Writing

AI is the most rapidly transformative technology ever developed. Consciousness is what gives life meaning. How should we think about the intersection?

A theory spanning Buddhist tanha, the Bayesian brain, physical and mental tension, and how VSMCs are a central regulating force on neural computation.

A distillation of Principia Qualia: the same thesis, much shorter, with updated structure and arguments.

An account of the autistic bundle of symptoms as naturally arising from a nervous system whose dimensionality parameter is maladaptively high.

A proposal to look for distant signatures of alien telos by reasoning from what kinds of qualia advanced civilizations might try to create.

Beautiful philosophy takes the messy and complicated, and leaves it clean, simple, and obvious. This essay offers ten binary questions about consciousness.

A compact introduction to the central claim that symmetry in the mathematical representation of experience is a promising handle on valence.

An argument for approaching the brain as a self-organizing system governed by core principles, rather than a catalog of localized functions.

A short taxonomy of evolved, primordial, technological, and megascale qualia — and a prompt to widen the search space of consciousness.

A clean metaphysical seed: if reality is one kind of thing, then physics and phenomenology should ultimately be two descriptions of the same structure.

Buddhism tells a coherent and useful story about the mind, but needs bridges to neuroscience and information theory to explain how these dynamics are implemented.

A proposal for elegant bottom-up bridges from measurable neural dynamics to psychological, phenomenological, and psychiatric phenomena.

Philosophy has lost much of its energy, focus, and glamor in our modern era. What happened?

Functionalism sounds better than it turns out to be in practice, especially when trying to define ethics and suffering in a way that can mediate disagreements.

What would a systematic solution to the mystery of consciousness and qualia look like?