Featured
Selected essays and core writings.
Writing
15 items
Principles of Vasocomputation
Buddhist phenomenology, active inference, and physical reflex
A theory spanning Buddhist tanha, the Bayesian brain, physical and mental tension, and how VSMCs are a central regulating force on neural computation.
Qualia Formalism and a Symmetry Theory of Valence
Whitepaper
A distillation of Principia Qualia: the same thesis, much shorter, with updated structure and arguments.
A Paradigm for AI Consciousness
AI and consciousness
AI is the most rapidly transformative technology ever developed. Consciousness is what gives life meaning. How should we think about the intersection?
Autism as a disorder of dimensionality
Neurodivergence and dimensionality
An account of the autistic bundle of symptoms as naturally arising from a nervous system whose dimensionality parameter is maladaptively high.
It From Bit, Revisited
Binary questions about consciousness
Beautiful philosophy takes the messy and complicated, and leaves it clean, simple, and obvious. This essay offers ten binary questions about consciousness.
A Future for Neuroscience
Bridging neural dynamics and high-level mind
A proposal for elegant bottom-up bridges from measurable neural dynamics to psychological, phenomenological, and psychiatric phenomena.
Neural Annealing
Toward a neural theory of everything
An argument for approaching the brain as a self-organizing system governed by core principles, rather than a catalog of localized functions.
Principia Qualia
Book-length consciousness theory
What would a systematic solution to the mystery of consciousness and qualia look like?
Rescuing Philosophy
Philosophy and its lost energy
Philosophy has lost much of its energy, focus, and glamor in our modern era. What happened?
Against Functionalism
A critique of functionalist consciousness theories
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.
The Neuroscience of Meditation
Buddhism, mind, brain, and information theory
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 Primer on the Symmetry Theory of Valence
Valence and symmetry
A compact introduction to the central claim that symmetry in the mathematical representation of experience is a promising handle on valence.
Taking Monism Seriously
Metaphysics and phenomenology
A clean metaphysical seed: if reality is one kind of thing, then physics and phenomenology should ultimately be two descriptions of the same structure.
Qualia Astronomy
Cosmology and alien qualia
A proposal to look for distant signatures of alien telos by reasoning from what kinds of qualia advanced civilizations might try to create.
What's Out There?
Taxonomy of nonhuman qualia
A short taxonomy of evolved, primordial, technological, and megascale qualia — and a prompt to widen the search space of consciousness.