Unmaking Sense

Episode 4.04: The Dewey Principle: if we cannot enjoy today today, we won’t enjoy tomorrow tomorrow.

If the facts about the system imply that Dewey’s Principle “will never work”, then there is something wrong with the system because it cannot be right that some enjoy living the present at the expense of others who cannot.

Episode 4.03: Two things that protect us from the tyranny of our own rationality.

If our rationality leads us to abhorrent conclusions, we change our assumptions; if consistency binds us to the past, we abandon consistency. These two practices break the tyranny of rationality and free us to create the future independently.

Episode 4.02: Jelly on a plate: the difference between too much and not enough shape in education.

How do we navigate the path between providing children with too much shape in our educational systems, with too much control, so that we turn them into what we want them to be, in other words; and not enough, so they waste their lives for lack of shape and direction?

Episode 4.01: Rationality is not what we like to think.

We tend to assume that there is only one kind of rationality, but there are as many rationalities as there are sets of assumptions on which we base our reason. That we inherit the assumptions of our culture only serves to encourage us to think of them as the only or the best forms of rationality, but this is an unwarranted assumption. Different cultural forms are not mad or irrational; they have arisen because their peoples have made different choices.

Episode 3.24 and 100: The robots are coming, and they will take our motivation for everything.

We have drifted into a way of living where everything we do and so our motives is dictated by some other purpose, authority or threat. When robots take most jobs they will also remove such motivation: for education; for work; for struggle; for life itself. We need to address these challenges before they become acute or their consequences will dwarf anything we have ever experienced, including global wars and pandemics. The time is now.

Episode 3.23: Allowing the future to emerge from the interests consciousness has identified.

Because we do not have the conscious capacity to anticipate or control the future we must direct our nonconscious brains using interests we are conscious of, preferences we recognise and validate, then leave our nonconscious brains to process them and throw up thoughts for further evaluation.

Episode 3.22: Making better use of the non conscious brain in practical terms.

Knowing the importance of the non conscious brain is not the same as knowing how to put it to use. We explore some strategies as experiments in non conscious cognition.

Episode 3.21: The limits of consciousness and the three tyrannies of the ancient world.

Consciousness can only process 16-120 bits per second and our short-term memory can only hold between 12 and 18 items. So what is our relationship to our own history, long-term memories and the 625 pages of notes on my desk or the 97 voice-notes in this sequence? Need they be coherent and consistent? Is the person who produced the first the same as the person who is producing this one? In other words, is identity persistent? Is our future determined by our past? Should we refuse to allow it to be? Unmaking this kind of sense.

Episode 3.20: The order we find in the world is chosen to match what we are predisposed to look for.

Ramsey Theory tells us that when we have a sufficient amount of information and complexity, we can always find some patterns in it. Those patterns reflect our predispositions and needs. But to force the world to match those patterns we have to throw away lots of information. Deterministic views of the world arise from this selectivity. When we manipulate the world using partial information we are essentially doing something we don’t understand. We may have no choice, being creatures with limited intelligence and observational capacity, but we shouldn’t be surprised if unwelcome and unexpected consequences arise.

Episode 3.19: Tidy and untidy world and minds.

We need to simplify the world - to tidy it up - in order to understand and manage it, but the resulting tidiness comes at the cost of rejecting all the uniqueness we find in nature. One person’s tidiness can be another’s untidiness; what matters is how we make sense of things and whether there are better ways to do so.