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1. Say you're an orb floating in space: a being of pure agency, freedom, choice. You can go wherever and manipulate matter. Your judgment gets no nudges from things like hunger or cultural norms. You don't have the baggage – the human past, the emotional machinery – of
1. “Anxiety is the only emotion that doesn’t deceive,” say some in the psychoanalytic tradition. This annoyed me when I first heard it. Anyone with anxiety knows it’s a room of funhouse mirrors. I look into the claim and begrudgingly agree; though anxiety may raise false scenarios, every
On knowing where you get them 1. My favorite thing was acing tests. To my slow and painful surprise life turned out not to be about the 100 in red ink but everything before it. The usefulness and enjoyment of the skill; an understanding of the rules that lets you
The story that definitely kind of happened 1. Here’s what I was told: five monkeys are in a room with a ladder. Suspended over the ladder is a banana. Any monkey who tries to touch it gets shocked. They all quickly learn to not touch it. One by one,
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On the clinical limits of mind-body dualism
