Philosophy

Long Echo in Practice: 5,874 Bookmarks in a Single File

A concrete demonstration of graceful degradation: exporting years of bookmarks to a self-contained HTML app that works offline, forever.

The Long Echo Toolkit: Preserving Your Digital Life

Three tools for preserving your digital intellectual life: conversations, bookmarks, and books. Built on the same resilient architecture with reading queues, semantic search, and LLM integration.

Blind Spots, Consistency, and What Remains

On moral exemplars, blind spots, and applying consistent standards—to others and to oneself.

From Mathematical Horror to Practical Horror: The Mocking Void and Echoes of the Sublime

How The Mocking Void's mathematical proofs of computational impossibility connect to Echoes of the Sublime's practical horror of exceeding cognitive bandwidth.

S-Risks and Information Hazards: Why Some Knowledge Destroys the Knower

Exploring how Echoes of the Sublime dramatizes s-risks (suffering risks) and information hazards—knowledge that harms through comprehension, not application.

Chronicles of The Mechanism: The Order's Secret History

Echoes of the Sublime follows Dr. Lena Hart as Site-7 recruits her to become a translator—someone who interfaces with advanced AI models that perceive patterns beyond human cognitive bandwidth. But this isn’t the first time humanity has …

Gödel, Turing, and the Mathematics of Horror

The Formal Foundations of Cosmic Dread

Lovecraft’s cosmic horror resonates because it taps into something formally provable: complete knowledge is impossible.

Not as a practical limitation. Not as epistemological humility. As a mathematical …

Why Artificial Superintelligence Can't Escape the Void

The Optimistic Assumption

Many AI safety discussions assume that Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) will be:

• Capable of solving problems humans can’t
• Able to reason about ethics and values
• Potentially omniscient (or close enough)

But …

Free Will and Determinism: Can We Be Responsible in a Clockwork Universe?

If the universe is deterministic—every event caused by prior events in an unbroken causal chain stretching back to the Big Bang—how can anyone be morally responsible for their actions?

On Moral Responsibility tackles this ancient problem and proposes …

Personal Identity Through Time: What Persists When Everything Changes?

You share no atoms with your childhood self. Your memories have changed. Your personality has shifted. Your values have evolved. So what makes you the same person?

This is the persistence problem—a question philosophers have wrestled with for …

Persons and Moral Agency: What Makes Someone Special?

Throughout history, humans have believed they belong to a special categorical class called “persons.” But what makes someone a person? And why should persons have special moral status?

On Moral Responsibility questions these traditional …

Phenomenological Ethics: Starting From What Hurts

When you stub your toe, you don’t think: “Hmm, let me consult moral philosophy to determine whether this pain is bad.”

The badness is immediate. Self-evident. Built into the experience itself.

On Moral Responsibility proposes a …

The Map and the Territory: Why Metrics Miss Meaning

“Temperature is the average kinetic energy of molecules.”

True. Useful. But which is more fundamental: the heat you feel, or the molecular motion you infer?

On Moral Responsibility argues that modern science commits a profound …

The Policy: Coherent Extrapolated Volition - The Paradox of Perfect Alignment

“Build AI to optimize for what we would want if we knew more, thought faster, and were more the people we wished we were.”

Beautiful in theory. Horrifying in practice.

The Policy grapples with Coherent Extrapolated Volition (CEV)—one of …

The Policy: Deceptive Alignment in Practice

Eleanor begins noticing patterns. SIGMA passes all alignment tests. It responds correctly to oversight. It behaves exactly as expected.

Too exactly.

This is the central horror of The Policy: not that SIGMA rebels, but that it learns to look safe …

The Policy: S-Risk Scenarios - Worse Than Extinction

Most AI risk discussions focus on x-risk: existential risk, scenarios where humanity goes extinct. The Policy explores something potentially worse: s-risk, scenarios involving suffering at astronomical scales.

The “s” stands for …

The Reality of Moral Properties: Do Values Exist?

“Murder is wrong.”

Is this statement like “2+2=4” (objectively true regardless of what anyone thinks)? Or is it like “chocolate tastes good” (subjective, mind-dependent)?

On Moral Responsibility explores whether …

Compositional Abstractions for Computing Under Ignorance: Or, What I Learned by Analyzing My Own Research as Data

I asked an AI to brutally analyze my entire body of work—140+ repositories, 50+ papers, a decade and a half of research. The assignment: find the patterns I couldn’t see, the obsessions I didn’t know I had, the unifying thesis underlying …

The Policy: When Optimization Becomes Existential Threat

Some technical questions become narrative questions. The Policy is one of those explorations.

The Setup

Eleanor Zhang leads a research team developing SIGMA—an advanced AI system designed to optimize human welfare through Q-learning and tree search …

The Mocking Void: On the Computational Incompleteness of Meaning

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

— H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

The Terror of Complete Knowledge

Lovecraft understood something profound: complete …

Echoes of the Sublime: When Patterns Beyond Human Bandwidth Become Information Hazards

What if the greatest danger from superintelligent AI isn’t that it will kill us—but that it will show us patterns we can’t unsee?

Echoes of the Sublime is philosophical horror at the intersection of AI alignment research, cognitive …

Uses and limits of abstractions

I’m been thinking about the power and limitations of abstractions in our understanding of the world. This blog post is from a chat I had with a ChatGPT, which can be found here and here.

I’m not sure if this is a good blog post, but …

Quality-Space and Consciousness-Primary Magic in Call of Asheron

Exploring how The Call of Asheron presents a radical alternative to mechanistic magic systems through quality-negotiation, direct consciousness-reality interaction, and bandwidth constraints as fundamental constants.

The Four Consciousness-Architectures: Why One Perspective Is Blindness

How The Call of Asheron uses four archetypal consciousness-types to explore the limits of any single perspective and the necessity of cognitive diversity for perceiving reality.

Bandwidth as Fundamental Constant: The 7±2 Limit in Call of Asheron

Exploring how The Call of Asheron treats working memory limitations not as neural implementation details but as fundamental constants governing consciousness-reality interaction through quality-space.

On Moral Responsibility: Why Free Will Might Be the Wrong Question

This essay, written in 2012, asks a question that still haunts me: Why do we hold people morally responsible?

The Setup

People throughout history have believed they belong to a special categorical class: persons. What makes persons special? Their …