What I'm thinking about
May 04, 2023
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.