about this site

This website is a stand-in for my end of conversations I would enjoy having with a few like-minded, perhaps over pints of our favorite. In spirit of The Inklings, a decades-long friendship of Owen Barfield, C.S. Lewis, J.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, meeting at the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford to discuss their works and ideas about literature, philosophy and theology. It’s an early-stage hodgepodge of ideas that strike me as fitting together in a view of the world that accommodates some of the major things that we know (or should know) to be true about the world, in particular the immense range of consciousness exhibited by (at least some) humans and, my mild obsession with cetacean intelligence. that accommodates a broad range of what we have reason to believe is true.

The goal here is not to argue for a specific worldview or narrative, but rather in a small way to help open up the conceptual space A phrase Lorraine L. Besser and Shigehiro Oishi in “The psychologically rich life” for discussions about alternative narratives and worldviews. The articles here are a mosaic of ideas about a few select areas of the immensely broad but yet barely explored territory of fundamental mind. Once we get past the myopic notion that reality, which is to say consciousness, See “Jerison’s take on reality” is exclusively physical, the horizon may extend beyond what most of us can even imagine. This of course also opens up opportunities for crazy stuff, although we will need to be more judicious in what we summarily reject. It seems safe to exclude Pastafarianism in serious discussions about spirituality. But the idea that religions are a form of mental illness should be seen as equally absurd, as claimed by Sam Harris in The End of Faith.

Edward Tufte style

The site was built with a GitHub Hugo theme based on Edward Tufte’s ideas, and the very strong tutelage of ChatGPT (no way I could have done this on my own). The Tufte CSS package was developed by Dave Liepman “to style web articles using the ideas demonstrated by Edward Tufte’s books and handouts.” Tufte is revered by many for his simple, elegant approach to presenting information, particularly data visualization. Many of his books, all self-published, Tufte was turned down by numerous publishing houses, finally deciding to mortgage his house and self-publish his first book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information in 1983. are widely considered classics by technical editors and professionals whose job includes communicating technical information. Tufte has a particularly low regard for Power Point presentations. His 2003 eBook The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within argues that Power Point presentations may have significantly contributed to the Columbia shuttle disaster through jargon-heavy, carelessly structured bullet points by Boeing engineers in presentations about the potential for foam debris to have damaged the shuttle’s wing.