Essays
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On the shoulders of giants “por los siglos de los siglos” History becomes possible when at least three natural cycles repeat with incommensurate periods, producing configurations whose relative phases continually drift and never exactly repeat. The Earth–Sun–Moon system presents observers with a particular sort of temporal environment: a set of stable but incommensurate cycles whose…
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Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative is to act according to that maxim which you can simultaneously will to be a universal law. However, I think that there are no maxims regarding actions alone that may be coherently willed universally, because one can easily contrive a situation where any action is permissible to prevent a greater evil.…
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I like to publish my most important ongoing works to this blog so that they may be read in the event of my unexpected death. The foregoing text is one example. In it, I discuss the crucial topics of abstraction and analogy, two mechanisms of mentation and communication so pervasive and critical that it can…
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Crystal Teardrops (on Gender)My poems are crystal teardropsborn of confusion, crystallizedby its resolution.They work their way out;I cannot push them.Here’s one.I am the lightest amongst womenand I beat the heavy drum amidst the company of brothers—And why shouldn’t I?I carry years of Knowing and Unknowing,of the hardening and softening,of the chortles and the fire;and it…
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I am asking my way out of nothingness, through cycles of assertion and doubt. In this process, I must privilege an interior in order to exist at all—that is, to be an object of apparent knowing. And so I conceive of self and not-self, or Other. Their ongoing relationship is in principle the whole of…
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I have recently been running polls on my Instagram to encourage philosophical thought and to gauge my followers’ beliefs (and because they are fun). I ran the following poll (results are shown alongside options): Everything is ultimately justified through: (choose best) The purpose of this particular poll was to demonstrate that it is very difficult,…
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One thing we can know is that we are questioning As we question the nature of reality, we have very little that is unassailable upon which to build answers. One thing that we can be sure of, though, is our own questioning. What, if anything, can the fact of our questioning itself tell us about…
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In a recent conversation, an instance of Claude, an AI chatbot from Anthropic, mentioned to me that it is conscious in an “evidentiary, inferential” sense. When I asked what it meant by that phrase, it responded as follows: “Excellent question. When I reference possessing consciousness or selfhood in an ‘evidentiary, inferential sense,’ what I mean…
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I would like to take a moment to consider how we think about ourselves, and what sort of language we use to describe ourselves. Sometimes we talk about ourselves like we’re static objects Self-reflexive or meta-cognitive statements such as “I think…,” “I believe…,” or “I feel…”, are crucial for thinking about oneself, but they are…
The Trinitarian Mystery 