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Knowledge

"One should say 'it thinks,' just as one says: 'it's lightning.'" Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

The Inherent and Severe Limitations of Thinking

In the early 1990s, I practiced law with a lot of impressive Jewish attorneys. One, particularly so. He was brilliant, aggressive, and driven. He also held a Ph.D. in philosophy. I always wanted to ask him why he got a doctorate in philosophy and then went to law school,

Thinking isn't Rational: It's Embodied Reasoning

David Weinberger at University Bookman

Handwriting: Brain Connectivity?

George Citroner at Epoch Times

What the Ape Man Can Teach Us About a Common Mental Mistake

Pithecanthropus is the ape-man. He's also known as the Java Man and the Peking Man. Latin-loving scientists call him Homo erectus, Homo modjokertenses, Meganthropus palaeojavanicus, Pithecanthropus robustus, and Pithecanthropus dubius. He is the creation of Dutch physician Eugene Dubois. In the 1890s, Dubois discovered a few bony remains

This is Your Brain on News

Interview of Bryan Caplan at the 80,000 Hours Podcast. Transcript.

Leftists Trying Not to be Gnostics

Current Affairs seems like a worthwhile magazine. It describes itself as "the left magazine for people skeptical of leftism." Based on this essay, it seems pretty far left . . . Bernie Sanders-left . . . but intellectually honest left. In the perspective of the Hemisphere Hypothesis, an "intellectually honest" leftist is

AI and the Left Hemisphere

About once a month, I come across an online essay that is so lengthy and compelling that, after reading the first section, I merely scan the rest and print it out so I can study it later. Such is this essay by Adam Kirsch. It appears to be an explanation

Edward Frenkel on the Limits of Large Language Models

"I wonder if a large language model could actually ever come up with the idea that the square root of negative one is something that is essential or meaningful because if all information you get, if all the knowledge that had been accumulated up to that point, tells you