A theme that I love from Revelations and this piece (and one that speaks to your background as a scientist) - the vertiginous self-doubt of pursuing a mystery and questioning whether or not there even is a mystery in the first place (and in the process questioning whether you have begun to lose your grasp on reality).
Bravo, Borges would like this one I think. Ok now it's time for me to write that Borges-inspired short story I've been putting off...
Wow good catch, yeah that's become a running theme without me really trying. I think it's from working on developing scientific theories of consciousness, which itself is so difficult to get a solid logical handle on.
I think that the occasional Borges-style short fiction work well mixed in with a normally nonfiction newsletter. I haven't seen a pure or even majority fiction substack that has done well. I'm watching substacks like Salman Rushdie's to see how successful they are at this.
Yea I would say it definitely comes from your interest in consciousness, I don't think molecular biologists have this feeling quite as often lol.
I think it's really tough with fiction, going to be hit or miss for so many people. There is a much larger conversation to be had about the decline in fiction reading, but maybe especially on substack people are going to be much more turned off if they read a boring piece of fiction vs. non-fiction (well at least I learned something...).
Are you familiar with Ramon Llull? I got a copy of DIALOGOS: Ramon Llull's Method of Thought and Artistic Practice. Incredible resource to supplement Yates. You also might like the work of Michel Beaujour on rhetoric.
Hey Batislu - thanks! And haha, don't worry, you're not the enemy, I think explainable AI is important (of course, I do wish we'd just drop the whole thing, in the end). It's interesting to consider the difference between an index-based memory and associative memory. In fact, one reason why I myself practiced by never really used the art of memory is that I didn't feel that it was *real knowledge* i.e., things stored there weren't quite part of my associative web. In a sense, all the mystic systems people introduced historically were ways to attempt to solve this problem, and build a semantic web on top of the standard "X is stored here" version of memory palaces that make them incredibly good for rote memorization but not-so-good for incorporating knowledge in a way that's accessible to the rest of your everyday cognition.
A theme that I love from Revelations and this piece (and one that speaks to your background as a scientist) - the vertiginous self-doubt of pursuing a mystery and questioning whether or not there even is a mystery in the first place (and in the process questioning whether you have begun to lose your grasp on reality).
Bravo, Borges would like this one I think. Ok now it's time for me to write that Borges-inspired short story I've been putting off...
Wow good catch, yeah that's become a running theme without me really trying. I think it's from working on developing scientific theories of consciousness, which itself is so difficult to get a solid logical handle on.
I think that the occasional Borges-style short fiction work well mixed in with a normally nonfiction newsletter. I haven't seen a pure or even majority fiction substack that has done well. I'm watching substacks like Salman Rushdie's to see how successful they are at this.
Yea I would say it definitely comes from your interest in consciousness, I don't think molecular biologists have this feeling quite as often lol.
I think it's really tough with fiction, going to be hit or miss for so many people. There is a much larger conversation to be had about the decline in fiction reading, but maybe especially on substack people are going to be much more turned off if they read a boring piece of fiction vs. non-fiction (well at least I learned something...).
Are you familiar with Ramon Llull? I got a copy of DIALOGOS: Ramon Llull's Method of Thought and Artistic Practice. Incredible resource to supplement Yates. You also might like the work of Michel Beaujour on rhetoric.
I am, I once read: https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Art-Memory-Universal-Language/dp/0226728269/ which has some very good analyses of Llull's work. Had not heard of DIALOGOS though, sounds interesting.
I have this too, but haven’t read yet. Nice to meet you!
I really enjoyed this. Thanks!
Thank you for reading! It's always a bit risky to do a short story in what is normally an essay series, but it worked out I think
Hey Batislu - thanks! And haha, don't worry, you're not the enemy, I think explainable AI is important (of course, I do wish we'd just drop the whole thing, in the end). It's interesting to consider the difference between an index-based memory and associative memory. In fact, one reason why I myself practiced by never really used the art of memory is that I didn't feel that it was *real knowledge* i.e., things stored there weren't quite part of my associative web. In a sense, all the mystic systems people introduced historically were ways to attempt to solve this problem, and build a semantic web on top of the standard "X is stored here" version of memory palaces that make them incredibly good for rote memorization but not-so-good for incorporating knowledge in a way that's accessible to the rest of your everyday cognition.