What I'm thinking about

This page was automatically generated from my Zettelkasten. It uses git to show which notes have changed recently.

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• “Truth” is a Western concern
• Donald Munro (1931–)
• The Concept of Man in Early China (1969)
• Scientific Revolutions Article
• Hegel asserts identity of phenomena and noumena
• Phenomena : Noumena :: Matter/intellect : Will
• The sense of time is a hack on space
• Concept of material object must precede space/time
• John Locke (1632–1704)
• Isaac Newton (1643–1727)
• Sensualism: No a priori
• Kant’s reaction against Locke
• HC Prologue
• Thinking is not a traditional human activity
• The Dawn of Everything (2021)
• Europeans were unfree (16th C)
• Metaphysical realism
• Papanca: Mental proliferation
• Papanca undefined
• Parmenides sundered experience and ideas
• Concepts are useless in art
• Science, Perception, and Reality (1963)
• Einstein: Consensus transforms an experience into an event
• Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989)
• Greek Buddha (2015)
• The Aristocles Passage
• Pyrrho, His Antecedents, and His Legacy (2000)
• Richard Bett (1957–)
• Timon of Phlius (320–235 BC)
• Pyrrho of Elis (360-270 BC)
• Timon’s thinking is identical to Pyrrho’s
• Pensees (1670)
• Goldilocks Conditions
• Not too tight, not too loose
• Pascal on goldilocks zones
• Louis Agassiz (1807–1873)
• David R. Olson (1935–)
• Jerome Bruner (1915–2016)
• Oliver Sacks (1933-2015)
• “Two Modes of Thought” (1986)
• “Luria and ‘Romantic Science’” (2014)
• “The Mind according to Bruner” (1992)
• Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986)
• Conceptual activity presupposes language
• Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910)
• Recollections and Essays (1910)
• “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?” (1910)
• Intellectual Laziness
• The lazy should be punished
• Men cease thinking right before it becomes fruitful
• People stop thinking when they tire of it
• WWR Volume I (1818)
• The pool player
• Flow states are the antithesis of consciousness
• Absorption in tasks to forgetting your own existence
• Speech separates from action
• The gods guided novel action
• We don’t know what we’re about to say
• Consciousness not involved in speech/writing
• Rational knowledge can hinder action
• Abstraction is for communication and storage
• Philosophy should write to concepts, not read from them
• “Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy, and ‘Truth’” (1985)
• Platonic : Confucian :: Semantic : Pragmatic
• Modes of Thought (1938)
• Perception of simultaneity below certain threshold
• “Relativity and the Problem of Space” (1952)
• No simultaneity between inertial systems
• The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (1931–1958)
• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781)
• The notion of an instant as a simple fact is nonsense
• How God Becomes Real (2022)
• Attention
• Attention = altering precision-weighting
• Paying attention is more important than change
• Making the invisible other real
• Sound & Vision: Bicameral to Conscious
• Seeing the invisible requires skill
• Rob Knight
• Self-enslavement
• Theravada positive program is minimal
• Microprocesses of attention as kindling
• Spinoza’s Ethics (1678)
• Anuloma: With the grain conditionality
• Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills
• Men think themselves free because they know what they want
• Mathematics which refer to reality are not certain; mathematics which are certain do not refer to reality
• IoT: Spinoza (2007)
• Three Grades of knowledge
• Three types of knowledge
• Creativity vs life interview list
• Contextualism
• Tao 8
• SN 12.60
• Samyutta Nikaya/SN: Connected Discourses
• Namarupa: name and form
• The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1975)
• Consciousness depends on language
• Language and consciousness arise dependently on each other
• SN 12.67: Sheaves of Reeds
• The Story of Philosophy (1926/1933)
• Poverty is slavery
• Wealth provides attention
• The bourgeoisie are slaves
• Four types of attachment
• Patticasamuppada: Practical Dependent Origination (1978)
• Four types of clinging
• Upadana
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
• Plato : Kant :: Aristarchus : Copernicus
• Aristarchus was only right in retrospect
• Copernicus (1473–1543)
• The word “revolution”
• Kuhn’s “revolution” is from Copernicus
• Polymathy
• Robert Eisler (1882–1949)
• Pleasure and pain amplified in humans
• Pleasure is a type of pain
• People seek strong sensations
• Löwenmensch figurine/Lion-man (35–40 kya)
• Man into Wolf (1948)
• Concept and Reality in Early Buddhist Thought (1971)
• Tanha
• Dependent origination does not depend on words
• Mana (Buddhism: “conceit”)
• People are disturbed by views
• Sceptics can still think/perceive evident things
• Logos as dogmatic account of non-evident matters
• Ditthi (Buddhism: “view”)
• Dependent Origination: Paticca-samuppada (1959)
• Thinking on middle ways
• The Middle Way
• “Both the deed and the doer are fictions”
• Dependent origination and the self
• Moment-by-moment dependent origination
• Dependent Origination
• Nidana-samyutta: Paticcasamuppada
• SN 12.46: A Certain Brahman
• Middle way and two extremes
• Patiloma: Against the grain conditionality
• Realism denies the most important fact of all
• Materialism is unwittingly relativist
• WWR Volume II (1844)
• Transparency of inference in language
• Only vision is fast enough to be unconscious
• Von Helmholtz: Unconscious Inference
• Unconscious inference
• Sea People (2019)
• Julius von Haast (1822–1887)
• Archaeological Industry
• Paleolithic → Neolithic (10k BC) : Flaked → polished
• Drunk (2021)
• Timeline
• Drunken banquet as community-building technology
• The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism (2010)
• Anaxarchus (380–320 BC)
• Against the Mathematicians (~200)
• Perception does unconscious inference
• Anaxarchus: Existing things are stage-painting
• Objectification-classifications (papanca-sankha)
• Sn 4.11: Quarrels and Disputes
• MN 18: The Honeyball Sutta
• Nibbana is no craving, conceit, views
• End of perceptions and categories of objectification
• Majjhima Nikaya: Middle-length Discourses (~250 BC–150)
• MN 126: To Bhūmija Bhūmija Sutta
• Belief must be enacted
• Pascal inverts religious schema
• Belief doesn’t matter
• Follow the path; beliefs don’t matter
• “Outside us” as theatre set
• M.-Marsel Mesulam (~1946–)
• “From Sensation to Cognition” (1998)
• Flexible goal-oriented behaviour
• Longer neural chains allow integrative processing
• Sankhara (fabrication)
• Vinnana (consciousness)
• Skandhas (Five Aggregates)
• History of Scepticism from Savonorola to Bayle (2003)
• Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498)
• Savonarola and Sextus (~1480)
• Platonism (extreme realism)
• “The Hilbert-Brouwer Controversy Resolved?” (2008)
• David Hilbert (1862–1943)
• Gottlob Frege (1848–1925)
• Frege “wipes the floor” with Wittgenstein (1911)
• Brouwer’s view of mathematics
• Logical realism
• Luitzen Egbertus Jan (L. E. J.) Brouwer (1881–1966)
• Logicism
• “Intuitionism and Formalism” (1912)
• Kant: Intuition and categories are mind’s contribution to knowledge
• Logic is a part of mathematics
• Space, time, material originally come from geometry
• Geometry is the refuge of cowards
• “Geometry and Experience” (1921)
• Heraclitus (545–475 BC)
• Pre-Socratic philosophers
• WP428: The Moral Idiosyncrasy
• Pericles (495–429 BC)
• Thucydides (460–400 BC)
• Good science is Sophist
• Intuitionism
• Asymmetry in causality
• Law of the Excluded Middle (~350 BC–1908)
• Asymmetry between negative and positive statements in intuitionism
• Zettel Count
• OED: Intuitionism
• 2023-04-28 Epistolary Creativity

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.