I’m on a three week long streak posting an essay on Substack. This week, I’ve extended the conversation about self and values to where values actually come from.
These posts are experimental, but at least being read on the site at a pretty steady rate. As I suspected, like other social sites the algorithm is putting my writing directly in front of some readers, something that is hard to do here on the blog other than through search engagement. But I have no plans to give up my casual journal efforts here. I added a Substack subscribe form to the site here to push my readers here to sign up for the posts there. I’ll probably archive them here at some point, but for now the idea is to see whether there’s really interest in reading my contemplations on brain and mind.
The idea on Substack is to keep to a publishing schedule and put out something of a complete thought in each. As I’ve written here, it’s a drawback of the blog format that it promotes this kind of running narrative and makes it difficult to communicate more complex, bigger ideas. The truth is that really only book format can be structured and long enough to really allow for exposition and elaboration of ideas. But I think that I can at least get better at explaining and chunking down ideas by regularly writing these explainers for the general audience on Substack.
Plus, it’s the start of the next intellectual journey. Or at least documenting where I’m going since slogging through turning “Deciding Better” into a book now that I’ve been at it close to 25 years. I’ve ended up in a place that I now realize is both in the mainstream of thought among neuroscientists, but pretty shocking to anyone outside of the neurosciences. It started when I began to realize that when we feel like we’re deciding, we really are more realistically being aware of what the brain is doing and if we wish, probing and rationalizing the choices we’ve made. The book is all about how to improve the process, but it can’t restore the illusion that there’s an “I” in charge of the brain. It’s quite the other way around.
So no wonder that in these first essays on Substack, I’m examining things from the other side: What is the “I” that I think I am. How is it constructed and to what extent can I control or change it. Plenty more to come.
