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You share no atoms with your childhood self. Your memories have changed. Your personality has shifted. Your values have evolved. So what makes you the same person?
This is the persistence problem—a question philosophers have wrestled with for …
“Temperature is the average kinetic energy of molecules.”
True. Useful. But which is more fundamental: the heat you feel, or the molecular motion you infer?
On Moral Responsibility argues that modern science commits a profound …
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Lovecraft understood something profound: complete …
A philosophical novel exploring epiphenomenal consciousness. Dr. Lena Hart discovers that her thoughts can be predicted before she's aware of them—consciousness might be merely an echo, a post-hoc narrative constructed by the brain to maintain the …
What if you’re not making decisions—you’re just narrating them after the fact?
Echoes of the Sublime explores the terrifying possibility that consciousness is epiphenomenal: a post-hoc story your brain tells itself to maintain the …
Cancer gives you a lot of time to think about suffering—its nature, its purpose (if any), and whether it reveals anything fundamental about reality.
One way to think about suffering: it’s how certain patterns of …
This essay, written in 2012, asks a question that still haunts me: Why do we hold people morally responsible?
People throughout history have believed they belong to a special categorical class: persons. What makes persons special? Their …
A philosophical exploration of free will, determinism, and moral agency. What does it mean to be a moral agent? Can we truly be held responsible for our actions in a deterministic universe?