Drawn In Perspective

Here is my taxonomy, each item is a distinct and independent dimension where technological progress is possible: Transport matter Store, transport, and release energy Communicate Cooperate Process information Engineer materials Alter experiences Extend li…

What does it mean to understand that something is a pattern?

I am trying to understand what role images play in a Kantian account of cognition, with a particular focus on his examples concerning judgements about mathematics.

I went to a talk by a wizard.

The comedian Rob Paravonian’s “Pachelbel rant” is one of the first YouTube videos I remember watching.

I spent some time recently reading about community building, and noticed that a lot of frameworks are unidimensional: they describe a single spectrum of "engagement" and rank people by where they are on this spectrum.

These are the final weeks of my sabbatical - which means I will soon have less time to write.

Imagine you press the following keys on an old-style calculator (the kind which only displays one input or output at a time on the display): 2 + 2 = You are using your calculator to compute the output of some function.

I've been re-reading David Allen's book "Getting Things Done".

When people ask me whether I think LLMs are phenomenally conscious I often prefer to start by answering a different question: "if they were phenomenally conscious, should we expect them to be phenomenally conscious in a way we could reliably conclude from…

I intentionally wrote a post which was less than 500 words yesterday, in an attempt to get "kicked out" of the blogging residency which was ending anyway.

Inkhaven is the name of the 30 day blogging retreat that I went on this month.

Earlier this month I built a replication of a classic psychology result: time taken to solve shape rotation puzzles scales with the angles between the shapes.

A machine is a physical system that can perform actions in the real world.

In yesterday's joint post with Adria he and I spoke about a surprisingly pernicious problem in the philosophy of computer science: we don't actually have a good account of what "implementation" is.

And it’s screwing up both functionalist theories of consciousness and mechanistic interpretability.

I’ve written a few blog posts lately discussing the aesthetic of cyberpunk media.

Why do mirrors appear to swap our left hands for our right hands but not our heads for our toes?

What have I been blogging about?

This post is a case study, applying ideas related to dynamic nominalism to the practice of giving and receiving feedback on teams with shared goals.

In my post on hackers, wizards, and scientists I ended with the following tension: Fields where individuals can cheaply iterate on technical ideas with tight feedback loops tend to see explosions of innovation.

I first came across Perpetual Peace when reading about the London 1851 Great Exhibition.

Agency The word "agency" can be used to mean many things.

The medieval debate regarding the problem of universals grew so fierce that it is said to have spilled out into fistfights on the streets of 1400s Paris.1 This is a blog post about why that debate remains relevant to basic philosophical questions about pe…

Yesterday I wrote a blog post about Jaakko Hintikka's account of the analytic/synthetic distinction in mathematics and logic.

What kind of judgement is required to establish an arithmetic truth like 2+2=4 or 5+7=12?

In a previous blog post I wrote about Nietzsche's genealogy of guilt in book 2 of the "Genealogy of Morality".

In a couple of previous blog posts I talked about functionalist accounts of phenomenal consciousness.

I didn’t want to write this blog post.

The word "agent" can be applied at a range of scales.

Read my original blog post about this letter here.

This is a blog post about the nomological claim that: in this universe, phenomenal consciousness supervenes on functional organisation.

This is a blog post about the logical and metaphysical possibility of p-zombies.

..instead of saying, the animals play because they are young, we must say, the animals have a youth in order that they may play -Karl Groos — but I do not, therefore, want my life to stop being a game.

In some previous blog posts I spoke about two definitions of the word "function".

I went to a workshop this week about replicating scientific studies, organised by Slime Mold Time Mold at Inkhaven.

Skip to the text of the original speech here.

You can read more about this speech and my own encounter with it in my full blog post on the topic.

Earlier this week I wrote a post about disambiguating the word function.

I wanted to share an interesting passage I came across when doing research for an upcoming blog post that mentions Kant's philosophy of arithmetic1.

In his 2024 Black Hat talk, Moxie Marlinspike (the cryptographer and founder of Signal) spoke about some ways our world is different to the ones portrayed in fantasy stories like JK Rowling's Harry Potter books.

Sometimes when people talk about "functions" they are talking about abstract processes that can be instantiated in the real world, other times they are talking about the properties of things that make them fit for some purpose.

Cyberpunk is a genre of science fiction about high tech, urban sprawl, and do-it-yourself counterculture.

By using the term evaluative philosophy of mind, I am trying to draw attention to philosophical work which studies the value judgements we make about mental phenomena like experiences, desires, and actions.

This post is a letter to my 19-year old self, sitting in a "Philosophy of Logic and Language" lecture, and wondering whether I've made a terrible mistake.

Alternate title: You can't just keep going up one level of abstraction as a substitute for learning anything difficult In 2017 I had the embarrassing revelation that for most of that year I had been making only one intellectual “move”, which was to make t…

I ran some games of General Knowledge Poker recently and several people asked me where they could find the rules online, so I wrote them out here.

Recently I've been thinking1 about a philosophical movement called logical empiricism2 and its relationship to the philosophy of mind.

This is a non exhaustive list of things that I learnt doing a 2-year part-time Philosophy MA that I thought were interesting enough to share.

If you know anything about me you might be wondering how I ended up studying more philosophy.