Samarth Bansal
@samarthbansal
Samarth Bansal
Greil Marcus: "Why I Write"
yalereview.org
“I realized I had a choice as a writer: make the world bigger and more interesting and live in that world, and find a life’s work, or shrink everything down to your own crabbed and paltry self, hang on for years conning editors and publishers and yourself, and find your life’s a lie.”
The Chinese Room Argument (John Searle): Searle imagines a scenario in which a person who does not understand Chinese is locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols and a rule book for manipulating the symbols. The person can receive questions in Chinese and, by following the rules, send out appropriate responses in Chinese, indistinguishable... See more
Mary’s Room (Frank Jackson): This thought experiment questions the nature of consciousness and the acquisition of knowledge. Mary is a scientist who has lived her entire life in a black and white room, learning about the world through a black and white television. She knows everything there is to know about the physical world and color, but she has... See more
The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of... See more
Maria Popova • Maria Popova — Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age
When you have trouble writing, it’s usually because you don’t know what you’re trying to say. Most writing problems are actually thinking problems. And you can't copyedit your way out of poor thinking.
The Veil of Ignorance: Proposed by philosopher John Rawls, this thought experiment asks you to design a just society without knowing your place in it. The "veil" obscures details about yourself such as your age, sex, intelligence, wealth, or race. The idea is to promote fairness and equality, as decisions would be made without considering one's own
... See moreThe Experience Machine: If you could plug into a machine that would give you any experience you desired, would you do it? This experiment, proposed by philosopher Robert Nozick, questions the value of living in the real world versus a simulated reality tailored to one's preferences. It challenges the notion of hedonism, the idea that pleasure is
... See moreThe Ship of Theseus: If a ship has all of its components replaced over time, is it still the same ship? (This thought experiment questions the nature of identity and whether an object remains the same if all of its parts are replaced.)
