Unmaking Sense

Living the Present as Preparation for the Future

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Episodes

Friday Sep 09, 2022

The death of Queen Elizabeth II marks the end of the life of someone who was, by any conceivable standards, a great woman. Her greatness had nothing to do with being a monarch, but with the way she discharged the onerous duties that entails. For the rest, she embodies everything we all should aspire to be, not in subservience but in autonomous freedom and dutiful service. So we mourn her passing while deploring the institution that she served with such distinction because it represents and reinforces everything that is wrong with our dysfunctional leadership-obsessed human lives.

Thursday Sep 08, 2022

Knowing a simple set of rules does not necessarily convey what those rules entail. So simplification needs more if we are to understand what has been simplified.

Wednesday Sep 07, 2022

If we learn to live the present by seeing the multiplicity of the possibilities that are in it rather than the possibly-dire consequences of whatever certainty it is that we may think we see in it, then we will find that our lives are enriched and we are made better able to derive as much meaning as possible from every present experience in Dewey’s terms. One of our most serious bad habits as human beings is forming premature fixed judgements about what is the case. Learning to live with multiple readings is one way of helping to break that habit and so putting ourselves in a position where we can see the positive consequences of everything that happens rather than - as is more common - only the negative ones.

Wednesday Sep 07, 2022

The possibility that our reading or interpretation of the present might change repeatedly as we think about it again from the perspective of the future suggests that our current reading of the present may not be all that we think it is, nor as certain or as fixed as we may think it is. The implications of that for our lives, for living the present, and for our mental health.

Tuesday Sep 06, 2022

When we use a map to find our way around the countryside we are used to the fact that there is less information than there is in the world. But what if we needed to know more then there is in the countryside in order to understand how to navigate our way around it? Could there be a map that had 2 miles for every mile, and what would it look like?

Tuesday Sep 06, 2022

Our love of simplification has a lot to do with our desire for certainty and with the ability to predict the future, but what if the future isn’t predictable and the consequences of any action are simply unknowable? What then?

Tuesday Sep 06, 2022

Our human love for simplification, for explanation, for things that try to reduce complex matters to simple matters is a natural extension of the limitations of our intelligence. Where does the notion that we can understand the universe come from? Why do we suppose that knowledge that is less than perfect is thereby somehow worthless? Or that our difficulties in understanding are defects in our personalities?

Tuesday Sep 06, 2022

This is a taster or short summary episode that gives a hint about what will happen in the three episodes that follow at 6.06, 6.07 and 6.08.

Monday Aug 15, 2022

What it is and why it matters. Binary programs on tapes, Universal Turing Machines (UTMs) and running programs. Each UTM has its own Omega number, but it is fixed despite being unknowable.

Monday Aug 15, 2022

Why Omega matters in terms of what it tells us about life.

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