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.. Epistemology
Language and thought

.. Art
Fake art

.. Cognition
General Artificial Intelligence
Observing My Experience

.. Computers
Microsoft

.. Economics
National Debt.

.. Epistemology
22 Theories of Consciousness
Consciousness defined
Correlation vs Causation
Dialectics and Evolution
Everything contains the seeds of it's own destruction
Free Will
Intentional Stance
Mental Telepathy
Projection
Subliminal Suggestion
Training vs learning
Validation
We cannot escape stories
What is a Vegetable?
Why Do We Like Pictures?

.. Evolution
Life is Amazing
Swarms
What is a Species?
Why are Tropical Birds So Colorful

.. HUM
A Mind

.. Philosophy
Amateur Philosophy

.. Politics
Silos
Strikes
Unelected Bureaucrats
Who Decides an Election?
Why Are So Many of Our Relationships Adversarial?

.. Science
The Sense of Balance

.. Society
Adversarial Legislatures
Altruism
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Cut Energy Use
Emotional Plague
Entropy and Life
Gender
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Getting Old
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Jesus and the Money Changers
Merry Christmas
Misinformation and disinformation
Moral Hazard
Pay
Privacy
Red flags
Red Rover Red Rover
Religion in Schools
Reusable Bags
Sleeping in a tent
Social Media
The Myth of Leadership
We Live in Interesting Times
What is Wrong with Merry Christmas

.. teems
Cars made bicycles possible

... evolution
Philosophy of Plants

...HUM
Culture is Ordinary

Art
AI and Art
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Excellence is a Plateau
Is this picture real?
NonFungible Tokens
Public Art
Tearing Down Statues
Weave
What is Art?
Working With Reality

Cognition
Artificial Intelligence and the Collingridge Dilemma.
Bird Brains
Bounded Rationality
Competence Without Comprehension
Consciousness is More Like Fame Than Television
Developmental Processes
Emergence and Cognition
Gender dysphoria
Genius
GIGO
I Lost My Knife
Illusion
Incomplete Information and Stories
Instinct
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Is free will an illusion?
Metarepresentations
Natural Law
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On Affordances
Pencil and Paper
Post Phenomenology
Reflective Equilibrium
Return of the Law of Forms
Shifting Meanings
Structures of Understanding
Superstition
Taking Things on Faith
The Hard Problem
The I Love You Gesture
The Imagined Order
The Phenomenology of Swim Bladders.
Thinking about medical procedures
Thinking About Risk
Underdetermination and Redundancy
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
What Does Google Know?
What is going on?

Economics
A Country Is Not Like A Company
Alternate ideas lying around waiting for disaster
Blood and Money
Can Capitalism Survive?
Do Our Minds Own Our Bodies?
Everyday Communism
Inflation
Invisible Hand
Job Creators
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Money is Different
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Profit Motive Fails
Rentier Capitalism
Social Wealth vs Surplus Value
Spending Money Into Existence
The Metaphysics of Money
The Ontology of Debt
Thinking about Money
Wealth is What Money Buys

Environmentalism
Blowing Up Pipelines

Epistemology
Absolute Knowledge
Equivalence
Exists
I do not know everything
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
Rethinking Knowledge
Rethinking Knowledge
Semiotics and Body Language
The Curious Ineffectiveness of Facts
The Past and the Future.
Uncertainty and Unpredictability
Unpredictability
Verificationism
Whatever happened to The Truth?

Epistmology
Dire Warnings

Evolution
Body Plans
Competition and Cooperation
Dr Malthus would be pleased
Error Correction
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Evolution is not Religion
Evolution of Cars
Extinction
Forces of Nature
Is Natural Selection Obsolete?
Networks
Omicron
Politics and Evolution
Roles
Temes
The Evolution of Purpose.
The Problem with Natural Selection.
The Source of Bad Behavior
Thinking about Tails
Why Does a Leopard Have Spots?
Wildlife

Freedom
Free Speech in the age of Twitter
Freedom and Badness
Freedom and Morality
Freedom From and Freedom To
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Laws
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HUM
10 Views of Landscape
Affect and Effect
Dataism
I pay rent.
Listening to Corn
The Reform vs Revolution Paradox
What is Public Schooling For?

Levels of Abstraction
Levels of Abstraction and Minds
What is a newspaper?

Mathematics
As Much As Possible
Zipfs Law

Memetics
Emotional Plague
Memes: Imitated Behavior.
The Problem with Memes
What is a replicator?

Morality
Beyond Rules Based Morality
Freedom and Morality
Moral Realism.
What do we owe animals?

pending
Police

Philosophy
Agency
Being
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The Gorilla in the Room of Science
The Purpose of Science
What is Going On?

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If It Walks Like a Duck
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Programming
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Science
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Correlation Wins
Fields
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Time
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Society
A Job
A society needs a government.
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Its a Free Country
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Society and The State
Society evolved
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The Collingridge Dilemma
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The Homeless
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The Rule of Law.
Thoughts on Justice
To the Moon
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We Live in the Present
What is to be said?
What made freedom a bad word?
Why is there a shortage of nurses?
Work - Productive, Useful, Worthless, and Bad.

UBI
Implications of Very Productive Technology
Modest Proposal
Problems with Universal Basic Income
Tormenting Unlucky People
Why there are oligarchs







Structures of Understanding

Something we trust.

As a part of my own philosophic practice for a long time I have shied away from the idea of 'mind'.

It's not that I don't understand what mind means in daily conversation. Rather it's an idea that seems solid but sort of falls apart like a wet tissue when examined.

People used to think that they can think and feel because they have minds. But let's remember how when Descartes descended into the depths of skepticism to find the solid ground for belief he ended up at:
'I think, therefore I am.'
He didn't say 'I think, therefore I HAVE A MIND'.
He stopped at saying 'I think.

I've stopped there, philosophically, when I consider the issue of; how is it possible that I can think. After all, saying it's because I have a mind gets me noplace in understanding how I can think.

The idea of a 'structure of understanding' has been central to how I think about how we can think for a long time. And I'm sure that many philosophers have dealt with the same idea and called it by a different label.
So let me expand on what I mean by that label.

Our brains have many structures of neurons that do surprisingly particular tasks. For instance, there is structure (forget the name) that recognizes faces (literally). If a person has that structure damaged, for whatever reason, they can't recognize faces. They can't recognize their own mother by face but can by voice.
Other structures in our brains do similarly specific thing and all of those structures inform each other all the time in realtime. What we do from moment to moment is the result of this or that coalition of structures becoming influential in that whole dance. This all happens at the level of neurons but there is a higher level of abstraction that is involved that has to be considered too.

An interpreter is a structure that takes in data from various sources and then fires if certain conditions are met. These interpreters in the neocortex are vastly interconnected in a cascading structure. The firing of each becomes the input data for many others, and those in turn fire and provide data for still other layers of interpreters. This is a process that takes in data at the bottom and produces meaning at the top. The moment to moment meaning coming out of the neo-cortex mixes with other inputs like memory and emotion to determine what we do from moment to moment. The level of abstraction we need involves thinking about how do all those modules interact.

A level of abstraction is not hard to understand - it happens when the interactions of simple things make more complex things. For instance; the way electrons, protons, and neutrons interact produce atoms. The atoms have properties that the protons and neutrons and electrons do not have. When the complex things produced by the interaction of simple things occur we see a level of abstraction. Obviously - the complex things like atoms can also interact as simple things to produce other levels of abstraction like 'water' or 'salt' and also obviously this expands to very many levels of abstraction.
We call it reality.

Returning to how our mental modules interact. If the mental modules interact chaotically nothing can happen. And in fact the process of growing and learning produces mental modules that generally interact harmoniously.
For instance; I want bread, which interacts with my memory that knows how to get to the store which interacts with my body that knows how to walk - it's a structure - an abstract structure.
This is a structure of understanding.

Think back to the neocortex and it's cascade of interpreters.
That cascade is an intricate structure built up over time as we grow and learn.
The more we grow and learn and the more intricate that structure becomes the harder it gets to inject new things into it without breaking it.
And breaking a structure of understanding is very dangerous. Let me be plain - that structure enables us to understand reality - and breaking it means we can't.
I'm not talking here about whether my structure of understanding is superior or anything.
I'm talking about how my structure of reality has to be pretty inflexible or it wouldn't work and I have to defend it (and I do unconsciously).

I think a structure of understanding is a bit like a building - it needs a solid foundation.
Most of the elements of the structure are self-reinforcing in the sense that what I know about ice makes igloos make sense. But we do need to take some things on faith - they aren't part of that self-reinforcing loop.
I take on faith that reality exists and that we can learn about it via experience and thinking.

What do you think?

Star I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life. I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it. Each week I write a short essay to set the topic. I show a selection of them here.

I've been thinking and reading about philosophy for a long time but I'm mostly self taught. That is I've had the good fortune to read what interests me rather than follow a course of study. That has it's limits of course but advantages. It doesn't cost as much and is fun too.

My interests are things like evolution and cognition and social issues and economics and science in general.