matiasz

I find Frederick Eberhardt’s writing on causality to be particularly clear and instructive.

Two physicists and a philosopher recently published a similar article that makes this point even more cogently, in my opinion.

“The blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience” https://aeon.co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-negl...

Chomsky discusses this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aydw2neS1W8&feature=youtu.be...

I think Chomsky is referring to gravity’s action at a distance, which Newton regarded to be absurd. I’ve heard Chomsky say that, after Newton, “physical” has come to mean “what we more or less understand” — that is, the physical is no longer identical to the material (body), in the sense of a world filled with nothing but billiard ball–like atoms bumping into each other. In the quotation above, Chomsky says that John Locke understood these points, so it may be worth looking at his work.

I find it interesting that Noam Chomsky rejects the mind–body problem as it’s often presented, given that Newton demolished the concept of body, not mind. Below is a relevant passage from the book Optimism Over Despair, in which Chomsky explains his position. I’d appreciate any references that elaborate on this line of thought.

[Interviewer:] The well-known University College London linguist Neil Smith argued in his book Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals (Cambridge University Press, 1999) that you put to rest the mind-body problem not by showing that we have a limited understanding of the mind but that we cannot define what the body is. What can he possibly mean by this?

[Chomsky:] I wasn’t the person who put it to rest. Far from it. Isaac Newton did. Early modern science, from Galileo and his contemporaries, was based on the principle that the world is a machine, a much more complex version of the remarkable automata then being constructed by skilled craftsmen, which excited the scientific imagination of the day, much as computers and information processing do today. The great scientists of the time, including Newton, accepted this “mechanical philosophy” (meaning the science of mechanics) as the foundation of their enterprise. Descartes believed he had pretty much established the mechanical philosophy, including all the phenomena of body, though he recognized that some phenomena lay beyond its reach, including, crucially, the “creative aspect of language use” described above. He therefore, plausibly, postulated a new principle—in the metaphysics of the day, a new substance, res cogitans, “thinking substance, mind.” His followers devised experimental techniques to try to determine whether other creatures had this property, and like Descartes, were concerned to discover how the two substances interacted.

Newton demolished the picture. He demonstrated that the Cartesian account of body was incorrect and, furthermore, that there could be no mechanical account of the physical world: the world is not a machine. Newton regarded this conclusion as so “absurd” that no one of sound scientific understanding could possibly entertain it—though it was true. Accordingly, Newton demolished the concept of body (material, physical, and so on), in the form that it was then understood, and there really is nothing to replace it, beyond “whatever we more or less understand.” The Cartesian concept of mind remained unaffected. It has become conventional to say that we have rid ourselves of the mysticism of “the ghost in the machine.” Quite the contrary: Newton exorcised the machine while leaving the ghost intact, a consequence understood very well by the great philosophers of the period, like John Locke.

Locke went on to speculate (in the accepted theological idiom) that just as God had added to matter properties of attraction and repulsion that are inconceivable to us (as demonstrated by “the judicious Mr. Newton”), so he might have “superadded” to matter the capacity of thought. The suggestion (known as “Locke’s suggestion”) in the history of philosophy was pursued extensively in the eighteenth century, particularly by philosopher and chemist Joseph Priestley, adopted by Darwin, and rediscovered (apparently without awareness of the earlier origins) in contemporary neuroscience and philosophy.

There is much more to say about these matters, but that, in essence, is what Smith was referring to. Newton eliminated the mind-body problem in its classic Cartesian form (it is not clear that there is any other coherent version), by eliminating body, leaving mind intact. (191–192)

Judea Pearl sees a way out of the winter.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/machi...

Yes [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.04016

Matthew Butterick made this argument years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9063177

I recommend Stephen LaBerge’s work.

In my experience, the best way to improve my attention is by practicing śamatha meditation. The śamatha practices that entail mindfulness of breathing are thought to be ideal for those living in modernity.

The best introduction to śamatha that I’m aware of is B. Alan Wallace’s “The Attention Revolution: Unlocking the Power of the Focused Mind.”

I completely agree! Doumont often gives talks at universities that are open to the public.

http://www.principiae.be/X0200.php

Matthew Butterick’s font Triplicate has true italics and a Code version with programming alternates.

www.triplicatefont.com

The typographer Matthew Butterick was so bothered by the use of Verdana in “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” that he wrote a letter to Brad Bird, the film’s director.

PDF: http://mbtype.com/pdf/bird-verdana.pdf

You may also enjoy Matthew Butterick’s Triplicate, which has true italics.

http://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html

Butterick’s Practical Typography recommends a body-text size of 15–25 pixels.

http://practicaltypography.com/point-size.html

I highly recommend “Style: Toward Clarity and Grace,” by Joseph Williams. It’s by far the best advice on writing I’ve ever read. I learned about it from Norman Ramsey’s website [1], which has many other good resources. Another good book is the “HBR Guide to Better Business Writing,” by Bryan Garner.

[1] http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/students/writing.html

It’s amazing that there aren’t many articles like this one. I wrote something very similar [1] last year because I simply couldn’t find a complete, step-by-step guide that addressed the details of forking, branching, etc.

[1] http://www.matiasz.com/2015/04/16/contribute-open-source-rep...

On the home page, the apostrophe in "World's" should be a curly apos­tro­phe, not a straight single quote.

I hope someone follows this up with Doumont CSS.

http://www.treesmapsandtheorems.com/

Jean-luc Doumont gives excellent advice on how to avoid making slides like the ones mentioned in this article.

http://www.principiae.be/X0800.php

I think it's a profound book on communication, and I consider my copy to be a piece of art.

I'd like to see a LaTeX template in the style of Jean-luc Doumont's book, Trees, maps, and theorems (http://www.treesmapsandtheorems.com/).