Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Philosophy

  • an epistemic heat death of universal solipsism

    Interesting (old?) idea from Venkatesh Rao: Divergentism is both an idea you can believe or disbelieve, and a basis for an ideological doctrine (hence the –ism) that you can subscribe to or reject. You could capture both aspects with this simple statement: Humans diverge at all levels of thought-space, from the sub-individual to species, and…

  • more futures than people

    TFW a webcomic, which you’ve been reading for what is probably fifteen years or so by this point, unexpectedly recapitulates one of the major planks of your own academic theoretical framework, and does so via the staggeringly economical medium of a few panels of dinosaur clip-art: Of course, the observation that all futures—from the most…

  • this addiction can be overcome

    On the one hand, it’s nice to see the theory’n’philosophy crowd come out swinging for “disruption”: In order to resist disruption it is not enough to demonstrate that its benefits are based on shaky evidence. […] While these analyses are useful to debunk the illusion that innovation is always an improvement, they do not modify…

  • an immaterial objection

    Via L M Sacasas, an interview by Evan Selinger with David Chalmers, who appears to be analytical philosophy’s current useful idiot from the POV of the tech scene. Does that seem harsh, whether on analytical philosophy in general or Chalmers in particular? Well, given said discipline prides itself on a rigour that the filthy continentals…

  • dispensable and scarce

    Just a quick subtweetish sort of blog post, here, to note that the more times people start an essay or article or academic paper or blog post with a phrase along the lines of “[d]igital platforms and the online services that they provide have become an indispensable and ubiquitous part of modern lifestyles, mediating our…