#and theories of mind and research. (

[zvaigzdelasas]

what does your blog title mean

Assuming you mean "The Universe As A Causal Set"? Think in the near decade I've had this title you're one of the first to ask lmao... it's the title of appendix C from this paper that I find as an interesting theoretical cosmological model as well as a framing that i think is quite colorful as a demonstration for the awe-some scope of Cosmology as an epistemological project

[yanderespamton78]

Fucking HELP ME GUYS one of my best friends who I talk to basically 24/7 hasn't replied or has any messages I've sent to him deliver in 36 FUCKING HOURS now I'm genuinely starting to get concerned about him where the flying fanny flap is he I wanna talk to my bestie

[spottedenchants]

**CR C3 Spoilers** So I was just reading “Just a Little Bit Longer, Love” in your TS series and in Chapter 3, when Essek’s teasing Caleb with all the names of his many aliases/disguises, you included: “Maybe Journey, or Seth?” Did you… did you somehow PREDICT his Cobalt Soul disguise???! 👀

okay short answer: no, not really xD

Seth (the name) is 100% from C3 ep94, and TS!Essek has had a Cobalt Soul persona in the bg of the the series for (irl) years. 'Prediction' feels like it requires some narrative foresight- I just wanted to make Essek do some community service xD

long answer with its own tl;dr:

One thing I like about fanfic is that it's a very fluid medium. One thing I like about writing TS as a non-chronological series is that fluidity is inherent to the 'overarching' story I am telling- it's like revisiting and revising memories. I'd like to think of TS as being canon-adjacent or canon-compatible, and I do on occasion edit minor details when something comes up in CR canon that I would like to include in the series. For example, the Nein Heroez is destroyed in Mighty Nein Reunited, so I went back through the series and renamed the ship to the Nein Heroez II because I thought the original getting destroyed was interesting while also still being very fond of its name.

'Seth' is not a name I came up with as an alias for Essek- that 100% came from C3 ep94. In fact, the original name I had there in Just a Little Bit Longer, Love was 'Tristan', an alias I have never used in TS save for that singular instance and thus far have not even drafted/planned anything for beyond a rough concept you can find on this post here.

THAT SAID (<- getting excited)

For the longest time, I have had TS!Essek doing Cobalt Soul work alongside Beauregard and Caleb in the background of the series (in the bg because idk how to write the work he is doing in an interesting way yet) and I am absolutely thrilled that Essek might be pursuing a similar path by 843 PD in CR canon AND that other people seem enthused about the idea too!

'Seth' as a concept (divorced from Cobalt Soul things) has helped me work through some open-ended tangles I've been picking at in my WIP pile for ages, such as Arc 2 TS!Essek being displeased when maintaining his persona of Phillip Sommer for prolonged periods of time. Phillip Sommer was drafted to be TS!Essek's main face in the Empire and thus his Cobalt Soul persona. However, all of TS!Essek's personas are gifted by his friends, kindly, yes, but gifted just the same, and that means none of them are Him- they don't look like him, their names don't sound like his, they are Different People. So 'Seth' slots in very nicely and I am Very excited to carve into TS!Essek's sense of self as it relates to 'Seth'.

TL;DR: While I do edit minor details like Tristan -> Seth, I am and have been a staunch supporter of Essek working with the Cobalt Soul for A While and I am so very excited to see others warm up to the concept so readily :D

[l8tof1]

I feel like some fans are way too invested in his personal/love life. Like?? He's a GROWN man?? He makes his own decisions?? Even if you don't like his choices of women, it's not your place as a fan of his work and who he is as what you perceive him to be, to judge or want to have an opinion on who he dates or spends his time with. Does he show up and do his work? Yes. Does he give back to his community? Yes. Does he stand for something other than himself? Yes. As a fan of his, that is where you should draw the line. Fans fell in love with his dedication to his work, his story as he got into F1 , the struggle , the perseverance, the encouraging words, the dazzling smile and that amazing body (short king got it like that).

Now, if he was dating a predator (like max is), then your opinion is something that can be looked at.

well. it’s contradictory imo to say don’t look at drivers’ personal lives but do have an opinion on max and his partner. 😸

but i agree that we really really do not need to be investigating and analyzing drivers’ romantic lives. the fact that there seem to be entire accounts out there dedicated to this is so creepy and insane (and tbf that other anon did not come off to me at all like they were this level of unhinged about lewis lol).

idk if this is controversial to say but imo you can choose to be a fan of someone for certain values they embody or things they have achieved or comfort they give you without needing to know everything about them and without approving of every single choice they make. that’s how i feel about my love for lewis at least :)

[daisies-on-a-cup]

freud was stupid for believing that the mind had everything to do with it. and watson was stupid for believing the mind had next to nothing to do with it. if they were alive today, the criticism they would receive on their research would be so severe i think they might have killed themselves.

[kittykatninja321]

Jason and Catherine thoughts soft launch: I think they could’ve (would’ve?) been terribly enmeshed

[sunburnacoustic]

[Matt, on the Chinese lettering on Simulation Theory's cover] It's a trilemma: it's like a triangle, instead of a dilemma, it's like a three-way problem which you kind of solve, which is basically the band, it's me, Dom and Chris, we are a trilemma.

[lesamis]

🍋

sometimes i get a little sad about the way being at the phd home for a long time makes me want to like. take off the academiasona and just breathe for a bit. bc i love my friends here but our lives are v fundamentally different and this becomes glaringly obvious when one of them mentions their summer home or says they're taking their mum to the folkwang museum for her bday or when they randomly have cremant in the house and i instantly feel like im wearing some kind of Bildungsbürger skinsuit they tailored for me and it doesn't fit right. but then. these are the same people you can send a silly little poem to that you wrote about a rotten lemon and they'll reply straightaway saying they love it and it reminds them of this one contemporary sculptor who makes giant bedazzled rotten lemons. and for a second this whole thing makes sense

[forestofmemories]

you don’t seem that annoyed about having to discuss theories with your “researcher colleagues” though👀

uh huh

“fellow researcher” UH HUH

[compneuropapers]

Interesting Reviews for Week 21, 2023

Planning with Theory of Mind. Ho, M. K., Saxe, R., & Cushman, F. (2022). Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 26(11), 959–971.

Learning to see in depth. Levi, D. M. (2022). Vision Research, 200, 108082.

Multistability, perceptual value, and internal foraging. Safavi, S., & Dayan, P. (2022). Neuron, 110(19), 3076–3090.

How to build a cognitive map. Whittington, J. C. R., McCaffary, D., Bakermans, J. J. W., & Behrens, T. E. J. (2022). Nature Neuroscience, 25(10), 1257–1272.

[areyoudoingthis]

people will make fun of tjlc for being a conspiracy and then turn around and do the same thing with their show and be 100% convinced that they're right actually and the difference is that the tjlcers were wrong

[quill-of-thoth]

It isn’t “for” anything

Small pet peeve, because I have been clearing through old links and stuff, but I thought everyone deserved to be reminded: there’s a lot of stuff socially, psychologically, and evolutionarily that doesn’t exist because of any specific thing. It’s a byproduct of how they made the sausage (the organism) and it doesn’t reliably harm us enough to get cut out... it’s also probably older (though sometimes younger) than you think by at least a factor of ten.  There’s a lot of fascinating theories  that float around tumblr that make this fundamental attribution error: sure, something might be USEFUL for a specific neurological or psychological purpose, but that doesn’t mean that it was invented to solve that problem. Just like the thumb is ultimately a hyperspecialized piece of fish fin, and even if you go back to the first instance of a thumb, they’re not created to open pill bottles - they were there long before the pill bottles were. The lack of depth of scale is especially evident in “why do we have x stereotype in society?” or “why is X a common fear,” which is where evolutionary biology focused on humans tends to fail hardest. 

Social mores are always younger than expected, because our societal memory is not exactly vast and we re-interperet the past every day. Do you really think that all human societies, which at one point were “everybody within 30 miles of a specific good water source” or “everyone descended from one of grandma’s friends” were uniform around the globe and had some consistent ur-mythology that you can discover? Chemical and physical brain stuff has the opposite problem. It’s older than your theories propose. Propose some sort of radical brain structure change in the last ten thousand years and get laughed out of the fucking room. Like, where did you think brain architecture came from? You think we invented all that shit in the past ten thousand years? Half the time we got it from Great Great X10^1000 grandparent planarian, who used it to tell time.

[hugepolecat3298]

interesting about the Japan manslaughter laws. Do you think that Kazui would be found guilty then? It seems like it depends on how he told Hinako/what he expected or offered for the relationship to be like afterwards. He treated her kindly it seems like while still lying to her. ig it also depends on what he told her too.

i'm unsure tbh, he definitely understood that she would be very upset by what he was going to tell her (even disregarding the cat/dove imagery bc he may have 'added' the violence to his memories after she died, his facial expressions during the smoke break part makes it seem like he knows something bad is going to happen) but if i were him i would have assumed that she would be mad at me, scream at me maybe, definitely not want to be with me anymore but i doubt the possibility of her killing herself would have crossed his mind. i won't go so far to say that she overreacted but most people in (besides the lack of love on kazui's part) happy/non-abusive marriages wouldn't immediately kill themselves if their spouse wanted to end said marriage so i can't really fault kazui for telling her and i doubt a court of law would either

[bo0zey]

vegeterian corndogs and sausage on a stick u r my kryptonites

[mekatrio]

interesting how much of kido's novel backstory was retconned... this is from novel 3. bc in novel 7, while kido's dad is a piece of shit, he isnt described to partake in any of these behaviors. and also, that kido and rin were in the dungeon when they died, not the bedroom.. hmm

[kawaii-kushami]

the go/lden kam/uy fixation is really making me curious about hygiene/habits around sneezing in early 1900s japan and i just have no idea where to find any info on that