Newsletter
On the gestures and practices of awareness
April 30, 2021
Hello,
New articles:
At the bottom of the trendiest trends of cognitive science today is something very interesting indeed. A man named Francisco Varela and his efforts to model the structural dynamics of contemplative traditions.
Full article at bottom of email
Varela’s gestures are a simple, almost trite, model of the crowning achievement of human thought—insight. At first it might appear to simple. Here, we take a survey of the sciences of the mind, and we find that in fact, despite all the technology at our disposal, the complex methods and methodologies, the summary of the sciences is strikingly similar.
Highlights from the scholia:
The deterministic view of free will always seems to cause such furore, forgetting that whether free will exists or not, this world is so intractably complex that for almost all practical purposes, it doesn’t matter.
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Anthropological case study for the lockdown as a ‘spiritual and economic reset’ from an Indonesian community who would voluntarily retreat every couple of years. Similar ideas to this more modern-focused take.
Recently updated:
Updates to On Emotion.
Updates to the danger in oversubscribing to automatic thinking.
Notes:
The site is finally arranged around what it has always been exploring: our credenda, which is finally published in it’s final form as a manifesto of sorts. Article collections and links have been shuffled around to match.
Grouse new font and colour palette to celebrate.
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You can find links to all my previous emails to you here.
That’s all from me! Enjoy.
Warm regards,
Dorian | The Armchair Collective
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This week’s article selection: Varela’s Gestures
You’re reading this on the site, so you can just go to the article.