iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 16/02/2026

Detail from Hua Yan (1682-1756), Scholar and a Bat.

Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 17/11/2025

Guess who wrote this, more than 10 years prior to Churchland's “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes”.

There is an important respect in which Armstrong's analogy between materialism and the equation of the gene and the DNA molecule fails. Pre-molecular genetics was an exact scientific theory: the concept of the gene was introduced in the service of scientific explanation, and subsequent work in molecular biology which makes the equation plausible has had the same aim. But the psychology of common sense, embodied in the ordinary concepts of belief, desire, sensation, perception, emotion, and so forth is not a scientific theory.
The mental states for which Armstrong offers causal analyses are picked out by a system which has evolved naturally, and whose form may depend significantly on its extra-scientific functions. Our dealings with and declarations to one another require a specialized vocabulary, and although it serves us moderately well in ordinary life, its narrowness and inadequacy as a psychological theory become evident when we attempt to apply it in the formulation of general descriptions of human behavior or in the explanation of abnormal mental conditions.
The crude and incomplete causal theory embodied in common-sense pyschology should not be expected to survive the next hundred years of central nervous system studies intact. It would be surprising if concepts like belief and desire found correspondents in a neurophysiological theory, considering how limited their explanatory and predictive power is, even for gross behavior. The physical behavior which, on Armstrong's analysis, a given intention is apt to cause, may be the product of causes whose complexity cannot be brought into even rough correspondence with the simple elements of a present-day psychological explanation.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 07/10/2025

A perfect table of contents.

1 Happiness 1
2 Death 61
3 The Remainder of Life 106

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Dr Liam Sims @liamsims.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

A stunningly beautiful initial depicting a dying man in bed with his soul being taken up by an angel. From a copy of Aristotle’s De Anima, likely copied at Oxford c. 1260. @theulspeccoll.bsky.social since 1715, MS Ee.2.31.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 31/01/2025

150 years ago you could get random observations of your baby published in Mind. Indisputably the most famous person to ever publish there—guess who!

No. 7. JULY, 1877.
MIND
A QUARTERLY REVIEW OF PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.
I.-A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF AN INFANT.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 03/01/2025

Unless your multiverse has endless hells lurking in the triangular gaps between worlds, I don't buy it.

Surrounding the great, circular ocean is a ring of mountains known as Cakravāla (also Cakravāḍa), which forms the external boundary of the world. The disk-shaped earth that supports all these oceans, continents, and mountains floats atop decreasingly substantial layers of fundamental elements (earth, water, sometimes fire, and wind) that ultimately float in the void of space. Most traditions acknowledge a multiplicity of such single world-systems (loka-dhātu), often abutting one another horizontally and sometimes also layered vertically. Groups of thousands, millions, and billions of such worlds play important roles in metaphors for vastness and innumerability. When described in such collections, each world typically has the same basic geographical features, including its own Sumeru, four major continents, great ocean, and so on, making this a generic model for all worlds in Buddhist cosmology. In other cases, however, alternative worlds are described with quite different landscapes to emphasize specific contrasts with this world (see the section “Mahāyāna and East Asia”).

Within each single world-system that follows the generic pattern, there are also numerous heavens and hells above and below the relatively flat surface of the world. While the heavens generally rise directly above Sumeru, the hells may descend—depending on the tradition—centrally below Sumeru, peripherally below southern Jambudvīpa, broadly filling all of the elemental layers below the entire cosmos, or even externally in the deltoid interstices between adjacent discoid worlds. Based on these layers above and below the surface of the earth, many cosmological systems also propose vertical divisions of space, most commonly distinguishing the more-or-less geographical realm of the earth, hells, and lower heavens (kāma-dhātu, realm of desire) from more ethereal realms of form (rūpa-dhātu) and formlessness (ārūpya-dhātu) above.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 21/12/2024

The magic spell hypothesis: just as magic spells are written distinctively to make them appear special, so legal language is made complex in order to signal a special kind of authority. See: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

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noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 20/12/2024

why would you use chatgpt to simulate an endless tedious argument with various professional philosophers when we already have the daily nous comment section?

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 19/12/2024

Shibata Zeshin, Monkey Posing as a Collector, 1835. Justin Sun posing with Maurizio Cattelan, Comedian, 2019.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 19/12/2024

Two excellent new articles on the cultural wasteland produced by corporate streaming— @tavlin.bsky.social on Netflix: www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/ess... and @lizpelly.bsky.social on Spotify: harpers.org/archive/2025...

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Al Wilson @modalizing.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

An 18-chapter volume on Levels of Explanation, co-edited with Katie Robertson. It's out in hardback on 31 Dec, but it's also open access and the PDF is already free to download: global.oup.com/academic/pro...

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 18/12/2024

“a labourer working to put down lasting foundations in the midst of the waves” —Proust on memory of music.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 17/12/2024

Prediction: the only good consequence of generative AI will be improved public understanding of cryptographic methods to prove authenticity.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 17/12/2024

Pascal Quignard, The Roving Shadows.

$The earth has been turning for 3,500 million years. Humanity has lived for one million years. The history of human civilizations has lasted for 10,000 years, without being either continuous or evolutionary. The civilized, artistic, noetic, literary part is only an imperceptible fraction of the species Homo. Imperceptible by the species itself, as a general rule. There have been only a few works, a few objects, a few sounds, a few books, a few walls glimpsed by a few human beings who, from time to time, bow reverentially to them.$

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 14/12/2024

Analia Saban, Perceptron, 2024.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 10/12/2024

Shanghai at night. Photo taken from the International Space Station, 27 March 2012.

Photograph of Shanghai at night, taken by a crew member on the International Space Station, 27 March 2012.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 10/12/2024

Wonderful article on Zabihollah Mansouri, the prolific Iranian writer who simply made up much of what he “translated“. His Persian rendition of Lolita is twice as long as the original; his The Three Musketeers is ten times as long! See: yalereview.org/article/amir...

There is, though, a catch. I have been referring to Mansouri as a “translator.” But by contemporary standards, the most popular translator in the history of Iran translated hardly anything at all. Most of his works are a hodgepodge of source text mixed with his own additions and musings, which he offered so generously as to sometimes overwhelm the original. In some cases, the author of the book Mansouri was supposedly translating didn’t even exist. He would write something of his own, then make up a French name and publish his work under the fictive author’s byline. Many would say that one of the most popular literary figures of twentieth-century Iran was a full-blown charlatan.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 09/12/2024

We should also arrest everyone else who gave five stars to a Dan Ariely book.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 08/12/2024

A story about a story to tell, next time you teach Descartes.

The mechanical daughter of rene descartes: the origin and history of an intellectual fable

Minsoo Kang

History Department, University of Missouri–Saint Louis E-mail: kangmi@umsl.edu

This article pursues the origin and mutation of a fantastic story concerning an automaton in the shape of a young girl that was supposedly built by Rene Descartes. In recent decades it has been retold and reimagined so many times that the tale has become an iconic narrative in the context of the reassessment of Descartes’s significance in intellectual history. But a close reading of the original story, found in a 1699 work entitled Melanges d’histoire et de litterature by Vigneul-Marville, reveals an overtly stated agenda of saving the philosopher’s moral reputation, which makes most recent interpretations of the story problematic. The vast majority of modern retellings demonstrate no awareness of the content or the significance of the first tale even as it has been used to shed light on Descartes, Cartesian ideas, and early modern thought in general.

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A fantastic story concerning Rene Descartes relates how the philosopher once built an automaton in the shape of a young girl and took it aboard a ship. When the captain of the vessel found it, he became terrified by its mechanical movements and threw it overboard.

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

Musil To R.Lejeune: "From this awareness that you're looking out for me so much, along with the Wotrubas' warmth flowing into me, so that the art does not go cold...I borrow the recklessness I need to keep building a house of cards, while the earth collapses under it. (November 1939)

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Søren Mau @sorenmau.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

I hope these two lonely animals, stranded in a strange landscape far from their natural habitat in Australia, managed to meet and become friends before one of them was tragically killed by a car on the main street in a town called Søllested, whose name translates to 'Miserable Place'

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 06/12/2024

At a party recently people were naming their favourite science fiction films and when I said “Stalker“ everyone said they hadn't seen it except one woman who said “I see, so you're that sort of guy” which is somehow both trivially true and very mean, philosophers of language should look into this.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 05/12/2024

This is incredibly cool work.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 04/12/2024

God's Eyes Here on Earth is a play designed to be performed in front of the surveillance cameras used to monitor churches. Photo from the Surveillance Camera Players, St. Patrick's Cathedral, Manhattan, 24 September 2000.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 02/12/2024

Dust jacket from a Russian edition of Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, c1933.

See: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-d344-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 02/12/2024

I've published three diagrams in @eldiagram.bsky.social and you should (submit to them) too.

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Helen De Cruz @helendecruz.net · 30/11/2024

I love early accounts of Native Americans who discuss religion with settlers. Here's Adriaen van der Donck (1655) who discusses the problem of evil with Native people. They think that if you believe in an all-good God, then the devil must be in charge to explain evil. Why doesn't God react? Well...

When we refute these absurdities easily, we do so by tell-
ing them that God is omniscient and omnipotent; knows the nature of devils exactly; quietly observes their doings; and
will not permit a puffed-up and faithless servant to tyrannize
man, who is the most glorious creature of all and made in
God’s image, provided he duly puts his trust in God and does
not forsake his commandments in favor of evil. To that they respond with an odd and fantastic argument: “You Dutch say
so, and seen superficially it may seem to be as you maintain,
but you do not understand the matter aright. This God, who
is supremely good, almighty, and beneficent, Lord of heaven
and earth and all its host, is not alone up there in heaven without any company or diversion, but has with him a goddess
or a woman who is the fairest the eye has ever beheld or can behold. With this goddess or beauty he passes and forgets the
time, being deeply attached to her, and meanwhile the devil
plays the lord on earth and does whatever he wishes.”

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 29/11/2024

The perfection of sponges.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 28/11/2024

Due to their rigorous training in epistemology, philosophers are simply immune to this.

the biggest dunning-kruger problem isn't dumb people who think they're smart, it's kinda-smart people who think they are polymath geniuses

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 28/11/2024

Leibniz, optimistically.

Once this has been done, if ever further controversies should arise, there should be no more reason for disputes between two philosophers than between two calculators. All that will be necessary is that, pen in hand, they sit down together at a table and say to each other (having called, if they so please, a friend) "let us calculate"

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DMV @drdmv.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

The undergraduate students at NYU Shanghai are so good that I have to constantly reevaluate my conception of how good it is even possible for an undergraduate to be

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 27/11/2024

Bandcamp is still the best social media site. Deeply obsessed DJs and record collectors following each other based purely on taste, and you only get to speak if you also buy the record.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 27/11/2024

Disciplines can be divided into those in which this could happen and those in which it could not.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: This letter derives from separate, similar contributions of the coauthors originally submitted at about the same time. The two authors were put into contact with each other, and the present contribution is a revised and extended version of their earlier efforts.]

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 26/11/2024

Very cool paper on historical methodology by @zafulotus.bsky.social —see: doi.org/10.1163/1745...

Robyn Faith Walsh, “The Mouse of the Mysteries“, in Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 22 (2024) 219–236.

This article presents an imaginative exercise in which a fictional author from the year 4025 details results from excavations of archaeological sites dating to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Based on analyses of small domestic finds, as well as the discovery of a monumental complex utilizing similar imagery, the author concludes
that people must have worshipped an anthropomorphic mouse god – the Historical Mouse – in the Mechano-Digital Age, keeping devotional votives in their homes and traveling at least once a year to a primary space of worship centered around the experience of various ritual mysteries. This article calls upon students to perform a self-evaluation about their own assumptions and approaches to the ancient world
as they witness a hypothetical historian make outrageous, yet plausible, errors in the course of trying to describe an ‘ancient’ religion.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 26/11/2024

Surely not in humans, though.

I mean this category of “evaluation” broadly, to cover all sorts of responses that include some assessment of good or bad, attractive or repulsive. Evaluation or appreciation is a special kind of receiver-side behavior. I say it is “receiver-side” although some of what we evaluate was not produced for that purpose. A lot of what we evaluate was produced for a reason of that kind, though, and a huge amount of effort by animals is aimed at getting particular evaluative responses to occur.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 25/11/2024

Whiplash between posts on how AI is ruining everything, and posts taking AI sentience seriously. Has anyone defended the view that AI is both sentient and intent on ruining human life?

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 25/11/2024

Prompt: “Generate a picture of four guys who think AI can disrupt books”.

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