Don,
Thank you for liking my essay. I have read and graded your essay in turn. I don't say what score, but your essay deserved respectable credit. As for your points:
1,2,3: Interesting that you imply we are more truly aware when we transcend thinking per se, presumably to get in touch with our basic feelings of things. My point about Descartes is that cognitive processes in themselves cannot achieve awareness of "being" as a fundamental category. They can't tell the difference between a mathematical model, versus concrete existence. Hence our minds must have access to that foundation and can't just be substrate-independent processes that are just as easily representable by a flow chart, signal exchanges, etc. As for "free will" - I am not claiming it is independent of causality or detached from physical embedding, but rather that it has a global character and acts as a whole - the ultimate source of the choices themselves remaining quite mysterious.
5: Thanks. I think my tax plan is a good idea too, but am not sure. I pose it as an "excercise" rather than a confidently firmed up "how to" in this context.
6. Wow, that's surprising. Calculus is full of paradoxical descriptions but it *works* as far as I know, but I'll check your site.
7. Good point - actually *practicing* and seeing the results of mistakes is indeed part of ultimate mistake-avoidance training, not just warnings not to do X, Y, Z.
8. I wanted readers to consider two "banal" everyday examples of a. something built wrongly due to idealization and b. an everyday piece of "optical furniture" and how confusing it is to the understanding. But sure, most valuable IMHO is the appreciation that the "fire breathed into the equations" that makes the world real, is the same that breathes fire into our "computations" and makes them real experiences, too.