Captain Pleasure, Andrés Gómez Emilsson@algekalipso• 8 months ago

I once talked to someone at a party in college that made one brilliant point after another at the intersection of philosophy of mind and economics. He was crystal clear in his thinking and he had an elaborate (but not overfit as far as I can tell) model of how society was not made of individuals, but rather of attention streams. Rather than carving the social ontology at the individual, he would break it down in terms of attention types and degrees of signal to noise ratio in verbal actions. He viewed economic activity in terms of attention streams recruiting each other for information processing and resource extraction. And so on. He said he was putting this into writing and emailing professors about it, and I wished him luck. He apparently got into a fight with someone at the group house hosting the party later that night but I never learned what exactly happened. About a week later I found him at the cafeteria and asked him how his theory was going. "Oh, that? I was going through a manic episode. I just came back from the hospital, and currently being stabilized with meds. Doctors suspect bipolar II." Months later I talked to him again over dinner. Fully stabilized and "back to normal", he said he thought his theory was just bullshit coming from a manic mind. And now he was just recited full mainstream neuroscience ideas together with a Dennettian deflationary view of consciousness: "yeah, I guess it's all just my prefrontal cortex organizing sensations" or something to that effect. I thought his manic self was brilliant; his normal self a complete normie without any interesting point to share. Last time I saw him was at another party where he said he had stayed up all night on Vyvanse trying to induce a manic episode again. Didn't work out very well. Not that he he hurt himself (to my knowledge), but he just never was able to recreate the mental state of his episode, something which he dearly missed. I do remember he graduated and found a job, and I hope things work out for him. Part of me is still hoping to see a book on "Economics as Attention Management" on the shelves one day.