Janet Akselrud's Wandering Mind

November 02, 2026

I made lots of comments. I didn't make any comments about the bit at 25:25 because that idea never ever occurred to me!

Here's one comment:

1:18:45 I hope I'm not boring you too much! I heard a great idea last month (from the Biologist Robert Rosen) that was actually an idea I had years and years ago but had forgotten! The idea was about how we know stuff because there is a process going in our mind which corresponds with a process going on in the world which we observe. And these processes are all going in everyone, and what do when we understand something or someone is that we see the correspondence between the processes in our own minds with those in the processes we observe in the world around us. And Aristotle actually put it into a single paragraph in Metaphysics, saying that this was the process of thought becoming the object of thought, and he said this possession of the object of thought was the divine element in thought. That's why I liked your "I became the infinite darkness" song. The whole world unfolds from that infinite darkness, and in the process the "I"s are all seen for what they are, the individual processes where there is some discontinuity or incongruence between what goes on the mental process and what is observed in the world.

1:29:42 On what is a good question, .... you must be an intuitionist! Intuitionists are always asking questions like that. A lot of them are a bit boring, but there is one called Jean-Yves Girard who came up with a great answer to that. He gave an example of how does he know something is a DVD and the answer is that you put it in the DVD drive and it asks you a question! He invented something called Linear Logic is a kind of logic where everything is a process like this. So on that count a good question is one that answers with another question.