The human capacity to abstract discrete categories over continuous phenomenon constitutes perhaps our greatest blessing and curse. It at once blesses us with the combinatoric potential we call creativity, and curses us to forever renegotiate the boundaries of the discrete.

This is a deeply unwise frame to take on. People are their whole selves, pre-frontal cortical inhibitions included. Removing that part of the loop, as alcohol does, produces a severely distorted image of a personality. You will get insight into the temperament of their.

It’s Lumpers vs Splitters all the way down.

Convergent reflection of reality's functionally emergent cleavages in no way entails the reality of a Platonic realm––it just demonstrates the tendency of abstractions to converge when they gesture toward the same domain. But that convergence never makes the jump to a realized.

The moment our political order internalized the concept of Public Opinion—and therefore sought to instrumentally manipulate said opinion top-down via mass-media-shaped consciousness—marked the end of meaningful democratic representation in America.

To the extent one naively comes to despise all “hierarchy”, they inadvertently position themselves in opposition to all multi-scale emergent structure, and will therefore act to erode all such emergent societal scaffolding until it crumbles beneath their own feet.

The Active Inference / broader FPAI community understands this, and is well positioned to lead this transition.

Like the Sun, one can’t point directly toward deep truths without blinding those who look. One must use lenses, shadows, and other indirect forms of observation that—in their overall perspectival convergence—catalyze within the mind a synthetic image of the truth in question.

RT @MattPirkowski: @cometaj2 I followed the path of reductive materialism, in the domain of evolutionary biology / psychology, down to its….

For fathers, or fathers-yet-to-be:. It’s important that the child—especially the son—develop their own identity beyond the identity of the father. This happens while the father lives, but only partially. In a sense, the death of a son’s father constitutes a second birth—one now

This is a reasonable entry point for those beginning to think through the nature of the male desire for personal immorality. Here are a few other threads to pull, which will take you far deeper into the evolutionary and psychosocial aspects of the behavior.

But if I'm being honest, the evolution of fast food transactions had already traveled far enough down this path to remove meaning from most such interactions.

We are responsible for injecting the existential energy landscape with metastable affordances (local minima). In every case, this requires energetic sacrifice. Absent the capacity for and willingness to sacrifice, all becomes a homogenizing race to the entropic bottom.

The smile on the left infused the meal with additional meaning. The smile on the right is that of (simulated) transient amusement, and fades as the displacement of human interaction by autonomous transaction further subtracts meaning from embodied experience.

(and "Religion" describes the ritualized capacity for transmitting and updating "morality" inter-generationally).

John Adams once said that "our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.". But it's not just the Constitution. The amoral deployment of capital itself, when exercised amidst an irreligious people, implies.

We severely underestimate the power of a cultural technology that places the idea of Free Lunches beyond the immanent realm, simultaneously reducing material exposure to the catastrophic side effects of utopianism while still harnessing the motivational potential of the impulse.

This interpretation also implies the corollary that while said efflorescence plays a meaningful role in the cultural lifecycle, its fruits alone remain insufficient to maintain our culture's overall adaptive capacity.

The "enlightenment" is best understood as a flowering from extant cultural seeds, not as a paradigmatic moral or epistemic overhaul. So much confusion within contemporary Western culture descends from this fundamental miscategorization.

On the bright side I now have an embodied intuition for how my cranial nervous system relates to my tongue.

How?. Was in the garden doing a bit of morning stewardship, and had my coffee sitting on the corner of a raised bed. Took a sip while attending to the watering I was doing, and realized a wasp was in my mouth. As I spat it out it stung the tip of my tongue.