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Eric is a fantastic writer and I highly suggest his books including a recent collection of his works in "The Weirdness of the World". Finding "Describing Inner

Eric is a fantastic writer and I highly suggest his books including a recent collection of his works in "The Weirdness of the World". Finding "Describing Inner Experience" in grad school had a profound effect on me.

bbor 2y ago
Huh okay thanks for commenting, I was very confused about what exactly I was reading until you prompted me to look him up. Interesting guy — he’s a full time professional academic in philosophy, and yet writes like a hacker, even going as far as to skip APA citations in favor of undescribed hyperlinks! The style is a fascinating mix of analytic (such as only giving the time of day to recent theories, and constricting his argument to an explicit outline) and a more casual blog style. He’s also been writing about exactly this — perhaps in slightly less unified (hehe) terms - since at least 2007: https://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/ https://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/ If you find the time, could you share what the big takeaways were that had a profound effect? I’m guessing it was a practical exercise that trained you to more accurately introspect, but that’s just a guess. I’m way too deep into all this philosophy stuff already so I mostly got indignant disagreement out of this essay, and I’d like to see it in a more productive light!
- jhickok 2y ago
  I'm glad you like his style! I find him incredibly approachable and clear for some of the reasons you outlined above. He also take great pains to be a clear communicator, which you can see in pieces of media like his appearance on Sean Carroll's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0evRaWV_HU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0evRaWV_HU Anyway, I was not a philosophy undergraduate and so a lot of my exposure was either to popular level works (surveys, etc), or big historical names (Descartes, Hume, Plato), or to very specific areas of research (I was big into metaphysics and philosophy of mind "realists", like Chalmers, Searle, Flanagan etc), and skepticism about intuition, or sense-data, or even skepticism about a priori truths had just never really occurred to me. That's more of a self-own than anything, but we first-years in grad school had a course together where someone in the dept. would take us thru a deep dive in a very specific area by way of a brand new book. For example, the year prior to my arrival they read thru a "Climbing the Mountain", an early draft of the book that would eventually become Parfit's "On What Matters". Anyway, my year all picked "Describing Inner Experience", and this would become my introduction to an ultimately useful view that opened the world of CogSci to me since assumptions I had (which can probably be described at Cartesian) no longer posed powerful arguments against a more empirically-minded look into how the mind works. So, folks that I previously disregarded like Dennett, Wittgenstein, the Churchlands, were now gateways into Smolensky, Prinz, Carruthers, etc.

bbor 2y ago

Huh okay thanks for commenting, I was very confused about what exactly I was reading until you prompted me to look him up. Interesting guy — he’s a full time professional academic in philosophy, and yet writes like a hacker, even going as far as to skip APA citations in favor of undescribed hyperlinks! The style is a fascinating mix of analytic (such as only giving the time of day to recent theories, and constricting his argument to an explicit outline) and a more casual blog style. He’s also been writing about exactly this — perhaps in slightly less unified (hehe) terms - since at least 2007: https://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/ https://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/ If you find the time, could you share what the big takeaways were that had a profound effect? I’m guessing it was a practical exercise that trained you to more accurately introspect, but that’s just a guess. I’m way too deep into all this philosophy stuff already so I mostly got indignant disagreement out of this essay, and I’d like to see it in a more productive light!

jhickok 2y ago
I'm glad you like his style! I find him incredibly approachable and clear for some of the reasons you outlined above. He also take great pains to be a clear communicator, which you can see in pieces of media like his appearance on Sean Carroll's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0evRaWV_HU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0evRaWV_HU Anyway, I was not a philosophy undergraduate and so a lot of my exposure was either to popular level works (surveys, etc), or big historical names (Descartes, Hume, Plato), or to very specific areas of research (I was big into metaphysics and philosophy of mind "realists", like Chalmers, Searle, Flanagan etc), and skepticism about intuition, or sense-data, or even skepticism about a priori truths had just never really occurred to me. That's more of a self-own than anything, but we first-years in grad school had a course together where someone in the dept. would take us thru a deep dive in a very specific area by way of a brand new book. For example, the year prior to my arrival they read thru a "Climbing the Mountain", an early draft of the book that would eventually become Parfit's "On What Matters". Anyway, my year all picked "Describing Inner Experience", and this would become my introduction to an ultimately useful view that opened the world of CogSci to me since assumptions I had (which can probably be described at Cartesian) no longer posed powerful arguments against a more empirically-minded look into how the mind works. So, folks that I previously disregarded like Dennett, Wittgenstein, the Churchlands, were now gateways into Smolensky, Prinz, Carruthers, etc.