Consciousness

I believe—and again, these are bold generalizations, but generally substantiated—that nature is fractal in its structure. What that means is that a pattern occurring on a given scale can be expected to occur on other scales; very different. Simple example: an atom is a nucleus with electrons spinning around it. A solar system is a star with atoms... See more

He is introspecting, but he’s not introspecting by meditating on his existence or talking to a therapist (though maybe he should); he’s introspecting by acting on the world. He’s introspecting by doing stuff and then observing how it makes him feel—as if he was running a million small experiments trying to figure out the composition of this object... See more

And someone like Piaget has studied this phenomenon in the development of the drawing styles of young children, and believes, then, that a child essentially—in the spirit of the old song that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—the child develops through these cultural phases. You know, from the iconic hieroglyphic to the flattened—I can’t remember... See more

So I claim that teleology is a subset of the spectrum of intelligence. And what I mean by intelligence is this: William James gave a nice, very cybernetic definition of intelligence. He didn't talk about brains. He didn't talk about what problem space was involved. He said it's the ability to reach the same goal by different means.

Reach the same

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“To live is to be other. It’s not even possible to feel, if one feels today what he felt yesterday. To feel today what one felt yesterday is not to feel—it’s to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today’s living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost. To erase everything from the slate from one day to the next, to be new with each

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I think law allows freedom because freedom means you go outside of law. But law doesn’t allow novelty, exactly. That’s a slightly different concept. So if you take seriously this idea that the concept of law can be replaced by the idea of habit, then suddenly you’re not in a Newtonian machine, a soulless cuckoo clock of natural laws. What you’re... See more

to me the most amazing thing about regeneration is that they know when to stop. Knowing when to stop is because you've rebuilt the same structure, meaning you've gone back to the same region of anatomical space within some small error is basically anatomical homeostasis. It is goal-directed because the system has a set point. If you deviate from

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Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

—John Stuart Mill

I often think about the example of the electromagnetic spectrum. So prior to having a good theory of electromagnetism, we used to first of all think that static electricity, lightning, magnets, and light were all completely different things. They certainly seemed like different things. We had different words for them. The vocabulary that we used

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