Category Archives: The Book

Notes for the Book: Magical Thinking, Cognitive Dissonance, Group-Thinking

Posted on 30 September 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Extending thoughts from previous posts about the future of enlightenment and similar matters. About group-thinking and how people get along in their lives just fine without understanding how the world actually works (as well-established by physics, chemistry, biology including evolution, … Continue reading →

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Notes for the Book: Deutsch on Reality

Posted on 16 September 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m still, intermittently, reading my way through David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality, and today came across these passages, that echo and underscore my thoughts in Notes for the Book: Hierarchy of Knowledge and Human Affairs. I said in that … Continue reading →

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Notes for the Book: The Future of Enlightenment

Posted on 24 August 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

More thoughts coming together. A famous quote is this from SF author William Gibson: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” (There are variants of this phrase around the web also.) Then there was a video … Continue reading →

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Notes for the Book: Timelines

Posted on 5 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

I love timelines, especially those scaled depictions of the progress of time from left (the past) to right (the present and the future). Back in the 8th grade, I think it was, I constructed such a timeline on a scroll … Continue reading →

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Notes for the Book? Certainly Excerpt from the Memoirs. Hierarchy of Process Management: CMMI

Posted on 1 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m frequently fascinated by trying to recreate my train of thought — or perhaps I should say, I occasionally realize how my train of thought came about and am fascinated by the realization. For five or six weeks now I’ve … Continue reading →

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Notes for the Book: Hierarchy of Morality

Posted on 26 June 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

This one isn’t mine; this is Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, which I first became aware of in Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), page 624, and later recalled when I reread E.O. Wilson’s foundational On … Continue reading →

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Notes for the Book: Hierarchy of Attitudes about Gender and Sex

Posted on 4 June 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m rethinking a lot of matters, about epistemology, about culture and politics, as ranges of attitudes, from the intuitive and simplistic, to the informed and complex. Are some of these spectra, rather than hierarchies? A hierarchy implies that the top … Continue reading →

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Notes for the Book: Hierarchy of Science Fiction

Posted on 3 June 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

(updated 8jul20, with additional para’s at the end) What is science fiction? Many things, and what interests me about science fiction is not reflected in all its forms, any more than any particular music fan, interesting in dance, say, or … Continue reading →

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Notes for the Book: Hierarchy of Knowledge and Human Affairs

Posted on 30 May 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

[updated 8 Jul 2020] [updated 26 Jun 2020] Everything you need to understand the reality of the world, as discovered over centuries, and especially in the past century and past few decades, is out there, available to you. All the … Continue reading →

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Notes for the Book: A Hierarchy of Understanding

Posted on 28 May 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Next, a hierarchy of stages about the extent to any of us understands the universe. (Which is distinct from simply being aware of it, though it overlaps it somewhat.) At the base level is the understanding of primitive tribes about … Continue reading →

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