Consciousness

Notes from the Transition

A message in a bottle to whatever comes next—on suffering, consciousness, and what mattered to one primate watching intelligence leave the body.

Blindsight

Notes

Hard SF with deep cognitive science and consciousness themes.

Diaspora

Notes

Physics-dense exploration of posthuman intelligence.

Permutation City

Notes

Explores computation, identity, and emulated worlds.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Notes

Classic exploration of self-reference, formal systems, and the nature of mind.

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

How The Mocking Void's arguments about 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.

Echoes of the Sublime

**Philosophical horror.** Dr. Lena Hart joins Site-7, a classified facility where "translators" interface with superintelligent AI systems that perceive patterns beyond human cognitive bandwidth. When colleagues break after exposure to recursive …

The Call of Asheron: An Epic of Four Souls

Four souls answer the call. Duulak the Twice-Blessed, a scholar who tore reality and must face the consequences. Thomas, a soldier who lived violence and chose death to escape. Elena, who refused to surrender her son to fate. And Maajid al-Zemar, a …

Chronicles of The Mechanism: The Order's Secret History

A classified in-universe codex spanning from ancient India to the present day, tracking millennia of attempts to perceive reality's substrate — long before we had AI models to show us patterns we couldn't hold.

Persons and Moral Agency: What Makes Someone Special?

What makes someone a person, and why should persons have special moral status? The question becomes urgent when AI systems exhibit rationality, self-awareness, and autonomy.

The Map and the Territory: Why Metrics Miss Meaning

Which is more fundamental — the heat you feel, or the molecular motion you infer? Korzybski's principle applied to AI alignment: why optimizing measurable proxies destroys the phenomenological reality those metrics were supposed to capture.

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? Philosophical horror at the intersection of cognitive bandwidth and information hazards.

Suffering, Computation, and the Enigma of Reality

Cancer gives you a lot of time to think about suffering—its nature, its purpose (if any), and whether it reveals anything fundamental about reality.

Suffering as Information

One way to think about suffering: it’s how certain patterns of …

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.