Sampling the 2024 blogosphere: Part 1
Sampling the 2024 blogosphere: Part 1
The Intrinsic Perspective's summer subscriber writing extravaganza
After receiving around 100 submissions for my call for subscriber writing to read and share, I’ve had a great tour of the 2024 blogosphere via the minds of the people who read The Intrinsic Perspective. Much as last year, I’m happy to report the blogosphere is in excellent condition. Nowhere else can you find a collection of voices touching on such diverse topics and subjects, nowhere else is there more jungle-like pullulating (now that’s a fun word) growth.
The results of my reading is broken into three parts (so expect two more of these to crop up across the summer months). What follows are some links, summaries, and excerpts I pulled from the submitted pieces that show off the verdant nature of writing online in 2024. TIP subscribers shared their work on topics like the connection between Gene Wolfe’s fiction and Dark Souls, to explaining why some people find philosophical zombies so inconceivable, to a retrospective of the parents whose daughter was murdered in South Africa and became national news, to how the original prototype of convolutional neural networks was made of literal physical beads, to candid explorations of the privilege of growing up with generation wealth.
I highly encourage digging through what’s below, dipping and delving as necessary. Last year many found hidden gems of new favorite up-and-coming writers, especially on topics that don’t normally get a ton of press and virality. Think of it like you’re at a wine tasting—just sample, see if you like it, spit it out if not, move on to the next. You might find a preferred flavor you didn’t know you had.
(Some of these have political content. Please do not take my including a piece in this compilation as endorsement of the content of the post, or its accuracy. Read at your own risk!)
One difference from last year is that I had authors write their own summaries of their pieces; however, I personally still pulled the quotes you see and commented on a lot them. The original descriptions written by the authors are in italics and my commentary is what’s in normal text.
1. “Transcendence of the sacred game that made us” by Axel Gruvaeus is a reflection on how hunting shaped human cooperation and morality and what the future might hold for a niche that no longer serves the same purpose.
Paleobiologist Stefan Bengston imagines such a theoretical world without predation as a world of primary energy producers, perhaps joined by composters living off their organic remains. It wouldn't be a world of agile cats, fast deer, or cunning foxes. Adaption in such a world is all about digestion effectiveness and photosynthesis, which doesn't necessarily favor the big guy. A paradise where no one eats anyone else would be a world of algae and bacteria. It would be slow and sun-worshipping, fundamentally different from the melee we call nature.
I loved this thought experiment of an evolved world sans hunting. It reminded me of speculation in my novel, The Revelations, that the origin of consciousness was spurred by the invention of predation, and therefore has a similarly dark origin.
2. “Folding the Box” by Gilad Seckler draws inspiration for problem solving and life from something I know quite well: box folding! See, a well-folded box looks seamless, and many people don’t know how to do it without tape, via the flaps alone (I learned this method working in a bookstore, which involves a surprising amount of boxes).
When we look at an impressive finished product—a book, a film, a well-made website—or admire someone at the top of their field, it’s easy to imagine that the pieces magically snapped into place. We find it inconceivable, extrapolating backwards, that the characters, plot, and setting of a story (elements which seem inextricable in the version we’re consuming) could ever have existed independently… Instead, people and projects alike go through periods of disequilibrium in which some flaps are “folded” and others are not, and there’s some awkward jamming of corners in the process of reaching a new, stable synthesis; eventually everything fits where it’s supposed to, and no one else can perceive the clunky transitional phase.
3. “Alienation: Technology & the Soul” by Connor O'Leary is about the effects of technology on the human psyche. Watching closely his own phenomenology, Connor finds:
Only recently removed from this sheltered environment, I became fully ensconced in the digital world of web browsers and Netflix and Youtube and Facebook, and I began to experience a creeping feeling of disconnection and flatness. It felt as if I could no longer experience the full richness of the world around me, that there had grown up an invisible yet palpable wall between me and physical experience. And it didn’t feel as if this were occurring only when my attention was broken by technology. There was an actual change in the way I processed the world, even when my attention was directed wholly toward it. It was more shallow, more rapid. I was scanning the environment for a hit of something interesting, and then moving on, much as we scan a website and rapidly scroll.
4. “Why is Compassion So Hard?” by Brian Sherwin is about the physical, cognitive and emotional limits of human compassion and how we might improve our situation through conscious meaning making.
As much as we might like to feel compassion for every human being on the planet, our capacity for experiencing emotional compassion is fundamentally limited by our energy and the number of people in the world.
5. “Control Group” by P. Jordan Anderson is about the relationship between the Effective Altruism/longtermism movement and modern technology. It’s well-cited and thorough, and I think gets at the difficulties of utilitarian philosophies. But it also acknowledges the practical aspect particular moral philosophies have for people who make life and death decisions, for example:
In 2018, after a teenager was killed in a 116 mile per-hour collision in his Tesla Model S, Musk resisted the father’s request for newer models to include safety devices that would limit their maximum speed, on the grounds that too many options would make the vehicles’ operation overly complicated for many users. “I want to make sure that we get this right”, Musk wrote to the young man’s father, James Riley, in an email. “Most good for most number of people.”
6. “On the Soul” by Amanuel Sahilu is a philosophical exchange between models of the soul put forward by different cultures: primarily between the Greeks (Plato, Aristotle, and we their scientific inheritors) and the Yakut tribe of Northern Siberia.
This is because despite the centuries, an implicit view among scientists today who study the biological basis of the mind appears no more philosophically advanced than Aristotelian hylomorphism, the idea that the soul (or mind, as we now prefer to call it) emerges from the structural pattern of the body, the same way that though an axe may materially be composed of metal and wood, it’s the form of the object—in this case, that the metal is pudgy-shaped and has a weighty edge—that confers its “axe-ness” (as opposed to the forms of other kinds of blades). Likewise, within today’s “functionalist” view held by many (systems) neuroscientists, the various functions implemented on different neural structures are what are said to constitute the mind; it’s only within an abstract layer distinct from the biology that a mind can be said to reside.
7. “We see with our eyes. We recognize with our hearts” by James Bailey is about Peter and Linda Biehl, who were tragically made famous in the 1990s due to the murder of their daughter, Amy. Amy herself was set to marry someone James, the writer of this piece, personally knew from high school. The murder became a reflection of what was going on in South Africa as apartheid ended.
While earning her degree from Stanford University, her giant and service-oriented heart discovered a passion for South Africa and the plight of the Apartheid-oppressed black population. At graduation, she wore a cap with the words “Free Mandela” across the front…She won a Fulbright scholarship to work on the post-apartheid future and touched down in Cape Town in 1992…
Two days before she was to fly home, blonde-haired and blue-eyed Amy was dragged from her car by a 100-strong mob, stoned unconscious, and stabbed to death on the side of the road – killed by the very people she was working to help….
A year later, the four men responsible for inflicting the final blows that killed Amy stood trial…. all sat motionless and expressed no remorse. Each was found guilty. The prosecution sought the death penalty. The judge rejected the request, saying that despite their lack of remorse, the killers could be rehabilitated. Each was sentenced to 18 years in prison.
Peter and Linda were asked if they were disappointed that the judge didn’t impose the death penalty. They answered that killing Amy’s assailants wasn’t going to bring her back, adding that they, too, hoped her killers could be rehabilitated…
In 1996, three years after Amy’s murder, newly elected president Nelson Mandela established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission… If you had already been punished, you could apply for amnesty. In 1997, Ntobeko Peni, Easy Nofemela, Mongesi Manqina, and Vusumzi Ntamo applied for amnesty...
After their release from prison, Ntobeko Peni and Easy Nofemela were determined to chart a new path and make a positive contribution to the next generation. They set up a youth club in Guguletu Township – the very place of Amy’s murder and began an afterschool mentorship program…
Peter and Linda saw the impact Ntobeko and Easy were having and the men they were becoming…Peter and Linda offered Ntobeko and Easy jobs with the Amy Biehl Foundation. They would go on to forge a deep and lasting relationship. Easy spent fifteen years with the foundation, and Ntobeko continues his work there to this day.
I’d heard the story, but didn’t know or had forgotten many details. To be honest, as a parent I had… many strong feelings about it (not the writing of the essay itself by James, I mean the tale of the Peter and Linda Biehl).
8. “The Artist Against the Machine” by The Delinquent Academic, is about maintaining one's artistic integrity in the face of Generative AI. It considers the idea, one that feels unfortunately quite relevant today, of an “artist’s dystopia” in which generative AI exceeds human artistic ability across most relevant domains.
When I saw the capability of Large Language Models, to edit your work, to generate; like a knife cut, I felt two emotions, one on either side of the slice.
First, on the right side of the cut, I felt dejected. I had a dream, since a young child, of becoming a writer. Of developing my craft, outside of any institution, of never giving up, and eventually - after 20,000 hours of writing if necessary - having a small number of people appreciate my work. That is all I wanted; having done it all by my human self…
Second, on the left side of the cut, I saw an opportunity. I saw how pragmatically, the model's ability to edit one’s work, generate phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and come up with new ideas, if used with skill, might elevate my work. ‘Why resist these changes, you Luddite?’ I asked myself, ‘Use them to your advantage. The art world’s definitely trending toward this; it can be no other way…”
But, as Morpheus said to Neo in the Matrix, this thought process was like a splinter in my mind, driving me mad.
9. “A Skeptics Guide to Awakening the Third Eye” by Rebecca Eydeland is about meditating with an Inner Space Technique practitioner.
“Ok, let’s begin,” he said. “I want you to close your eyes and feel the back of the mat, feel the entirety of the mat. Sink into it, sink down into the mat.” He repeated this several times. At first, I felt the normal discomfort of closing one’s eyes and trying to meditate in front of someone. But quickly this morphed. A solid 360 darkness engulfed me, a dark black formed over my pupils like dark mysterious velvet caterpillars from my youth.
Matteus continued, “Now, I want you to take up space in the room, fill up the whole room. If it helps, imagine someone else, someone who fills up the room as soon as they walk in. Can you think of someone like that? Someone who walks into a room and immediately can fill it up with their presence?” My mind darted around to a few people, and then settled on one person—my daughter, L.
This description made sense to me as a parent. I can’t think of anyone who fills up the room like my toddler—parents become so tuned to emotions that it does feel like your kid take up a huge amount of psychological space wherever they are, even when quiet. Like 30% of your brain’s resting state or something.
10. “Experience and Immersion” by Severin Sjømark is on the proposition that the fundamental drive toward dualism is a natural process of thought.
“Consciousness” is perhaps the most charged of these terms. Similar to “mind”, it too has baked into it the notion of capacity. Looking up the definition of consciousness by various writers one usually finds that common to all of them is that consciousness describes our capacity for experience. “Conscious” is an adjective, while “consciousness” is a noun, and as such describes a state or a quality, thus “being conscious” is a state described by “consciousness”. But a state of what? What is in this state? It must obviously be a something, a substantive. But this then presupposes a dualism, the very dualism that has led to centuries of philosophical trouble. On the other hand, “experience” can be both a noun and a verb.
This part reminded me of a phrase in the novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell: “Soul is a verb, not a noun.”
11. “Shouting Is At Least Talking” by Sumil Thakrar is about communication styles, and how we are drawn to those who affirm our insecurities. Worth mentioning: it’s a short story published in American Short Fiction.
She put her hand on my shoulder and continued. “But the most important thing for me is helping others who find life difficult, all because of their skin. As you can see, my friend here has combination skin. Which means the cheeks are flaky and dry, but the nose and forehead are slick with oil. It’s one of the hardest types of skin to deal with. And my friend recently got dumped—now, I’m not saying it was just because of their skin, but we all know bad skin doesn’t help.”
12. “A Case for Reproductive Futurism” by Eva Shang is about pro-natalism and why young people should have children.
At 27, I’m the first of my friends to have a baby. In San Francisco, having a baby in your twenties is as unthinkable as being a teen mom is elsewhere in the country. Friends in their thirties, still childless, were baffled as to how J and I knew we were ready for the obligations…
Eva makes a case for parenthood in a way I’ve thought about, and felt, myself: that life stages have diminishing returns, and at some point the itch to move on and do something radically different takes over. Since I’ve been planning on publishing a piece that references literally this exact experience very soon it’s worth highlighting Eva’s writing as a pitch-perfect description of it:
I met strangers. I racked up frequent flyer miles. I went to far-flung locales. I ate supposedly fancy food. What then? After you’ve met all the people there are to meet, after you’ve eaten all the things there are to eat, after you’ve played in all the places there are to play? I don’t think for the record, that I’ve met all the people there are to meet, but I began to recognize archetypes: beautiful women and hungry bachelors and conniving eunuchs and lonely old men. Restaurant food began to taste greasy to me. At some point, you hit diminishing marginal returns on the supposedly fun things you get to do as an adult.
13. “Imprecise Truths About The American Caste System” by David Roberts is about an honest view of the elite from the POV of someone who grew up with generational wealth and writes about it with transparency.
I’ve been writing post after post about the toxic level of American inequality across not only income and wealth but most recently across issues of criminal justice. But I’d never use my children in order to promote a more equal society. I don’t know any privileged parent who would.
14. “Zooming Into a Zombie World” by Justin T. Sampson is interesting to me as someone who finds the classic zombie argument very convincing (at least in its intuitive force). His piece, in turn, comes from the other direction: about the author's difficulty imagining a world without conscious experience and his interest in learning how others are able to do so.
Imagining darkness would be imagining Mary being blind, which she is not—a physically different world. I might as well imagine spinning on a carnival ride, feeling nauseous from too much cotton candy. For the thought experiment to be meaningful, we must imagine the same physical world from a first-person point of view, not an experience of some arbitrary other world. From the first person, there is nothing but the first person to give us evidence of what world we’re imagining, so if we are not imagining the same physical world experienced in the same way by Mary then we are imagining some other world being experienced by some other person and merely declaring that it is Mary’s experience in the zombie world.
15. “A Constraint Theory of Technology” by R.B. Griggs is about how we can get the technological future we want by thinking less about utopias/dystopias and more about systems of constraint.
The paradox of freedom is that it can only flourish through constraint, like Chesterton's playground at the edge of a cliff.
A fence along the cliff edge does not restrict freedom, it enables freedom. It removes the possibility of falling over the edge from the child's consciousness, so they can play without fear and hence with maximum freedom. The fence is the constraint that, by limiting one negative possibility, enables a much larger space of positive possibilities. It removes one freedom to enable others.
16. “Seven Glass Beads” by HonoreDB uses stories about physical beads to discuss a 20th-century shift in attitudes about intellectualism and the abstract.
In 1931, German author Herman Hesse began writing a novel whose title translates literally to “The Glass Bead Game” (the first English translation was titled “Magister Ludi”). It takes the form of a faux-biography from an alternate universe, or possible future, where religion, art, science, and philosophy have all merged into the same pursuit, conducted by intellectuals cloistered in something like a university/monastery. This pursuit is never described in detail, but its purest expression is considered to be a game played with glass beads….
In the fifties and sixties, Mitchie had an idea for a prototype of what techies today call “convolutional neural networks”—the foundation of the machine learning process responsible for most modern AI. Computers were hard to come by, so he made a working prototype out of matchboxes and beads…
17. “The Replication Crisis, Science is a little less true than we thought" by Avery Mickalide is about how the replication crisis in science calls us to take other sources of truth more seriously.
My personal experience as a PhD student in physics confirms on a small scale the larger replication crisis. Here are just a few things I witnessed personally:
When one experiment gave an exciting result, while an identical experiment did not, a paper was written that only mentioned the first experiment.
After being questioned on one of his assumptions, a scientist responded “Well we have to make assumptions,” and carried forward without missing a beat.
After a graduate student said to a professor “If we don’t make hypotheses before we conduct experiments, then are we really doing science?” the room got tense and the professor changed the subject.
A colleague mentioned to me that it seemed like professors could always find some way to “justify” a claim, even if the claim were not exactly true.
After being told by his student that the error bars on a set of plots the student made did not account for all the error, the professor responded, “These error bars will just be underestimates then.” The error bars were never revised.
I’ll add in what I think is the most common failure of scientists in my observations, and leads to the most pernicious effects since it’s impossible to catch (and I’ve never seen anyone punished for it): endless and unconstrained restructuring of hypotheses across multiple rounds of data collection and analysis.
18. “Beware the taxicab fallacy” by Kevin Whitaker is about how trying to get a fixed amount of work done every day is inefficient—you should ride your productive days hard and log off early when you're unproductive.
Back when people actually hailed taxis, researchers followed a bunch of drivers to understand how long they chose to work. They found most drivers seemed to set a fixed target for each day: if a normal day brought in $120, they'd drive each day until they reached that amount…. Sounds reasonable, right? Except the implication is that the drivers worked more hours precisely when they earned the least. When they worked six-hour days, they were earning $20/hour; when they worked 12-hour days, they were earning only $10/hour. If they'd flipped their hours—called it early on the tough day and worked late on the good one—they would have averaged $150 across the two days instead of $120!
19. “Religion as Dirt in Contemporary Musicology - and Religious Studies” by Dirk von der Horst is on music theory, and explores the claim that secularism's feminization of religion manifests in scholarly rhetoric.
There is a growing number of scholars who want religious studies to be the scientific study of religion, to the extent that it is the only field I know of where one can find people who are are motivated by actual contempt for their object of study.
It had some interesting historical notes, like:
Another example of secularism as restricting women’s rights is the effect of the American Revolution on women’s rights in Catholic Maryland. Before the Revolution, women had the right to exercise power of attorney in their own name, but under the laws of the new Republic, these rights were revoked through the establishment of a secular government that understood maleness as a prerequisite for citizenship.
20. “Depression was useful?” by Chris Lakin is about his realization that psychological issues might be strategic, as opposed to mere symptoms.
In which case, my problem wasn’t “being depressed” as I had thought. Instead, it was not knowing how to interact with other people in a way that felt emotionally safe.
I was working with an excellent counselor at the time, and once we found this, we worked on making social interactions safe. Within a few weeks/sessions my fears were handled and I didn’t need to be depressed anymore.
Also, while I was depressed I had moved to the middle of nowhere — conveniently far from almost anyone I might have wanted to talk to. But within three weeks of this shift I moved to a big city and had ten times as much social interaction. I have not needed to be depressed again in more than 1.5 years since.
21. “Research as leisure activity” by Celine Nguyen is about research as a form of play—why it's fun to pursue your idiosyncratic passions and interests outside of academia; and why the internet's best content comes from enthusiastic, autodidactic amateurs.
The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and interest. It’s not about the formal credentials. It’s fundamentally about play. It seems to describe a life where it’s just fun to be reading, learning, writing, and collaborating on ideas.
I think this is a great description, and frankly, perhaps why super successful academics have not in turn been super successful (in general, as a rule) even on the more intellectually high-gear areas of writing online: as an academic, it’s easy for intellectual activity to get transformed into work, not play, through long habituation.
22. “COUNTRY, CURATORS & CONSTABLE: Political Thoughts & the Fitzwilliam Museum” by Steve Sangapore takes a deeper look at American political culture and deconstructs a recent political development in the art world.
A one-dimensional ethical thread runs straight through many of today’s ideologies. After all, synthetic moral virtue is the currency of our day. There is a growing culture of empty moralism that is used by individuals, groups, and organizations to leverage against others in a vain attempt to climb the social dominance hierarchy. We see it everywhere. Lots of frosting with very little cake.
23. “The Most Dangerous Idea” by Roger's Bacon makes the case for traumatic transcendence (“a visionary warping of space and time effected by the gravity of intense human suffering”). It also proposes that one reason measuring psychic effects in a lab never works is that such effects occur mostly at periods of heightened dramatic events (premonitions of death, etc)—Roger’s Bacon includes some famous reports of this (supposed) sort of premonition from sources like Mark Twain.
Twain… was obsessed with such moments in his life, of which there were all too many. In 1878, he described some of them in an essay and even theorized how they work. But he could not bring himself to publish it, as he feared “the public would treat the thing as a joke whereas I was in earnest.” Finally, Twain gave in, allowed his name to be attached to his own experiences and ideas, and published this material in Harper’s magazine in two separate installments: “Mental Telegraphy: A Manuscript with a History” (1891) and “Mental Telegraphy Again” (1895).”
24. “Fly Fishing and Henry Bugbee” by Carter Davis Johnson explores the concept of phenomenological openness, as articulated by twentieth-century American philosopher Henry Bugbee, through the experience of fly fishing.
My initial steps downstream are noisy and sloppy. I want to sprint but I restrain myself, chanting inwardly “slow, slow.” The outstretched branches of oak trees and pines create a low canopy. I creep toward the eddy, impatiently gaining ground toward the few spots from which I can make a cast. A few flicks later, the “blue winged olive” touches the water. The water molecules rally together to hold up the string and feather before passing it along. In this moment, as the drift begins, everything falls silent. I don’t hear the birds. I don’t notice myself breathing. I don’t notice where my arm ends and the fly begins. The entire world seems to rush into the drift. Everything is transfixed without stopping. I am not annihilated by some dissolution of the self; instead, I am drawn forth to face that emerging something.
Reading this I was reminded of a book that influenced me when younger: A River Runs Through It (great movie too), which made me fond of the more, shall we say, theological aspects of fly fishing, despite having never cast a rod myself.
25. “Tripping With the Maasai” by Dave Gardner is a piece inspired by a visit to Lake Natron while stuck in Tanzania because of Covid during a global circumnavigation.
This is also the place where Homo Sapiens evolved. The home of man. Unless you are African, the footprints you saw are too young to have come from one of your ancestors – they are only a few tens of thousands of years old. However, it is almost certain that no matter what race you are or what color your skin is, one of your ancestors lived in this region 100,000 years ago.
26. “The Book of the New Sun is the Dark Souls of Books” by C.W. Howell is about how Gene Wolfe's sci-fi/fantasy masterpiece The Book of the New Sun—and the video game Dark Souls, which resembles it—both militate against consumer culture by creating stories that cannot be consumed as content but must be reread and replayed to understand.
As C.S. Lewis wrote, “The literary man re-reads, other men simply read. A novel once read is to them like yesterday’s newspaper….” Some books simply demand rereading, there is no other way to interact with them. Lewis’s own Till We Have Faces is like this—the end of that novel essentially demanding one flip to the front and immediately start again. So does Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Gene Wolfe’s books make this same ask, and so, in their way, militate against the acidic consumer culture that burns through stories and other media faster than it can be produced.
In its own way, I think Dark Souls does this too, encouraging the player to revisit, replay, rediscover. To deepen one’s engagement is to interact with something is become more than a passive consumer. I do not think readers (and gamers, too) want to be passive receptacles for content. They want to be engaged, constructive, and imaginative. They want to apply themselves to the text and the image and build their interpretation out of it.
I’m sympathetic to this argument: just as there is a real demand for literature that is not easy, and takes the audience’s intelligence seriously, the surprising market success of very difficult and esoteric games like Dark Souls are drawing from the same well of interest, as it were.
27. “Wittgenstein’s Method and its Application to Natural Philosophy” by Adam Krellenstein asks how one can reason philosophically about the natural world. Essentially, it argues that one can take Wittgenstein’s theories about language as use and apply them to science. For example:
Feynman posits that what constitutes his “chair” is “defined only approximately”… but what does that actually mean? If I say that one measurement is an approximation of another—for instance, I might say that I can approximate the number of marbles in a jar by, say, dividing the volume of the jar by the volume of each marble, rather than counting the marbles individually—that is a valid use of the word “approximation”. We understand what the word “approximation” means in this case, i.e., how we use that word.
28. “Trending towards the human hive mind” by Vibhor Kumar hypothesizes that individualism has trended downwards throughout history, and that it will continue to do so. E.g., one example given is the increase in speed of communication between individuals has gotten much faster:
The development of language… itself dramatically increased the expressive power of our communication enabling us to convey many more ideas than ever possible in less time.
The development of oral tradition enabled communication of ideas across generations for the first time.
The development of written language enabled higher fidelity communication (from writer to reader) across time.
The printing press caused the proliferation of written materials and exploded the amount of shared/common knowledge, ideas, and culture…
The telegraph enabled long-distance communication, virtually eliminating the space-constraint present in all prior communication.
The telephone enabled high fidelty (verbal) long-distance communication.
Thanks again for doing this--I'm excited to look through the offerings. The collection of both technology and religious studies pieces especially appeals to me since that's my area of academic study.
I appreciate my essay on Wolfe/Dark Souls being included. Good timing, too, since Elden Ring's DLC is about to release!
Thank you so much for including me a second time!!! These are all so thought-provoking.