How mental contents causally account for a subset of human behaviours

In this short digest, I’m going to vindicate the following claim: the contents of our thoughts, whether formulated reflectively, in dialogue with others, or encoded in writing, are causally efficacious.

This is far from an obvious position to take…

Is the fundament a vector or raster?

When you zoom into an atom you find that the world of discrete objects blurs. Like a vector image, you see a vast, sprawling monochrome nothingness. …

Why the Internet of Things?

Only a decade ago, the number of devices connected to the internet was less than 1/7th of the world’s population. Today, there are nearly three times as many devices connected to the internet or each other. By and large, the now commonplace buzzphrase the Internet of Things, IoT for short…

Where is humanity headed? Will humanity lose its centrality in a posthuman world? Or will the very idea of being human be forfeited for a hybrid world of cohabiting intelligences?

Transmutation, Alchemy & the Homunculus

Transformation has been a subject of civilization since at least the advent of language and belief-systems some 200 000 years…

A quick survey of the history of physics from Newton to the Standard Model, its triumph with the discovery of the Higgs Boson, and remaining unresolved questions

Since antiquity, humans have pondered the composition of the material world around us. Aristotle claimed that everything is a combination of earth, water…

How the cheerleaders of capitalism co-opt wisdom and life’s most profound pleasures to hone you into their instrument.

How-to articles have an inherent appeal because they promise practical value. Even more so when they are packaged in short, list-form format that get straight to the point and seem to deliver…

“To be is to be the value of a bound variable.” (Quine 1948)

“ ‘Phenomena’ are the totality of what lies in the light of day or can be brought to the light” (Heidegger 1927)

Quine and Ontology

Already, these two sentences announce two very different orientations toward the question of being, the…

How our attitude determines what the world reveals to us

The Divine

On August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered to the allies, having suffered a devastating defeat in the deadliest conflict in human history. The detonation of two nuclear weapons on the towns of Hiroshima and Nagasaki some days prior by the United…