A scratchpad for exploring favorite themes: Borges, time, consciousness, computer science, etc.
We can look around and observe that, for lack of a better term, lower beings (plants, animals) have varyingly complex conceptions of the…
I’ve come to think of almost everything as explainable by some sort of feedback loop. ...
Loss has nothing to do with the past and everything to do with the future. You can’t lose what has already happened; the past is immutable…
I think of this passage almost every time I speculate about the future...
An absolutely lovely passage out of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire…
What’s the ontological status of the past? Is it less real than the present because it no longer exists? Or more real because, in a universe…
Suppose the dead can return to the world and be anyone from any era: inhabit the life of a living person, think what they think, feel what…
On the burning February morning Beatriz Viterbo died, after braving an agony that never for a single moment gave way to self-pity or fear, I…
What could be more human than making art? Than mastering a highly complex physical skill (fulfilling our evolutionary destiny as the…
Yesterday I finally finished Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. It’s been a long time coming...