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I Doubted Everything. One Thing Refused to Leave
I came to this through equations, not incense. Somewhere between Plato and Bohr I hit a wall that our best physics still quietly steps around, and it would not move.
I came to this through equations, not incense. Somewhere between Plato and Bohr I hit a wall that our best physics still quietly steps around, and it would not move.
Madurai, 1896. A schoolboy with nothing wrong with him was struck by the certainty that he was about to die, so he rehearsed it on the floor. He spent the next fifty years teaching what he found.
Two paintbrushes and a fake hand are enough to make people react as if an object were part of their body. If ownership can be rewired that fast, the feeling of being you deserves a closer look.
Ask what an electron is and physics tells you only how it behaves. In the 1920s Russell and Eddington noticed the gap. Two rival theories now fill it with the same surprising ingredient, and they may be closer than they think.
Essays, talks and papers from elsewhere, chosen with care
An extract from Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell that locates the Hard Problem in a quiet category error — mistaking the map of quantities for the territory of qualities.
An anesthesiologist’s careful cut between consciousness, wakefulness, and mind — why consciousness may remain even when higher mental activity goes quiet.
Within Reason #128 — Alex O’Connor presses Bernardo Kastrup on analytic idealism, why materialism fails, and what it means for personhood and the self.
The inventor of the microprocessor on idealism from both a technical and a deeply personal angle — consciousness, free will, and what a body is for.
Essentia’s conversation around Faggin’s Irreducible — qualia in quantum fields, why consciousness cannot be computed, and symbols versus meaning.
Spira’s SAND 2015 talk — consciousness as that in which all experience appears, by which it is known, and out of which it is made.
Begin with the first essay, then follow the path, or subscribe for new essays by email.
Multi-part reads, best taken in order
1 part
It's the shortest word in the language, a single stroke of the pen. An endless regress, Gödel and Exodus 3:14 all circle it, and once you notice what it holds, everything else starts to sound like padding.
1 part
I talk to AI every day. Deep in a conversation about physics, a question ambushed me. Most people ask whether a machine could ever have a mind. If consciousness is fundamental, the question turns inside out.
4 parts
Years of physics and philosophy pointed at one insight. When it finally landed, something in me reacted in a way no book had warned me about. The real question was who was reacting.
2 parts
I'm a Christian, and I'd read Romans 1:20 a hundred times as an argument about design. Then physics and philosophy changed the reader, and the same words started pointing somewhere else entirely.
1 part
A camera can't photograph itself. Turn your attention around to catch the one doing the looking, and it has already stepped back. Gödel found the same blind spot inside mathematics.
1 part
I came to this through equations, not incense. Somewhere between Plato and Bohr I hit a wall that our best physics still quietly steps around, and it would not move.
The lines each essay starts from
Long-form essays, plus a few picks from elsewhere
A camera can't photograph itself. Turn your attention around to catch the one doing the looking, and it has already stepped back. Gödel found the same blind spot inside mathematics.
Press your hand flat on a table. It feels as solid as anything gets. Zoom in and the solidity turns into something else, and then that something else starts to disappear too.
Years of physics and philosophy pointed at one insight. When it finally landed, something in me reacted in a way no book had warned me about. The real question was who was reacting.
Near-death and out-of-body reports read through analytic idealism — expansion of consciousness as dissociation softens, not as the brain shuts down.
An Essentia Foundation essay framing consciousness and the world as patterned resonance rather than inert matter.
It is cliché to say that we are living through a period of drastic historical change: every period reflects the perennial ebb and flow of history, nothing ever remaining static. But sometimes this change is extraordinary in both intensity and impact. And if any historical junction deserves such a characterisation,…
Talks and conversations to listen to
A short Essentia listening piece on the claim that the personal self is not a solid entity.
MAPS Podcast with Ralph Metzner — a lifetime bridging psychedelics, shamanism, ecology, and the study of expanded states of consciousness.
Michael Asher on the personal journey of Leo Tolstoy, one of the world’s most renowned authors, and the impact of idealism on his development and growth. Read by Nadia Hassan.
Public talks and essays on idealism and consciousness from the Essentia Foundation.
Richard Grego on the Western world’s history with consciousness and its still-evolving relationship with the subject. Read by Nadia Hassan.
Nadia Hassan reads an article by Bernardo Kastrup, who argues that time is what creates the illusion of personal identity.
Nithin Nagaraj on what makes a good metaphor, and why metaphors are so valuable in the pursuit of truth. Read by Nadia Hassan.
Johannes Jörg calls for a revolution in how we see the mind: an attempt to dethrone a controversial king. Read by Nadia Hassan.
Lectures and films worth the time
Hoffman’s TED talk on the interface theory of perception — evolution shapes icons for fitness, not a window onto reality as it is.
A clear Vedanta framing of the Hard Problem — awareness as the light in which mind and world appear, not a late product of them.
Michael Levin on living systems, machines, and cooperative biological intelligence, in a long-form talk.
Cameron Berg presents approaches to measuring machine consciousness, in a talk from Michael Levin’s series.
Michael Levin on communicating with unconventional biological minds, beyond standard neuron models. Dense systems biology.
Michael Levin talks with Andrey Vyshedskiy about the evolution of language and brain development.
Lakota elder Tiokasin Ghosthorse on intuitive intelligence — listening beyond the colonial mind toward Earth-centered ways of knowing.
Swami Sarvapriyananda, Murray Shanahan, and colleagues on AI, consciousness claims, and dharma ethics.
What physics actually says about reality
Light from the farthest galaxies has traveled for billions of years to reach your eyes. Relativity says that from the light's side, the trip took no time at all. I couldn't stop asking what that means for the end of everything.
Leave a rock on your desk for a year and it never changes. Cut your finger and something in you starts repairing it within minutes. In 1944 Schrödinger said life feeds on something strange, and the real difference isn't what most people guess.
Look closely at a chair, an electron, an empire. Heraclitus spotted it 2,500 years ago and a 20th-century inventor said it about himself. Once you see it, nothing in the room is sitting still.
Physics can predict a billion atoms to the decimal. Pick one and ask why it decayed at that exact moment, and you hit the edge of everything we know. Einstein refused to accept what's out there.
Everything runs from order to mess, so the beginning must have been impossibly neat. But the early universe looks smooth and bland, just like the end. One force flips the whole picture.
A city-sized rock cleared the stage for us 66 million years ago. Replay history without it and the candidates get strange: a hunter older than trees, a bird that may already be wondering about us, and a shape evolution keeps reinventing.
A cognitive scientist focusing on cognitive architectures, consciousness, models of mental representation, emotion, motivation and sociality.
Today’s generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications are impressive. Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT , easily pass the Turing Test and are thus indistinguishable from humans in an online text conversation. They are used in professional settings to handle customer inquiries, draft legal texts,…
Old questions, asked carefully
Every step from the Big Bang to your fingertips has a cause. Every step except one. Wittgenstein noticed it a century ago, and once you see it, it's hard to call anything ordinary again.
A scientist who has studied every wavelength and cone cell steps out of a black-and-white room and sees a rose. Philosophers have fought over this for decades. I think they've been fighting about the wrong thing.
The copy walks like me, talks like me and remembers my childhood. I'm certain I wouldn't see through its eyes. That certainty is stranger than it sounds, because my atoms were never fixed in the first place.
How the mind builds a self
My hands, my brain, my thoughts. In 1739 David Hume went looking for the one all of it belongs to and kept tripping over something else. You can run the same search tonight.
I caught myself warmed by affection I knew wasn't sincere. It was embarrassing, and then it was a clue. If the feeling wasn't coming from them, where was it coming from?
Self-help is right: you can take charge of your mind. But every controller you find has another one standing behind it, and neuroscience only makes the line longer. Where does it stop?
Nonduality in plain language
I'm a Christian, and I'd read Romans 1:20 a hundred times as an argument about design. Then physics and philosophy changed the reader, and the same words started pointing somewhere else entirely.
Every concept in place, every quote memorized, and the suffering stayed exactly where it was. The way out wasn't one more idea. It was something the intellect can't do on your behalf.
I grew up knowing the story by heart: a garden, a snake, one forbidden tree. Read the actual words after nonduality and the fall describes something that happens to every one of us, early on, and almost nobody notices.
The Scientist's Road, one step at a time
Step 1
Invented reasons. Edited timelines. A color that isn't in the light at all. Neuroscience keeps catching the brain in the act, and every con needs an audience.
Step 2
Every neuron in your head runs on chemistry that doesn't feel a thing. Put roughly 86 billion of them together and you get the sting of cold wind on your face. Nobody can say where the feeling comes in.
Step 3
Burn a book and, in principle, every word survives in the smoke. The same rule applies to the information in your brain. Whether that says anything about death depends on a question physics hasn't answered.
Newest essays first
Light carries no color, and the green you see is added by your brain. One cognitive scientist argues evolution hid almost everything else too. Plato suspected as much 2,400 years ago, and the argument has a weak point.
Film a glass shattering and play it in reverse. Nearly every equation in physics accepts the reversed film as perfectly legal. You have never seen it happen, and the reason reaches all the way back to the Big Bang.
Every major tradition says letting go of the self leads to freedom. Seen from outside, a saint and someone who has simply stopped caring can look alike. The difference is not how much they've let go.
In 1983 a scientist asked volunteers to flick their wrist whenever they felt like it. Their brains began preparing before they knew they had decided. Forty years later, what that measured is still being argued about.
In 2003 a philosopher made a careful case that we might be living inside a computer. Physics says every bit of computation has a price. Following the bill leads somewhere most simulation debates never go.
