No Dreams

We launched Listed in 2019 as an experimental feature to give Standard Notes writers a way to publish their work. In recent years, however, the feature has become virtually unused as many other platforms supporting writers have emerged. So we've decided to sunset Listed and stay focused on our founding mission: to build the best privacy-first note-taking app available. It has come to my attention that this blog platform will end support, and this blog will have to find a new home. I'm not hap...

This is not a post but it's definitely a placeholder for one. It's more substantial than a tweet, though not by much. All I want to complain about is the overwhelming influence of social history and contextualization in the history of thought, whether in the history of ideas, history of science or the history of philosophy. The kind of "internalist" theoretical history of thought that you see in Arthur Lovejoy and Alexandre Koyré has let itself die in the Anglophone world since the 1970s. The sa...

It was science fiction, and then science fiction criticism that got me interested in literature, literary criticism and (horror of horrors!) continental philosophy. It is then appropriate that it is time to return the favour by writing up my own contribution to science fiction studies. I therefore offer a deliberately speculative response to the perennial question: what is the distinction between science fiction and fantasy? I hope to work this out regardless of how unfashionable it has become. ...

The true promoters of philosophy in France and England are their great natural scientists, and it is not to the discredit of the English if philosophy for them mainly, indeed almost exclusively, means physics. German ideas seem to gain entry to France mainly in the realm of the natural sciences. Whoever, e.g., reads many recent French investigations of the anatomy of the brain will be surprised to find a new language, a new kind of expression which until very recently people in Germany thought ...

[The following review has spoilers for Christopher Nolan's film The Odyssey.] Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents his research so that human events do not fade with time. May the great and wonderful deeds—some brought forth by the Hellenes, others by the barbarians—not go unsung; as well as the causes that led them to make war on each other. 1 I watched The Odyssey earlier today, so here's my review. It might seem counter-intuitive that I begin a review of an adaptation of Homer's poem ...

With apologies to Miley Cyrus. In thinking and writing about American history I was struck with the realization that I don't actually have a good model that would help me understand American political history in context. The problem is that there seem to be a few points that are "cuts" wherein we can determine the political polarity in our terms: 1776, but also Lincoln and the Civil War, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, and finally Lyndon Johnson with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Today w...

“It is the strongest weapon in the universe. It will destroy the Tyranni and us alike, but will save the Nebular Kingdoms. Without it, we could perhaps defeat the Tyranni, but we would only have exchanged one feudal despotism for another, and as the Tyranni are plotted against, we would be plotted against. We and they must both be delivered into the ashcan of outmoded political systems. The time for maturity has come as it once came on the planet Earth, and there will be a new kind of governmen...

I've discovered that it is incredibly fun to come up with grand Theories of Everything, with the main motivation being "why not". This is one particular theory that I sketched out over a few days. I do not pretend that it is correct in any particular sense, or that it truly is a Theory of Everything. But I found that thinking about it in a spirit of fun and lightness helped me make some curious connections that I would not have thought of before. If this were a formal theory, it would have been ...

In my younger days I liked to pour my brain into the art of worldbuilding, particularly coming up with strange and baroque political systems. When looking through my documents, I saw this, which I had written as late as 2025! This was a pretty fun thought-experiment. I don't think it would work out, of course, especially the economics. I don't think that the labour-hour vouchers or the Bank can function as written, and neither can the compulsory work be planned out this well. I have doubts about...

I wrote the following a few months ago. Looking back on this, I consider the following to be a failure, though I consider it an interesting failure, and so I leave the essay (beginning "The thoughts here come out of a letter ..." as I wrote it without edits). There are reasons for this. The failure is for the following reasons. The first is that my characterization of the history of mathematics and the "deep" picture of mathematical structure is still too ad hoc (given how I pile on characteriz...

Apparently I once made a remark that modern LessWrong rationalism, especially when it discusses AGI and superintelligence, is surprisingly similar to “naive unreconstructed 17th-18th century rationalist epistemology.” The context of this was discussions about AGI/ASI, whether it was possible for an AI to “FOOM” by exceeding the sum of human knowledge without the restrictions of having to do experiments. Biology is the example that skeptics of imminent transformative AGI in STEM cite as somethi...

I am presenting here a series of compressed notes on the French philosopher of science, Gaston Bachelard. I’ve recently begun the habit of writing down pen-and-paper notes for the books that I’m reading, and in this way I’ve accumulated a fair amount of notes reading Mary Tiles’ excellent book, Bachelard: Science and Objectivity. Before I read Tiles’ book, I read Gillian Rose’s excellent Hegel Contra Sociology. Having Rose’s work in mind put me in a Hegelian mode, and I was inclined to read Tile...

Is there any reason we should read Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s Letters on the Kantian Philosophy today? Reinhold, if we remember him today, is known for only two things: that he was an early popularizer of the new critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and that later he would turn away from Kant toward his own “elementary philosophy.” Reinhold’s Letters occupy an ambiguous place, because if we want to understand Kant, we can just read Kant, and if we want to understand Reinhold, we can turn to his l...

I don’t pretend to understand Hegel. I’ve read little of him and my understanding is tenuous. I haven’t even read any of the major canonical works of Hegel, like the Science of Logic and the Phenomenology of Spirit. I've read his early, unpublished works, the 1802 System der Sittlichkeit (System of Ethical Life) and the 1804–5 Jena System, alongside portions of some shorter works, such as “Who Thinks Abstractly?” and “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate”. So what I am presenting here is a se...

Is there a history of “memetics” before Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme”, in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene? The hypothesis of this essay is that there is indeed such a history (a tradition, if we can call it that) which is quite distinct from memetics post-Dawkins, even though at various points it overlaps in differing ways with memetics. This is not a history in the sense of being the list of influences that Richard Dawkins (and later writers on memetics) had. Quite possibly Richard Da...

What would it mean for us to be an interplanetary civilization? Let’s suppose that an interplanetary civilization, if we are to ever become one, means that we can maintain a self-sustaining colony on Mars. What do we need so that we’re able to do this? Instead of talking about rocket payload capacities yet, let’s take a look at the high-level social organization required for something like that. The main thing that a self-sustaining colony on Mars needs is that it should have self-sufficiency...

“Angelicism09 is a post-authorship project.... the author of the text has no name, merely a wandering internet-possessed ghost of the wired…” There are now non-leftists, post-rightists. We can never really ascertain what these words mean; they sound more and more like mangled signifiers by washed-out New Yorkers with more (supposed) style than substance. (We are given to understand that this was the primary audience of the original Angelicism). We can hope, however, that there is more sense beh...

Post-Pauline Christianity is a perversion, one that takes the cult of Jesus as a fetish to be worshipped. In that, it finds its inverse in Nietzsche, the great pervert of the philosophical tradition. Nietzsche is a dream: a pervert beyond the perversion of Christianity, the pervert-beyond-perversion. If Christ is an idol that forms a secret pact with the jouissance of the priest and Christian, it is the place of Nietzsche to start up a war machine that will destroy this idol, as if with a hamme...

This is a fictional text, in the style of Borges and Lem, that purports to be the table of contents of a textbook of artificial intelligence, written after the first AGI. This is an attempt to work with ideas through play, really. Contents INTRODUCTION 1 GENEALOGIES AND INHERITANCES 1 Turing, Wittgenstein and Husserl … the Science of Logic … Plotinus and neo-Platonism … neo-Platonic themes in Frege … Llull and the problem of artificial intelligence … Introduction to the ω-language...

Thanks to Streetli for comments on an early draft The account of science given in Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's What is Philosophy intriguingly enough begins with chaos. We should be careful not to identify "chaos" too directly with what the scientists talk about when it comes to chaos theory, chaos science (and we must be careful not to over-excitedly over-extrapolate from the popular literature on chaos, as its often done), and yet there are certain resonances between the two. Deleuz...

[This is a series of preliminary notes, a beginning toward a somewhat larger project of mine. How big it is, as of yet, I'm not sure yet. Enjoy the ride.] the ideas men Finally, the most shameful moment came when computer science, marketing, design, and advertising, all the disciplines of communication, seized hold of the word concept itself and said: "This is our concern, we are the creative ones, we are the ideas men! We are the friends of the concept, we put it in our computers." What is...

This is a brief series of notes on what I am going to briefly refer to as the formal systems of interpretation of people. Formal systems for short. Here I'm mostly going to look at those pseudo-scientific systems of people classification, taken as formal systems used to interpret human personality and behaviour, and refer to as examples the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (and C. G. Jung's earlier work in this matter), the Enneagram, astrology, socionics, and even the Big 5 personality system (while...

Walter Kaufmann, in his translation of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra has an interesting aside in his Editor's Note to the first part, in his description of Part 4, "On the Despisers of the Body". "The psychological analysis begun in the previous chapter ['On The Afterworldly'] is here carried further. The use of the term 'ego' influenced Freud, via Georg Groddeck." [1] The relation between Freud and Nietzsche is ambiguous, but it does seem to be the consensus that there are some rather def...

A genre is a conversation that moves in fits and starts, breaks and discontinuities. There isn’t an isolated set of criteria or even a status family resemblance that we can recognise as a genre. There are two canons, personal and public, and how books are written and how they are read depends precisely on this interplay of canons. The public canon of science fiction contains Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Ballard, Aldiss, Dick, Moorcock, Gibson and so on, stabilized over the years by word of mouth, ...

I thought I would re-up an old post of mine that I had un-published for some reason. It's old! And not very deep. Regardless I feel bad for taking it down for no good reason, it might as well be up again. Originally published January 17, 2023, lightly edited June 7, 2025 [The following essay is an edited version of a series of comments I made in a Discord server I am in, presented for convenience. The discussion of Galileo is indebted to P. Feyerabend's discussion of it in Against Method, has...

There is a sense in which thinking is about breaking through the cliches of your general mental activity. You have a particular set of cached thoughts—a specific pattern of ideas that goes from A to B to C and so on, not necessarily because you are right, but rather because that is what you are used to. There are two ways to make yourself think. The first way is to open yourself up to something that is of sufficient complexity that is difficult to easily integrate into your mental schema. The ...

Immanence is less a state you are in, but more of a continuous operation, a process you inhabit, a steady dismantling and production. Spinoza produces modes and relations between propositions that reach out and grow out of themselves in the five books of the Ethics, [a production that touches the infinite, in the movement from substance to infinite substance, from a finite mode to the infinity of God]. Each operation of immanence is an experiment, a moment of risk, a throw of the dice. This ri...