Hello, and welcome to my blog, Dissolved Distinctions.
This post will serve as a repository in which I deposit links to my collected writings, along with a line or two of description for each. The Substack algorithm seems to have picked up my latest major piece: Welcome, new subscribers!
Dissolved Distinctions advocates a non-foundationalist, non-dualist, process-relational approach to philosophy of mind mainly in the vein of Mahayana and Madhyamaka Buddhism, but also in the vein of many similarly aligned philosophies and traditions in the world. These include: -
- Daoism of the Zhuangzi variety;
- Radical fallibilism as to the shape and nature of cognition, while avoiding commitment to philosophical realism;
- And as strong logical kin for future work: the apophaticism of Meister Eckhart, of “mystical” Jewish thinkers such as Isaac Luria, and of Sufi philosophers like Ibn ʿArabī and Mansour Al-Hallaj.
In particular, the guiding philosophy of Dissolved Distinctions is as formally rendered in my paper “The Modal Catuṣkoṭi” and casually rendered in my associated blog post, “The Internal Logic of Buddhism is Verifiably Correct”:
No proposition has a truth value assigned to it necessarily.
This statement reflects a formula:
¬□(v(P) = t) ∧ ¬□(v(P) = f) ∧ ¬□(v(P) = b) ∧ ¬□(v(P) = n)
- which has been verified in Lean and is discussed in the paper and blog post. That said, I won’t be using this as some totem for pointing to whenever someone has questions; my writing will generally seek to demonstrate how the conventional truth of this formula exhibits itself in philosophical concepts, speech, action, culture, and ideologies, as well as what recognition of its truth rationally encourages us to adopt.
However, while my writing generally reflects this ethos, I didn’t start out with this specific formula in mind. Blog posts made prior to the publication of my paper should be considered to accord in spirit rather than as strict derivations.
In which I outline the general research program and outlook of this blog.
In which I discuss leading theories and categories of consciousness, and how proposed theories almost universally render down into unprincipled unfalsifiability, circular reasoning, or vicious regress in search of a fundamental ground.
Extra Reading: Whose Qualia Is It, Anyway?
In which I discuss the Western analytic concept of qualia and its place in discussions of consciousness.
In which I praise philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel’s general conclusion of an epistemic ‘fog of uncertainty’ around the issue of AI consciousness, but criticize the presentation of these issues as concerns for a hypothetical future that can be resolved by preventing the formation of potentially conscious AI.
In which I discuss theories of cognition including computationalism, connectionism, enactivism, and predictive processing, and suggest an alternative: “Pragmatic Representationalism.”
In which I discuss various ways theories of metacognition have interacted with theories of cognition, paying special attention to the work of Douglas Hofstadter.
In which I critique the essentialist tendencies within Enactivism, particularly by those following in Varela’s footsteps, in which biological embodiment is taken to be fundamental to conscious existence.
In which I critique fellow Substacker Benjamin Riley’s Verge article claiming that Large Language Models do not and cannot exhibit or engage in proper reasoning.
In which I analyze the coherence of Emily Bender’s arguments in her seminal papers “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” and “Climbing Towards NLU”.
Extra Reading: Deconstructing the Chinese Room
In which I critique John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment as exhibiting the common failures of an intuition pump: a rhetorical argument that cannot establish the logic that justifies its premises beyond mere assertion, instead relying on a scenario that builds the conclusions into its own provided definitions.
In which I advocate for earnest dialogue with philosophical Buddhism and discuss its attractive characteristics in a world where essentialist and foundationalist theories of mind are beset with failures and contradictions.
In which I reject the supposition that a paperclip maximizer, even if possible, can be made much sense of as “intelligent” or capable of productive goal-oriented work.
In which I suggest an approach to training Large Language Models under principles rooted in the American Pragmatist tradition of warranted assertion, revisability, and proper chains of logical reasoning between what originates a premise, a premise itself, and what is concluded from the premise.
In which I discuss my paper in Comparative Philosophy “The Modal Catuskoti” and its formula ¬□(v(P) = t) ∧ ¬□(v(P) = f) ∧ ¬□(v(P) = b) ∧ ¬□(v(P) = n) - which refutes foundationalism of any metaphysical or non-revisable sort by providing a satisfiable counterexample on any local level of analysis to claims of necessity.
In which I pen a Mahayana Buddhist devotional work that incorporates the formal findings of the above-mentioned paper to dissolve centuries-long binary contentions within Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism.
I hope you enjoy reading my blog; it will always be free.
Chance Chapman
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