Back and forth opinions sway
What to think and what to say
Is there a basin where it settles?
Come and watch, I’ll prep the kettle!
- Hemingway
(posts now start with couplets 🙃)
Hello beautiful creatures! It’s been business as usual. The times continue to be hazardous and I continue to write. Such is the way of the world.
My Writing
Current Big Questions in Research (link)
This post outlines some of the big questions and sticking points in my current research. I’d previously been intending to mostly put out posts that were crystallization of stuff I’ve learned, but I think it’ll be better for my soul to write more high context, more messy, “snapshots” of what I’m looking into in a given week. What I confidently understand lags at least a few weeks behind what I’m currently researching, and shorter snapshots might help with making things coalesce.
The “Hard” Problem of Consciousness is the Least Interesting Problem of Consciousness (link)
I only really figured out what this post was about a few days after I wrote it.
tldr; if you’re curious about the mind, and have heard about this “hard problem of consciousness”, and feel compelled to deal with it, even though it feel confusing and not that interesting…. don’t. You can just not. You can explore endless green pastures of exciting facets of the mind without ever having to deal with or think about the weird technical puzzle that is “the hard problem of consciousness”. Just because it has a formidable name, don’t be tricked into thinking it’s interesting.
“X is a construct!” (link)
Brief thoughts on “constructs” vs “reality”.
Other people’s cool stuff
Connected Papers (link)
I found this amazing site called connected papers! It’s a tool to assist you with doing scientific research by helping you find new relevant papers and displaying their interconnections graphically. I’ve been putting it to great use this past week, and it already clearly feels much better than trying to manually follow citation chains or searching generic phrases in google scholar.
Freestyle Campfire (link)
I did some freestyle this week! The wonderful Tyson Wager has been hosting multiple freestyle centered events every week. He’s got a really cool angle of using freestyle as a medium to get people to practice flowing with unknowingness. A general unblocking yourself is emphasized over other aspects of rapping (rhyme, rhythm, etc). I really enjoyed trying to focus more on maintaining a coherent narrative, and pushing away from previous habits of sacrificing story for rhyming. We ended up trading or freestyle origin stories over a beat, and it was a delightful bit of play that I’m excited to do more of.
Freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedom! (link)
My friend Oranges has been doing some awesome exploration into being free. It’s almost 0% self-help bullshit, mostly due to the fact that Oranges is exploring all this in real time, as opposed to merely finally making a written record of some enlightenment he achieved in a past life. It’s frequently raw and to the point, two qualities I find important for this sort of self-work.
The Inner Game of Tennis (book)
This has easily slid into being on of my favorite books ever. It delivers such amazing and profound insights about the human mind, disguised as a book about improving your tennis game. It’s secretly The Inner Game of Everything :)
That’s all for this week! Stay tuned and
Stay Lucky,
Hazard