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.. Epistemology
Language and thought

.. Art
Fake art

.. Cognition
General Artificial Intelligence
Observing My Experience

.. Computers
Microsoft

.. Epistemology
22 Theories of Consciousness
Consciousness defined
Dialectics and Evolution
Everything contains the seeds of it's own destruction
Free Will
Intentional Stance
Mental Telepathy
Projection
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?

.. Society
Adversarial Legislatures
Borders
Cut Energy Use
Emotional Plague
Entropy and Life
Genocide
Getting Old
Improving Democracy
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
We Live in Interesting Times

.. 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
Intelligence and Motivation
Is free will an illusion?
Metarepresentations
Natural Law
Necessary Illusions
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
Job Destroyers
Markets
Money and Value
Money is Different
National Accounts
Necessary Production
Paper Wealth
Post Capitalist Society
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
Evolution Defended
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
Freedom in the Age of Convoys
Laws
Libertarian Coercion

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
Maps and Territories
Metaphysics Without Absolutes
Philosophy Buds
Ratchets
Sincerely Held Beliefs
Sorites Paradox
Stereoscopic Vision and The Hard Problem
The Gorilla in the Room of Science
The Purpose of Science
What is Going On?

Politics
If It Walks Like a Duck
Right Wing Freedom
The Sovereign Citizen
Tyranny of the Majority

Programming
Loopsidaisy

Science
Constructed Life
Correlation Wins
Fields
Neurophilosophy
Quack Doctors
The Great Shattering
The Material Space
Thinking about Interconnection
Time
Too Small to See
UFOs
Watching Pigeons
Weirdness in Physics

Society
A Job
A society needs a government.
Antisemitism
Babies and Bathwater
Belly of the Beast
Civilization
Compassion
Conservative
Corruption
Cultural Appropriation
Disinformation
Drag Story Tellers
Family Values
Governance
Governance and Power
Griefers and Misinformation and Disinformation
Homelessness
I Distrust the News
Immigration
Inclusion and Christmas
Indigenous
Its a Free Country
Life Extension
Magic
Moral Decline
Open Society and Falsification
Parents, Children, and Community
Possessions
Prisons
Privacy
Race
Rethinking Rights
Rules in a Knife Fight?
Sex and Gender
Should We Go to Mars?
Social vs Individual Responsibility.
Society and The State
Society evolved
Spheres of Influence
Swimming
The Care and Feeding of Free Speech
The Collingridge Dilemma
The Common Good
The Dual Meaning of Power
The Homeless
The Problem with Hedonism
The Rule of Law.
Thoughts on Justice
To the Moon
Totalitarianism
Trial by jury
Virtue Signalling
Voting
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







Return of the Law of Forms

Not idealistic though

The idea of a Law of Form is ancient.

For example:
"...The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth..." (Tao Te Ching).
"I am; that is who I am." (Exodus 3:14)
"The Father and I are one." (John 10:30).
"That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they may also be one in us: that the world may believe that thou has sent me."
"All creatures derive from God and from nothingness. Their self-being is of God, their nonbeing is of nothing" - Leibniz
And lots more in that vein. People haven't thought that way in a while.

Interestingly, in a recent book What Darwin Got Wrong Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini (henceforth F-P) argue that natural selection is not finding those solutions - it is driven to them by a law of form of some sort. They see this as somehow a refutation of natural selection.

What would the saw of form they are talking about be like? Let's try to see.

Cellular automata provide an interesting tool for philosophers because they enable 'toy universes' where things can happen according to a set of rules that can be completely understood. A cellular automaton (CA) space is completely determined.
I have written my own programs that create them but today I played with a free one called Golly. If I make a random squiggle on the screen and run then there is an explosion of seemingly random flashing pixels that would a few shapes on the screen. It's those shapes I'd like to consider - why are they there? Basically they are the few pixel arrangements that are stable over time. Every once in a while, at random, a stable shape would be formed, and when most pixels were off those shapes persisted.

Perhaps we can use this as an abstract example of a rule of form. A form that exists because it can.

We find rules of form often in nature. There is quite a clear relation between bone size and animal weight for instance. Or think of the fractal vascular structure so common in nature. Many many biological systems have vascular systems that obey. exactly the same math.
Why are these structures there?
For reasons very similar to the persistent shapes in the CA - because they can and once found they persist. The mechanism at work is difference of course.

Vascular systems work under two constraints; to serve as many cells as possible as efficiently as possible. The mainstream view is that Natural Selection will SORTA search a huge possibility space to find optimal solutions to situations. The mainstream view of Natural Selection is also that it's not limited to one mode. It doesn't just work by causing mutations that are selected. Any change, whether at the level of phenotype or ecoysystem or climate or asteroid strikes or laws of form is grist for Natural Selection's mill.

Perhaps we could soothe Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini's fevered brow by offering this olive branch.
Natural selection has selected a particular form because that form really is the best. But it's still natural selection doing the choosing.

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.