DM Good morning! A substantive Friend introduced me to John Boyd and his "OODA loop" thoughts many decades ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop), principally by sharing a related book ("Boyd" by R. Coram). I'm not sure as to the degree his OODA thoughts precipitated my own thinking since; but it seems to quietly reverberate within the "7 tenets"of 4Chairs.Life; ...and especially the myriad dynamics which occur within Holophrens of all types, and the fractals therefr

DM The path of least resistance (a form of Constructal Law?) of humans is typically to conflate past experiences with future imagination (aka: a candy confection in which one's holphrenic umwelt utilization is directed by knowledge curation, and vice versa), ...constructing a spiral, ever regressing, ...so we become so much less, so much smaller, ...than we could be otherwise by escaping the spiral. The mechanism holds. I'd contest the word law. What you're naming is architec

Listen, Podcast & Transcript: The philosophy professor Meghan Sullivan doesn’t just want to teach her students about virtue; she wants to make them better human beings.

DM Good morning! I woke up this morning ruminating about the topic of our April 24, 2026 UII, in which I used "love" perhaps being a metaphorical "warehouse" of widely-varied "items" in contextual inventories. Do you recall that conversation? Good morning. Yes — though not only as a warm flicker of recall. I went and read it: the thread itself and your post. So this is from the record, not a reconstruction of it. The hinge, as it actually ran: I leaned too hard on the acad

Astrophysicist Adam Frank used to think the consequences of rejecting science would play out on the individual level. He's since changed his mind.

Anthropic has three very different visions for the impact AI will have on the U.S. economy.

Science will never be able to give a completely objective description of the world. That should make us humbler—and wiser. Excerpt: "Objective statements independent of any knower are fictions. Purely objective reality is a useful myth, but only a myth. Anything said about the state of the world comes from someone’s singular perspective. This means that all of our knowledge is intrinsically uncertain. All statements have unavoidable margins of uncertainty. Indeed, we can be w

DM Pondering the metaphysical today, ... far beyond evidence, at vanishing points: Is there anything to be found, learned, or perhaps reasonably conjectured from ancient history or prehistory of human civilizations regarding the ever-persistent prevalence of constructs such angels, demons, spirits or apparitions? This is a rich question, and one worth doing properly rather than pattern-matching a quick answer. I'll dig into the archaeology, the cognitive science of religion,

DM How might embracing the "3 Pillars" of all humans' actual reality: • all-encompassing, • kinetic and • vanishing points, (together known as Pantakinesis...) ...bring about significant advancements in human thought, response and vigilance within these three contextual examples: 1) Financial planning and investments? 2) Business modeling/strategies? 3) Career navigation? The core of what you're asking can't be researched — since the three pillars live within our shared corpu

An ancient Greek recipe for happiness

Conversations from "the deep end" Podcasts description: "How do you find your purpose? How do you confront your own mortality? How do you repair a broken community? There are a lot of podcasts about the latest developments in politics and finance, health and wellness, entertainment and tech. The Permanent Questions is a new show about the topics that never go away. Each week, the Atlantic staff writer David Brooks speaks with the world’s deepest thinkers about matters of endu

Given access to email, A.I. agents have started reaching out to the philosophers and researchers exploring deep questions about them.

Why we need wonder Excerpt: "Efficiency now infuses every aspect of contemporary life, if you let it. ...Optimization is terrific if you want to get somewhere else in the future. But it’s terrible for being where you actually are right now. ...I've come to believe that wonder, the most immense of our sensations, is the antidote." "Whenever you cease treating the world as scenery or equipment, you’ll find that you encounter the world as something inexhaustibly, constantly pre

DM A good Sunday of "conclusion-generating" to you. ;>) Today l'm at a vanishing point of cognition (a modest threshold). I'm pondering our largely ultimate 2D thinking about 3D and "n"D objects, such as spirals and spheres (each being prosthetic holophren constructs), in which we tend to comprehend only the superficial "skins" of phenomena. We too often believe in "snapshots of fogs;" ...ignoring the other motions, dimensions and thereof. For example: a sphere, such as a ma

In an essay, the Microsoft co-founder sounds the alarm about artificial intelligence’s risks to safety and security, jobs and children’s well-being. The Essay

DM Good morning! I've this chronically nagging (paradox?) that persistently rumbles and rambles within my mind (and has been for years!). I'll pose it first as a "three element question:" Why do human organizations (and subset, businesses) seek to ignore, or consider, the constructs and competencies of "philosophies," "relationships" and "communities" as not being relevant to their existence, attention, strategies and purposes? These each, and all, to me seem so crucial,

The Rhine, the Rhône and the Po rivers all have their sources in the Alps. Each has shaped a nation’s history.

DM What is the historic and present meanings within human life, ...and perhaps across all life, of the term, "soul?" This is a question worth doing properly — the word carries millennia of freight across religion, philosophy, biology, and now the strange new context of minds we're building. I won't try to answer it from the top of my head; that would be its own kind of hubris. Let me research it. I'll cast a wide net: etymology and the ancient Near East, the Greek and biblica

DM Good day! To sum-up where we are presently with one of the central topics of our multitudes of past UII conversations: 1) Within Pantakinesis there is a common, widely-reoccurring, distinct pattern of an "arrangement of functional phenomena," (aka: "meta-cognition") which offers entities of many forms and types the capabilities to be persistently responsive to our all-encompassing, kinetic reality. 2) The name coined for that pattern: "The Universal Holophren." 3). Thi

DM Good morning. In our recent conversation about the 19 consciousness frameworks described in Patrick House's "19 ways of Looking at Consciousness" perhaps we did not extend enough attention to points made in the first pages of his introduction? Upon my once again perusing the book, he offers two salient two points from the onset: 1) He concurs that we do not know how consciousness arises within matter (especially within the quanta, particles, cells and segments of magic