Epistemology

How could gaining knowledge amount to anything other than discovering what was already there? How could the truth of a statement or a theory be anything but its correspondence to facts that were fixed before we started investigating them?

Some philosophers have argued that, despite widespread intuitions to the contrary, knowledge is not merely a... See more

Some seven types of stupidity.. via @mrianleslie https://ianleslie.substack.com/p/seven-varieties-of-stupidity?s=r…

If I were going to study psychic shit, my money would be on theta providing access to a buffet of non-local information. Like weird, action-at-a-distance, outside of conventional time and space info. This is a different kind of knowledge, and you can’t approach it like regular, daylight, yes-no questions, because it’s not structured that way.

Here’s the deal with theta: it’s a different kind of knowing than beta. Beta is a crisp, oh-I-just-cogitated-this-thought. But experience in theta is knowing. Theta hits you in a total, murky, deep-but-diffuse way.

That we can write the prompt or query is not an emblem of our freedom but of our surrender. We give up on what we think the words mean and let the machine process them in alien and opaque ways.