Over-read and over-ate. Finished The Silk Roads, jumped into Chomsky's Necessary Illusions, then ploughed on with Tim Crane's Mechanical Mind.

Frustrated with the book on the philosophy of mind; following the hypothetical minutae of arguments and theories that can only ever be falsifiable by science -- what is the point? Either the brain is reducible to structures that are rule-describable or it isn't. If it is, we can in principle replicate it, and thought is fundamentally computational. If it isn't, then it lies outside of the understanding of science forever, and then that is a much bigger problem on our hands, and an interesting philosophical area for study. How to deal with the fact that there is something in the universe that is fundamentally beyond logical description? It's the question of the limits of science, like 'what is outside the universe' or 'what was before the big bang' or 'how can there be nothing'?

Can you reverse engineer the rules governing the behaviour of an arbitrary black box? No; you can never be sure you have tested all possible inputs and outputs. Therefore you can never be completely sure you can reverse engineer a brain. But you can asymptotically approach it, forever feeding more data and replicating the results.

Motoring through The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan which is gripping, well-written and illuminating, if a little over-insistent in places.

Quiet, housebound day, only popped my head out of doors for a moment; drizzle, wood smoke smell, collared doves.

Perpetually awaiting a girl to slip into the role of the adored object, but have made no active effort to find one. Passivity characterizes my life!

Receding hairline.

I can feel the self-indulgent pomposity of this project becoming quite overpowering, even to me. Haven't the inclination to think of anything else to draw or write, so the downwards spiral into myself continues.

Frustratingly weak drawing tonight, which I completely scrubbed out in anger several times. Feel like a bratty child when my drawings go wrong, feel like shouting and swearing and throwing it all against the wall. Miserable lack of artistic and emotional control, and yet the delusions of grandeur persist, I can't drown the feeling that I ought to be one of the extraordinary, floating on the sea of the ordinary.

I only believe in my leading idea that men are in general divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word. There are, of course, innumerable sub-divisions, but the distinguishing features of both categories are fairly well marked. The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that's their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them. The second category all transgress the law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction according to their capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better. But if such a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I maintain, find within himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading through blood — that depends on the idea and its dimensions, note that.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment

Day-trip to Hampton Court Palace; essentially an agglomeration of Cambridge colleges. Saw some unexpected Rembrandts, Ruisdael, and two excellent paint sketches, one wonderfully loose Diana and Acteon by Gainsborough and a scale modello by Van Dyke. The rest of the palaces felt empty, gutted and bare. Cold November mist penetrating the unadorned rooms did nothing to bring the place alive.

Mental states and locations; nowhere is there more repose than at home.

Soggy day, stayed inside and read, stared into space, waited for the appointed hour to pick up my sister. Spent so long figuring out logistics for going down to Hampton Court tomorrow, a huge waste of time and energy being indecisive. Strange the trivialites that fill my days, and yet I only spent an hour doing my drawing.

Reading The Mechanical Mind by Tim Crane, the philosopher who didn't impress me in the artificial intelligence talk I went to the other day. Trying to understand why he argues against reductionism, and denies that everything should be fundamentally reducible to physics, a view I strongly hold.

Object strongly to the almost wilfully obscure jargon, the academic style in general. As a web designer I spend a lot of time thinking about user experience, and how to make it easy for users to achieve their goals. As a 'user' of this 'introduction to the computational theory of mind', my goal of learning is constantly obstructed by needless obfuscation. Example: intentionality and intensionality; two almost-identical words meaning different things, and not what you would think. Scrap and replace with something lucid!

Driving new roads, new opportunities for hesitation, error, dry-mouthed fretting. Went for a walk around Bartlow, taking in the medieval church and its mist-wet air, rotting frescoes, sonorously empty still space, the Roman burial mounds, the vast hazy green fields, languid buzzards and their kill.

Middle-class cotton-wool coffee shop, prattling well-spoken little children, parents looking inward, a horrid and enviable and undemanding comfortableness.

Dinner at friends' house in Cambridge. Wonderful how I find myself retelling the same stories and thoughts to different people with an undiminished relish each time. Saying things and believing them later.

Realised that most people have no idea of the depths, the horrendous dark depths of depression nor the insistent gnaw of anxiety. A schoolboy friend casually mentioned how people with depression sometimes find it hard to get out of bed, as if this was not something I would know. The disconnect between people's perception of oneself and the interior experiences we identify with. People benefit from labels, clear cut, externally verifiable signifiers to grasp at when making judgements of character.

Always surprised that people listen to the words I say, most of which I would recant in an instant, and go away with opinions that surprise me when later relayed. I say so much unprepared, contradictory nonsense, arguing for the sake of it, that inconstancy, suppleness and slopiness should be my lasting impression, not anything taken from any of the individual threads of thought that I might leave hanging, any one of which is a tangled, knotted and frayed mess of verbiage, principally said to draw attention to myself and precious little else.

Hibernated the morning away. Watched John Berger documentary on looking. He likes how riding a motorcycle requires complete concentration, demands you live in the moment and constantly keep looking. And so I am beginning to enjoy driving; I bob along in the fast-flowing current, unable to dwell on anything for long, reacting and evaluating and not projecting myself far into the future. A certain calm from being torn away from oneself and having attention focused outwards.

I have scarcely done a stroke of work for weeks, and I can feel myself brimming with mental energy. Reading many books simultaneously, looking at art, bathing myself in the best thoughts that have been thought. Connections fizzling in my head, nurtured by leisure and unstructured time. Vast intellectual vistas lay on all sides, crisscrossed with networks of interjoining paths, travelled before by minds of similar bent, all of us on the same happy and meandering quest.

Finished Montaigne today, who will remain a friend and a model.

Dipping into Dutton on the Art Instinct; fundamentally similair brain architecture the world over leads to convergent cultural evolution.

Montaigne discovers mindfulness from his own first principles half a millenia ago, but Buddhism had meditation a thousand years before him. It has come into vogue again with positive paychology and its reminders to attend to the present. Circles of minds forever groping towards the same conclusions, forever bounded by the same limitations and discovering the same revelations over and again.

When I walk alone in the beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been dwelling on extraneous incidents for some part of the time, for some other part I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, and to me.
Michel de Montaigne - Essays

Fulfilling day with old friends in Cambridge, unanticipated and refreshing. Preceded by a pleasant stroll around the Fitzwilliam Museum on my own. Finished looking at the wonderful manuscripts exhibition - such design, control, patience, and exceptionally well curated. What a treasure to have in a small provincial town.

Invigorating, rigorous, long discussions about civil liberties, superintelligence, existential risk, relativism, utilitarianism. A feeling that policy and culture needs to be more open in acknowledging our latent tribal, base, racist, sexist biases rather than merely burying them, a movement away from political correctness that the populist sentiment is ready for.

The desirability of creating a secular religion, self-knowingly full of comforting, necessary falsehoods that work like a placebo - doing good although not real. Just as Donald Trump can continue to attract followers whilst demonstrably lying outright, so a religion that acknowledges its own fabrication could attract followers if it pushes all the other buttons; community, ritual, moral framework, art, singing, frameworks for celebrating, marking, mourning life events, a positive doctrine of future bliss. The fact that it is an obviously artificial creation would be forgotten if the everyday benefits to the previously apathetic, disaffected, aimless followers are tangible and long-lasting. Comforting lies rather than unpleasant truths, as a complete and transparent package.

Attended an AI panel debate at the University, which was woeful. The Director of Philosophy is seemingly technologically illiterate, and his awareness of the possibilities of the field of AI, neuroscience, computer science completely inadequate. Enjoyed feeling superior, however misplaced that feeling may be.

Drove home in the dark, another minor triumph in my anxiety-ridden life.

Walking through cut-grass, leaf-littered parkland I realised I have aneasthetised myself to my own incredible good fortune, always seeking reasons to look beyond it.

I have freedom; no responsibilities that I can't jettison, enough money to travel the world or quit work and live comfortably for several years, multiple houses that I can stay in indefinitely (the benign parasite that I am), and nothing but time, youth, good health and sufficient numbers of attractive acquaintances to be able to live in perpetual hope and expectation of an ill-advised liaison. It's actually quite delicious when I stop and consider it from someone else's perspective.

Living it is a different matter. The tiniest things mushroom into overwhelming dread that occludes all else; parking the car, getting a missed call from a client, feeling a neurosis stir.

Snoozed late, drove, lunched, prevaricated, got offered an interview, drew. Not sure I am constitutionally capable of going back to work now, so habituated have I become to enriching myself alone.