Aura as a proprioceptive glitch
At my recent Vipassana retreat, I had a peculiar experience of feeling distinct physical sensations outside of my physical body... O_o
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Pavel Chvykov
- Jan 9
- 4 min
Against the Paradox of Tolerance
[The ideas here followed from some great discussion with Jerome Warren in Brussels 2022] Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance argues that...
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Pavel Chvykov
- Aug 30, 2022
- 4 min
And the word was "God"
I want to explore a word that seems to be very triggering, and thereby somehow very important, in our culture: the word God. Whether you...
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Pavel Chvykov
- Mar 26, 2022
- 3 min
Magic, tricks, and high-dimensional configuration spaces
What is a magic trick? Any complex system, such as our world, may be described in terms of its numerous degrees of freedom, each...
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Pavel Chvykov
- Jan 23, 2022
- 4 min
Emotional Microscope
Seeing is believing. Before we could accept the germ theory of disease, we had to invent the microscope to directly see the culprits of...
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Pavel Chvykov
- Jan 13, 2022
- 2 min
Doing “good”
I just did my first substantial donation (informed by Effective Altruism, and my own work on complex social systems). Even though I have...
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Pavel Chvykov
- Aug 16, 2021
- 4 min
A gentle apocalypse
Is robots taking over the world bad? Some of the AI-risk scenarios I’ve read almost feel like it’s inevitable — and I’ve been wondering...
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Pavel Chvykov
- May 14, 2021
- 2 min
Does butterfly affect?
Can a butterfly really cause a hurricane? Having been working in complexity science, I realize that I have a problem with the...
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Pavel Chvykov
- Apr 30, 2021
- 3 min
Mindfulness as debugging
Are mindfulness practices just attempts to reverse-engineer our brain’s compression algorithms? Photo by Yu Hai on Unsplash I was...
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Pavel Chvykov
- Apr 4, 2021
- 2 min
Our compressed perception
One of the most important and amazing feats that our brain learns to do in this complex world is to find compressed representations of...
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Pavel Chvykov
- Mar 12, 2021
- 3 min
Is social theory our doom?
Complexity science, and especially the dream to deeply understand social systems and build concrete predictive models (such as Asimov’s...
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Pavel Chvykov
- Feb 10, 2021
- 3 min
What is magic?
Don’t know about you, but I’ve always wanted to discover real magic in this world. Recently, I was trying to formulate this desire more...
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Pavel Chvykov
- Feb 4, 2021
- 4 min
Letters about structure of the universe
In this post, I wanted to share a bit of a sense of the more fun aspects of a scientific career: namely having cool conversations and...
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Pavel Chvykov
- Jan 28, 2021
- 3 min
In search of Truth
Is there one true way to understand a tree? Well, of course there is — talk to any scientist! A physicist will tell you that it’s a...
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Pavel Chvykov
- Jan 20, 2021
- 2 min
Is Santa real?
Just wanted to take a break to sprinkle some magic into this blog ;P Well as it happens, I have always believed in Santa. Perhaps thanks...
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Pavel Chvykov
- Jan 15, 2021
- 2 min
Deriving everyday reality from fundamental rules
What makes a good scientific model? As a theoretical physicist I used to think that modeling everything at the level of atoms seems like...
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Pavel Chvykov
- Jan 6, 2021
- 2 min
Darwinian designs
What is the difference between the amazing designs of biology, and those built by humans? Well, as we’ve discussed in the last couple...
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Pavel Chvykov
- Jan 3, 2021
- 2 min
Building cars we don't understand
Alright, so in the last post we were talking about growing cars (yes, I’m pretending this is a talk-show). I tried to argue that the...
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Pavel Chvykov
- Dec 31, 2020
- 2 min
Can we grow cars instead of building them?
Well that sounds like an exciting idea — imagine a car tree that grows on its own, and we need not do anything other than pick the...
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