A scratchpad for exploring favorite themes: Borges, time, consciousness, computer science, etc.
So much of philosophy feels almost purely academic: questions about whether we’re brains in a vat, or whether we were created a second ago…
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...
Religion (at least certain versions of it) offers a clean slate: “all is forgiven.” Yet mere time offers something almost as powerful. We…
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…