What an incredible piece of work, and—may I dare to write ‘real’—thinking. I’ll need more time to (try to) think about some sections from this essay, and will come back to it.
At some point in the essay (particularly the C.S. Lewis part) I was reminded of this section I once read in which Virginia Woolf described shocks of (rare) inescapable realizations.
Would you say these are (also) descriptions of real thinking, when something is being shaken loose and crystallizes in a new, surprising and often shocking form?
Glad you enjoyed it, Brigitte :). I'm not sure exactly what you/Woolf have in mind re: "inescapable realizations," but I think epistemic shifts that present as realizations/epiphanies are often pretty "real" in the sense I have in mind here (though I think there's sometimes a risk of letting the intensity of "realness" push out the need for further critical scrutiny, rigor, etc).
As an often lazy reader on substack, this made me wish it was in a hard copy of a book.
It points at something I've pigeon-holed as scholar of philosophy vs philosophy. It's really useful to see all these other angles getting at why truth is so important and beautiful.
In some ways, it feels like this is the exposition a nerd needs to defend him/herself about why they care so much about the truth! About really thinking!
That was a long one. Maybe quite overwrought for essentially one topic, may I suggest much harsher editing. ☺️
In general, I recall being in this frame of mind earlier. I’ve found it lacking.
The binary of “vs.” is the issue here. There is no such distinction.
I believe all thinking is inherently non-binary and has multiple layers to it depending on which memories are we bringing over.
Additionally, all of it is “fake”. Donald Hoffman is a leading voice in this, allnof his interviews are great.
It’s all biochemical at the very lowest level and we know that. Neurons and cortical columns in the brain work with “packages“ of sorts, neural patterns that may or may not match the models that we already have.
Jeff Hawkins’ “A thousand brain” educated me a lot on this.
We seem to be getting lost in words a lot and thinking that words are at the core of the thoughts, but then verbal thought can be broken down into smaller quanta, and at the very low level, they’re very simple. Signals from neurons in statistical chaos.
What an incredible piece of work, and—may I dare to write ‘real’—thinking. I’ll need more time to (try to) think about some sections from this essay, and will come back to it.
At some point in the essay (particularly the C.S. Lewis part) I was reminded of this section I once read in which Virginia Woolf described shocks of (rare) inescapable realizations.
Would you say these are (also) descriptions of real thinking, when something is being shaken loose and crystallizes in a new, surprising and often shocking form?
Glad you enjoyed it, Brigitte :). I'm not sure exactly what you/Woolf have in mind re: "inescapable realizations," but I think epistemic shifts that present as realizations/epiphanies are often pretty "real" in the sense I have in mind here (though I think there's sometimes a risk of letting the intensity of "realness" push out the need for further critical scrutiny, rigor, etc).
As an often lazy reader on substack, this made me wish it was in a hard copy of a book.
It points at something I've pigeon-holed as scholar of philosophy vs philosophy. It's really useful to see all these other angles getting at why truth is so important and beautiful.
In some ways, it feels like this is the exposition a nerd needs to defend him/herself about why they care so much about the truth! About really thinking!
That was a long one. Maybe quite overwrought for essentially one topic, may I suggest much harsher editing. ☺️
In general, I recall being in this frame of mind earlier. I’ve found it lacking.
The binary of “vs.” is the issue here. There is no such distinction.
I believe all thinking is inherently non-binary and has multiple layers to it depending on which memories are we bringing over.
Additionally, all of it is “fake”. Donald Hoffman is a leading voice in this, allnof his interviews are great.
It’s all biochemical at the very lowest level and we know that. Neurons and cortical columns in the brain work with “packages“ of sorts, neural patterns that may or may not match the models that we already have.
Jeff Hawkins’ “A thousand brain” educated me a lot on this.
We seem to be getting lost in words a lot and thinking that words are at the core of the thoughts, but then verbal thought can be broken down into smaller quanta, and at the very low level, they’re very simple. Signals from neurons in statistical chaos.
And