There are two story series on Reddit that I’ve been really getting into, written by the same author:

• Straylight – an adventure ducking between VR combat and real world intrigue as a washed up man finds himself caught in more than he can handle.
  
• Tik Tok – the story of a world of superhumans and one time warping anomaly.
  

Re: Asian feminism – what does it look like?

I think one reason that Asian feminism is hard to describe is because the Asian identity is hard to describe – when we talk about Black feminism, it’s usually specific to African-American women (and in turn, when people talk about “being black”, it’s usually “being black in America”). Black culture is something that’s been in public and academic discourse for a while (not implying that it’s been talked about as much as it should be in comparison to white, Eurocentric culture, though).

Asian culture, on the other hand, is complicated by questions like: are we only talking about Asian-American issues? are South Asians included? are we talking about “native” culture (e.g. Chinese culture, Indian culture, etc.) or immigrant culture? As someone who grew up in the American South, there was no AAPI community to be a part of – I struggled with what being “Asian-American” meant, as did a lot of my peers. And this fragmentation of Asian identity affects Asian feminism because I think a lot of us are still struggling with the “Asian” part. This may be the strongest thing we have in common with Black feminists, i.e. acknowledging that race is often the most complicated part of our identities (whereas in white feminism, being a woman is most obviously the biggest emergency).

I have a lot of reading on Black feminism to learn from (just found Melissa Harris-Perry’s Black Feminism Syllabus).

Re: dualism and mental health

When writing about mental health, people often distinguish between the mind and the body. I feel like my body isn’t really me when I’m experiencing body dysmorphia or anxiety. Even though I’m a physicalist and I intellectually know that my mind is my brain is my body, the dualist perspective is appealing because it’s what it feels like – I think that this feeling of dualism and the general acceptance of a separation between mind and body by most people is why mental health is viewed the way it is. Mental illness is often not taken as seriously as physical illness.

How People Treat Mental Illness Vs. How They Treat Physical Illness:

In actuality, there is no difference between mental and physical health – the difference comes from the accepted belief in dualism. No matter if it’s CBT to treat harmful thought cycles or medicine to treat chemical imbalances, mental health is physical health because the mind is the body. Writing about mental illness from a dualist perspective is so common, though; the irony is that it perpetuates the perception of mental health as different from physical health.

Ideas cannot exist only “in the mind”

There is no sense in which an idea can exist only “in the mind.” To come to understand and consider any idea is the outcome of actions such as learning and thinking, which require the employment of a substrate called the physical person. And to bring a given idea to mind from storage is also an action with specific costs.

Thinking of philosophy means that one is unable to also play football, at least not well. There is a choice and act involved in considering any given concept as opposed to any other, or to engaging in some other less abstract activity altogether. The mind does not exist without the substrate of body/brain. Nor is it reducible to such substrate.

Consciousness is an emergent layer of complexity that has evolved out of, and along with, biological structures. Those are scarce resources, which when used in one way cannot also be used in another incompatible way.

On the other hand, no idea exists outside the mind either. Ideas only register within active human understandings within each person. The external markers for ideas, such as books, or instantiations of ideas in the form of physical structures and systems, are, without the ongoing individual human activities of deriving and imputing meaning to them, merely so many rearranged atoms with no significance.

Significance comes about when living people relate to them as being meaningful. Just as the mind is emergent from and with the biological layer, ideas and meanings are emergent from and with the mind layer.

—Konrad Graf