Analogies as the engine of thought
A review of Hofstadter's 'Surfaces and Essences'
Kasra's Blog
Recent content on Kasra's Blog
Latest posts
Nonreactivity as an avoidance strategy
There’s a common meditation instruction for working with challenging emotions: “focus on the physical sensations of the emotion without trying to change them.” The idea is to pay close attention to the raw feelings (e.g. sadness, anxiety), rather than the mental stories around them—whether they’re good or bad, why why they arose, or what they say about you. Over time I have shifted my view…
How much does attention influence the physical world?
Does our mind influence the world, separate from our actions? Usually the way we influence the world is with our physical movements: whether it’s the movement of our hands in manipulating objects, or verbal utterances that influence the movements of others. But does simply paying attention in a particular way change something about the physical world, without you or anyone else actually…
List of papers showing neural networks across scales
Mechanical neural networks: Architected materials that learn behaviors A synthetic protein-level neural network in mammalian cells A cell signaling model as a trainable neural nanonetwork Single cortical neurons as deep artificial neural networks The neuron computing an XOR function: Dendritic action potentials and computation in human layer 2/3 cortical neurons Gene regulatory networks exhibit…
why I left nyc
a letter to friends
How to not get bamboozled by the question of 'what exists'
hint: stop asking the question
Consciousness During Dreamless Sleep: References
For experiments showing consciousness during non-REM sleep using serial awakenings, see Early-night serial awakenings as a new paradigm for studies on NREM dreaming and Assessing sleep consciousness within subjects using a serial awakening paradigm. For the discussion of dreamless sleep in Indian philosophy, see Evan Thompson’s paper Dreamless Sleep, the Embodied Mind, and Consciousness. For…
Lessons from the 100 most influential scientists in history
book review notes
Planarian notes
This is a citation list accompanying my thread on the planarian worm. A clarification: there are actually hundreds of species of planarians, and despite being closely related, some of them are capable of the full-body regeneration described in the thread, while others have limited regenerative capacity, and still others show no regeneration at all. This divergence is itself a fascinating area of…
At night I feel alive
notes on a distinctive mood
The city of juxtapositions
tales of new york
Create the social spaces you want to see in the world
the world needs it
That time there was a giant black hole in the sky
unedited recap of my eclipse experience
Parasocial Friends
hol up lemme break the 4th wall for a sec
How to save your friends
a guide to non-prescriptive listening
Give your friends a chance to abandon you
in praise of occasional helplessness
Real Life
reminder
You can't will yourself into okayness
notes to self
Notes on the nature of thought
ramble
Tastes of Magic
This is what I remember about childhood: things seemed magical.
Writing exercises
Usually when I sit down to write, I have an essay idea in mind, and I’m trying to write it from start to finish. There are other ways to spend your writing time that can both make the process more enjoyable and improve your output. 1. rewriting great writing Henrik Karlsson describes this in a comment: The one deliberate practice thing that I have found valuable is rewriting great writing…
Push and pull, or, the art of good listening
an conversational anecdote
How to make a lot of friends
and what happens once you get there
Research notes (8/21/2023)
Using this as a weekly notepad to document the questions and ideas I’m currently exploring. Connectome-specific harmonic waves By virtue of this Open Theory blog post I learned about Selen Atasoy’s theory of connectome-specific harmonic waves (CSHW), so I’m currently digging deeper into that. Optimistically, the theory provides us with a “new language” for talking…
What would a non-nebulous world look like?
In this post I explore two questions relating to David Chapman’s idea of nebulosity. The questions are: Why is zooming in relevant? What would a non-nebulous world look like? Why is zooming in relevant? David Chapman claims that the nebulosity of objects is apparent when you look really closely at them. For example: From a distance, clouds can look solid; close-up they are mere fog, which…
Book Review: Being You by Anil Seth
Anil Seth’s Being You is hard to review, because he covers astonishingly wide territory in just a few hundred pages. Rather than compiling a systematic summary of everything he says (you can just read the book for that – and I highly recommend you do), I’ll just share the important bits that come to mind. First, we have the hard problem of consciousness, which is where Seth begins.…
Nihilism and dogmatism are not the only two options
For more of my writing, consider subscribing to my substack. Often when I have philosophical conversations with friends I run into this intuition that I think is very obviously wrong but that a lot of people seem to share. People tend to believe that the meaning of life is something that is either perfectly secured by the axioms of a religion, or is completely nonexistent. Either you convince…
How to succeed: don't take things for granted
People like to explain success with a single “most important” trait. Alexandr Wang says the most important trait is a bias for action, Paul Graham says it’s being relentlessly resourceful. The trait that has been ringing true for me lately as a key to success is the willingness to not take things for granted. i. levels of reality When I think about what I should or shouldn’t take for…
The myth of perfect execution
I can't have it all but surely I can have a little bit of everything in exactly the right proportions?
A slice of my mind
braindump on spiritual clarity, rhythm in writing, the story of the universe, and more
What would a “robust” theory of the mind give us?
some high-level questions and speculations about neuroscience
Neuro research: questions, ideas, and motivations
This post summarizes my independent readings and research into psychology and neuroscience. My initial interest in the mind In the past few years I’ve embarked on a lifelong quest to understand the mind and brain. Starting in the pandemic, I spent the evenings after my day job reading textbooks and papers, and writing the occasional blog post (I wrote this overview of my learnings from reading…
“You have to be weird”
we all need more lobsters and shrump
Life is a pen
you can't erase, you can't undo, but you can press on
How I use social media mindfully
browser extensions are your friend
Life as a core path with a bunch of detours
easy to see in retrospect
Notes on AGI risk
some rough intuitions against panic
How to save your friends
you can't, but you can help them save themselves
You will never have an answer for how hard to push yourself
one of many existential problems
No bitterness, no sneering, no cynicism
This is the third post in my series of daily posts for the month of April. To get the best of my writing in your inbox and support my writing, subscribe to my Substack. Everyone with ambition has a life that they dream of. Maybe you dream of being an artist in New York, or a serial entrepreneur, or the member of a niche internet social club. I have many such dreams, and for the first time in a…
Being honest about the struggle of writing
This is the second post in my series of daily posts for the month of April. To get the best of my writing in your inbox, you can subscribe to my Substack. It’s quite late in the night, but I feel excited about the fact that I’m actually writing and publishing something for the second day in a row. I have a feeling that many of these posts will be about writing itself, which I’m…
Comprehending art (daily blog 1 of 30)
I’m trying out an experiment where I write and publish every day for the month of April. This is the first post. I’m doing this for a few reasons. First, I want to get back to enjoying writing more, and I can only do that if I overcome some of my fears around it. Fears of writing? you might ask, what fears do you have if you’ve already been writing for two years?
Research Snapshot: March 2023
Below I’ve copied over rough notes on my psychology research as of mid-March. I’ve written it to be fairly readable, so I’ve avoided use of jargon wherever I can. therapy is this interesting profession where, in the course of merely having a conversation with somebody, you change things in their brain, in an occasionally dramatic fashion. Bruce Ecker and others propose the idea…
Abstractions as regularities in the world
Do abstractions exist? Here we go for the 641st time… This piece is largely a response to silenceinbetween’s excellent post A Case For the Reality of Abstractions. (For brevity I will refer to the author as S going forward.) S frames the problem as such: The central tension here is that physics, as we currently understand it, operates like so: there was an initial set of conditions and laws which…
Updated thoughts on non-coercion and the fun criterion
Growing up I internalized ideas about self-discipline that, in retrospect, were rather unhealthy. Like: You should be very hard on yourself. If you don’t do “enough”, you should yell at yourself. Hard work will be effortful, it will be a grind. You should be gritting your teeth and tensing your neck and shoulders until you’re done. If you have a goal, you should work…
Contra Harris contra Hoel on consequentialism
In Why I am not an effective altruist, Erik Hoel criticizes the philosophical core of the EA movement. The problem with effective altruism—which is basically utilitarianism—is that it leads to repugnant conclusions (coined by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons): Example: strict utilitarianism would claim that a surgeon, trying to save ten patients with organ failure, should find someone in a back…
Notes: David Deutsch’s misleading definition of rationalism
This piece is about why I think the Deutschian definition of rationalism is wrong, and what I would propose as an alternative (but admittedly more vague) definition. I’m posting this first draft without edits as part of an attempt to get feedback while working on a longer piece about what I think is missing in the Deutschian worldview. Any feedback, especially from critical rationalists about what…
Even in silence you are loved
Just reproducing this brief tweet thread as a blog post. something you realize after sharing things on social media for a while is that the number of people who are impacted by your stuff is a lot bigger than strictly the number of people who actively engage with it (likes, replies, DMs) e.g. I had a friend randomly make a remark about a post of mine that they’d read 8 months ago, and I had…
Subjectivity as a construct
(Originally written in December 2021.) In a previous post I explored some arguments about whether we have direct access to qualia. I was trying to figure out whether there are entities within our direct experience, and whether that undermines aspects of Deutsch and Popper’s philosophy, as well as whether it has implications for which beings are conscious. After writing that post, a remark by Jake…
On receiving praise: it's not about you
There are many things that are uncomfortable about writing on the internet. You’re showing vulnerability to anonymous strangers, exposing yourself to criticism, mockery, scorn, or mere silent judgement. But there’s one part of it that you would expect to be nothing but pleasant: when people tell you that they really like your work. It took me a while to even realize that I felt uncomfortable being…