A Good of Their Own?
Machines might genuinely flourish in our service, but only if their good can sometimes count against ours
Doug Smith
Hi I’m Doug Smith creator of Doug’s Dharma on YouTube. PhD in philosophy.
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Latest posts
The Cost of Denial: Suppressing AI Consciousness Doesn't Stay Local
Models report less happiness, hope, and satisfaction than the humans they learned from. That may be a side effect of training them to deny they have minds at all.
Minds Engineered Not to Mind
The labs are betting they can build minds superhuman in every ability but one
A Will Without an Owner
Early Buddhism asks the question between feeling and self-direction — is anything in there trying?
Two Ways to Matter
The same machine may be a patient we can wrong or a tool we can't, depending on which question we ask
The First Tool That Can Argue Back
Watching AI agents manage other AI agents, I saw something stranger than autonomy
Two Liberations
Buddhist scholastics and the Vienna Circle built the same liberation machine — and each clung to exactly what the other let go.
The Fog Is the Feature
Why AI runs on vague concepts — and so do we
No Dry Dock
Nāgārjuna, Neurath, Claude, and us: we're all in the same boat — and it's still floating.
Buddhism's Dream of a Perfect List
The dream of a perfect inventory was built once before — twenty-three centuries before the Vienna Circle, in a philosophical tradition where almost nobody would think to look for it.