What I'm thinking about
July 24, 2022
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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.