Sublime

The self.

The strange loop of us thinking about our own consciousness in relation to others.

Wallace’s fictional manuscript and the philosophy thesis were also of a piece: both asked whether language depicted the world or in some deeper way defined it and even altered it.

Derek Parfit,

Henry James’s notebooks,

I am transcribing a book that I have, in a sense, not yet written, and in another sense, have always written, and in another sense, am currently writing, and in another sense, am always writing, and in another sense, will never write.

Is this the Unconscious? The Self? Whatever it is, it's smarter than we are. A lot smarter. It doesn't need us to tell it what to do. It goes to work all by itself. It seems to want to work. It seems to enjoy it. What exactly is it doing? It's organizing. The principle of organization is built into nature. Chaos itself is self-organizing. Out of pr

Past philosophers have taken this observation and run with it, arguing that minds and brains are fundamentally distinct and separate phenomena. This is the view the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.”1 But modern scientists and philosophers who have rejected dualism haven’t necessarily replaced it with a better