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Invisible Hand Fail Modes
January 29, 2021I’ve been browsing through the archives of the newly reanimated Slate Star Codex, and came across a post reviewing Eliezer Yudkowsky’s book Inadequate Equilibria. I have not read it myself, but Scott Alexander’s summary relates a text which (among other things) examines the ways in which free...
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Mutual Recognition and Costly Signalling
January 21, 2021According to Kant, being an agent is about having reasons for your actions. This is to understand having agency as a matter of being subject to normative assessment, of being the kind of creature that can undertake commitments and possess entitlements. Within Kant’s framework, our rational and moral agency rests...
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On Indexicality
January 17, 2021Why can’t friendship be bought? Perhaps the thought goes something like this. If I can buy a friendship, then anyone else could have bought that friendship. But if so, then this means that this friendship is not in any way particular to me. This, however, seems to contradict very idea...
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Note on Category Theory
January 15, 2021This is a quick summary of a few points I found striking in a brief high-level dive into category theory. I first had some contact with category theory several years ago while studying computability, logic, and set theory. At the time I had some difficulty seeing what conceptual resources it...
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Note on Anthropocentrism
December 27, 2020Richard Rorty once paraphrased the criticism of relativism in terms of a dilemma it faces when confronted with the question of cross-cultural dialogue (Rorty, 1989). Since they deny the possibility of a universal perspective—a view from nowhere in which all cultural perspectives are assigned equal status—the relativist is...
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Phenomenal Properties
December 16, 2020Here’s some follow up thoughts to my last post on private ostension and its relationship to the hard problem of consciousness. An exchange on Twitter has had me thinking through this issue more carefully, and where it fits within the broader conservation. First I want to talk about...
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Consciousness and Private Ostension
December 9, 2020While philosophy of mind has not been in the foreground for me recently, some forays into Hegel and normativity have brought me back into contact with it. My last sustained effort to get clear on consciousness was several years ago, but I’ve not changed my mind on any key issues...
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Note on Superrationality
November 30, 2020In game theory, a superrational player is a perfectly rational (that is, utility maximising) player with the added characteristic that they treat all other players as superrational, where superrational players always play the same strategy in the same scenario. This idea (coined by Douglas Hofstadter in a chapter...
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Indeterminacy and Norm-Grounding in Brandom
November 21, 2020I recently came across a post by David Roden called Robert Brandom and the Posthuman which gives, among other things, an excellent introduction to a criticism that can be levelled against Brandom’s philosophical project. In this post I want to consider the nature of the threat this problem poses...
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Bad Optics
November 8, 2020A theme that comes up often is flight from the institution. The institution in question may be academia, or the mainstream left, or even something as nebulous as The Traditional Career, but the story is largely the same in all quarters: an increasingly stifling culture of gatekeeping, competition and/or witch-hunting...
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The Octopus and the Machine
October 30, 2020Some writing of mine, The Octopus and the Machine, has been published at Epoché Magazine. The piece considers what research in octopus intelligence can teach us about technological alienation.
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Some Snarks at Postmodern Sincerity
October 18, 20201.
A collective whose parties are usually ticketed puts on a free event. It is promoted as a thank you to their community, and as a gesture of inclusivity to those on low incomes. A big deal is implicitly made of selflessness of the gesture in the promotional materials....
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The Cathedral and the Vampire Castle
October 9, 2020Some loose thoughts on similarities and differences in Curtis Yarvin, Mark Fisher, and Hanzi Freinacht. See also my post on accelerationism.
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Curtis Yarvin’s analysis of progressivism as a decentralised program of control is striking in its structural similarity to many contemporary critiques of capitalism.
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Walter Benjamin on Brecht
September 26, 2020Some excerpts from Walter Benjamin’s Understanding Brecht (Benjamin, 1998), plus notes. See also a previous post on Brecht and the Chinese Opera.
The point at issue in the theatre today can be more accurately defined in relation to the stage than to the play. The abyss...
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Psychedelic Selves
September 26, 2020Recently I’ve been on the hunt for philosophical work engaging with the phenomenology of psychedelic experience. This has proved oddly difficult, despite the resurgence in public enthusiasm for psychedelics. The conversation seems mostly to be dominated by a combination of neuroscientists, psychotherapists, wellness practitioners and Silicon Valley types, all of...
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Yuk Hui on Technics, Time and Geometry
September 26, 2020Here’s a few snippets pulled from Yuk Hui’s essay The Question Concerning Technology In China (Hui, 2018). These come from a later section about geometry and temporalisation that I found interesting in relation to some recent avenues I’ve been exploring on time, and which also elaborates on...
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Note on Collective Action Problems
September 26, 2020I first encountered the rumour that Adam Smith’s formulation of the free market was cribbed from earlier Islamic scholars in David Graeber’s marvellous tome Debt: The First 5000 Years (Graeber, 2011, p. 279). The invisible hand of the market began its life—perhaps—as the hand of Allah. Except that...
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Remixing the Master's Tools
September 23, 2020In a now famous omen, offering a stark prognosis of the pitfalls in fighting oppression with the weapons of the oppressor, Audre Lorde declared in 1984 that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house (Lorde, 2007). Since then this maxim—which I shall refer to as the...
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Sketch of a Mechanism of Subjectivation
August 26, 2020Here’s a brief of sketch of a mechanism of subjectivation (the engineering or production of subjectivity itself). It was brought on by an admittedly odd mix of Brandom’s reading of Hegel on self-consciousness, Žižek’s analysis of what he calls “interpassivity” (Žižek, 1998), and some intersecting thoughts about...
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The Technical Mediation of Public Memory
August 25, 2020The aim of this post is to pull together a few distinct threads that have been converging for me recently on the topics of media, authority and temporality. I’ll start where I mean to end—with a quote from Anthony Wilden, writing of George Orwell’s portrayal of the perils of mass...
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