses: ‘secondary burial’ in the Babenberg and Habsburg dynasties” (2001)
• Double burials
• Elite burial in the Middle Ages
• The Lives of Eminent Philosophers (~235)
• Heraclitus (545–475 BC)
• Greek alphabet changes vision
• Only vision is fast enough to be unconscious
• Promethean vision change
• How to Take Smart Notes (2017)
• “What is thinking?”
• Thinking in writing
• Linking language to vision
• Eyesight is a lying sense
• Summary of Heraclitus
• “On the Gradual Construction of Thoughts During Speech” (1806)
• Metaphors of the mind are the world it perceives
• The Hemispheres
• Speech and thought proceed in parallel
• Principles require maintenance and hearing
• “Burial of the Christian Dead” (2013)
• The Death of the Gods
• Serotonin
• Brightening of the senses
• “Blurred Genres” (1980)
• Philology shatters into humanities and sciences
• Shen and kuei
• School teaches rules
• Technology of Reproduction
• Praxis
• Explosion in public education (1860–1940)
• The school as silent state apparatus
• Edward Shils (1910–1995)
• Michael Polanyi (1891–1976)
• You can’t know in advance
• The Torment of Secrecy (1956)
• John Dewey (1859–1952)
• Experience and Nature (1925)
• Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963)
• Science, Dewey, and education
• Christina Thompson (~1960–)
• Sea People (2019)
• Orality and Literacy (1982)
• Soviet Modernisation
• Oral culture is “close to the living human lifeworld”
• HS: Middle Ages 2 — The Dark Age
• Clovis (466–511) as semi-divine
• The form is fluid, the “meaning” even more so
• Early German Guilds (500s–1800s)
• University of Jena (1558–)
• EoP Entry: Carnap
• Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932)
• Auguste Comte (1798–1857)
• German Youth Movement (1896–1933)
• Voluntarism
• Positivism as philosophy plus Youth Movement
• “Postmodernism’s Use and Abuse of Nietzsche” (2001)
• On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
• “The doer is merely a fiction added to the deed”
• Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
• “Our body is but a social structure composed of many souls”
• The Will to Power (unfinished; ~1888)
• Nietzsche against the singular/unified self
• V. Gordon Childe (1892–1957)
• Timeline of the Term Culture
• Intellect is subversive and unpredictable
• The End of Bias (2021)
• Gymnosophists in Ancient India
• Stromata (~210)
• Palingenesis
• Lev Shestov (1866–1938)
• Clement on scripture and Logos
• Philo of Alexandria (~20 BC–50)
• Athens and Jerusalem (1937)
• Clement of Alexandria (~150–215)
• List of ancient philosophers/mystics
• Born to Run (2009)
• Untethering: Revolutions Break Bottlenecks
• Language is about reducing distance
• Language as cheap social grooming
• Human sweat glands
• Origins of human evolutionary untethering
• Sweat and brain temperature
• Lung bottleneck?
• Sound or vision?
• Seafood and the brain
• Inward Training (4th C BC)
• Why is breathing conscious?
• Don’t praise/blame
• Sung Hsing praised by Mencius and Chuang-tzu
• Sung Hsing (301 BC?)
• Sung Hsing: Refusal to be praised or blamed
• Paradigm can provide hunches
• Metaphors aren’t true or false
• Theories can’t be true
• Truth was once…
• Etymology of “truth”
• Disputers of the Tao (1989)
• Pinyin to Wade-Giles Conversion
• Left hemisphere denies context
• Macular vision as left hemisphere
• Either/Or (1843)
• Obscuring the sublime
• All dichotomies are false
• Left hemisphere divides/dichotomises
• WP490: No singular self
• Bittersweetness, ambiguity vs dichotomy
• Pleasure is transferred to the brain
• Pleasure and pain amplified in humans
• Pleasure is a type of pain
• Modernity doesn’t activate ingenuity or artistry
• Math concepts are about ingenuity
• Puzzles require ingenuity
• Epicurean pleasure
• Philosophers like us are rare
• The Master and His Emissary (2009)
• Ajivika (5th C BC–14th C)
• The Revolution That Wasn’t
• Timeline
• HS: Feudalism (2021)
• Historiansplaining
• Peasantry does not produce automatic surplus
• Archaeological Culture
• Man Makes Himself (1936)
• False dichotomies
• Pre-history vs history is a false dichotomy
• Robert G. Bednarik (1944–)
• Against the Grain (2017)
• Self-Domestication
• “The Domestication of Humans” (2008)
• Archaeological Industry
• Crito (~399 BC)
• Marshall B. Rosenberg (1934–2015)
• Nonviolent Communication (1999)
• Four responses to negative communication
• Capital must provide means for workers to reproduce themselves
• This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (2019)
• Karl Marx (1818–1883)
• Marx is not determinist about history
• Grundrisse (1857–8/1939)
• Master-slave morality
• Socrates is a slave who advocates slavery
• Slavery requires consent/understanding consequences
• Frederick Douglass (1818–1895)
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)
• Happy Slaves
• Language resources
• General language resources
• Petrarch (1304–1374)
• Memetics: Everything was invented
• Petrarch as source of “dark ages”
• Tim O’Neill
• “The Dark Ages” and the Middle Ages and Periodisation (2016)
• Paradigm choice is social
• Took 90 years for Ptolemaic consensus to change
• Book recommendation resources
• Book recommendations
• Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
• George Berkeley (1685–1753)
• “Fraser’s Works of Bishop Berkeley” (1871)
• Nominalism/Realism
• The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (1931–1958)
• Francis Ellingwood Abbot (1836–1903)
• Santayana: Pantheism is atheism
• Scientific Theism (1885)
• Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854)
• Modern philosophers and “existence”
• Is science nominalist or realist?
• Pensees (1670)
• Struggle, rest, boredom, craving
• Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961)
• J. L. Austin (1911–1960)
• Taylor explained Merleau-Ponty to Austin
• Charles Taylor (philosopher)
• Kicking out the ladder
• Natural sciences use space-like concepts alone
• Dancing in the Streets (2007)
• The Dawn of Everything (2021)
• Top-down collapses to bottom-up
• Turning the world upside down
• Ritual of inversion
• The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
• East Meets West
• Eastern canon
• Non-obvious Ideological State Apparatuses
• Bureaucracy’s war on the imagination has led to its dismantling (1968–)
• Bureaucracy separates means from ends
• Bureaucracy and cash transactions
• Bureaucracy and schematization
• Bourses du Travail prevented revolution (1875–1918)
• Utopia of Rules (2015)
• Necessity of degenerates
• Squanderers by trade
• True science is the study of the useless
• Waste is a good sign
• Academia no longer a refuge for eccentrics
• GS354: On the “genius of the species”
• Carl Lange (1834–1900)
• BY III.9: Being a Beast Machine
• James-Lange Theory (1884–)
• Reverse causality
• Interoceptive signalling and James–Lange theory
• Wright Show: Stephen Kinzer (2021-11-16)
• Practicality and pragmatism
• Pragmatism
• Americans don’t want to understand, they want to do
• Original Thinking
• Middle Ages as samatha
• History of Platonism
• Duns Scotus (1265–1308)
• Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)
• René Descartes (1596–1650)
• Habit as the source of all difficulties
• List of paradigmatic textbooks
• William James (1842–1910)
• Whitehead: Be less conscious
• James on Habits

I'm Bryan Kam. I'm thinking about complexity and selfhood. Please sign up to my newsletter or see more here.