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Animal Sentience

[article] Stupid Questions — 1 Jan 2026
Nature is just nurture over time, and nurture is far more obviously in charge; nothing changes if free will isn’t real; and the same is true of consciousness. They’re just complicated debates with no real outcomes.
[article] AI Hallucination is just Man-Guessing — 1 Nov 2025
Human reasoning isn’t flawed, it’s a social tool we use in the wrong places. It’s about sharing and evaluating intuitive claims, not generating rational ones. AI is fundamentally this but crippled: without the grounded intuitions and social friction that makes it work.
[article] Beyond System 1 and System 2 — 13 Jun 2025
System 1 vs System 2 is a useful shorthand, but our minds aren’t two-speed engines—they’re multi-process coalitions of specialised agents working in parallel and in series.
[article] Evolution is overrated — 18 Apr 2025
Without time-travel, evolutionary narratives can only identify theories that don’t make sense (like death drives). It can’t tell you what theories do make sense, because you can make many to explain the same thing. All they do is let you see what people wish the world was like.
[article] There is no authentic self — 11 Apr 2025
There’s no hidden version of you. If anything, we are a collection of bits and pieces that we weave together from the stories we learn from others. You don’t need to find an authentic self, you need to find a story you can weave that makes you happy.
[article] AI is never human-like — 14 Mar 2025
AI has human-like output, but a very different environment and different values for than environment, and until all three align, they will never actually be human-like.
[article] AI isn't that scary — 22 Jun 2024
AI alarmism thrives on speculative, worst-case scenarios, but our understanding of AI’s fundamentally alien nature and the complex forms of consciousness make me suspect that less stressful alternatives are equally plausible.
[article] Overengineering 'calm down' — 21 Mar 2024
Pop-psych theories on stress often use complex jargon to describe fundamentally simple concepts. They act less to inform, and more to reassure us, fascinate us, and absolve us of responsibility.
[article] Panpsychism isn't that fun — 22 Sep 2023
Panpsychists reckon they’ve one-upped materialists and non-materialists in explaining how consciousness might have come to be by telling us that everything is conscious. Then they just leave us hanging.
[article] Abstractions as Gods — 28 Dec 2022
We can use abstractions to get a handle on complex features of the world. By personalising centres of purpose in the world, we can better connect them to ideologies. This permits the crafting of ever more graceful solutions to our complex world.
[article] The colour of the inhuman world — 7 Nov 2022
Humans imagine that there is no other way of being than the way that we conceive of, and all experiences are ultimately relative to ours. This is a practical mistake, but one that leads to astonishing errors of judgement.
[article] Autopoiesis: the origin of complex thought — 4 Feb 2021
The complexity of our world determines the complexity of our actions. Simple enough to say, and perhaps to understand, but the implications are quite incredible and it all hinges on one concept: autopoiesis.
[article] Genetics is nurture — 11 Jan 2021
How much of who we are and what we do is the result of our genetic predispositions, and how much because of our environment? This tension is made complicated by the fact that the dichotomy doesn’t really exist. Rather, our nature is a form of nurture.
[article] States of Mind — 5 Dec 2020
There is no such thing as an ‘altered’ state of mind. Or rather, all states of mind are ones that are altered. Preferring the familiar ones provides a dangerous sense of safety, and avoiding the profound ones obscures some of the greatest benefits.
[article] Honey-bees are smarter than they should be — 29 Mar 2020
Animals show glimpses of cognitive abilities that challenge our traditional notions of higher-order thinking, making us question what truly characterises sophisticated thought and what it means to be clever.