The differences between analytic and continental philosophy (with Alexander Prescott-Couch)

1. Detach from Fixed Identity

Recognize that your mind is separable from innate ‘monkey desires’ and a fixed identity; this allows you to choose who you want to be and explore different contexts, making you less powerful if you cling to a fixed identity.

2. Control Your Self-Narrative

Understand that your self is not determined by past stories; gain agency over the narratives you tell yourself to make them more truthful and relevant, thereby reducing suffering.

3. Minimize Suffering by Acceptance

Reduce suffering by understanding your true place in the world and focusing your efforts on regulating only what you can change, rather than fighting unchangeable aspects.

4. Separate Pain from Suffering

Practice separating physical pain from the suffering it causes by stripping away the narrative that labels the pain as ‘bad,’ viewing it instead as a neutral sensation.

5. Journal for Clarity

When overwhelmed by thoughts or emotions, write them all out to prevent circular thinking, quiet your mind, and enable access to higher levels of understanding and behavior.

6. Resolve Conflict by Values

To resolve disagreements, especially political ones, delve two levels deeper to understand how both parties arrived at their values and opinions, enabling negotiation from a shared understanding of value construction.

7. Cultivate Mature Love

Cultivate mature love by understanding it as built on shared purposes and a sense of sacredness, moving beyond infatuation and projections to negotiate everyday life together.

8. Seek Good in All Worldviews

Actively look for positive aspects and valid points in all worldviews, even those you disagree with, to gain a more accurate and nuanced understanding of the world.

9. Gain Situational Understanding

To overcome emotional pain like lovesickness, seek a higher-level understanding of the situation by considering others’ perspectives and your role, moving beyond projections to see true relationships.

10. Identify Shared Sacredness

Discover shared ‘sacredness’ – purposes above ego for which you and others are willing to sacrifice – to foster non-transactional support and collaboration.

11. Love as Shared Purpose

Understand love as the ability to create next-level agency through shared purpose, fostering collaboration that transcends individual self-interest.

12. Seek Causal Structure

Beyond recognizing patterns, prioritize discovering the causal structures and underlying systems that produce those patterns, as humans primarily do this after early perceptual learning.

13. Perceive Information as Change

Understand that information is fundamentally about difference and change; focus on registering changes to build models of what remains stable in the world.

14. Recognize Information Flow

Direct your intelligence towards recognizing the flow and transformation of information, as this is how the universe becomes intelligible.

15. Define Intelligence Clearly

Understand intelligence as the ability to make models, distinct from rationality, smartness, or wisdom, to better conceptualize cognitive abilities.

16. Intelligence for Control

View intelligence as the ability to create models that serve control, enabling an agent to predict future outcomes and choose preferable actions.

17. Discover Your Place

To become sentient, model your own nature as an agent in the world and understand your relationships to your environment.

18. Understand Intelligence Types

Recognize the distinction between fluid intelligence (solving new problems) and crystallized intelligence (skills acquired), as IQ tests don’t fully measure all capabilities.

19. Assess Algorithmic Intelligence

Consider using the task of writing programs from scratch, especially for children who haven’t learned programming, as a predictor for later cognitive performance.

20. Embrace Computational Semantics

Shift from a stateless, platonic view of truth to a computational, stateful notion, understanding truth as tied to the procedure by which it is acquired, which has implications for understanding the universe and ourselves.

21. Value Computable Results Only

Adopt the principle that only computable results truly have value, fundamentally changing how one approaches mathematics and understanding of reality.

22. View Pi as a Function

From a computational perspective, understand irrational numbers like Pi not as fixed values, but as functions or procedures that can only be computed to a certain degree.

23. Distinguish Function and Value

Recognize the fundamental difference between a function, which is a procedure, and a value, which only exists to the degree that its generating procedure can be executed.

24. Avoid Infinite Language Contradictions

Understand that languages treating infinities as existing entities can become self-contradictory; rethink how you use language to express concepts involving infinity.

25. Use Computational Languages for Consistency

To create internally consistent languages and models, adopt a computational framework where everything is defined from first principles.

26. Model Continuous Space with Finite Lattices

When describing continuous space, work with finite-resolved lattices rather than assuming infinite resolution, as true continuous space is not computable in practice.

27. Use AI for Mind Understanding

Engage with artificial intelligence as a productive field to understand how minds work, by creating and testing computational models of cognitive processes.

28. Learn Minds from AI Failures

Build AI models, even those that fall short of human capabilities, to gain deeper insights into what human minds are and are not.

29. View Particle World as Quantum Implementation

Adopt the mental model that our observable particle universe is an inefficient implementation running on a more fundamental quantum substrate universe.