Mind
- Answer Patterns: Four dimensions for reading what an answer is doing.
- Attention: Two ways the mind processes, feature integration, the gorilla test, and the global workspace.
- Avoid and Practice: The site’s advice in one-line pairs, each linked to the entry that argues it.
- Beauty: Where our sense of beauty comes from, and why I think it redeems us.
- Noam Chomsky: Where I follow him, where I part ways, and his point about the limits of intelligence.
- Cold Logic: Reasoning that follows a principle past where it serves people, and its warm opposite.
- Comfort and Biases: Why comforting beliefs persist, and the one bias under all the others.
- Complexity: Two fields that share one word, the key terms, how settled each is, and the traps.
- Computation: Universal computation, computational irreducibility, and why paradigm shifts matter.
- Consciousness: The easy problem, the hard problem, the answers on offer, and why I side with Dennett.
- Human Core Challenges: The biological, social, and entropy problems under every other problem.
- Cultural Cognition: Reading facts through group identity, and how societies move past it.
- Richard Dawkins: The gene’s-eye view that settles what an adaptation is for, and prose worth rereading.
- Daniel Dennett: Gradualism, intuition pumps, and Darwin’s dangerous idea.
- Desire: A single scale from hatred to addiction.
- Detecting Baloney: Pointers for an intellectual self-defense toolkit.
- Domain-Specific Models: Beliefs as bundles of inborn and learned models, and how they get misapplied.
- Dunning-Kruger: What the effect does and does not show, and a public lesson in taking an honest review.
- Edge Website: The best salon on the web, and its Epstein problem.
- Emotions and Relational States: Emotions by intensity and by group, and the states between people.
- Famous Lessons: Razors and reminders for thinking.
- Famous Quotes: A few lines worth remembering, and how to use quotes well.
- Four Floors: Where motivation comes from: genes, reflection, other minds, and reflexivity.
- Free Will: The Harris and Dennett exchange, in three layers.
- Holographic Space: Why space itself may be one more level, built from quantum information.
- Hold Your Identity Lightly: Fewer labels, freer thinking, calmer talk, and the values worth keeping.
- Optimism: Lines and proverbs against pessimism.
- The Ouroboros: One world in levels, from particles to minds, and how it folds back on itself.
- Roger Penrose: Provisional physics and non-algorithmic consciousness.
- Steven Pinker: My primary reference in psychology, with three reservations.
- Karl Popper: Three principles of toleration under every good argument.
- Pseudoscience: Why it is bad, who is drawn to it, and what actually counters it.
- Reflexivity: Observing and revising your thinking, its evolved limits, and how institutions extend it.
- Reflexivity Curriculum: Norms, practices, and safeguards that make reflection the default.
- Bruce Schneier: Encryption and privacy expert; trust as civilization; agreement on public AI.
- Science: The most important mental tool we have, and why it comes hard.
- The Sense of Style: What Pinker’s book argues, which popular tips are his, and how to use it.
- Sorites Paradox: No paradox once you set the gate, and the move to watch for.
- Threads of Mind: An intuition pump: many threads of consciousness, and why the mind already has them.
- Three Realms: Physical, emotional, and intellectual, and why effort flows to the one that pays.
- John Tooby: The mental programs that write the reality we live in, and why seeing them is the way out.
- Transcendence: Why we crave something larger: the fear half, the appetite half.
- Trust in Truth: Six habits for keeping trust in each other and in the institutions of knowledge.
- Two Systems: Fast and slow thinking as a fiction, what survived, and the remedy.
- Who Counts: Why an AGI with the right machinery is someone, and where the line falls.
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