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The Children of AI
If AI can do our most serious work better than we can, adulthood may begin to resemble supervised play. Even a benevolent intelligence could leave us wondering what it means to be needed.
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Essays on belief, identity and how we interpret experience.
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26 essays · Newest first
26 essays
The Children of AI
If AI can do our most serious work better than we can, adulthood may begin to resemble supervised play. Even a benevolent intelligence could leave us wondering what it means to be needed.
On Shame
When we hide the parts of ourselves we expect others to reject, their acceptance can become difficult to trust. Shame may leave us living among people who care for us while feeling that the person they care for has been carefully edited.
On Dissociation
Remembering what happened and feeling that it belongs to us are different things. Dissociation makes that difference difficult to ignore, especially when an understanding reached in one state becomes hard to access in another.
On the Decay of a Nation from Within
A society can survive fierce disagreement when people can still correct one another. The deeper danger begins when evidence becomes a test of loyalty and every failure is absorbed into the story that produced it.
It is what it is. What even is, is?
A dream can be unreal as an event and real in what it does to us. That distinction complicates the question of reality: how much does the certainty of an experience tell us about the world it appears to disclose?
On the Examined Life
We have to act before every belief is settled. In this imagined dialogue, Roman, Troy and Socrates examine how to distinguish a necessary approximation from the convenient story we would prefer to believe.
On the Paradox of Remaining
What keeps a person participating when the world they understand is difficult to believe in? An exploration of moral distress, limited agency and the attachments that persist before a convincing explanation of life arrives.
On the Isolation of the lived Philosopher
When philosophical questions begin governing ordinary decisions, they also change how we belong. A personal account of living through inquiry—and of the difficulty of examining others without placing ourselves outside the examination.
Accountability Becomes Inevitable
In this speculative future, institutions can assemble a durable account of a person's conduct from records once kept apart. The danger is that a record becomes authoritative faster than it becomes accurate—or open to appeal.
Empathy, Weaponised.
Someone's distress can move us to help before we know what happened. The difficulty begins when concern for that person becomes certainty about another. Shared feeling can carry an accusation further than the evidence supporting it.
What is it about reality that disappoints you so much?
Roman and the Narrator consider the distance between human capability and human judgement. The disappointment concerns what we do with an extraordinary life—and whether greater intelligence would change our purposes or give them more power.
Nousophy: Beyond the Four Letters
Two different personality results led me to develop a more detailed model, and to ask what would make its distinctions useful beyond the description they provide.
Let the Thought Finish
Someone has not replied, and you begin to think they are annoyed. A brief exercise in separating what happened from what you inferred, then choosing what to do.
The Name That Explained You Begins Producing You
A name can make an existing pattern easier to understand, then influence what we notice, expect and attempt. The difficulty is recognising when that influence narrows the account.
Starting Over, Repeatedly
An old Facebook account showed me familiar questions running through periods that had felt like separate beginnings, and changed how I understood the work of staying connected to my past.
How to Win Arguments
I tend to examine what a conclusion depends on while someone is still explaining it. That can clarify a disagreement, provided I also examine the inference, my own assumptions and the conversation we are having.
The Cost Of Seeing Yourself Clearly
Recognising a pattern can change how we live before we know what to do differently. My experience in therapy involved that unsettled period. Repeated self-judgement can add further difficulty without improving understanding.
Give Me Something to Make Sense Of
Walking back up the beach, my partner suggested we should act normal. The wind-shaped trees made that instruction difficult to interpret. A little later, my mind seemed to make a more unreasonable demand.
When Free Will Stops Explaining Evil
Free will may help explain why a good God permits some wrongdoing. Its reach becomes less clear when we ask about unequal capacities, the consequences a choice is allowed to have, and suffering that no human decision produces.
Narcissism as a Closed System
When feedback repeatedly becomes a threat to be deflected, a relationship can begin to organise itself around protecting one person's self-image. The pattern becomes clearer when we examine what happens to accountability.
The Unfinished Self
A person can develop abilities long before finding a useful way to combine them. When identity settles around only what is already easy to recognise, interests and capacities that might change the work can remain unused.
The Self You Think You Chose
You can choose to try something without choosing your first response to it. Self-discovery begins in that difference, then becomes more complicated as experience changes the preferences we are trying to understand.
Narcissism Is Self-Deception That Outlived Its Purpose
An explanation that makes a painful event easier to bear can become difficult to revise once it helps define the person telling it. The relief may continue even as the story begins to obstruct recognition and change.
We Are Algae, Rendered at Maximum Resolution
Human life shares its chemistry and evolutionary history with the rest of the living world. That continuity gives me reasons for a naturalistic view, while leaving the origins of life and the conditions for consciousness open to investigation.
The Paradox at the Origin of Everything
Asking for the origin of everything also puts time, causation and explanation in question. The difficulty may expose assumptions in the question, but an unanswered question is different from a contradiction.
The Trolley Problem of the Self
The image places a future self at the lever, the present inside the trolley and a younger self on the track. It makes change look like sacrifice, although care for the past and movement towards a different future can coexist.
From the notebooks / 36 pieces
Aphorisms
Short statements, with room to examine what follows from them.