Author: Christopher

The mind is an ecosystem of ideas through which we see the world. This is my expansion of Karl Popper’s, Searchlight Theory of the Mind.

And men ought to know that from nothing else but (from the brain) come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations. And by this, in an especial manner, we acquire wisdom and knowledge, and see and hear, and know what are foul and what are fair, what are bad and what are good, what are sweet, and what unsavory; some we discriminate by habit, and some we perceive by their utility. By this we distinguish objects of relish and disrelish, according to the seasons; and the same things do not always please us. And by the same organ we become mad and delirious, and fears and terrors assail us, some by night, and some by day, and dreams and untimely wanderings, and cares that are not suitable, and ignorance of present circumstances, desuetude, and unskilfulness. All these things we endure from the brain, when it is not healthy, but is more hot, more cold, more moist, or more dry than natural, or when it suffers any other preternatural and unusual affection. And we become mad from humidity (of the brain). For when it is more moist than natural, it is necessarily put into motion, and the affection being moved, neither the sight nor hearing can be at rest, and the tongue speaks in accordance with the sight and hearing.

– The Genuine Works of Hippocrates. Hippocrates. Charles Darwin Adams. New York. Dover. 1868.

Links to this note:
Learning
Tools for Thought
Theory-ladenness
The Purpose Of Thinking
True Practice Makes Perfectly Fun
What is a Memory System?

• The question before any educator or education system, or anyone “helping” children to learn is not: how can creativity, imagination and curiosity be fostered? It is: how can one avoid stifling the creativity, imagination and curiosity of the learner?
• Anyone can learn anything is true in principle. We can learn anything because we can explain anything.
• Learning is an abstract process of creating and criticizing guesses about the world around us. What our minds do is guess what is correct or what might work and then our minds criticize that guess. This is all that learning ever is. It is in short guess and check.
• Everyone is indeed capable of learning anything in any curriculum – in principle. But this idea – explanatory universality – also gives the only good account as to why they do not. It is not because they lack the intelligence (everyone is equally a universal explainer after all) but rather it can only be because they are not sufficiently interested to learn everything in the curriculum to super high proficiency. Where the education system, curriculum, teachers and parents everywhere and received wisdom says: the reason Jane or Johnny did not do well in this or that test is because they lack the cognitive capability to do so, explanatory universality says they have the cognitive capability to do so but chose to use that capability to do something else they preferred. And this should be expected because universal minds can do an infinite number of things and so we should not be surprised when even minds confined under punishment to learn the same thing choose not to learn the same thing.

Brett Hall on X/Twitter: @ToKTeacher

Links to this note:
Learning

Learning is a process where we make progress in understanding something by eliminating misconceptions and integrating that understanding into the mind’s ecosystem (construction and reconostruction).

“Learning” isn’t a commodity you accumulate, it’s what happens when a mind is actively solving problems.

“Fast learning” is often either (a) reuse of a small set of good explanations across many superficially different tasks, or (b) doing a lot of already-solved problems with minor variation.

Learning is conjunctive; prevention is disjunctive.

There is no general, actionable condition whose presence is reliably positively diagnostic of learning across contexts, because learning depends on an open-ended conjunction of requirements and we cannot, in general, know that the relevant conjunction is satisfied.

Whereas:
There exist many conditions whose presence is negatively diagnostic (they shut down error-correction) because they instantiate a violated prerequisite.

See also: Brett Hall’s Tweets About Learning

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Adjacent Possible
True Practice Makes Perfectly Fun

The recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying knowledge as true or probable.

To trust a source, you need a reason to trust it. But that reason is itself a source so you need a reason to trust that. And so on, forever.

There’s no place the chain can legitimately stop. Any stopping point is just a place you decided to stop which means it’s assumption, not justification.

Links to this note:
The Scientific Method Does not Exist

A good explanation is a hard to vary assertion about reality, because every detail, ideally, plays a functional role, and if the explanation is refuted, its defenders would have nowhere to go.

We form good explanations by committing to claims that are easy to refute. We spell out how the claims could fail and what evidence would count against it. That specificity prevents us from keeping the explanation alive by adding convenient exceptions that undermine what it originally promised. We prefer these explanations because their survival may reveal how the world works.

See also:
The Most Powerful Ideas For Progress

Links to this note:
Explanatory Knowledge
What is a Rationalist
Become More Demanding

Explanatory knowledge is information where its causal power is derived from an understanding of reality. This understanding is built by forming good explanations.

See: David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

Links to this note:
Tools for Thought
Adjacent Possible
The Most Powerful Ideas For Progress
About This Website
Ambition
Tools for Thought
Free Will
Agency Is Not Fundamental

The adjacent possible is the set of new problems, conjectures, and actions that become reachable from your current situation because of the explanatory knowledge you possess. 

When you learn something or solve a problem, more doors become reachable, and the nearby options change.

See:

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About This Website
Explanatory Knowledge

A new tool/medium for thought widens the nearby ideas and questions your mind can actually reach next. It doesn’t change what you’re capable of in principle, but it expands the practical next steps for guessing, questioning, and improving your ideas.

See also: How can we develop transformative tools for thought? (Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen)

Links to this note:
About This Website
Explanatory Knowledge

Links to this note:
Good Explanation
A Genuinely Felt Problem is the Most Powerful Generator of Creative Problem-Solving that Exists
The Principle of Optimism
Explanatory Knowledge