Open questions

What do you think computers are doing to our minds? Everyone can see the atrophy, for example—we don't need to memorize the geometry of the city anymore, and I've heard rumors about worsening illiteracy among children. But what else? Could it be that the mind perceives people on the internet as parts of itself, or the user interface as a second body? Does the mind always distinguish between self and other?

What does meditation do? Is it related to sleep? How is it able to generate physical sensations on command? Is there an environmental factor that causes the damage that meditation repairs? Why does meditating often make me cry? What is the psychological effect of crying? Why do emotions cause certain muscles to contract involuntarily? Why does meditation relax them? What are the physiological effects of chronic muscle tension? What is the psychological purpose of that tension, and why does the body allow it to persist if it is destructive? Will anyone fund me to do electromyography on the scalps of bald men?

Is capitalism an extension of the evolutionary process? Societies : humans :: animals : cells? To continue the analogy—will we become completely subjugated in the way that cells are? Programmed death and all? Could there be a statistical mechanics of capitalist society? Is there a single watertight argument that AI is going to be good for the average person—one that doesn’t invoke utopia? If we had that statistical theory of capitalism, could we prove it?

Is cancer a runaway evolutionary process? Is its existence connected to the halting problem—the fact that it's impossible, in general, to predict the behavior of a program? Does that mean that we should invert Prop 65 and assume that any synthetic chemical is a carcinogen until there's sufficient evidence otherwise?

What allows the mind to deceive itself? Why doesn't conscious awareness extend to the whole thing? Could it—and would that be desirable? What is the process that generates anxiety, and why is it active in such safe environments? What is the ego, or the self, and can it really be dissolved? Does the mind have to “refactor” itself when it encounters something new? Does high variety in information consumed interfere with this process? Is rapid consumption of content physically harmful?

Is the sense of meaning a mechanism for justifying suffering, or is it valuable in its own right? What is the point of emotional suffering? What are emotions, anyway? Read a little Jung and you're forced to wonder—do emotions have an algebraic structure? What’s love? Is feeling understood different from love? What happens to the mind during a breakup? What is happening physiologically when someone falls in love with a person they've never met in real life? Or with an AI? How does the existence of a dating market affect the selection pressure on humans? Could Match Group make predictions of future human trait frequencies? If so, could someone manipulate those frequencies?

What the hell is time? Is it really continuous, or could it be discrete? Does the universe update its state everywhere at once (with the necessary relativistic corrections) or in bits and pieces? Could we tell the difference? Loschmidt's paradox—how do reversible microscopic dynamics generate an irreversible macroscopic world? Why does the Lagrangian method—in which future and past determine the intermediate events—work at all? Why is there absolutely no mathematical evidence that time has to run in any particular direction? But then why can't we remember the future?

What is lost when we turn speech into writing? Do the particulars of a language interact with the creation of internal narrative structures? The prosody of language moderates its emotional impact—is that impact interpreted separately from the words? Is that why we listen to music? Could I skip the intermediate steps and create waveforms that control my feelings? Could we devise an algebra of musical psychological operators?