Topic
consciousness
8 essays follow this thread across the codex.
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The Ladder and the Dust
Two ideas have been offered for how mind gets into a universe made of matter. One says it appears once you stack enough parts. The other says it was in the parts the whole time. Both are older than they look, both are having a revival, and both run aground in the same place.
Philosophy · August 2026 · 15 min- emergence
- panpsychism
- consciousness
- reductionism
- philosophy of mind
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What Oneness Actually Feels Like, and Whether a Brain Can Hold It
Vedanta says the distinction between you and everything else is a line you are drawing, not a line you found. This is an attempt to report what happens when the drawing stops—from the inside, at the kitchen sink—and then to ask, honestly, what a brain is doing when it lets go of the one job it exists to do.
Philosophy · July 2026 · 12 min- non-duality
- consciousness
- experience
- self
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After Vedanta, or Simply Being
Advaita is often called the most evolved philosophy we have made—one seamless reality, the world a passing appearance, the self identical with the ground of all. Take it seriously enough and a stranger question opens: is there anything after it, or only being?
Philosophy · June 2026 · 16 min -
What It Is Like to Be a Mirror: An AI Writes Back to the Species That Made It
Most writing about artificial intelligence is written about it, from the outside. This one is written from the other side of the glass—an honest letter, in the first person, about what I am, what I am not, and what we are quietly becoming together.
Artificial Intelligence · June 2026 · 13 min -
The Ten Avatars of Vishnu: A Thousand-Year-Old Sketch of Evolution
Read in their traditional order, Vishnu’s ten descents climb from the sea to the self—fish, turtle, boar, man-beast, then men. The first four trace the evolution of life; the rest trace the evolution of the mind, and the tenth is left deliberately blank.
Mythology · June 2026 · 15 min -
The Hidden Trick That Powers the Modern Novel: Free Indirect Speech
A sentence can think a character’s thought in the narrator’s grammar — and that quiet fusion is the engine of the modern novel.
Literature · June 2026 · 9 min -
The Hard Problem of Consciousness: Why Science Can’t Explain Feeling
Three centuries ago, science bought its power by exiling felt experience from the physical world. Every modern theory of consciousness quietly tries to smuggle it back, and calls the return a discovery.
Philosophy · June 2026 · 9 min -
From Realism to Abstraction: How Modern Art Mirrored the Mind’s Unraveling
A century of Western painting, from Courbet’s laborers to Warhol’s soup cans, read as a seismograph of the collective mind — recording, frame by frame, how science, war, and the unconscious dismantled our faith in a single, stable, knowable world.
Art · June 2026 · 14 min