Philosophy

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.

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 …

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 …

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 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 …

Orientation Under Pressure: Notes on a Life Lived Deliberately

On maintaining orientation under entropy, creating artifacts as resistance, and the quiet privilege of having any space at all to think beyond survival.

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 …

Echoes of the Sublime

The Mocking Void: On the Computational Incompleteness of Meaning and the Mathematics of Cosmic Horror

The Policy

The Policy

A speculative fiction novel exploring AI alignment, existential risk, and the fundamental tension between optimization and ethics. When a research team develops SIGMA, an advanced AI system designed to optimize human welfare, they must confront an …

Mathematical Elegance in Software Design

The best software I’ve written has mathematical elegance—not because it uses advanced math, but because it embodies mathematical principles of abstraction, composition, and invariants.

What Mathematical Elegance Means

In mathematics, elegance …

Long Echo: Designing for Digital Resilience Across Decades

Not resurrection. Not immortality. Just love that still responds. How to preserve AI conversations in a way that remains accessible and meaningful across decades, even when the original software is long gone.

Why I Build Comprehensively in Open Source

I maintain 50+ open source repositories. Every one has documentation, tests, examples, and clear architecture.

People ask: “Why spend so much time on free software when you have stage 4 cancer?”

The question misunderstands what I’m …

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 …

The Beautiful Deception: How 256 Bits Pretend to be Infinity

The Beautiful Deception: How 256 Bits Pretend to be Infinity

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 …

Diagnosed with Stage 3 Cancer: Reflections on Mortality and Legacy

I was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer. Surgery scheduled for December 31st—literally the last day of 2020.

Fitting end to a difficult year.

I’m not going to use this space for medical details or false optimism. Instead, I want to think about what …

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.

The Call of Asheron: Magic as Computational Discovery

The Call of Asheron is fantasy written by someone who thinks magic should have computational rigor.

Magic as Discovery

Magic in this world isn’t mysterious power—it’s natural philosophy, the systematic study of reality’s …

API Design as Value Imprinting

I’ve been thinking about how API design encodes values—not just technical decisions, but philosophical ones.

Every interface you create is a constraint on future behavior. Every abstraction emphasizes certain patterns and discourages others. …

Why Open Source Matters for Reproducible Science

I develop almost everything in open source. People ask why I spend so much time on documentation, examples, and polish for free software.

The answer is simple: science should be reproducible, and code is increasingly central to scientific claims.

The …

The Beauty of Mathematical Abstraction

I’ve been thinking more about mathematics lately—not just as a tool for computation, but as a mode of thought.

There’s something deeply satisfying about mathematical abstraction. The way a good theorem compresses complex phenomena into a …

The Unix Philosophy and API Design

I keep coming back to the Unix philosophy: do one thing well, compose freely, use text streams.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a design principle that scales from command-line tools to library APIs to distributed systems.

What Makes a Good …

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 …

On moral responsibility: a metaphysical examination

On Moral Responsibility: A Metaphysical Examination

A philosophical exploration of free will, determinism, and moral agency. What does it mean to be a moral agent? Can we truly be held responsible for our actions in a deterministic universe?