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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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 04/04/2025

We stand in solidarity with the penguins.

A crowd of penguins captioned BREAKING: MASSIVE ANTI-AMERICAN PROTESTS IN HEARD AND MCDONALD ISLANDS.

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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 · 23/12/2024

To solve problems like this:

Paul Frambot | Morpho
@PaulFrambot

Last week, 6 out of 30 candidates interviewed by our recruiter were likely North Korean hackers using deepfakes to disguise their accents and facial expressions.

Now implementing stricter hiring protocols eg. thorough background checks, in-person meetings, ... Any suggestions?

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 22/12/2024

Scandalous that “Confucius for Trump?“ was addressed before “Funeral strippers?”

Abstract

Could the Chinese philosopher Confucius have supported Donald Trump?

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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 · 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 · 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.

I

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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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 07/12/2024

Galaxy brain strategy would have him unwittingly catch himself.

The Problem of the Essential Indexical JOHN PERRY STANFORD UNIVERSITY

I once followed a trail of sugar on a supermarket floor, pushing my cart down the aisle on one side of a tall counter and back the aisle on the other, seeking the shopper with the torn sack to tell him he was making a mess. With each trip around the counter, the trail became thicker. But I seemed unable to catch up. Finally it dawned on me. I was the shopper I was trying to catch.

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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

A Spacetime Diagram: thediagram.com/23_1/aspacet...

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

Supranuclear Palsy of Eyelid Closure: thediagram.com/9_3/supranuc...

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

Complex Tool-Use in Monkeys: thediagram.com/4_2/tool_use...

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

Helping Paul Scheerbart look up NBA stats is not what I expected when joining Bluesky.

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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

Pictured: a single overarching inference to the best explanation, composed of many smaller inferences to the best explanation.

Frontispiece of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 21/11/2024

Or more radically (from Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind, 1921)—

There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being fve minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that “remembered” a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 21/11/2024

For #worldphilosophyday here's a good characterisation of philosophy, inadvertently given by the guy who took Maurizio Cattelan’s banana off the gallery wall and ate it.

It’s like the story of Picasso and Modigliani, when they were having problems. Modigliani’s girlfriend gave Picasso some pieces and in the next week or two they had a group exhibition and what happened was Picasso painted his art on top of Modigliani’s art. He just left small pieces that you could recognize as Modigliani but it was Picasso. This is the same thing what happens now, but in a concept. Concept gets another concept.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 20/11/2024

Immediately provoked in me the image of—

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 19/11/2024

Two weeks later and he was already thinking about the carbon footprint—visionary.

Hal Finney, “Thinking about how to reduce CO2 emissions from a widespread Bitcoin implementation”, 27 January 2009.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 19/11/2024

Hypothesis—it was supposed to be paired with the quote that follows it, on the blackboard at the time of his death: “Know how to solve every problem that has been solved”. He meant that if you can't work through the solutions yourself, you don't understand them.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 18/11/2024

The art of mocking an inference by describing it for children. From E. H. Gombrich, A Little History of the World.

On another occasion, but still in Germany – in the Neander valley – a human skull was found. And this was also immensely interesting because nobody alive today has a skull like this one either. Instead of a forehead like ours it just had two thick ridges above the eyebrows. Now, if all our thinking goes on behind our foreheads and these people didn’t have any foreheads, then perhaps they didn’t think as much as we do. Or at any rate, thinking may have been harder for them. So the people who examined the skull concluded that once upon a time there were people who weren’t very good at thinking, but who were better at biting than we are today.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 17/11/2024

The same person, Eric Karpeles, wrote Paintings in Proust, the incredible visual guide to In Search of Lost Time; and created The Mentaculus, the book that appears in the Coen brothers film A Serious Man.

Cover of the Eric Karpeles book Paintings in Prouts.

Cover of The Mentaculus by Arthur Gopnik, from the film A Serious Man.

Interior of The Mentaculus by Arthur Gopnik, from the film A Serious Man.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 24/02/2024

Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022). An incredible film, if you have the stomach for it.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 22/02/2024

The inconveniences of working with both live and dead bodies.

In the preface to this work, Albinus described his goals and working methods in considerable detail, and in terms that seem self-contradictory by the standards of mechanical objectivity: he is at once committed to the most exacting standards of visual accuracy in depicting his specimens, and to creating images of "the best pattern of nature". To the former end, he goes to lengths until then unheard of among anatomists to meticulously clean, reassemble, and prop up the skeleton, checking the exact positions of the hip bones, thorax, clavicles, and so on, by comparison with a very skinny man made to stand naked alongside the prepared skeleton. (This test cost Albinus some anxiety as well as time and trouble, for the naked man demanded a fire to ward off the winter chill, greatly accelerating the putrefaction of the skeleton.)

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 16/02/2024

Albert (2013) on Aharanov and Albert (1984).

What Aharanov and I had to say about it (Aharanov and Albert 1984) was that in so far as frame K is concerned, the interaction “disrupts (as it were) the transformation properties of the state and disrupts its covariance, without in any way disrupting the history of the state itself.” But precisely how it is that the transformation properties of something can be disrupted without in any way disrupting the history of the thing itself I confess I can no longer imagine. It seems panicked – looking back on it now – and incoherent, and mad.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 13/02/2024

10thC Heart Sutra, in the shape of a pagoda, one of four found in Dunhuang. The text begins under the Buddha (probably Avalokiteśvara), and then follows the red dotted lines, weaving back to finish where it started. The character at the apex is the 130th, the centre of the sutra: 無, “emptiness”.

Chinese text of the Heart Sutra, arranged in the shape of a pagoda. Pelliot 2168 held at the National Library of France.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 11/02/2024

Gibbon uses the poem to make the point that even people such as this had to fear that their lives would be uprooted by war (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776-1789, Chapter XXX):

The old man, who had passed his simple and innocent life in the neighbourhood of Verona, was a stranger to the quarrels both of kings
and of bishops; his pleasures, his desires, his knowledge, were confined within the little circle of his paternal farm; and a staff supported his aged steps, on the same ground where he had sported in his infancy. Yet even this humble and rustic felicity (which Claudian describes with so much truth and feeling) was still exposed to the undistinguishing rage of war. His trees, his old contemporary trees, must blaze in the conflagration of the whole country; a detachment of Gothic cavalry might sweep away his cottage and his family; and the power of Alaric could destroy this happiness which he was not able either to taste or to bestow. “Fame,” says the poet, “encircling with terror her gloomy wings, proclaimed the march of the Barbarian army, and filled Italy with consternation”; [text continues]

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