Unmaking Sense

Episode 6.22: The Vogon perspective; completing to make one and separating to make many.

The one year anniversary of Unmaking Sense. How distinction depends upon perspective. The Vogons, the council and an ants’ nest put in proportion. Understanding ourselves apart from and integrated into the world.

Episode 6.21: Why how we observe the world tells us so little about what is going on. (Episode 200.)

When we observe the world, we like to think that what we see is evidence that will help us to decide what we should do, but that may not be the case even though we have little option but to think so. The way the world behaves may be governed by things that lie much deeper within it and the things that we can observe and our understanding of cause-and-effect may be correspondingly unreliable. David Hume was one of the first to intuit this fact, to which we can now add greater detail.

Episode 6.20: Completions, consummations and intellectual exhaustion.

How wrapping ideas up in a summative moment of realisation can leave us feeling exhausted, spent, empty. Completing trains of thought and discovering what if anything comes next. Resisting the temptation to come to premature conclusions.

Episode 6.19: The way we make sense of the world on first encounter is changed by what comes later.

We reduce the complexity of the world to know it, but when we first encounter it we do not have the full picture so what we observe is not reliable. This is not merely appearance and reality but something far more significant.

Episode 6.18: Actively and passively making sense of the world; living with multiplicity.

We reduce the world to one definite thing in order to reduce our anxieties about uncertain things. While the world appears to be in a state of flux and multiplicity we don’t know how to anticipate the future so we are tempted all the time perhaps and often prematurely to reduce the state of the world with all its multiplicities into a single state because it seems more manageable and seems more comfortable even if it turns out to be mistaken.

Episode 6.17: The Story So Far. Self-reference and the politics of the world.

We analyse more or less every political system in terms of its attitude to self-reference: to self-criticism; to dissent; to unthinking subservience. And we understand capitalism out of the same concern to allow anything but doubts about its own most fundamental assumptions that reflect its social Darwinism and are embodied in its assumption that differential rewards are the just desserts of those of unequal worth as measured by its own self-reinforcing measures of success. But all political systems endorse the same foundational assumption: that the only reliable measure of success is a person’s manifest command of more than their fair share of the world’s resources.

Episode 6.16: Going on about recursion again and again.

Recursion is a process in computer programming where a program calls itself or a function within a program cause the same function that it’s running in. It’s a very powerful but at first very perplexing and confusing concept. It relies on a capacity for self-reference. And so it’s very much central to the notion of self-consciousness and the relationship between our conscious and non-conscious brains.

Episode 6.15: In praise of obsessive self-distraction that frees the nonconscious brain.

I get obsessed with things and I’m not ashamed of it. I understand the things that I am obsessed with are often trivial. But I also understand that they distract my consciousness - which would otherwise be trying to solve at a conscious level problems that my non-conscious brain alone is likely to be able to resolve. So my obsessions are ways of freeing up my non-conscious existence to do what really matters by fixating my consciousness on things that don’t.

Episode 6.14: Thinking beyond the symptoms to the disease might also illustrate superintelligence.

An obvious objection to doing without leaders is that there are people like Putin who will come and land-grab and steal our stuff unless we do. But this is to mistake the symptoms of a problem for the problem. If none of us thought so highly of leaders, there wouldn’t be people like Vladimir Putin to worry about. Or at least that’s my pious hope.

Episode 6.13: What might superintelligence look like, even if we can’t implement it?

Being able to see further into the future, being able to hold more things in our minds before we settle on them, all of these might be at least some of the trappings of something that would qualify as superintelligence. We muse on a few more.