Aspects of the theory of breakfast

And wielding the power of meaninglessness! Plus: upcoming events, etc.

In this monthly News&Notes issue:

• 🕺In-person events: Berkeley and San Francisco, upcoming in January!

• ࿇ Vajrayana Q&A Zoom: Saturday, December 14th

• 🙋 Live video AMA, plus Substack chat: Be there or b²!

• 🎙️ Max Langenkamp interview with me

• 📖 Renaming the meta-rationality book

• 💭 Michael Huemer: “Great philosophers are bad philosophers”

• 🧘 December personal retreat

• 🗒️ Best-of: Notes from the past month

Berkeley and San Francisco in-person events

On Saturday, January 11th, Charlie Awbery and I will co-lead a Vajrayana evening at the Berkeley Alembic. Details are still tbd, but it will probably be an informal Q&A.

If there’s interest, I’d like to offer an informal “everything except Vajrayana” gathering in San Francisco on January 15th. Let me know if you’d want to participate! Also, if you know of a suitable venue.

Vajrayana Q&A:

Vajrayana is the unusual branch of Buddhism I discuss here on Substack, and on Vividness and Buddhism for Vampires. I offer live Zoom gatherings monthly: answering questions, and asking some, and facilitating discussion, together with Jared Janes. You can read more about the purpose and format here. I’ve posted some video excerpts from previous sessions, to give some sense of what they may be like. (I pontificate less than in those, and interact more, though!)

The next one will be on Saturday, December 14th, at 10:30 a.m. Eastern / 7:30 a.m. Pacific. The session is available only to Evolving Ground members, but membership is free. If you sign up, you’ll get an email with information on how to access the eG Discord forum. The top item in the forum is Events, and if you scroll the Events to the session date you’ll get the zoom link.

Think ahead and bring your puzzlements, problems, and excitements!

Substack live video AMA: December 28th

To facilitate community, I’m offering a monthly AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) via the Substack live video feature. You can watch excerpts from last month’s here:

The next one will be Saturday, December 28th, at 9 a.m. Pacific Time; noon Eastern.

It helps me a lot if you suggest questions ahead of time, so I’ve opened a chat thread for that.

To participate in either the chat or the live session, you need to subscribe (free or contributing), if you haven’t already.

Substack live streams are available only through the app, on mobile devices:

If you have the app open when the live sessions starts, you’ll get a notification with one-click instructions for how to get in.

Max Langenkamp interview

Max Langenkamp interviewed me about AI, Continental philosophy, my collaborator Phil Agre, meta-rationality, and the interactionist research scene in Palo Alto around 1990. He’s taken an interesting twenty-minute chunk from our conversation, and you can listen here! (With transcript if you’d rather read.)

Heideggerian AI, Xerox PARC, and Metarationality with David Chapman

Renaming the meta-rationality book

In the conversation with Max, we discussed the pre-history and future of my meta-rationality book. Until recently, I had been calling it In the Cells of the Eggplant. My new theory is that it is called Meta-rationality, which is at least somewhat helpfully descriptive.

I said:

My theory is that it's five Parts, but they're really more like Books or Volumes, and each one will have its own silly title.

So the first one, which is about rationalism, keeps the title In the Cells of the Eggplant.

And the second volume, which is about “mere reasonableness,” is called Aspects of the Theory of Breakfast. That is a play on Chomsky's early book called Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.

And then the third volume, Wielding the Power of Meaninglessness, is about how rationality actually works, and why. It works because of meaninglessness. That's the trick! It's the decontextualization and the stripping of purpose. You take whatever the real world thing is and you turn it into an equation, which is inherently meaningless.

The fourth part, which I'm struggling with now, is tentatively called Actually Caring About the Concrete Situation. I haven't got a title for the fifth part.

I’m not yet going to go through and update metarationality.com to reflect this, because that will be quite a big job. So the old scheme will stick around and confuse everybody for some time. Sorry!

“Great philosophers are bad philosophers”

Michael Huemer is one of the best contemporary philosophers. Substack user skaladom, responding to my recent “Undoing philosophy” post, pointed me to an excellent, similar piece by Huemer:

Great Philosophers Are Bad Philosophers

This should be obvious to anyone who reads philosophy. The Greats make no @#$%ing sense. There’s a mystifying cloak of sacredness draped over them; and thereby over philosophy as a whole. This aura of sanctity encourages you to read hyper-charitably: “this is Great Philosophy, central to the Western Tradition, so it must be deep and brilliant, and it is just my own limitation that I can’t understand it.” So you are hypnotized into overlooking extraordinary lapses of reason. You reverently accept absurd conclusions as somehow true, despite all logic, and in the face of your everyday natural experience.

Huemer has an interesting theory about why such terrible thinking gets valorized. I recommend his post highly! I’ll say more about this topic in upcoming chapters of “Undoing philosophy” (probably).

Ironically, weeks before skaladom’s recommendation, I wrote about Huemer in my draft. It was in a section noting that sometimes philosophers have correct and interesting ideas—but only when they are not thinking philosophically! Some philosophers are capable of ordinary, intelligent, non-philosophical understanding and explanation. And Huemer is an outstanding example!

My draft suggests that he, and other sensible philosophers, would do well to abandon the pretense of philosophy and become full-time Substack authors instead. (Only partly in jest :)

December personal retreat

My spouse Charlie Awbery is on personal retreat all month. I hope to join them as much as possible. That means that what I produce will be even more unpredictable than usual. I might be meditating all the time! But usually I don’t have the stamina for that.

And, I find intensive meditation produces an open, clear, vivid awareness, in which I’m often inspired to write. If I can clear the month of other responsibilities, it’s possible that I will write more than usual, rather than less. We’ll see!

Best Notes of November

I use Substack Notes for bits of writing or video that aren’t worked-out enough, or aren’t important enough, for full Posts. You can see all my Notes here. I also include some of the more popular, interesting, or substantial ones in my Monthly News&Notes posts. Here they are!

I expect to elaborate on this one in an upcoming chapter in “Undoing Philosophy”:

I posted this next one to twitter as well as Substack, and it went viral there. I was baffled for a while. Why would anyone (except me) care about this super-obscure point of early Indian philosophical history?

Then I realized that (to my surprise!) some people have never encountered the Gettier problem. Which is quite fun! So it was enjoyed by many, for a reason entirely unrelated to the reason I tweeted it. (Hooray! 🎉)

I’ll elaborate on this video in another upcoming chapter of “Undoing Philosophy”:

This one was quite popular! I forgot to mention that when I told my spouse Charlie Awbery about it, they said that exactly the same thing had happened to them.

The next one is about adult development stage theory. I have about a dozen posts about that sketched out, and hope to have time to complete several of them next year.