Redirecting you to this link…| kasra.io
Redirecting you to this link…| Kasra's Blog
Book a free intro session below. Many of us walk around with a messy jumble of thoughts in our head, and the mindful presence of another human can help us untangle these thoughts. This is what I offer in my unblocking practice. Why have hourlong calls with a human, rather than just reading more self-help books and/or going on a meditation retreat? Those things are good, and they often get you most of the way there, but neither of them are responsive in the way that an observant human can be.| kasra.io
Redirecting you to this link…| kasra.io
This is what I remember about childhood: things seemed magical.| kasra.io
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 from memory and compare it to the original - that helps you notice what good writers do that you don’t.| kasra.io
Is there something you've been struggling with? Something you want to improve about your life? Something you just want to talk through with an empathetic listener?| kasra.io
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 yourself that there is a God who hands down the moral value of everything, who dictates what is right...| kasra.io
some high-level questions and speculations about neuroscience| kasra.io
one of many existential problems| kasra.io
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 towards it at all costs, even if it doesn’t feel good.| kasra.io
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 I’m missing, would be appreciated!| kasra.io
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 no idea this person had ever seen any of my writing!| kasra.io
(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 Orthwein gave me a subtle but important shift in perspective.| kasra.io
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 praised for my writing, because it still is, on the whole, a great feeling.| kasra.io
The idea that the hard problem can be solved with metaphysics has been gelling in my mind for quite a while now. There are three threads I’m exploring that are all landing in the same place. First, there’s Bernardo Kastrup’s work. In his theory of analytical idealism, reality is ultimately made of a single, primitive, instinctive mind, and this mind dissociates into a bunch of more complex minds (these are the individual conscious beings that we’re familiar with).| kasra.io
About a month ago I experienced a setback. It was of the variety trying really hard to make outcome X happen and then not having it happen – not a huge deal, but still upsetting in the moment. I wrote down this list of thoughts and questions that helped me quite a bit. Isn’t this a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate how awesome you are at taking setbacks, rolling with the punches, plodding on?| kasra.io
There’s a certain class of bodily actions that I feel especially grateful for, and that I’ve been noticing more and more recently. I’ll call them unconscious subroutines—little functions, procedures, or actions that your brain and body carry out with next to no involvement from your conscious self. I’m not talking about totally unconscious behaviors like your heartbeat, or the defenses of your immune system, although those are cool too. I’m talking about behaviors that are sort of...| kasra.io
I recently published a substack post on consciousness and am using this to write a few extra notes that I excluded from the article for brevity. My goal with the article was to take the reader on a kind of explanatory journey, which meant that I had to take certain intellectual shortcuts and brush over some nuances. Examples: I start the piece with a materialist paradigm in which it’s “obvious” that chairs and atoms are not conscious.| kasra.io
I want to become more comfortable with publishing bad writing. What is bad writing? I’m not just talking about writing that falls short of the most stringent perfectionist standards. I’ve already been publishing pieces on this blog that fall way short of that. By “bad writing” I really mean writing that’s bad. Writing with typos, sloppy word choice, meandering tangents, weak concluding sentences. The kind of writing that, upon re-reading it a month later, you cringe a little (or a l...| kasra.io
For most of my life I was chasing after “it”. I always thought that I’d find “it” in what I was pursuing at the time—whether it was getting into a particular college, getting a particular job or having a particular crush like me back. What is “it”? It’s hard to put into words, but “it” refers to a feeling of significance, a feeling of having finally arrived, a feeling of deeper and more complete meaning than we tend to find in the drudgery of the everyday.| kasra.io
When describing the trajectories of other people’s lives, we sometimes make statements that I’ll call claims of ultimate ruination. They take the form of “X ruined his life”, where X is a very specific event or experience. Whatever X was, it changed the person’s life permanently and irredeemably. Examples of X: a breakup, a professional failure, an unsettling spiritual experience, an injury. These claims are appealing in their drama and simplicity, and terrifying in their implications.| kasra.io
I sometimes have dreams where I’m checking Twitter. This is bad news for me and my social media usage, but it offers a fascinating glimpse into how flexible our brains are. My dreams look like this: I’m interacting with the Twitter web app, clicking around between notifications and mentions, struggling to follow the information coming my way. But notably, my body isn’t there. There isn’t even a monitor and keyboard through which I’m interacting with Twitter.| kasra.io
Here’s something I wish I realized earlier: believing you will fail does not mean you will fail. You can succeed in spite of a lack of confidence in yourself. As a teenager and young adult I struggled to develop confidence in several areas of my life, from academics to social status to romantic relationships. I was dogged by insecurities about not being smart enough, not being interesting enough, not being attractive enough.| kasra.io
A key part of happiness is understanding the role and nature of problem-solving in life. We are always solving problems. A problem can be defined as a conflict between ideas. The process of solving it requires the creation (and testing) of new ideas. Here are examples of problems: how do I relieve this back pain? how do we enable knowledge workers to collaborate more effectively? how do we reduce poverty? how do we resolve the incompatibility between quantum physics and general relativity?| kasra.io
Many people have talked about this but I’d like to share my framing of it. As we grow, our ideas change. The way we see the world shifts. We update our political inclinations, philosophical stances, personal values, and understanding of things. Sometimes this is a sudden shift, precipitated by a profound experience or insight. But it usually happens more slowly than that. It can occur so slowly that it’s imperceptible – you only notice it after your worldview has already changed dramati...| kasra.io
In this post I discuss two methods for understanding reality, and the respective roles they’ve played in my own worldview over time. I conclude with my current thinking about the relationship between these two modes, which is that (1) they can complement each other but have incompatibilities, and that (2) I have no idea which one takes primacy. Two modes of inquiry There are two broad classes of knowledge and truth-seeking that have underpinned my worldview in the past few years:| kasra.io
My dream this morning looked like this: I was with a group of people, we were stuck in a classroom-like place, and some authority was keeping us trapped there. We wanted to escape, but leaving the room meant entering the hall, and in the hall we could be shot. So we ran out and kept ducking into corridors and doorways to avoid being in the line of fire. I remember waiting anxiously in a doorway, figuring out what I should do, seeing friends jumping in and getting hurt.| kasra.io
Sometimes I dream about taking a few years away from everything and reading 40 textbooks and trying to understand how everything works. This is something I felt deeply in high school, and then lost at some point in college, and in the time after college it’s come back with overwhelming force. The thing about this curiosity is that it’s something you need to feed in order to keep it alive; you need to keep setting aside time to learn about the things that fascinate you.| kasra.io
An ongoing list. how easily I can feel wonder from looking up at the sky how much of an urge I feel to check notifications in the morning how at ease I feel going to bed whether my news feed makes me happy or anxious how often I remember that it’s not obvious that there should be a universe at all whether I spend more than an hour in the day reading how comfortable I feel with something I share getting zero reactions how fearful I am of the prospect of something going wrong how patient I am...| kasra.io
I read this paper in late 2020 as part of my ongoing study of our neuroscientific understanding of consciousness. These are the notes I took. The full title of the paper is Homing in on consciousness in the nervous system: An action-based synthesis, by Morsella et al, and it can be accessed for free here. Thesis: passive frame theory of consciousness Passive frame theory proposes that the primary function of consciousness is well circumscribed, serving the somatic nervous system.| kasra.io
Overall: 2/5 stars. Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche is a Tibetan monk who goes on a 4 year wandering retreat in his thirties. What is a wandering retreat, you ask? It’s when a monk leaves their monastery to spend several years alone, stumbling around without aim and essentially living the life of a beggar. Monks already live an ascetic lifestyle (hours of meditation a day, no central temperature control), but these retreats really take it to the next level.| kasra.io
Overall: 4/5 stars. If Beale Street Could Talk is a love story told from the point of view of Tish Rivers, about her life and her lover Fonny Hunt, who is wrongly imprisoned soon after Tish becomes pregnant with his child. Tish has to persevere and work together with her family and Fonny’s to do all they can to get Fonny out of prison. They have no choice but to keep their spirits and resolve in tact in the midst of an unjust system and society.| kasra.io
If you’ve grown up in an environment that values prestige and extrinsic accomplishments, applying to college is a major milestone. It’s the culminating event for years of effort: AP exams, extracurriculars, impressing your teachers for reference letters. All for a shot at getting that coveted acceptance letter in the mail. My own experience with college applications was as stressful as you’d expect. I was surrounded by peers who were thirsting for admission to a prestigious university a...| kasra.io
Last updated: February 11, 2021 Mind and brain For general background, reading Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain by Bear et al. Very interested in consciousness specifically - have explored Morsella et al’s passive frame theory and some of the thoughts of Metzinger, Chalmers, and Seth. Curious about Hoffman and Prakash’s interface theory of consciousness. Knowledge Recently had my understanding of epistemology clarified by David Deutsch’s Beginning of Infinity. Currently reading Popper.| kasra.io
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. There are many ways to formulate it, but one I’ve taken a liking to lately is this: why is it that when ...| kasra.io
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 granted, I like to break down reality into different layers.| kasra.io
I can't have it all but surely I can have a little bit of everything in exactly the right proportions?| kasra.io
braindump on spiritual clarity, rhythm in writing, the story of the universe, and more| kasra.io
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 Bear et al’s Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain).| kasra.io
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 while I’m wholeheartedly pursuing them.| kasra.io
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 always hesitant to talk about, because I have an implicit belief that writing about writing is boring and self...| kasra.io
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?| kasra.io
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 that memory reconsolidation is the common mechanism that underlies all the various mechanisms of therapy that ...| kasra.io
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 operate on those conditions.| kasra.io
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 alley, murder them, and harvest all their organs. Example: utilitarianism would claim that t...| kasra.io
I recently thought of a meditation prompt that is fitting in moments of excitement, and potentially in other situations too. Sometimes when I feel really excited about good things going on in my life, it’s hard to meditate.1 I can spend my entire 20-minute session just thinking about all the good things happening, the things I’m looking forward to doing, or the people I enjoy interacting with. While on some level it’s fine to spend 20 minutes thinking good thoughts, meditating like this...| kasra.io
I was playing around with a handheld microscope recently and I felt like it gave me an intuitive picture of Chapman’s nebulosity idea.1 The first thing that became obvious is how much grainier reality is than our day-to-day experience suggests. When I write on my notebook with a pen, it feels like the edges of my pen’s ink and the shapes of the letters are pretty well-defined. But upon closer look, that’s not true:| kasra.io
Observation is theory-laden One of Deutsch and Popper’s oft-quoted phrases is that ‘observation is theory laden’.1 This is a revelatory point about the nature of science: no statement that we can utter, or observation that we can record, is a pure observation statement, completely divorced of all theory. A statement like ’there is a table over there’ assumes a whole collection of theories about tables, spatial positioning, and existence. Even a more hard-nosed statement like ‘a co...| kasra.io
This is an outgrowth of A first pass at David Chapman’s metarationality. In Abstract Reasoning as Emergent from Concrete Activity, David Chapman quotes a summary article about the “E-approaches” in the cognitive sciences: E-approaches propose that cognition depends on embodied engagements in the world. They rethink the alternative, ‘sandwich’ view of cognition as something pure that can be logically isolated from non-neural activity. Traditionally, cognition is imagined to occur who...| kasra.io
[The philosophical meat of this article is under the section “Current threads and questions”. Feel free to skip to that.] This tweet has had a big impact on my life: 🧵 Trying to Figure Out Where @DavidDeutschOxf's Critical Rationalism and @Meaningness's Meta-rationality Disagree (for the very small niche of people that find this interesting) — Jake Orthwein (@JakeOrthwein) April 24, 2021 When I stumbled upon it, I had spent about a year being deeply entrenched in the philosophical wo...| kasra.io
When I was reading The Beginning of Infinity, one of the passages that stood out to me was about contradictions (emphasis mine): Since theories can contradict each other, but there are no contradictions in reality, every problem signals that our knowledge must be flawed or inadequate. Our misconception could be about the reality we are observing or about how our perceptions are related to it, or both. (18) There are no contradictions in reality.| kasra.io
How is it that we can imagine things that are logically impossible? I’ve always been a little perturbed by this. It was strange to me that we can imagine or even believe things that are logically impossible. It makes sense to me that we can imagine things that are physically impossible. Our imagination is not constrained by the laws of physics. We can imagine physical objects which don’t exist or cannot exist.| kasra.io
I’d like to capture some feelings I have about a pattern I’ve noticed on the internet: the tendency towards curation. There are wonderful people—newsletter writers and tweeters—who serve the role of curator: who put together long collections of links and quotes from various articles and rabbit holes on the internet, with the idea that they’re saving you time by finding the very best bits of the web. Unlike most of history, we live in an age when human-generated content (everything f...| kasra.io
The word ‘absurd’ has always held a special place in my heart. ‘Absurd’ evokes the ridiculousness of everything around us—the serendipity of our mutual existence at this place and time, the immeasurable complexity of the cells and proteins that make up our bodies, the unfathomable size of our galaxy. The moments I’m in touch with this absurdity have always been the moments I felt most alive. I’d find myself in awe that anything exists at all, and that the things which do exist h...| kasra.io
This is a list of philosophical questions I’m currently grappling with. Truth and objectivity I tend to be a realist, i.e. I think there are objective truths about the world, whether or not we’re aware of those truths. And for a while I’ve had the view that through science, philosophy, conjecture, reason, and error-correction, we could get closer to knowing those objective truths. (Some thoughts on objectivity here.) Recently I’ve been less sure about (1) the existence of such definit...| kasra.io
In this piece, I first share a framework for causality put forth by Karl Popper; I then share how it differed from my initial intuitions about causality; and then I explain why Popper’s framework is better. In The Logic of Scientific Discovery (§12), Karl Popper states that there are two elements of any causal explanation: a statement in the form of a universal law. a statement of initial conditions. He gives the following example of a causal claim: a weight is placed on a thread and cause...| kasra.io
I read more slowly than most of my friends who read. I do all the wrong things: I subvocalize, I stop and start, I take detailed notes and extract quotes. My friends talk about finishing a book in one night, and the same book takes me weeks. Today I watched a video of Visa talking about reading The Beginning of Infinity in a few days, whereas it took me hours of reading per night for several months.| kasra.io
I hosted a conversation yesterday about knowledge and epistemology. I opened the convo with this presentation, covering: (i) the justified-true-belief view of knowledge, (ii) Popper’s/Deutsch’s alternative framing of knowledge, and (iii) defining a few words like skepticism, rationalism, empiricism, and relativism. Consciousness and knowing One of the first things that came up was a question about consciousness and whether conscious truths are the only truths we can be “sure” about.| kasra.io
This is a little mental exercise that I included in my most recent newsletter. Hope you enjoy. Photo: Tomasz Frankowski on Unplash. – Think about someone you find inspiring. Take a minute to visualize their face and their presence and all the things that make them awesome. What will that person be like in ten years? You know they’ll be doing something incredible, but you have no idea what. The same applies to all the other wonderful people you know.| kasra.io
Warning: includes spoilers! Overall: 4/5 stars. What would life be like if no one could remember who you are? If after every interaction, the other person’s memory of you was completely erased. This is the life of Addie LaRue. She made a deal with an evil god that gave her “freedom”, except freedom means that no one ever remembers meeting you. She’s also immortal. Also, it’s not just that people can’t remember you, but objects can’t either.| kasra.io
In February of 2020, I set a goal of finishing 40 books for the year. Before then, reading was never a habit I fully developed — I could never find the time or interest. But a few months after finishing college and starting a full-time job, I finally found an opportunity to add reading to my daily routine. First I developed a habit of spending my evenings after work in a cafe, bookstore, or library.| kasra.io
It began with hosting a series of zoom “salons” during the pandemic, which eventually became in-person. In total I hosted ~30 salons, on a number of topics including friendship, community, relationships with managers, jealousy, parents, social media, knowledge, and more. in the past two years, I've hosted 35+ events, including salons, “introvert parties”, reading & meditation nights, and curiosity dinners. across all the events, we’ve had 150+ different people participate. we've had...| kasra.io
This post is an attempt to answer the question: how do you define morality objectively? Context: I used to be a moral nihilist (there is no such thing as “good” and “bad”, morality is completely arbitrary and subjective, the universe does not care). Today, I’m closer to being a moral realist, though I reserve some room for the possibility that morality is entirely a human construct. At the very least, I think arguments for objective morality should be considered seriously.| kasra.io
