Sometimes, the stars align for just one person to make a large impact. Perhaps they are extraordinarily brave and capable, or maybe they were born or moved into a position where each of their actions ripple out enormously. I've met quite a few so-called "great men," and they were indeed special, a force of nature. But even they age out, or are jostled out, and are revealed to be also, just another person. I have equally met brilliant people whose names are known only by a few dozen.

I regret that I was not able to live out the greatest image of my dreams. I could not argue well enough, fight effectively enough, work hard enough to bring forth a utopia or a heaven. Nor could I convey such an image of my making persuasively enough that it gave people courage, hope, and direction. What I ended up being was just yet another medical student, maybe a little special in just how eager he was to help, who ended up burning out and retreating to his tribe. The people I set out to help, the homeless, the humiliated, the humble, they still sleep upon concrete beds, dreaming of a brighter future, and no cavalry is headed their way, since I could not muster one.

What I did was make a small project to bring a needed kind of care to the underserved. It's one of a small, growing movement nationwide. I'm proud of that.

I realized that I cannot be absolutely good to others and also myself. As long as we exist among one another, sometimes we must eat one another. Sometimes we must fashion tools out of one another. Sometimes we must step on one another to climb to a spot we need to get to. There is no perfect ending where everything resolves and becomes good and sensible. We are all living somewhere in the uncomfortable middle, searching for our very own "good enough" states, which when persisted, become our very own "good enough" stories.

I love life, I love my friends, I love my family, I love my girlfriend, I love my puppy, I love good food, I love good books, I love pretty clothes, I love a beautiful sky, I love a quiet waterfront, I love kind strangers, I love spontaneous moments of humanity. I love it all, and so with sorrow, I realize I cannot love everything at full volume at every moment of my life. Sometimes, I need to eat something I'd rather be friends with. Sometimes, I need to turn away from the man whose hands are outstretched towards me.

I'm searching for that good enough life, and I'm glad to share it with yours.

I am of the opinion that "abstract things are real" and "abstract things are inventions" are a false dichotomy. I think abstractions are reality, stripped of its features. Think of it like... alchemy? Instead of purifying water, you purify patterns. With your newly crisp and clear liquid, you can do things that would previously be impossible, like run a CPAP machine or, I don't know, cool particle accelerators. Same with patterns. So "the world is secretly just patterns" is stupid, but so is "patterns are just human inventions." Just my two cents.

You know that myth about the dude who fell in love with his own statue? In the myth, the statue comes alive. In reality, the statue probably did come alive, but only for that guy. Everyone else got a rambling dude trying to fuck marble. Don't fuck what you've made, guys.

Art, art is dangerous. In trying to express yourself, you can easily get lost in the sauce. You're making quick and untested associations, oftentimes through the medium of language, and language is very misleading. It's a cobbled-together mess of a communication protocol between humans. You're experimenting with that protocol to pass on a bigger, more colorful chunk of yourself, but in that process the protocol's exposed internals start messing with you back.

If you ever hit a dead end or get stuck in quicksand, know it is not defeat to ask for help or return to the masses.

나도 사실 분간이 안 가는 곳에서 노는 걸 좋아하는 사람이긴 한데
그러다 보면 진짜 이상한 데로 가기도 하더라고
내 글 쓰는 취미를 살리면서도 너무 혼자 동떨어지지 않으려면
일상에 가까운, 살에 맞닿은 글을 쓰는 게 좋을 것 같아

Looking back, it's a little insane. I was obsessed with the idea of self-reference and its relation to logic. Gödel is the obvious reference, but if you dig deeper, a whole category of structures reveals itself, traveling through Cantor, Tarski, Turing, Yanofsky, and others. Its extension to philosophy of mind is a shaky step, but I bit the bullet and connected it to ideas in theology. Thus was born my idea of "inter-choosing," that agency is real but unlike what Barad says, is not a cosmic principle of intra-determination but genuine interaction among discrete experiential selves with interiority.

It's not such an original idea, of course. You can see glimpses of it in Whitehead, Nagel, Heraclitus, James, Peirce, and even Buddhist and Ubuntu traditions. Bring it a little closer to lived reality and you get Thich Nhat Hanh's interbeing and maybe even Smolin's energetic causal sets. Viewed generously, it could be an amateur branch of process-relational philosophy, which is as old and new as philosophy itself.

But even Whitehead allowed eternal objects, Buddhism seeks enlightenment, and Smolin argued that time is genuine. I see these as attempts to bring radical ideas of flux and impermanence down into conciliation with our experience, where some things genuinely are so enduring that they might as well be permanent within our scales. It's like the joke where someone starts freaking out about the heat death of the universe. Buddy, your kid is crying.

poems, by soil is one of the proudest things I've done. It has maybe two-three occasional readers every month, it has three followers, and by all measures it is an obscure attempt at philosophy by an earnest twenty-something-year-old with no training. But I really enjoyed writing it, and I still think some pieces in it are worth reading. If you happen by it, I recommend reading about burying in winter snow and disillusionment in warm hearth.

In the time since I finished the site, I wrote three more and landed in a small diary with private and public components. In the diary, I still struggle with juggling the abstract with the concrete. This very passage you're reading is practice, by an amateur pilot who's learning not only to launch into the clouds but also guide the craft down to a soft landing with the contents left intact. I'd like to be someone you'd happily hitch a ride with, so I could show you the tops of the peaks I've found, then we can come back to earth and have a jolly chat about it over some dumplings, soup, and a can of coke.

Or, hear me out, lead climbing.

Plane ride.
"The table does not fall and dissolve into minded ichor; it remains held in place by things as real as teeth."

Rollercoaster.
"You read theory books and you might find your mind spinning with strange possibilities. Worry not, because the puppy being fluffy and the drink being cool and sweet are not less real than the things people talk about ten feet underneath the surface in Geneva. In fact, you can ask a physicist and they'll readily tell you that they are less certain about what they wrote in their most recent paper than the fact that their grandma makes some damn good Sunday gravy."

Lead climb.
"There are active research programs on the nature of entities in scales where quantum effects become dominant. One of the leading explanations for why those might not be so apparent in macroscopic scales is decoherence.

Although efforts are being made to extend our usual deterministic approaches to quantum mechanics called hidden-variable theories, they have become partly constrained by Bell inequalities observed in experiments that won the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics, which rules out local hidden variables.

Nonlocality has inspired interpretations that our intuitions are derivative of a more fundamental level that exists elsewhere.

My normative claim is that this should not inspire a reverse-directed approach to start away from the human scale and arrive back at it. Scientific theory should remain accountable to human use and understanding, therefore we should work to improve our 'nomological machines' to extend our macroscopic intuitions down to microscopic scales, rather than be misled into understanding a domain other than the one manifest to us is primary, and we are secondary to it. This is a position adjacent to Nancy Cartwright's in The Dappled World, Husserl's Crisis of European Sciences, and Aristotle's theory of abstraction as subtraction.

Although a circle made of carbon etchings on parchment may divulge things more readily than one made of copper, and that knowledge should help update our use of metal rings, it is the quick flight to a metaphysics where humans are mere ants in alien playgrounds that is the object of my critique.

shouting, from a distance upwards "Alright, down belay!""

I enjoyed writing lead climb the most, but I think rollercoaster is, surprisingly, the best work out of the three. It actually practices what it preaches, which is what makes it most trustworthy. I might try to write a rollercoaster-like explanation of Boltzmann brains next.

P.S.
Some more:

Plane ride.
"The boundary of the self is porous and actively staked; it is at the same time a fixed and moving point, relative to other discretenesses."

Rollercoaster.
"If you consider yourself, you'll see that through time, you change compared to a fixed point in time, and you also move through space."

Here's how I think about speculative theorizing. What did you like to do when you were a baby? I loved playing video games. I got scolded all the time for doing "useless" things and wasting my time. Frankly, if you paid attention to the cute girls and G.I. Joes shooting AK-47s at each other, you might've gotten the same idea! But hidden underneath the microtransactions and the painstaking efforts to land a 360 no-scope were things like hand-eye coordination, a taste for what kinds of game designs work and what other kinds suck, and communication under pressure. Which sounds like a bunch of bull, but I participated in a game jam in undergrad, I still write interactive fiction, and my love for narrative games translated really nicely to what you're reading right now!

All of that to say, I think speculative academics is a very highbrow version of this. You give a bunch of super gamer-minded people real weird toys, and they come up with a whole theory of categories of categories and universes with rules and – it's all nerd talk! You don't need to get it, much like you don't need to understand "savescumming" and "K/D/A" and "DPS" and "aggro." What matters is that all that playing sometimes runs into practical uses, and that you can log off when your mom tells you it's time for dinner. So don't you disrespect us gamers ever again!

I probably need to quit cold turkey since I'm not very good at keeping my feet on the ground when I start floating into ideas, but when it's late at night, I'm done with my work, and there's not much else to do, the blank page seems to beg for my input! I've all but given up on finding ways to practice "safely," I think my brain is just way too association-happy and not disciplined enough to engage in intellectualization responsibly. It's crazy how even things like these can become addictions.

One semi-last attempt to save my writing hobby/habit: instead of taking readers up onto a spiraling track, a zero-G flying experience, or a difficult climb with crimps and cams, why don't I just... take them on a nice walk along the waterfront? I'm good at that. I've been told I'm good at that. Maybe I'll do more of that.

"The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron'd with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv'd of the use of every member and faculty.

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium... I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther."

Maybe I should also write about my "philosophical melancholy and delirium" in very fashionable language and I'll be taken seriously by my contemporaries. :-)

Here's a practice that might be productive. Imagine the same scenario, if it were swapped with eating. "I eat when I'm tired, it's late at night, and I'm lonely" sounds sad. Well then, so does "I do philosophy when I'm tired, it's late at night, and I'm lonely." Sounding prestigious and being healthy are different things, although oftentimes not clearly distinguished.

타고난 성분들을 끼워서 맞추다 보면 '순리'라는 것이 자연스럽게 생기는 것 같다
말하자면 창발성 특성인 것이지
흐흐

그런데 이것마저도
나 자신을 돕기 위해 내가 만들고 내가 쓰는
나만을 위한 철학이어야 하지
그것을 남에게 적용하려고 애쓰다 보면
나도 모르게 '거스르는' 것이 되나니
하여튼 진리를 발견했다고 우쭐대다 보면 큰코다치기 참 쉽더라

'포기해. 포기하면 편해'가
이렇게나 큰 도움 되는 생각일지, 말일지 몰랐다

I've been to fine dining restaurants,
I've been to fancy bars,
I've been to buffets attached to glitzy hotels.

Of course, the food is good.
Fresh, varied, decadent.

But what lingers is who I've shared the meal with.

The humble rustic quality of food,
people tossing together a few fresh vegetables,
experimenting with fire, fat, moisture, salt, acid,
that's what I love.

Steamed sea bass with a green sauce in a plastic container on a short flight,
baked chicken wings by my grandma,
grilled cow entrails with my friends,
cold basil, garlic and cherry tomato pasta I cooked for my parents,
a charred and peeled Poblano pepper burger at a basement gastropub near my college,
these are the things I remember.