Kasra's Blog

A review of Hofstadter's "Surfaces and Essences"

There’s a common meditation instruction for working with challenging emotions: “focus on the physical sensations of the emotion without trying to change them.”

Does our mind influence the world, separate from our actions?

Mechanical neural networks: Architected materials that learn behaviors A synthetic protein-level neural network in mammalian cells A cell signaling model as a trainable neural nanonetwork Single cortical neurons as deep artificial neural networks The neur…

a letter to friends

hint: stop asking the question

For experiments showing consciousness during non-REM sleep using serial awakenings, see Early-night serial awakenings as a new paradigm for studies on NREM dreaming and Assessing sleep consciousness within subjects using a serial awakening paradigm.

book review + notes

This is a citation list accompanying my thread on the planarian worm.

notes on a distinctive mood

tales of new york

the world needs it

unedited recap of my eclipse experience

hol up lemme break the 4th wall for a sec

a guide to non-prescriptive listening

in praise of occasional helplessness

reminder

notes to self

ramble

This is what I remember about childhood: things seemed magical.

Usually when I sit down to write, I have an essay idea in mind, and I’m trying to write it from start to finish.

an conversational anecdote

and what happens once you get there

Using this as a weekly notepad to document the questions and ideas I’m currently exploring.

In this post I explore two questions relating to David Chapman’s idea of nebulosity.

Anil Seth’s Being You is hard to review, because he covers astonishingly wide territory in just a few hundred pages.

For more of my writing, consider subscribing to my substack.

People like to explain success with a single “most important” trait.

I can't have it all but surely I can have a little bit of everything in exactly the right proportions?

braindump on spiritual clarity, rhythm in writing, the story of the universe, and more

some high-level questions and speculations about neuroscience

This post summarizes my independent readings and research into psychology and neuroscience.

we all need more lobsters and shrump

you can't erase, you can't undo, but you can press on

browser extensions are your friend

easy to see in retrospect

some rough intuitions against panic

you can't, but you can help them save themselves

one of many existential problems

This is the third post in my series of daily posts for the month of April.

This is the second post in my series of daily posts for the month of April.

I’m trying out an experiment where I write and publish every day for the month of April.

Below I’ve copied over rough notes on my psychology research as of mid-March.

Do abstractions exist?

Growing up I internalized ideas about self-discipline that, in retrospect, were rather unhealthy.

In Why I am not an effective altruist, Erik Hoel criticizes the philosophical core of the EA movement.

This piece is about why I think the Deutschian definition of rationalism is wrong, and what I would propose as an alternative (but admittedly more vague) definition.

Just reproducing this brief tweet thread as a blog post. something you realize after sharing things on social media for a while is that the number of people who are impacted by your stuff is a lot bigger than strictly the number of people who actively eng…

(Originally written in December 2021.)

There are many things that are uncomfortable about writing on the internet.