philosophy
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Mark Tracy Imagine living in a world where patterns repeat in a meaningful sense—but never in exactly the same way. The Sun rises every day.The Moon goes through phases.The seasons return each year. But if you look closely, these cycles do not line up perfectly. The lunar month does not divide evenly into the year.…
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On the shoulders of giants “por los siglos de los siglos” History becomes possible when at least three natural cycles repeat with incommensurate periods, producing configurations whose relative phases continually drift and never exactly repeat. The Earth–Sun–Moon system presents observers with a particular sort of temporal environment: a set of stable but incommensurate cycles whose…
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Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative is to act according to that maxim which you can simultaneously will to be a universal law. However, I think that there are no maxims regarding actions alone that may be coherently willed universally, because one can easily contrive a situation where any action is permissible to prevent a greater evil.…
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I like to publish my most important ongoing works to this blog so that they may be read in the event of my unexpected death. The foregoing text is one example. In it, I discuss the crucial topics of abstraction and analogy, two mechanisms of mentation and communication so pervasive and critical that it can…
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If we choose to be, then we are reality articulating itself into existence as such. In saying “I am,” we at once give voice to God’s “I AM.”
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Crystal Teardrops (on Gender)My poems are crystal teardropsborn of confusion, crystallizedby its resolution.They work their way out;I cannot push them.Here’s one.I am the lightest amongst womenand I beat the heavy drum amidst the company of brothers—And why shouldn’t I?I carry years of Knowing and Unknowing,of the hardening and softening,of the chortles and the fire;and it…
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I have been thinking about grace recently. Psalm 42 says, “Hope in God, and you will praise Him again.” This strikes me because it seems that if you hope for grace, then you will have eyes to see it: or rather, you will attribute to grace what may otherwise have been attributed to chance or…
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Dear reader, Here is essentially everything I know, distilled into a handful of pages. It is a high-level map of how to model anything and how to learn from data. It is intentionally general, though it may be possible to generalize further. I’ll probably expand this writing over time, including by writing expositions to the…
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Individuals are not ultimately reducible to a collection or intersection of categories. No one has seriously argued that they are. Reality is inevitably more nuanced than any system of classification of individuals; and therefore, any set of actions based on a classification system is vulnerable to accusations of injustice by individuals who feel themselves to…
The Trinitarian Mystery 