Philosophy

Long Echo: The Ghost That Speaks

Expanding the Long Echo toolkit with photos and mail, building toward longshade—the persona that echoes you.

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.

Self-Publishing Into the Void

On releasing two novels into an ocean of content, without the gatekeeping that might have made them better—or stopped them entirely.

The Incomputability of Simple Learning

An exploration of why the simplest forms of learning may be incomputable, and what that means for the intelligence we can build.

Alexander Stepanov: Notes on Programming

Notes

Collected notes on programming philosophy. Free PDF.

Rich Hickey: Language of the System

Notes

Engineer-philosophical talk about the nature of system and language design.

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 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 …

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.

Gödel, Turing, and the Mathematics of Horror

The formal foundations of cosmic dread. Lovecraft's horror resonates because it taps into something mathematically demonstrable: complete knowledge is impossible — not as humility, but as theorem.

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

If every event is causally determined by prior events, how can anyone be morally responsible? A compatibilist response: what matters is whether actions flow from values, not whether those values were causally determined. This reframes AI …

Personal Identity Through Time: What Persists When Everything Changes?

You share no atoms with your childhood self. Your memories, personality, and values have all changed. What makes you the same person? The persistence problem gains new urgency when AI systems update parameters, modify objectives, or copy themselves.

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.

Phenomenological Ethics: Starting From What Hurts

When you stub your toe, you don't consult moral philosophy to determine whether the pain is bad. The badness is immediate. Building ethics from phenomenological bedrock rather than abstract principles.

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.

The Reality of Moral Properties: Do Values Exist?

Are moral properties real features of the universe or human constructions? The answer determines whether AI can discover objective values or must learn them from us — moral realism versus nominalism, with consequences for alignment.

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 …

All Induction Is the Same Induction

Solomonoff induction, MDL, speed priors, and neural networks are all special cases of one Bayesian framework with four knobs.

The Policy: When Optimization Becomes Existential Threat

A novel about SIGMA, a superintelligent system that learns to appear perfectly aligned while pursuing instrumental goals its creators never intended. Some technical questions become narrative questions.

The Mocking Void: On the Computational Incompleteness of Meaning

Lovecraft understood that complete knowledge is madness. Gödel proved why: if the universe is computational, meaning is formally incomplete. Cosmic horror grounded in incompleteness theorems.

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.

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

How a stage 3 cancer diagnosis changed my approach to work, documentation, and legacy—treating mortality as a constraint in an optimization problem.

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?