undershirt

Well, I can tell you what has helped me so far in my own epistemic crisis:

The first two chapters of “Maps of Meaning” helped me separate truth-as-a-descriptive-framework vs truth-as-a-functional-framework, which was great for recovering from what postmodernism did to our sense of truth.

“Postmodernism for Rationalists”[1] really helped me define the chaos i felt about truth, and helped me put words and philosophers to different thoughts that I didn‘t know were there.

“States and Nomads”[2] helped me realize how all models are wrong, and their utility is ultimately contextual. It also introduced me to Jorge Luis Borges, who has written a lot of creative fiction around ideas like this.

A big reprieve came from this analysis of an Emily Dickinson poem on truth[3]. The part about “circumference” of truth really worked for me, I feel now that peace has to come from outside that circumference, not inside (which is what you might be struggling with?). Bertrand Russell spent his life trying to find a philosophical basis for religion and never found one, but this is as close as I've gotten.

For my happiness, I intersperse fiction (poetry, short stories) with more serious essays of philosophy. I think that resulting balance between art and treatise has been important for me in getting through this, but I haven't been on this for long.

If any of this has landed for you, we can swap sources and thoughts sometime, which might be a good therapy (both ways).

[1]:https://palegreendot.net/assets/2017-10-09/postmodernism_for... [2]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGaFcI2UNrI [3]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55kqNg88JqI

There are two versions of the poem “Ozymandias”[1][2]. They tell the exact same story but in two completely different ways. After reading both, I’m almost certain you will find one more effective than the other. So I hope you reconsider that some ideas are not simply reducible to plain statements.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias#Comparison_of_the_t...

[2]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdQKUvv3bew (recited)

I tend to agree. Take their lyrics feature for example—imagine if Netflix showed subtitles, but then obscured them with “interesting facts” at random times, and that they were missing altogether from most of their selection.

> It states more about provability in the context of a single axiomatic system for constructed self-referential statements rather than truth in general.

Thanks. And oops, I didn't know that the result was proven in a larger system. Did some searching and found this short answer[1] and a longer description[2] that I liked.

[1]:https://math.stackexchange.com/a/120018/19178 [2]:https://mathoverflow.net/a/24919

This statement in particular helped:

> The Incompleteness Theorem prevents ZFC from proving its own consistency and for that we need to have an additional axiom, giving us a stronger theory which can then prove ZFC is consistent

This seems to throw more shade on the problem for me. There is a profound sense that there is no mode of reasoning (nevermind just the mechanical deductivism) that can completely capture all expressible truths without reaching contradiction.

The nature of knowing what is true is to capture a slice of reality in a model, and a model by its essence must leave out details, considering only elements which are important to its function. It seems that all of language, including anything we create with it, is an incorrect but useful model of Truth. Different models describing different things are expected to produce contradictions, but this math thing was talking about itself and it couldn't even do THAT consistently, right?

If Godel's theorem seems to be blown out of proportion as a synecdoche for the hundreds of years of collective malaise about unattainable truth, it is at least appreciable (and relevant to this wider domain) that Godel devastated the world by showing how logic fails at proving the consistency of a simple mathematical system (correct me if I'm wrong—it's not just axiomatic systems, "there ain't no such animal" of a consistency proof).

Anyway, there is a popular distinction between lowercase-t truth and uppercase-T Truth. The uppercase form represents knowledge we can never understand (outside our Circumference), and the lowercase form represents what we understand now. Since our understanding constantly changes over time, I imagine truth being a function of time, t. As t approaches infinity, truth(t) approaches this limit of Truth.

I highly recommend this poem (analyzed by Nerdwriter) on the expressibility of truth as well: https://youtu.be/55kqNg88JqI

Wanted to add Modulz [3] to this list

[3] https://www.modulz.app/

yes, I think it's time for this to be connected to text input for seeing how any word is pronounced.

specifically: https://twitter.com/shaunlebron/status/989192507828432896

i've jumped out of a plane (it was incredible of course), but i have no idea what you're talking about—but maybe I don't understand what "self-actualization" means.

A great reflection on both the quality of the teacher and the promise of the student. And I really liked all the subtleties captured in such simple code. Refreshing!

For those reading—this is a performance art and really has to be listened to while reading to get in the intended headspace.

If I was an editor at BBC, I'd be like—"hey guys, this is VA reaching space, can we get a picture of that thing in space?"

It's the negative line height—you can see by selecting multiple lines of text that the rows actually overlap each other.

Is this an accurate summary?

Spiro curves are necessarily smooth, but beziers aren't. To show what makes beziers smooth, you created a viz that maps spiro curves to their bezier equivalents:

  *   x,y = spiro curve angles
  * color = bezier handle lengths (to best approximate spiro)

The abrupt changes in color in the image reveal the difficulty in creating smooth bezier curves—because it forces abrupt changes in handle lengths for small angle changes.

My favorite parts touch on how thoughts projected out of neural firings do not describe the cause of those firings. I think.

I imagine planting bread crumbs after already walking a trail, as a best guess narrative of where I walked and why.

> What makes some neural firings [semantically significant] is just their place in the causal chain, the pathway to further behavior. Rats choose among alternative pathways as a result of neural firings produced by previous experience. But it’s not because these neuron circuits contain statements about anything.

> By colonizing consciousness, spoken language turned [consciousness] into a monologue of silent speech, tricking us that the meaning of spoken words is given by thoughts’ content when its just silent sounds passing through consciousness. Neuroscience shows that that in our brains the neural circuits neither have nor need content to do their jobs.

The struggle is that the symbolic graphs we construct to explain facts become logical beasts of their own, prone to generating sentences paradoxical under our desired interpretation.

Of course, the proofs are first constructed in the context of meaning, but the entire process seems to be a struggle to context-switch between the realms of meaning and symbology, which do not necessarily mirror one another.

But Godel has somehow proved that symbols cannot always provide both a consistent and complete system of meaning.

Gödel seems very much related to this, but I'm still lost.

I checked out the original tool Pipecut—it allows you to look at the output after each pipe:

https://youtu.be/CZHEZHK4jRc?t=1273

When I see stuff like this, I check the date to see if it happened before or after "Inventing on Principle" was presented in 2012. (It's always after)

in visual form (hold shift and move mouse): https://shaunlebron.github.io/ratios/

Actually, check again! I just updated it to NOT use wabt. Walt-compiler has its own semantic printer, so its output is more readable.

And yes! I think answering these kind of simple questions is important, so thanks for asking them.

Here you go :)

https://jsbin.com/nisoget/edit?html,js,console

I couldn't make it through GEB, but I read a good concise explanation in a book called Godel's Proof: https://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6dels-Proof-Ernest-Nagel/dp/081...

surely it's both—that our capacity for mental fortitude can lay dormant until woken by conditions

"How am I not myself?"

Jude Law repeats this in "I Heart Huckabees" as he slowly slips into existential crisis.

fascinating, thank you sharing that!

i am not my genes, i am my connectome (a hypothesis): https://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_seung

so that's where Christian "Apologetics" comes from

this is very good. i had it in my head that there was no "extend" function in JS, and didn't realize "push(...array)" was possible. thank you for the super detailed guide

I like your speaking style, and the product idea is neat.

As a snobby stickler for aesthetics, I think the instant darkness and silence at each pause feels like being unplugged too abruptly.

I'd take a cue from dialogue options in games [1], and not let the UI cover the whole screen, and maybe play a prerecorded "pause" video(s) so the flow isn't broken.

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwgNc_wZwZ0

Assigning each polygon its own color to identify the bad one via color picker is brilliant. I'd love to see more posts like these here.

I overheard a guy gushing about TempleOS at a data jam last weekend. It was great. He really liked the fresh takes on the old-school freedoms of the commodore 64. I pried him for more and he graciously gave me a short walkthrough of his favorite features since he had it running on his laptop.

I hope someone writes a book about it. I love learning about long term solo artworks like this that are difficult to appreciate.

Pouring one out for this passionate artist tonight. rest in peace

i'm sure the abstractions will increase out of necessity. it was just nice for once to warily peek into the code of a great product and see a single, well organized ~9k line file of small functions that I could follow with relative ease. best wishes on the new version!