All of us exist within a world of deep forces that we navigate at a level that is not what we term rational. All of us exist within a context, a late capitalist world, that is by no means rational. And in such a world, are untapped, unharnessed, undirected energies and longings going to be funneled and directed by those who figure out how to do so? Absolutely. And we’re not above that.

‘Reason’ isn’t just ‘trust scientists’ and ‘check your sources’; it is a deep re-evaluation of what life is for…

striving for value-free science is both unattainable and undesirable

Kuhn realized that if Aristotle was stuck within his own way of seeing the world, then so are we.

Proxies function as the necessary forms of make-believe and surrogacy that enable the production of knowledge. Such knowledge production relies on accessible representations of the world, and proxies are the people, artifacts, places, and moments invested with the authority to represent the world. To interrogate the use of proxies is to ask: to whom or to what do we delegate the power to represent the world?

Proxies are instrumental to developing ‘group-licensed ways of seeing,’ and they are crucial to the ways we learn how to participate in our communities by training ourselves through common references, by coming to see problems as akin, and by taking for granted that others in our community share those references and those ways of seeing.

Experiencing autonomy—being allowed to make those choices that constitute an autonomous life—as a learner is a better way of learning to be autonomous than being told what to do.

Education of whatever type cannot be sustained without some notion of imparting a belief system.

A rigorous philosophical analysis of how humans acquire mental categories which argues that human values are always already present in any act of teaching or learning, thus solving some of Wittgenstein’s problems and encouraging us to ask radical questions about what our education system currently values, and what it might be designed to value instead.

There isn’t “knowledge” as we’re used to thinking about it: figuring out, given observations and experiences in the world, what is “true” and once you come to “knowledge” you get to keep it for life. I now appreciate that everything is beliefs, is just a best guess.

How all reasoning is Bayesian.

Widely read as he was in Western philosophy, one of Nishida’s main concerns was to find possible points of contact between his own heritage and the philosophical background of the modern civilization that was taking shape in Japan during his lifetime.

A comparative analysis of Kitarō Nishida and Dōgen Kigen’s thoughts on space and time and how these concepts are presented throughout their life’s work. The article largely focuses on the thought of Nishida, a 20th-century Japanese philosopher. While it is known that Nishida was greatly influenced by Western philosophy, the author brings Nishida into dialogue with Dōgen, particularly his Being-Time, in an attempt to show that Nishida was firmly rooted in Asian thought.

… and now the geneticists say I may have 2% Neanderthal DNA, which presumably changes the status of Neanderthals, or the [definition] of species, or [possibly] both.

The units of paleontology, and of biology more generally, are different from the units of paleoanthropology, in that the latter are units in a story of our ancestors, and the ancestors are invariably sacred.

On why the species of historic hominids are so numerous and contested.

Three fundamental ways of approaching the relationship between Buddhism and science are outlined: (a) rejection (Buddhism and science are not, and cannot be, compatible); (b) acceptance (Buddhism and science share important commonalities); (c) construction (Buddhism and science are compatible because they have been made compatible in the course of specific historical processes).

… with special emphasis on the distinction between construing Buddhism as a “living” versus “dead” tradition.

Within the framework of experience, there is no quantum enigma; the boxed cat, being outside of one’s experiential frame of reference, doesn’t exist. Once I observe the cat, then it exists

The resulting synthesis leads to a worldview based on information that overcomes limitations of the currently dominating physics-based worldview.

In that structure of feeling well, we had started taking acid…

A long and wide conversation on the author’s life and on our collective, possible futures.

The original book can be read in its entirety online here

Love of hate acts as an axis uh huh
First it wanes and then it waxes
(Hmm so, procreate and pay your taxes)

… the trick that has helped me squint at the bleakness and see them more clearly is to admit, with every breath, that you have no idea what you are looking at.

Half a history of, and accessible meditation on the philosophy of, science and half memoir of the author’s grappling with depression, this pleasantly easy read captures something of “emptiness.” It shows how Buddhism still has much to add in the West’s ongoing struggle to reconcile its extremes of naive, Christian eternalism and cynical, “scientific” nihilism.

How much evidence do we need of the harmfulness of something before we act?

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

A classic collection of essays on the relationship between ideas and society which draws heavily on Huxley’s engagements with Buddhist philosophy.

The product of a bygone era, Ends and Means diagnoses modernity without the despair or self-promotion characteristic of later engagements. One instead feels the vitality and honesty that animated Huxley’s life and continue to inspire readers nearly a century later.

We call that “Progress”
But it’s just movement

An upbeat song about spiritual perspective.

In general, we humans are a self-interpreting species for whom the practice of recollecting and redescribing ourselves is a crucial necessity. For us the reconstruction of identity is a continuous process wherein the past is selectively crafted into a history. It is a creative and self-constitutive exercise. We come to know each other and ourselves not by exchanging resumes (mere inventories of events), but by telling our stories. And our stories change as we do; they reflect what actually happened and what we think is worth remembering, they reflect who we were, who we are, and who we would like to become.

An impassioned defense of asking big questions, especially in the context of our postmodern search for meaning.

…recognize that this view is not scientific discovery: it is ideology.

Many Westerners come to Buddhism wed to scientific materialism and find themselves unable to overcome their “Science Delusion.” White tackles this subject head-on in this striking interview.