Link to video Every lens shows you something. No lens can show you everything. And no lens shows you itself. The most powerful thing shaping what you think is the thing you’re least able to examine. It’s a structural condition of being any kind of…
Two thinkers. Same century. Same rejection of the standard picture of the mind. Gregory Bateson. Anthropologist, biologist, cyberneticist. Asked: what is the pattern that connects living systems? Humberto Maturana. Biologist, neuroscientist. Asked: how does a living system know anything at all? Different starting points. Profoundly…
What you think you know and what you actually know are separated by a gap most people never cross. This has little to do with capability or because of impossibility. This is because they don’t know the gap is there. And you cannot cross what…
Gregory Bateson’s ecology of mind is the idea that mind is not located in the brain, it is the pattern of relationships between an organism and its environment. That idea shifts how we understand thinking, mental health, and what a self actually is. The question…
Before you had a single thought, something was already deciding which thoughts were possible. This has nothing to do with a particular person, system, or even a conspiracy. It is something much more quiet than any of those. It is your background. Most people think…
Newton stayed. That’s where we left it. But staying is not passive. Staying is the hardest thing a thinking person can do. Here is what staying is not. It is not waiting. Waiting is passive. Waiting assumes the answer will arrive on its own if…
Newton had a problem no one on earth could solve. Including Newton. It wasn’t a lack of intelligence and it certainly was not a lack of effort. The problem was simpler than that and more fundamental. The tools didn’t exist. Newton was trying to describe…
You have been thinking. Not consuming. Not receiving. Not nodding along at fluent output that resolved your not-knowing before it could do its work. For fifteen videos you have been in genuine cognitive engagement with questions that don’t have easy answers and don’t pretend to.…
Imagine Socrates in the marketplace. Not in Athens, back then. Here. Now. The same man, the same deliberate unhurriedness, the same quality of attention that made people simultaneously drawn to him and uncomfortable, the same absolute refusal to be impressed by confidence that hadn’t been…
There is a story we tell about difficulty. That it is the price of an outcome. The unpleasant tax on the result you actually want. The thing to be minimized, optimized away, reduced as much as possible so that the output can arrive as efficiently…