Worldly Positions

Bodega Bay: workshop

What was the workshop like? Well there was really amazing carpet. I don’t know how relevant this is, but a lot of people…

Berkeley: being other people

Sometimes I enjoy understanding better what it is like to be other people. You can do this somewhat subtly by talking to people for ages about other topics, and making inferences. Lately I’ve been asking more directly, something like, ‘what about your experience do you think…

Moloch in whom I sit alone

I went to a party. Arriving guests got stickers: cats and pineapples. Pineapples would have to talk in a big group, cats would be pairs and trios. Everyone knew the cats had it better.

Oxford: mental state spot-the-difference

I spend time in different mental states, but it is surprisingly hard to say how they are different from one another. For instance, I just got back from a friend’s birthday dinner, which involved more wine consumption than my typical few hours of life, and I…

Oxford: explicit thoughts

Today I swore a lot. Part of this was due to my recent purchase of a tiny, cheap laptop PC to temporarily replace my apparently extremely taken for granted expensive MacBook. Part of it was due to the large amount of cycling up steep hills involved in this purchase. And part of it…

Oxford: wonder

I have mixed feelings about wonder. I kind of maybe really want it, and it also seems maybe kind of boring.

Part of me thinks, ‘wonder is just a kind of feeling you can have about certain things’, which seems disappointing — like, I want there to be something grander and more…

Oxford: unseen possibilities

Every morning I do my morning routine. Some evenings I change what is in my morning routine. Recently I added ‘do something you have never done before’, which I had done before, but not in a while.