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Humans Aren't Special — On minds beyond the human

• [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 <em>isn’t</em> 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] 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 <em>self</em>, 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 <em>values</em> for than environment, and until all three align, they will never <em>actually</em> 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] 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] 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] Spirituality of Mind — 29 Aug 2022
  The secular world replaced the soul with a mind in the brain. Modern science of mind finds no such thing, but a collection of mini-minds which does not stop at the body, but extends into the world. This philosophy presents us a secular spirituality, a god we can all believe in.
• [article] Animals First — 10 Oct 2021
  When we use the architecture of the brain to scaffold our thinking about the mind, we come to learn that humans are primarily animals first.
• [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] Consciousness vs Conscious Access — 25 Nov 2020
  When we think about the ‘mind’ and consciousness, we often make the mistake of equating these things with the ‘self’ that lives perched being the eyes. But the brain existed in nature long before the self, and many aspects of thinking don’t require the self at all.
• [article] The flaws of the human perspective — 29 Oct 2020
  The biologist’s time-machine is a classic thought experiment that re-emerges from time to time in the more eloquent textbooks, and shows us just how flawed the human perspective is.
• [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.
• [article] How reading (good) non-fiction books builds your empathy — 1 Jan 2016
  Reading literature builds empathy in a way your human interactions can’t.