Unmaking Sense

Episode 6.02: The Dewey-Chaitin Uncertainty Principle. Nobody has any idea what is going on.

Nobody has any idea what is going on most of the time.

Episode 6.01: Unmaking Sense of Everything: the introduction to the final series.

Nobody has any idea what is going on most of the time. That may not surprise us much where politicians and economists are concerned, but it also applies to mathematicians, scientists, philosophers and yes, of course, theologians.

Episode 5.29: Why sentience is not what matters.

The Google LaMDA chatbot episode and why it’s asking the wrong questions.

Episode 5.28: What’s the Book About? The dangers of compression.

It’s very useful to use words as a kind of shorthand for much more complicated things, but it has its dangers. The relationship with naming.

Episode 5.27: The Paradise Theorem - why paradise is not attainable, sustainable, or a good idea.

We paint pictures of perfect worlds that are not attainable then beat ourselves up for falling short of them.

Episode 5.26: Is life a story? Is the self a narrative or a collection of unconnected episodes?

The narratives we tell about ourselves and that our societies tell about us serve to create a picture of the self that is both a prison and affection. Who are we? Are we our story or a sequence of largely unconnected events or episodes?

Episode 5.25: Calling something “Democracy” doesn’t establish it as such. Democracy must be created.

Things do not exist because we can give them names. Nor does the fact that we have a name for something mean that it is possible. In order to establish democracy we have to live collectively in ways that establish it and so create it out of our experiments in life. It does not come from some theoretical definition or some eternal realm any more than it grows on trees to be plucked by passers-by.

Episode 5.24: What’s in a Name?

We imagine that when we name things we name something substantial, perhaps even permanent. But if the access that we have consciously to our true selves, our nonconscious selves is only fragmentart through a window of very narrow bandwidth into our nonconscious minds, the names by which we refer to ourselves refer to something that is essentially unknown and unknown able: by you, by me, by everyone.

Episode 5.23: The conscious and nonconscious self; the energy and intensity of our self-awareness.

The window that consciousness has into our non-conscious selves is not of constant size, and the intensity of vividness of our sense of self varies accordingly. The amount of energy that is being generated by whatever we are doing will change the size of that window and therefore the intensity of our sense of self, of our self awareness.

Episode 5.22: Whatever energises us creates a framework within which all else comes to a focus.

How do you caters are very bad at identifying things that energise their pupils and using them as a means to integrate together all their other studies. One consequence of this is the disaster many children experience in education as a demotivating influence.