Sisyphus Unbound

“According to some, the punishment of the rock had only one purpose: to keep Sisyphus occupied and prevent him from hatching new schemes. But at the least expected moment, Sisyphus will devise something and he’ll come back to Earth...” - 2666, Roberto Bolaño

Of all the punishments in Greek mythology, few are as iconic as that imposed on Sisyphus. For ratting on Zeus, screwing around with Thanatos, and tricking Persephone, he was condemned to forever roll a boulder up a hill in Tartarus and having it roll back down again. His fate of endless futility earns him the sympathy of us moderns. But his tale also warns us of the hubris and uselessness of intelligence against authority, a message which is anathema to our revolutionary Zeitgeist. Is intelligence always a force opposed to authority? If so, which would win in a Hegelian slugfest? Or are they two sides of the same coin? And what of the different forms of intelligence? Let us seek to answer these questions intelligently.

The Origin of Cognition in the Breakdown of the Caffeinated Mind

Ah, coffee. The sine qua non of modernity. And not merely the opium of the masses either. Alfréd Rényi once said, "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." Does coffee make me think better, or does it just make me think I'm thinking better? It feels like the former. Although, I hear a voice in my head asking, "And how would it feel if it was the latter, pray tell?"

Crouching T-Rex, Hidden Raptor

I'd always thought that if I had an intelligent, erudite roommate, we'd either get nothing done, or everything. But the frequency of my bedtime thoughts suggests that we would just keep each other awake with our epiphanies until we both died from lack of sleep.

I've had trouble sleeping pretty much all my life. But what was it that used to occupy my thoughts? There seems to be a K-T boundary, maybe even a Mohorovičić discontinuity, between my present and past selves, somewhere around 3 years ago (ironically these geological terms come from before that boundary, sometime in primary school when I used to love dinosaurs (and yes, that is K for Kretaceous)). I no longer know him. But is he buried and fossilised inside my mind, or was I within his, waiting to be exposed by the erosive processes of time?