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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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The Mind Is Flat Nick Chater

25 Mar 2026 - 25 Mar 2026
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    • This book seems really insidious, in that it makes some good and important points but takes them too far, resulting in conclusions that ar wrong and simply unacceptable.
    • Where I agree (I think, have not actually read this yet): "introspection", taken literally, does not exist. We can't see into our own minds, we don't have eyes pointed inwards. We can observe the functioning of our mind however, and tell stories about it. This is, more or less, what consciousness is. Note that it doesn't require any magic. We are self-aware more or less in the same way we are other-aware.
    • So under that model of the mind, we do not do literal introspection but we do a fuckton of reflection, which is what people mean when they say introspection.
    • Chater builds a lot on a theory of improvisation, which ordinarily is something that would resonate with me. I dig that stuff and think it is important. However,
    • Dearly curious what Meaningness thinks of this book, because it has a superficial similarity to some of his writings, which have that same quality of just too much eliminativism for my taste.
    • But all of this depth, richness and endless scope for exploration is utterly fake. There is no inner world. Our flow of momentary conscious experience is not the sparkling surface of a vast sea of thought it is all there is. And, as we shall see, each momentary experience turns out to be startlingly sketchy – at any moment, we can recognize just one face, or read just one word, or identify just one object. And when...we begin to describe our feelings, or explain our actions, we are only creating stories, one step at a time, not exploring a pre-existing inner world of thoughts and feelings. (p8)
    • Oh that is such a weirdly shaped thought. "We are only creating stories, not exploring a pre-existing inner world of thoughts and feelings". It seems to imply that the normal form of self-consciousness is all about "exploring a pre-existing inner world", rather than, you know, creating it. There is some weird kind of alienation going on.
    • Our flow of momentary conscious experience is not the sparkling surface of a vast sea of thought it is all there is