Changing the system I set out to observe
For a while I’ve been yearning to explore what might come up for me if I invent archetypes or personas for myself, along the lines of Internal Family Systems (a therapeutic approach popular with my corner of Twitter) but more heavily inspired by this post from Autotranslucence: https://autotranslucence.wordpress.com/2018/06/20/the-queen-the-engineer-the-poet-and-the-river-a-meaningful-life-on-de-institutionalised-time/ So I finally did it and wrote […]
Lots of people focus on living an objectively longer life by eating well and exercising. But just as important is living a *subjectively* longer life, no gym required.
More and more people are talking about meditation and even worse, suggesting that I try it. While I appreciate that other people like the activity, some of the woo-vocabualry and the way that people treat it as a panacea really scratch my face. But also, I’m kind of indignant about the fact that there are […]
This egregore is the god of the Unseen Seen. Things which it is possible to see, but which we prefer not to see. Things which we know are there, but delude ourselves into “knowing” are not there. If we see the unseen, by will or accident, we mostly experience shock and dislike, and we go […]
A few weeks ago an essay by @TheAnnaGat exploded all over my Twitter-Blogger-sphere. It outlined a possible movement of people that she has noticed building. The essay landing, and the reactions, were so exciting that I quit my work contract and returned to full time thinking! Here’s the original essay: https://medium.com/@the_i_i/were-a-niche-we-just-didn-t-know-9561f662e127 And Anna has set […]
I was reminded recently that a few years ago I chose to reject the maxim that there are no new ideas to be had. This truism comes in a variety of forms. I remember hearing it most often when it comes to stories. Apparently humans are all basically alike and any story about humans has […]
Causal Direction It has taken me a very long time to come to a fruitful understanding of tools. It was when I watched my artist housemate use a pen with a needle taped to the end in order to poke holes in clay that it finally fell into place. Tools are things that someone invented to […]
I realised with a bump the other day that I no longer view a person being both a scientist and religious as a contradiction. This is another example of a u-turn of my opinions in recent years. I was watching TV and two characters were having a discussion. The person was talking about how they […]
(cross posted from my personal blog) Sexuality In The Past Sexuality in the Anglo and European West for some recent previous generations was a simple affair. In the Victorian worldview, when categorising things was the preoccupation, the population was divided into two categories, men and women. If a person (a subject), founds themselves to be […]
This post is an investigation into the concept of pleasure or enjoyment as it relates to Kahnemans concept of the experiencing self and the remembering self. It is posted on this blog in the spirit of sharing strategies for pleasure, as mentioned by Sarah Perry in her essay Body Pleasure: I think that the best […]
“Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does.” – Douglas Adams
It’s time for some emotional maturity when it comes to cheaters in systems.
Preamble My thoughts in this blog post rely on other frameworks to better understand bisexuality. The first set of frameworks are eternalism/nihilism and monism/dualism as outlined by David Chapman on his project called meaningness. Very briefly, Eternalism says that everything has a definite, true meaning. Nihilism says that nothing really means anything. I will be […]
From the title, this post seems to me to have too broad a remit but I wanted to document the changes in my relationship to money. This blog was started at the outset of a journey in which I refused to engage with money. Money was being used as a weapon of power, particularly in […]
I recently came across this post, an article criticising what the author calls “Pop-Bayesianism”, the first time I’ve really come across a critique of my one of my new interests, ideas around rationality derived mainly from the Less Wrong blog/London meetups of same. I also saw a link to this video, a trailer for a film […]
“The lazy one is well prepared” – a proverb I’ve enjoyed contemplating. It means that taking small actions in the present allows for greater laziness in the future. Truly lazy people optimise their life for overall idleness, inactivity or in my case, flexibility. Laziness all the time does not foster opportunities for future laziness: money/food/shelter/goods […]
In numerous ways, I have come to observe that people think something is more worthwhile if it is difficult to achieve, or even more strangely, if it is painful to achieve. Additionally, if ‘the norm’ is to do one type of thing and someone comes up with an easier thing that achieves broadly the same […]
"Theories 2011-20 and other selected writings" is an epub containing all the posts from Theory Engine up to end of 2020 plus some Twitter threads AND selected greatest hits from the personal blog. It comes in at 73,000 words, which is as long as a real book. Choose your supporter price, and enjoy your read!
NB: The book may take 24 hours to arrive by email!