speak_plainly

Consciousness is still a pretty hollow concept. And it sounds like, at least in Finch's analysis, that it's being treating as a normative good. It also sounds like both Pollan and Finch are circling the functionalist versus essentialist debate.

Let's say for the sake of the argument it turns out that the brain tunes in to some quantum-level forces for computation and there are some other side effects to this that add to the mystery of what we call consciousness, it effectively changes nothing about this picture.

Humans or animals in general may be unique in how they accomplish consciousness but it is unlikely that it's the only pathway. To put it another way, even if humans and animals are special in their method, it doesn't mean we are special in our result.

If you can't sit still and quietly in a room alone for 30 minutes without becoming schizophrenic, maybe meditation is the least of your problems.

Meditation is not a tool or a medicine for mental health issues.

Dictionaries are a mixed bag at best. If you apply David Kaplan’s character/content distinction from Demonstratives, you have to ask: should pure indexicals, which are essentially 'contentless' pointers be treated the same way as standard words? Let alone the thousands of rigid designators in this dataset that map directly to specific objects in the real world. At a certain point, is there no room left for encyclopedias?

Karl Popper's warnings are more relevant now than ever as we continuously trade one version of a top-down, engineered Kallipolis for another. Plato failed to institute his own utopian blueprint, and it should have died in Syracuse. Instead, we endured a thousand years of the Catholic Church's theological adaptation, and today we are accelerating toward a technocratic iteration – essentially operating on a secularized Catholic hangover.

The most dangerous element of this cycle is how casually contemporary politics has embraced the noble lie. It twists a classical philosophical concept into a cynical excuse for leaders to deceive the public for our own supposed good. Often sanitized in intro political science courses as a pragmatic reality of governing, in practice, it functions as a corrosive mechanism for elites to control narratives and dodge accountability.

It has never worked, and it never will.

I remember a philosophy professor telling me we're studying philosophia, not philaletheia, and that really struck me. Truth has not been the primary objective of this equation for over 3,000 years. We desperately need Popper's demand for an open, truth-seeking society to break us out of this historicist trap.

It sounds like they stupidly did exactly what was stupidly expected.

I use YouTube’s AI to screen podcasts, but I’ve noticed it has been glazing over large sections involving politically sensitive or outlandish topics. Although the AI could verify these details when pressed, its initial failure to include them constitutes a form of editorializing. While I understand the policy motivations behind this, such omissions are unacceptable in a tool intended for objective summarization.

In Republic I, Socrates distinguishes the art of medicine from the art of wage-earning. One is about the work; the other is about getting paid. Historically, the craft was the primary goal, and the money was an extrinsic side effect.

Today, the money-making side has staged a hostile takeover.

The attention conundrum is just a symptom of a deeper financialization. Multi-billion dollar companies have turned profit into a data-driven science – analytically turning the screws on every script, product, and interaction to optimize for extraction. This is the destruction of the art of making things.

The real issue is that you cannot compete with an entity that has no respect for the art. When a platform replaces the integrity of the work with the logic of a metric, the independent creator is no longer an underdog – they are functionally excluded. You can be the best at any art, but in a system that prioritizes sheer extraction over excellence, your craft effectively ceases to exist.

Is this an actual bug or is this just a corrupt database or corrupt setting? What steps were taken to try to alleviate the issue, basics like resetting the keyboard dictionary? DFU restore of the phone? If you're not willing to troubleshoot an issue on your phone, rather than just throw it away and buy an Android, trying a 3rd party keyboard seems sensible to me.

Ultimately, Apple is responsible here but I don't think this is an intractable issue baked into the software. And yeah, maintenance is required despite what the perception might be. Apple even offers great support services for people who are not able to do it themselves.

Terrorizing Apple with a countdown threat is probably not going to accomplish much.

You could try installing Gboard (https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/gboard-the-google-keyboard/id1...), or SwiftKey (https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/microsoft-swiftkey-ai-keyboard...)...and there are probably other options.

It may be even more obvious, but there are settings in general/keyboard that you can toggle.

I noticed a bit of a shift in the stock typing experience, but I adapted and it's fine.

I have to remind myself to stay within the two to three cups a day recommendation.

There was a study in 2021 that found that drinking more than six cups of coffee a day was associated with a 53% increased risk of dementia and smaller total brain volume.

https://cardiologycoffee.com/blogs/news/new-study-says-coffe...

Apple News and News+ represent everything wrong with modern Apple: a ham-fisted approach to simplicity that ignores the end user. It is their most mediocre service, jarringly jamming cheap clickbait next to serious journalism in a layout that makes no sense.

The technical execution is just as lazy. While some magazines are tailored, many are just flat, low-res PDFs that look terrible on the high-end Retina screens Apple sells. Worst of all, Apple had the leverage to revolutionize a struggling industry; instead, they settled for a half-baked aggregator.

It’s a toxic mix of Apple tropes that simply weren't thought through. The ads are the cherry on the cake.

Someone at some point styled themselves as a new E.E. Cummings, and somehow this became a style. The article features inconsistent capitalization for proper names alongside capitalized initialisms, proving there is some recognition of the utility of capitalization.

Ultimately, the author forces an unnecessary cognitive burden on the reader by removing a simple form of navigation; in that regard, it feels like a form of disrespect.

Nobody pays for software. They pay for an SLA and a throat to choke when things go sideways.

I think maybe one thing you have to consider is that sensors still require maintenance. Software can measure the length of time the sensor requires to reach equilibrium and send a maintenance required alert and someone cleans it (like if the software expects equilibrium in 10 seconds but the reading settles at 60 seconds, it can calculate the sensor is 80% clogged and requires cleaning). There's also all sorts of techniques that can be used to mitigate gunk depending on how the sensor is being used such as physical wipers, air-blast systems, ultrasonic cleaning systems, and chemical coatings. So as long as some oxygen can get in and an equilibrium is made between the fluid outside the sensor and inside the sensor, you'll get a reading that you can trust.

A dirty window only ruins the reading if you are measuring the speed of the oxygen passing through it. The three electrode design stopped measuring speed and started measuring balance. Unless the gunk is a total airtight seal (which is rare on the scale of an oxygen molecule), the sensor will eventually reach the right answer, whereas the old version would fail.

To use an analogy with some metaphors: The sensor is like a sealed room with a screen window that only lets in oxygen. To get a reading, every molecule that enters is smashed to create a tiny spark of electricity. However, because the oxygen is destroyed to create that spark, it creates a suction effect, causing more oxygen to rush into the room to fill the void. This creates a major flaw: if gunk builds up on the screen, it slows down the flow of incoming oxygen. The sensor, which only counts sparks per second, is tricked into thinking the oxygen level outside is low, when really the window is just dirty.

By adding a third electrode to replace the oxygen every time one is smashed, you maintain a perfect balance and eliminate that suction. Because the room stays full, the sensor no longer relies on the speed of the oxygen rushing in; it simply measures the steady state of the oxygen already there. Even if gunk gets on the window, the sensor won't be starved of a reading. It might take a few extra seconds for the levels to settle, but the final number will be 100% accurate because the sensor is no longer emptying its own room to get a count.

If Socratic philosophy is the greatest threat to state power, Stoicism is the framework for mass compliance. It's a psychological strategy for emotional management that replaces the traditional goals of inquiry. This system encourages individuals to obey authority and limit their emotional range to reach a state of internal comfort. This objective discourages the act of questioning. In this regard, it functions as an anti-philosophy.

The modern interest in Stoicism in my opinion is a move toward a secular version of the Christian experience. Modern Stoicism retains the Christian emphasis on submission and endurance while ignoring the superstitious elements inherent in Stoic physics, such as providential fatalism.

If your objective is to maintain a state of functioning passivity, Stoicism is the effective solution (but I wouldn't recommend it).

This seems like an Apple AI subscription under the guise of a software bundle.

It’s a good value for some, especially if you want to use FCP, but seems like a bad value for most users who are expecting more value from their Mac purchase.

I wonder if new Macs will offer a three-month trial for this suite, or if the standard apps will be pre-installed and the AI features are unlocked through a subscription.

If bundled versions of iWork go away, we may see a renaissance for G Suite.

That was quick: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/12/elon-musk-reacts-to-gem...

The Historical Popularity Index (HPI) and Wikipedia pageviews are incommensurable data points.

HPI measures the global archival presence of a figure, while pageviews measure current search frequency. These quantify different variables that lack a direct logical relationship.

I was at Apple during the Jobs era and you could really see the Zen influence in how he ran things and his approach. I was slightly interested in Buddhism at the time but the Apple experience pushed me to dig a bit deeper. After I quit, I went and studied at a Zen monastery afterwards to try to and sort out and make sense of all that I had seen when I was there.

Steve was deep into a specific lineage that went from Kodo Sawaki (the 'Homeless Kodo') to Kobun Chino Otogawa, who was Steve’s long-time mentor and even did his wedding. Sawaki was famous for being a total rebel; he had a column in the Asahi Shimbun in the late '60s filled with these blunt aphorisms that basically told people to stop being so full of themselves. You can definitely see that 'no-BS' attitude in Steve's approach. He also used meditation as a way to work through problems.

I would recommend this book, 'The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo,' which features Kodo's aphorisms and various levels of commentary:https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Zen-Teaching-of-Homel...

All of Microsoft’s products seem like they are all trying to be everything for everyone. Instead, people want more focus. The entire experience of Windows is a mess. How many terminals does an OS need? Or settings and control panels? Or all the legacy stuff? Just start from scratch and think simple, secure, and fast…. Otherwise you get trapped and bound to endless reasons for doing stuff and no focus and end up with Windows 11.

This new model is way too sensitive to the point of being insulting. The ‘guard rails’ on this thing are off the rails.

I gave it a thought experiment test and it deemed a single point to be empirically false and just unacceptable. And it was so against such an innocent idea that it was condescending and insulting. The responses were laughable.

It also went overboard editing something because it perceived what I wrote to be culturally insensitive ... it wasn’t and just happened to be negative in tone.

I took the same test to Grok and it did a decent job and also to Gemini which was actually the best out of the three. Gemini engaged charitably and asked relevant and very interesting questions.

I’m ready to move on from OpenAI. I’m definitely not interested in paying a heap of GPUs to insult me and judge me.

An ideal listen for anyone looking to sharpen their critical thinking. The reasoning moves are subtle, and it’s easy to miss the small leaps and omissions that reveal how persuasive but unsound arguments work.

If you want to test your logic radar, keep a Reasoning-Error Bingo Card handy — here are some of the most common moves to watch for:

- Anecdotal Evidence as Proof – moving personal testimonies presented as sufficient evidence.

- Cherry-picking – highlighting the few “hits” or successful moments and ignoring null or failed sessions.

- Facilitator/Ideomotor Bias – unacknowledged influence of helpers who already know the answers.

- Lack of Experimental Control – demonstrations without blinding or verification procedures.

- Equivocation on “Spelling” and “Communication” – shifting definitions of what counts as independent expression.

- Over-extension/Universal Claim – extrapolating from a handful of cases to “all nonspeakers.”

- Appeal to Emotion and Narrative Framing – using distressing or inspiring stories to disarm skepticism.

- Appeal to Authority – invoking credentials, research funding, or famous supporters in place of data.

- Confirmation Bias/Omission of Counter-Evidence – excluding decades of research debunking similar methods.

- Shifting the Burden of Proof – implying critics must disprove telepathy rather than producers proving it.

- Quantum-Language Hijack – invoking “quantum entanglement” or “energy fields” as pseudo-explanations.

- False Dichotomy (“open-minded vs. materialist”) – framing skepticism as moral or emotional failure.

- Paradigm-Appeal Fallacy – claiming we’re witnessing a scientific “revolution” instead of providing data.

- Ambiguous Success Criteria – redefining what counts as a correct answer or “connection.”

- Halo Effect through Compassion – moral halo from helping disabled children transferred to truth of the claim.

Ironically, in trying to transcend “materialism,” the series repeats Descartes’ old mistake — treating mind and matter as mutually exclusive instead of as aspects of a single natural order. That move saddles them with the same impossible burden Descartes faced: explaining how an immaterial mind could causally interact with the physical world on top of everything else they need to prove.

Nintendo of America, like any U.S. company, must actively protect its trademarks or risk weakening or losing them. While the company generally seems tolerant of fan use of its copyrighted material, it’s entirely reasonable that Nintendo would want to safeguard its intellectual property, its core asset and main source of revenue, both to preserve its legal rights and maintain the integrity of its brand.

I get the reaction, but it’s worth remembering that Japanese copyright and trademark law strongly protect creative works and registered marks. Japan doesn’t have a broad “fair use” exemption like in the U.S., only narrow, specific exceptions (such as limited quotation or educational use). Under the Trademark Act, companies also have to actively enforce their marks or risk dilution or cancellation. So while Nintendo’s actions can seem heavy-handed, they’re also legally required to defend their intellectual property to preserve its value and exclusivity.

They should open source their methodologies, maybe someone else can carry on their work.

You're anticipating the modern AI angle and that's a good move.

In Searle's Chinese Room, we're asked to imagine a system that appears intelligent but lacks intentionality, the capacity of mental states to be about or directed toward something. In Searle's setup he didn't conceive of a system with either learning or an internal state and instead we have a static rulebook that manipulates symbols purely according to syntactic rules.

What you're suggesting is that if the rulebook or maybe the agent could learn and remember then it could adapt and is closer to an intelligent system and in turn would have understanding. Which is something Searle anticipated.

Searle covered this idea in the original paper and in a series of replies: Minds, Brains, and Programs (1980, anticipation p. 419 + peer replies), Minds, Brains, and Science (1984), Is the Brain’s Mind a Computer Program? (1990), The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992), and many more clarifications from lectures and interviews. He was responded to in papers from Dennett, the Churchlands, Hofstadter, Boden, Clark, and Chalmers (which you may be interested in if you're looking to go deeper).

To try and summarize Searle: adding learning or state will only complicate the syntax, it's still a purely rule-governed symbol manipulation system; there is no semantic content in the symbols; and the learning or internal changes remain formal operations (not experiences or intentions).

So zooming out, even adding learning and states, we're still dealing with syntax and no amount of syntactic complexity will get us to understanding. Of course, this leads to debate from Functionalists like Putnam, Fodor, and Lewis. This is similar to what you're pointing at and they would say that if a system with an internal state and learning can interpret new information, reason about it, and act coherently, then it functionally understands. And I think this is sort of the place where people are landing with modern AI.

Searle’s deeper claim, however, is that the mind is non-computational. Computation manipulates symbols; the mind means. And the best evidence for that, I think, lies not in metaphysics but in philosophy of language, where we can observe how meaning continually outruns syntax.

Phenomena such as deixis, speech acts, irony and metaphor, reference and anaphora, presupposition and implicature, and reflexivity all reveal a cognitive and contextual dimension to language that no formal grammar explains.

Searle’s view parallels Frege’s insight that meaning involves both sense (how something is presented) and reference (what it designates), and it also echoes Kaplan’s account of indexicals in Demonstratives (1977), where expressions such as I, here, now, today, and that take their content entirely from the context of utterance: who is speaking, when, and where. Both Frege and Kaplan, in different ways, reveal the same limit that Searle emphasizes: understanding depends on an intentional, contextual relation to the world, not on syntactic form alone.

Before this becomes a rambling essay, we're left with Frege's tension of coextensivity (A = A and A = B), where logic treats them as equivalent but understanding does not. If the functionalists are right, then perhaps that difference, between meaning and mechanism, is only apparent, and we’re making distinctions without real differences.

I think you might be missing out on what the Chinese Room thought experiment is about.

The argument isn’t about whether machines can think, but about whether computation alone can generate understanding.

It shows that syntax (in this case, the formal manipulation of symbols) is insufficient for semantics, or genuine meaning. That means whether you're a machine or human being, I can teach you every grammatical rule or syntactical rule of a language but that is not enough for you to understand what is being said or have meaning arise, just like in his thought experiment. From the outside it looks like you understand, but the agent in the room has no clue what meaning is being imparted. You cannot derive semantics from syntax.

Searle is highlighting a limitation for computationalism and the idea of 'Strong AI'. No matter how sophisticated you make your machine it will never be able to achieve genuine understanding, intentionality, or consciousness because it operates purely through syntactic processes.

This has implications beyond the thought experiment, for example, this idea has impacted Philosophy of Language, Linguistics, AI and ML, Epistemology, and Cognitive Science. To boil it down, one major implication is that we lack a rock-solid understanding or theory of how semantics arises, whether in machines or humans.

I opened ChatGPT on my Mac this morning and there was an update.

I updated ChatGPT and a little window popped up asking me to download Atlas. I declined as I already have it downloaded.

There was another window, similar to the update available window, in my chat asking me to download Atlas again...I went to hit the 'X' to close it and I somehow triggered it, it opened my browser to the Atlas page and triggered a download of Atlas.

This was not cool and has further shaken my already low confidence in OpenAI.