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Benvenuto
After ten years, this blog is shuttering, and will serve mainly as an archive. A semi-complete list of my writings as Suspended Reason can be found at suspendedreason.github.io. To better contextualize the blog’s archive, a sketch of its principal eras: A few other highlights from the past decade: Above all else, I remain proud of…
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Photographs & Phantoms
Suspended: If we were to imagine an ecosystem as a shifting body of water, then your CF3 chairs are carefully designed pebbles, dropped in the waters of Forsyth Plaza, and the ripple carefully documented. Does this seem fair? Cristóbal: I think the documentation certainly has that angle to it. But there’s a political dimension to…
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Will Nature Always Win?
“Only a fool swallows myths,” reads a protester’s sign, near Westminster, morn. “Keep the story of England alive,” counters a Parliament plaque, mere paces. Drenched in Medievalism lately. Picked up Ivanhoe at a Hythe charity shop. The chivalric figure, at least in Scott’s telling, is fundamentally generous—and yet (it is like a magic penny) the more…
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Cake, Calories, & Cartographic Pleasures
An Ecosystem of Effects. Let us posit a simplification, which will hopefully seem less arbitrary and less reductive as we further describe it. The simplification is this: that the two poles of concern, when it comes to what we call “art,” are the production of pleasure and the production of models. This is a bit…
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Response to Galen Cuth on Magic & Pragmatism
Galen recently wrote a wonderful response to my “Fool’s Gold” essay, trying to pinpoint where he and I disagree about when it comes to pragmatic theories of representation. This letter won’t make much sense unless you’ve first read his salvo. Epistemic status very much “Fumbling around in the dark”—lots of ideas and discourses invoked that…
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Open Questions 231011
Here’s a list of questions that I’m looking for leads on! If you think you can answer any, or are able to point me in the direction of writing that deals with similar issues, please reach out in the comments or over email; my contact is suspendedreason(at)gmail.com.
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Lewis & Clark Linguistics
This is a lightly edited version of a talk given at Fluidity Forum in September 2023. Expect scattered transcription errors. A few years ago, some friends and I started a group called The Inexact Sciences, or TIS for short. We run a group blog called tis.so that some people might know. And we took as our…
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Fool’s Gold (Notes on Lodge 49), pt 2
Last time, on Suspended Reason…. Prophetic revelation involves for both the prophet himself and for his followers… a unified view of the world derived from a consciously integrated and meaningful attitude toward life. To the prophet, both the life of man and the world, both social and cosmic events, have a certain systematic and coherent…
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Against “Self-Expression”
This is the tenth installment in a ten-part series. Information and emotion ripple across the social, transforming members’ attitudes and behaviors. Stress breeds stress; anger transfers; to paraphrase Buddha, the only moral imperative is spreading good vibes. This is the idea behind the phrase “all communication is manipulation”: to emphasize the effects of utterances—and similar…
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“Peacemakers” sidebar: Eliot’s egoic ontology
To each soul belongeth another world; to each soul is every other soul a back-world. (Nietzsche) Eliot repeatedly returns to the observation that individuals’ sense of the world—from morality to category to truth—is by default egocentric. This, in my read, is a logical extension of pragmatism from the level of cultural relevance to individual relevance.…
A D Jameson all communication is manipulation Alva Nöe ambiguity chords compression Erving Goffman fitness games generalized reading hermeneutic circle institutional theory Interpretation Jürgen Schmidhuber Karl Friston language games linguistics literary theory literature Maggie Nelson maps meaning modernism music music criticism New Sincerity nostalgia opticratics Peli Grietzer Pierre Bourdieu pop music poptimism pragmatism predictive hermeneutics predictive model predictive processing Sarah Perry selection games signaling strategic interaction surrogation the inexact sciences Thomas Schelling vibe theory visual art
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