Category: Blog
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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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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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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.…
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Primitive Peacemakers, pt 1: The Fall of Jordan Peterson
This is the beginning of a 5-part series, whose alternate titles might run: “Metarationality & the Frame Problem,” “Function/Form/Fluidity,” and “Cultural Relativism for Rationalists.” It aims to trace a throughline in taoist, pragmatist, and postmodern thinking, and to introduce a certain meta-systematic school of blogosphere philosophy which has crystallized around the frame problem in microsociology,…
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Maq III
Dear X, So the bad news is I have no easy way to explain what I’m working on/have been working on/will be working on for a while. I’ve been asked about the MS a few times now and every time my answer is very different and radically misleading. The form I’m working in does not…
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Open questions 221120
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; my contact is suspendedreason(at)gmail.com. I’m also looking for:
Suspended Reason 