One Year of Meandering

Baby's First Retrospective

Exciting news, friends - this week marks Mind Meandering’s first birthday! What a rush. It’s the sort of occasion that calls for a montage, but as this is a blog, I can’t imagine the B-roll of you looking at your phone would be particularly engaging.

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This is how you all look when you read my stuff, right?

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It feels like an appropriate moment to do a retrospective of sorts. As most of this blog is me yelling my opinions into the void, I’d like to touch base each year to review the work I’ve done, and give updates if my views have changed. It’s also an opportunity to share work from myself or others that I like. Assuming I keep up this practice, consider these posts a Dark Souls bonfire we sit at before going off and arguing with strangers for another 12 months.

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Rest up. You will be called many slurs.

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Changing Minds

I’ll start with posts of mine I’d change. I’m happy to keep the blog as an archive, so don’t intend on deleting/changing the posts themselves, but there are some I read now and think “Wow, how’d you miss that? Schmuck! Geez, you’re lucky you’re easy on the eyes”.

This post is a Pascal’s Wager type of argument. The general idea is that if you believe in a hell where you’ll be punished forever, then it seems prudent to avoid doing things that are likely to send you there, especially if they provide little benefit. Factory farming is plausibly the sort of thing that God would disapprove of (for obvious reasons), and the benefit of eating animals is so small, that it’s probably smart to eat plant based for 80 years if it increases your chances of living in heaven forever.

Cool idea, and I think it works for Muslims well. Particularly as they have Halal rules, which means they think God has already shown himself to care about animals somewhat. If God cares enough about animals that he wants you to kill them a specific way, he also probably doesn’t want you to killing them for the sake of it. He wrote those rules when we plausibly needed to eat them to survive, and I imagine his prescription would change once we invented supermarkets.

However, this post doesn’t depict Christianity accurately (as flagged by SolarxPvP in the comments). Depends on what denomination you are, but there are other factors besides your moral life that determine if you go to hell, such as being baptised, accepting Jesus as your lord and saviour, etc. Admittedly, my knowledge of theology is limited to what I hear from my Christian friends, so I’m not surprised I got some parts wrong. Still, I like the general approach, and I imagine Christians would still be moved by the idea that if something is plausibly awful, and the benefits from it are very small, you should avoid doing it.

In this post I steelman Incompatibilism. I wasn’t actually an Incompatibilist at the time, more of an agnostic, but it’s fun to defend views you’re unsure of sometimes. The main sticking point I have with this post is the section on the Flicker of Freedom response. At the time, I thought it was a pretty great response to Frankfurt cases, and put Compatibilism on shaky ground. However, more recently I’ve argued against the Flicker of Freedom response, and find it less compelling. Still agnostic on Compatibilism I’d say, just not moved by that argument anymore.

This post is a defense of Substance Dualism. If you’re familiar with Philosophy of Mind, you’ll not see anything revolutionary here. It deploys the sorts of arguments we’re mostly familiar with, such as P-Zombies, Intuition, Mary’s Room etc.

There’s a couple of parts of this article I’d change. First, the over confidence in the success of Philosophical Zombies. I’m still a bit partial to the argument, but would not so brazenly write as if it was an open and shut case. Fact is, physicalists have responses to P-Zombies that aren’t obviously wrong, and if you want to keep the argument alive you need to start getting real technical, and debate semantics. My official opinion these days is that P-zombies act as evidence of Dualism, but they’re not some knockdown argument.

The other thing I’d change is my characterisation of Physicalism. I framed Physicalism as believing consciousness literally is the brain, but that’s not quite right. That’s a type of Physicalism, sure, but it’s not even the most popular form. I still believe the Identity Theory is deeply unintuitive, but if I’m going to argue against a philosophical view I should make sure I’m talking about the strongest form of it.

If you’re wondering, I’m probably still a Substance Dualist, I’m just less naive about it.

Highlight Reel

Okay that’s enough growth for one day, let’s talk about how great I am. These were some posts I have soft spots for.

No philosophy, science, or research. Just being a dumb idiot while travelling in a beautiful country. Only post of mine with a picture of a Godzilla statue in it (for now).

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I’ve always been pro-nuclear, but I became particularly Nuclear-pilled while writing this one. If you’ve been reading since the start, you’ve probably noticed my interests are branching out a bit, and I’m writing about science more often. I like that I’m giving myself a longer leash, and I learned a lot during the week I wrote this. Was cool!

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Obviously, there’s a lot of ranting about animal rights on this blog, but I like this one because it targets a response that isn’t always easily handled. When someone says it’s fine to eat animals because they’re dumb, you can solve that pretty easily by pointing to dumb people and asking if you can eat them. However, when people point to the vague “capitalism is the real problem!” idea, you need to have numbers at hand to show them just how much worse eating animals is than other ordinary purchases. I think it’s handy to have this as a resource.

Thank You Tour

The blog has done a lot better than I thought it would. In the last year, we’ve picked up 650 subs, which is about 640 more than I expected, and my work has been read about 45,000 times! That’s really cool, and I’m very grateful to anyone that reads, shares, or comments here, because it always makes my weekends fun. I love meeting and chatting with people from different parts of the world, and I learn a lot from you. So, thanks! You’re a bunch of real ones.

There are also a few people that I’d like to give a shout out to.

Talis - Per Se

Talis and I were already friends before we started substack, and started writing around the same time. This was really handy, because he’s a much better philosopher than I am, and he proof read so much for me early on. It was daunting putting myself out there, but he always made time to read what I wrote, and give suggestions. We also did a collaboration post together that was a lot of fun.

It's Wrong to Eat Meat

I lean consequential round here, and Talis is always the foil to that. Here he gives a cool argument that if it’s permissible to kill animals, then it’d be wrong to perform painful surgery on them to save their life - but that seems fine! A tricky one for the humane farming advocates.

Bentham’s Bulldog - Bentham’s Newsletter

The only reason I even know what Substack is is from reading Matthew’s blog. That’s basically all I used the app for for the first year. When I did start writing myself, Matthew shared my work to his audience, which gave me enough momentum to start growing my own. I also had dinner with Matt and his girlfriend this year, and they were very friendly!

The Best Charity Isn't What You Think

I like how Matthew is willing to go to weird places in philosophy so long as he can back them up with rigorous argument. It’s this way of thinking that put him on the frontlines of the great Shrimp Welfare War this year, which saved a lot of shrimp from painful eyestalk ablation! Who says philosophy isn’t good for anything?

Tommy Blanchard - Cognitive Wonderland

Tommy’s another person that helped me find my audience by recommending me on his blog. He fought in Physicalism’s corner while I was wading into the waters of Philosophy of Mind, and showed me my missteps. He’s also a good sport when I gently bully him, which is good because it emboldens me to engage in aggressive, more violent bullying.

Myers-Briggs is Pseudoscience

Cognitive Wonderland is such a treasure trove, it’s hard to pick just one, but I did like this undressing of Myers-Briggs because I’m sick of people on Bumble asking me what mine is (I’m INT-J btw, I’m just built different). A lot of the people here came from Tommy’s blog, but if you haven’t checked him out yet, and you like your science mixed in with silly jokes, he’s your man.

Final thoughts

The first post I wrote was about lessons I’d learned since my dad died. Not really exemplary of what I write about now, but I’m glad I started with it. The sort of interests I have that motivate me to write here can be traced back to him, because he was my first teacher. He taught me what atoms are, and how gravity works. He taught me that if you go really really fast, time slows down. He even told me that one day the sun will explode and engulf us all (although, he failed to mention it would happen billions of years from now, and I didn’t sleep very well that night).

I regret that he isn’t around to read anything I put here, but I know that were he still around, he’d be sending me messages each week with his thoughts, and showing his friends. He died a couple of years before I ever made that first post, but teachers have a way of giving gifts that keep on giving, and I think this blog is one of his. If he wasn’t so curious, I probably wouldn’t be the sort of person that spends his weekends reading and writing about oxalates in spinach, but I’m glad I am. So, thanks Dad! I love you, and if I see you again, I’ll give you discounted sub! (Discounted. I’m not made of money, mate).