Unmaking Sense

Episode 10.42: What duality entails and what it doesn’t.

This episode should probably have come before 10.41. It is about not conceiving of duality in terms of conventional opposites but in terms of full alternatives that include opposites. The significance of the distinction.

Episode 10.41: Duality in education: what it isn’t and what it is; changing our dual changes it all.

Why educational opposites are all on the same side of the duality, and what is on the other.

Episode 10.40: Our systems of thought tend to be circular, so how do we revise them or escape them?

We start to explore ways to escape self-reinforcing systems of thought that imprison us by confirming their own assumptions. How and why might we decide to try to break out of them?

Episode 10.39: Passion in science; the persistence of the visionary; waste-paper-basket theory.

We look at questions to do with the personal convictions and passions that drive scientific discovery, and in particular the visionaries who leads scientific progress. We contrast the ways of understanding the universe that are now standard for many physicists with the scepticism of such as Roger Penrose who think that things in physics are nowhere near as settled as some would have us believe. We reiterate the waste-paper-basket principle.

Episode 10.38: Some rambling thoughts exploring the differences between classical and quantum.

Thinking differently is always hard because old habits constantly return and threaten to take control. These few thoughts are even more random than usual as a result. Think of them as the recovered contents of a waste-paper basket.

Episode 10.37: We can never assemble a set of sufficient reasons for either success or failure.

Is our habit of looking for the causes of whatever happens, good or bad, and either blaming or praising ourselves for them as a result, occasioned by the realisation that if there is no legitimacy in blame, neither is there legitimacy in praise or credit? Is this blame/credit just another flawed feature of the unreconstructed dual space where things are easy to understand but unfortunately far from optimal, and so wrong?

Episode 10.36: There is no discernible link between the influences we fall under and what we do.

The unknowable connection between what we read, hear, experience and what we do with our lives works both ways: we cannot predict and we cannot explain; everything is subject to many-layered uncertainty, unpredictability and flux.

Episode 10.35: Why reading, listening, studying, learning may entail far more layers than we think.

Continuing to explore the idea that the relationship between what we take in with our minds may be completely unrelated to how we process it, which is to say why intellectual activity should never be thought predictable or “flat”.

Episode 10.34: Questions of authority, of who is entitled to speak, and how we feed our minds.

We all legitimately have only as much authority as can arise from the voice of one person. To claim more, in the name of god, the laws of the universe, or the metaphysics of eternity, is to try to steal another person’s space. It is also a form of cowardice.

Episode 10.33: How do we find our way in a dual space that is more difficult and unfamiliar?

Pioneers and having the conviction to carry on when all about you are expressing doubts or contempt.