100days

I've been reading Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason. It's a bit surprising I haven't read it before, given my whole deal, but I'm glad I'm finally getting to it. The book is primarily concerned with the ways that the rigid logic of computers reinforces the allure of behaviorism and physicalism (as well as making it easier for a certain type of compulsive person to come to conceive of themselves as godlike). The logic is thus: at its lowest level, a Turing machine is a symbolic system that can solve any problem expressible within that system. It follows naturally

Graeber & Wengrow's Dawn of Everything opens with a discussion of the (admittedly one-sided, since Hobbes had been dead for a a century) debate between Hobbes and Rousseau on the state of nature: the way humans are in the absence of society. Hobbes holds that humans are, by nature, in a state of war against all others: in the absence of a social contract or bodies to enforce it, everyone's only incentive is to seek their own benefit. Rousseau contrasts this with an Edenic vision of true freedom, where the introduction of the law and private property serve as a