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Showing posts from August, 2025

A Closer Look at two Philosophical Trees

 Two Dominant Trees (🌳) of Philosophy today. The Genealogy of Postmodernism 1. Ancient/Medieval Roots (the soil) - Sophists (Protagoras, Gorgias): “Man is the measure of all things.” Early relativists who doubted objective truth. - Skeptics (Pyrrho, Sextus Empiricus): Suspended judgment, argued certainty is impossible. - Nominalists ( Ockham ): Universals are just names, not real essences. A precursor to anti-essentialism. These are early shadows of the postmodern impulse: suspicion of universals, emphasis on perspective. 2. Early Modern Break (the trunk) - Descartes & Rationalism: “Cogito” sought indubitable foundations. Ironically, by making the subject central, he set the stage for questioning those foundations. - Kant : Split noumenon (things-in-themselves) vs. phenomenon (what we can know). This critical turn sowed the seeds of later relativism: we never grasp reality directly, only through categories. - Hegel: History and truth are dialectical — destabilizes static abs...

Engrams, Meaning, and the Breath Between: A Journey from Neuron to Morality

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A journey from neurons to guilt, from prediction to philosophy, from perception to selfhood. 1. The Humble Neuron This is a neuron: For simplicity sake I'll just draw it like this:  >----< It’s a special type of cell — a nerve cell — responsible for processing and transmitting information in the brain and throughout the body. There are about 86 billion neurons in the human brain alone. On its own, it doesn’t do much.  - It doesn’t think, feel, or decide. - It holds no memory, no guilt, no remorse. But when a strong enough signal reaches it — through the receiving branches called dendrites — the neuron fires: sending an electrical impulse down its long arm, the axon, toward other neurons. At the end of the axon, the signal must cross a tiny gap — a synapse — where it becomes chemical and activates the next neuron: Once again for simplicity stake I'll draw it like this:  >---<○>---< And here's where it gets interesting: - The more often two neurons fire to...