Kasra's Blog

The idea that the hard problem can be solved with metaphysics has been gelling in my mind for quite a while now.

I recently thought of a meditation prompt that is fitting in moments of excitement, and potentially in other situations too.

About a month ago I experienced a setback.

I was playing around with a handheld microscope recently and I felt like it gave me an intuitive picture of Chapman’s nebulosity idea.1 The first thing that became obvious is how much grainier reality is than our day-to-day experience suggests.

There’s a certain class of bodily actions that I feel especially grateful for, and that I’ve been noticing more and more recently.

Observation is theory-laden One of Deutsch and Popper’s oft-quoted phrases is that ‘observation is theory laden’.1 This is a revelatory point about the nature of science: no statement that we can utter, or observation that we can record, is a pure observa…

This is an outgrowth of A first pass at David Chapman’s metarationality.

[The philosophical meat of this article is under the section “Current threads and questions”.

When I was reading The Beginning of Infinity, one of the passages that stood out to me was about contradictions (emphasis mine): Since theories can contradict each other, but there are no contradictions in reality, every problem signals that our knowledge…

I recently published a substack post on consciousness and am using this to write a few extra notes that I excluded from the article for brevity.

I want to become more comfortable with publishing bad writing.

For most of my life I was chasing after “it”.

How is it that we can imagine things that are logically impossible?

When describing the trajectories of other people’s lives, we sometimes make statements that I’ll call claims of ultimate ruination.

I sometimes have dreams where I’m checking Twitter.

Here’s something I wish I realized earlier: believing you will fail does not mean you will fail.

I’d like to capture some feelings I have about a pattern I’ve noticed on the internet: the tendency towards curation.

The word ‘absurd’ has always held a special place in my heart.

This is a list of philosophical questions I’m currently grappling with.

A key part of happiness is understanding the role and nature of problem-solving in life.

This post is an attempt to answer the question: how do you define morality objectively?

Many people have talked about this but I’d like to share my framing of it.

In this post I discuss two methods for understanding reality, and the respective roles they’ve played in my own worldview over time.

In this piece, I first share a framework for causality put forth by Karl Popper; I then share how it differed from my initial intuitions about causality; and then I explain why Popper’s framework is better.

I read more slowly than most of my friends who read.

My dream this morning looked like this: I was with a group of people, we were stuck in a classroom-like place, and some authority was keeping us trapped there.

I hosted a conversation yesterday about knowledge and epistemology.

Sometimes I dream about taking a few years away from everything and reading 40 textbooks and trying to understand how everything works.

An ongoing list. how easily I can feel wonder from looking up at the sky how much of an urge I feel to check notifications in the morning how at ease I feel going to bed whether my news feed makes me happy or anxious how often I remember that it’s not obv…

This is a little mental exercise that I included in my most recent newsletter.

I read this paper in late 2020 as part of my ongoing study of our neuroscientific understanding of consciousness.

Overall: 2/5 stars.

Overall: 4/5 stars.

If you’ve grown up in an environment that values prestige and extrinsic accomplishments, applying to college is a major milestone.

Warning: includes spoilers!

In February of 2020, I set a goal of finishing 40 books for the year.