This website is an archive as of 31 Dec 2023. For my latest website, please visit mattelim.com

mind


  • There has been an acceleration of artificial intelligence (AI) in the past year, especially in chatbot AIs. OpenAI’s ChatGPT became the fastest app to reach 100 million monthly active users within a short span of two months. For reference, the runner-up TikTok took nine months — more than four times — to reach those numbers.…

  • Writer’s note: this is part two of a three-part essay. Click here for part one. For the second part of this essay, I will be looking at the limitations of the mind in facilitating the processes of knowing and understanding. To narrow the scope of this part, I will be limiting the discussion to mental…

  • In 1758, the father of modern taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus gave the name “Homo Sapiens” to our species. The term means “wise man” in Latin. We mostly stuck with the name, although there have been competing ones offered by various people in the years since. Linnaeus purportedly christened us with “wise” because of our ability to…

  • A unique aspect of human beings is our ability to use abstract and complex language. We can use language not only to communicate ideas but also to think and make sense of the world. For some of us, the latter exists as an internal monologue. Through language, we can name and label tangible objects, intangible…

  • Writer’s note: this is part 2 of this essay, click here for part 1. We have now covered everything in our list except one — belief, which is the thorniest one to deal with. Within cognitive psychology, belief is defined as a “propositional attitude”. The combination of beliefs that one holds forms a worldview (or…

  • Writer’s note: this was a difficult one to write, I scrapped an earlier draft completely because the more I wrote, the more I found myself having to account for too many considerations, which led to me feeling like I knew nothing about anything. That feeling prompted me to start over and adopt a structure that…