Community Archive

🧵 View Thread

🧵 Thread (27 tweets)

Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago

some quick notes from a skim of a book that I obsessed about in 2011, Tor Nørretranders’ The User Illusion https://t.co/MeM6mqQ4ew

Tweet image 1
285 29
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

“…people experience far more than their consciousness perceives; they interact far more with the world and with each other than their consciousness thinks they do… Consciousness plays a far smaller role in human life than Western culture has tended to believe.”

107 3
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

“it takes half a second to become conscious of something, though that is not how we perceive it” when you touch a hot stove, for eg, the illusion is broken

92 1
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

a mystery of science, such as with maxwell’s equations: while the map might not be the territory, some maps have enabled us to see details of territories that were unknown when the map was drawn

67 1
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

Heinrich Herz: “One cannot escape the feeling that these equations have an existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them.” (Re: Maxwell’s)

64 1
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

“What we mean by heat and measure in temperature is disordered movement.” “In matter at a given temperature, molecules evince many different speeds… we cannot tell from the individual molecule to which temperature it belongs.”

42 0
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

the enticing idea of Maxwell’s Demon: theoretically, if you were smart and nimble enough to separate fast moving molecules from slow ones, you could reverse entropy but, next chapter asks, what is the price for being so clever? https://t.co/eRzKpVfq2g

Tweet image 1
45 1
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

skipping over lots of details but basically knowledge is costly ig. you have to measure stuff, observe stuff. this takes effort, which requires calories for a human and electricity for a computer

51 3
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

but also… there are ways to compress knowledge… this book is a serious mental workout I’m getting tired already lol https://t.co/1Oamqz7Fpb

Tweet image 1
49 2
12/31/2022
Placeholder
cado@cocadonv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

@visakanv yes there are ways to compress information, and this is the concern of information theory . I recommend reading an intro to it, It is one of those watershed things to know

1 0
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

one of my favorite examples of excellent reply game from Victor Hugo’s publisher: https://t.co/YeEyxzV6d6

Tweet image 1
53 3
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

a good communicator does not think only of himself, he also thinks about what the receiver has in his head https://t.co/Xd5GIjGhbJ

Tweet image 1
70 5
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

The least interesting aspect of good conversation is what is actually said. What is more interesting is all the deliberations and emotions that take place simultaneously during conversation in the heads and bodies of the conversers https://t.co/eocs5wKp0N

Tweet image 1
68 9
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

‘The radicality of the behaviorist opposition to any kind of introspection and self-observation is perhaps best demonstrated by the joke about the two behaviorists who have intercourse. Afterward one behaviorist says to the other, “That was fine for you, but how was it for me?”’

35 3
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

why do people go to watch plays when they already know everything that is going to happen? if the actors are good, they don’t just merely recite their lines – they embody them with a fresh liveliness, true to the moment, and that’s what’s really enchanting to witness https://t.co/RBu0D19nb2

Tweet image 1
52 3
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

split-brain experiments (tests on epilepsy patients who had last-resort surgery to split the hemispheres) seem to suggest that people are capable of inventing bullshit explanations that they thoroughly believe with no hesitation or uncertainty https://t.co/UDDss0phFZ

Tweet image 1
44 1
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

“consciousness presents us with sensory data that have already been heavily processed, but it does not tell us that” “consciousness is depth but is experienced as surface” imo lots of people have an uneasy, unhappy, contentious relationship with their consciousness

34 1
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

there’s some excellent stuff about the deeper self beyond consciousness that he describes as the Me which is distinct from the I, and how it ties up with everything. Very evocative and very difficult to condense https://t.co/t6GtSgdAlj

Tweet image 1
19 0
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

“Almost all spiritual traditions use posture and gesture as a means whereby we enter into relation with the divine… this body’s roots reach down into the soil of an organismic vitality where the conscious mind cannot follow” musicians, athletes, etc all know this too https://t.co/Vh5u8190fp

Tweet image 1
23 1
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

P. W. Anderson: “the ability to reduce everything down to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.”

28 2
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

lol I was so excited https://t.co/OpUWZxOwxI

Tweet image 1
23 0
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

“Fuck straight lines” - Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser https://t.co/nqBOCTqvU3

Tweet image 1
28 2
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

“People are not transparent to themselves and are therefore unable to formulate their needs through the low bandwidth of language” but!! https://t.co/P2hZjITwpO

Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 3 years ago

💡! you don't actually need to "know" what you want in order to do what you want

263 22
35 3
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

here’s a bit I found really compelling, and further catalyzed my conviction to be a culture-worker: Tor argues that the threat and anxiety of nuclear apocalypse diminished because, as simple and naive as it sounds… people talked about it. Everyone did. And culture changed https://t.co/DJHVUAOVK8

Tweet image 1
18 1
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

“We must have the courage to say naive things, do naive things, persistently and amicably over the decades, simply because we believe they are right and feel they are right and are conscious they are right.” ^ this surely influenced my riffs about Long Games https://t.co/Q8QIHJcpfY

Tweet image 1
30 4
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

on the sublime: https://t.co/nYnHVWIiDK

Tweet image 1
16 3
12/31/2022
Placeholder
Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 2 years ago
Replying to @visakanv

may you have the courage to dare to believe that the world is more than we see, more than we think, more than we know. ❤️‍🔥 /fin https://t.co/PyL4pOt53n

Tweet image 1
34 5
12/31/2022