philosophy
-
Introduction The nature of consciousness has long been one of the most profound and perplexing mysteries of human existence. Despite centuries of philosophical inquiry and scientific investigation, the inner world of subjective experience remains largely opaque and inaccessible, both to ourselves and to others. This fundamental uncertainty and unknowability of consciousness has often been seen…
-
My friend Avi asked me something along the lines of what I would say the meaning of life is in one word. At first I was tempted to say, “Love,” but that word has too many different meanings or connotations. I felt then that I should say, “Support,” to single out a specific kind of…
-
Today I find myself very tempted to resume my reading of The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose. This is a book that was first gifted to me by my fried Floriano in high school, because he knew about my affinity for physics. What he didn’t know is how this book would feature in my…
-
Recently I was in Maine. I stood in the woods and really appreciated the weight of my own philosophy, my recovery from mental illness, and all that I have come to learn and unlearn. I used an app to check whether the trees I was looking at were yews or firs (they were balsam firs).…
-
This post is a collection of quick thoughts. My goal in writing it is to come closer to an emotional resolution on the topic of fallibilism and the apparent problem posed by the reflexivity thereof. Does absolute certainty exist? First, one can never prove with absolute certainty that absolute certainty is not possible, because to…
-
Here’s a quick post demystifying the process by which we’re scientifically bootstrapping our way out of our minds’ and brains’ black boxes into better and better self-knowledge. 1. We identify types of human cognition that are of interest to us. For example, analogical reasoning. Once you’ve learned about it, it’s shocking how analogy underlies almost…
-
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…
-
I am beginning this blog in order to continue the daily habit of writing without obsessively writing and rewriting my book, The Trinitarian Mystery. Because that book has been such a living document, and because the philosophy contained therein is so rich and prone to self-affirmation, I must for the sake of my own health…
-
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…
-
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 