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Reading the Lattice Without the Legend: Grinberg, Syntergy, and the Argument for Real Entry

A scientist walks out of his office in Mexico City on December 8, 1994, and never walks back in. The man is Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum, forty-eight years old, a UNAM-trained neurophysiologist with a doctorate from New York Medical College, the author of a stack of monographs on consciousness, and the last serious researcher to claim that the human brain could be wired into a holographic substrate of reality he called the Lattice. He had spent years measuring electroencephalographic correlations between separated human subjects. Two months before he vanished, he published a paper in Physics Essays arguing that pairs of subjects, separated inside semisilent Faraday chambers fourteen and a half meters apart, showed brain activity that mirrored stimulation given to only one of them. Then he was gone. The laboratory was found. Several notes were missing. His wife, who had cause to suspect him of an affair and a documented history of violence, became a person of interest and was never charged. Mexican press cycled through the story for years. Mystics and conspiracy theorists folded the disappearance into the theory, as if the man had stepped sideways into his own hypothesis.

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Consciousness Explained Away: Daniel Dennett’s Illusionism and the Theory That Spends Its Own Foundation

When Daniel Dennett died on April 19, 2024, at the age of eighty-two, the philosophical world lost one of the last serious defenders of a position so counterintuitive that even sympathetic readers spent decades trying to talk themselves into it. Dennett argued, across more than fifty years of writing, that consciousness as we ordinarily understand it does not exist. The reds and greens you see, the texture of cool water against the palm, the sense that there is somebody home behind your eyes reading these words: all of it, on Dennett’s account, is what he called a user illusion, a simplified internal model the brain generates for navigation purposes, with no inner light behind it and no observer to whom the show is being staged. The position is called illusionism, and it remains the strongest possible challenge to the panpsychism we considered in the previous article on Iain McGilchrist. If Dennett was right, McGilchrist’s whole project rests on a misdescription of what we are.

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Always Offend

The transitive definition of the verb “offend” is — “to cause to feel upset, annoyed or resentful” — and I argue today that when you offend an audience in even the smallest way, you have achieved an important human condition that is often missing in the live Modern American theatre experience.

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How the Superman Syndrome Ruins Student Writing

Hubris is dangerous in the classroom.  The student that believes nothing can be learned that isn’t already known catches nothing.  The instructor that believes in an all-knowing prescience guarantees nothing worthwhile is cast for the capturing.  That battle between student and teacher can dangerously become a war between good and evil — and that fight leaves no winners on the field of learning.

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Pointless Argument Primer

It occurred to me recently that, though it happens to just about everybody, not everyone can tell so easily that they have somehow found themselves in a critically pointless argument. Some people continue on with the argument for hours, being unaware of the futility of said argument and the hopelessness of any sort of resolution. I therefore decided to write this primer to maybe help a little.

Why Do Pointless Arguments Exist?
One might think that in theory, at least, pointless arguments should not exist at all. After all, we have but a short and finite time to live on this earth – and seeing as we can hardly agree on what happens after we leave it, we may as well try to make the time we have as pleasant as possible, right? Part of making the time we have here quite pleasant would seem to include the avoidance of pointless arguments. So how is it that these trivial, useless, ultimately insignificant arguments come about? I think it all comes down to the perception of the people who initiate the argument.

As an analogy, let us analyze the average carnival or fair attendant. They might approach a carnival game with the anticipation that they are going to win a large plush animal. Even if the odds are largely stacked against the person, they don’t hesitate to put down their money in the pursuit of getting said large plush animal. If the person really thought that they didn’t have any chance of getting the animal, there is no way that they would put down their hard earned money (or the money of a parent, loving significant other, etc.) in exchange for the chance to win the animal.

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