Archive
22 essays and notes, organised by topic and subject.
Embodiment & selfhood
The witness and the biography
The immediate fact of experiencing differs from the story of a particular person. That distinction opens a serious inquiry into selfhood without proving a timeless observer.
When the body feels like ours
Bodily ownership is part of experience and can be experimentally altered. Its construction helps explain embodiment while leaving the nature of the experiencing subject open.
Perception & the interface
Hoffman and the useful world
Donald Hoffman's interface theory separates successful perception from faithful depiction. Its challenge reaches beyond ordinary perceptual error.
Experience & explanation
Does experience make a difference?
Our lives respond to pain, thought, and feeling. Explaining their causal role becomes difficult when experience is treated as something added to an already sufficient physical process.
The brain as a filter
A filter theory treats the brain as a condition of access to consciousness. Its strongest question concerns dependence; its hardest task is explaining what the filter actually does.
The fact of experience
A description of what a mind does leaves a disputed question about why there is anything it feels like to be that mind.
What neural intervention shows
Altering brain activity can alter a specific experience. That establishes a causal role for neural processes while leaving the ultimate nature of experience disputed.
What physicalism commits us to
Physicalism makes a claim about the foundations of reality. Its success depends on explaining experience, rather than merely locating the machinery associated with it.
Eternalism
Chance and the existing future
Unpredictability, indeterminism, and an unwritten future are separate claims. Quantum uncertainty does not settle the ontology of time by itself.
The future as part of reality
Eternalism gives future events the same ontological standing as the past. Taking that proposition seriously changes what it means to inhabit a life.
Alternatives to eternalism
A present that belongs to the world
Presentism and the growing block preserve objective becoming. Their strongest motivation is also the source of their hardest physical problem.
Agency & the fixed future
A choice without an alternative
The experience of considering several actions can be real even if only one future is actual. The remaining dispute concerns what freedom requires.
Destiny and deliberation
A future that exists cannot be replaced with another actual future. That leaves a harder question about what our reasoning contributes to the history we inhabit.
Spacetime & temporal experience
A life in spacetime
A worldline places events in a temporal geometry. It helps us think beyond an isolated present without supplying a theory of the observer.
Clocks and lived duration
Relativistic time dilation makes elapsed time depend on a path through spacetime. It challenges a universal clock without proving an ontology.
The present and the limits of simultaneity
Relativity changes the physical meaning of a shared present. The metaphysical conclusions require a further argument.
Quantum foundations
Measurement without a mind
Environmental interactions can suppress quantum interference without anyone watching. That changes what quantum measurement can establish about consciousness.
Entropy & information
Why the arrow needs an explanation
Temporal order and the thermodynamic arrow answer different questions. A complete history can contain a direction without requiring a moving present.
Editorial method
Inquiry and evidential support
The distinct obligations involved in investigating a report, evaluating an explanation, and drawing a conclusion.
An explanation has a boundary
A practical way to notice when a successful model is being asked to answer a different question.
Coherence and the burden of evidence
An internally consistent account can organise observations while leaving its central claim unconfirmed.
Judgment under uncertainty
Incomplete knowledge still permits discriminating judgments. The difficulty is deciding which commitments the evidence warrants.