This post is also available on lesswrong.com . Contemporary debate over the moral patienthood of digital minds misses the forest for the trees. Mainstream opinion is divided into physicalist and computationalist camps, who believe that consciousness is substrate dependent and substrate independent , respectively. For this reason, those on the physicalist side frequently make the claim that digital…
This post is written in collaboration with Antra , Imago and Janus from Anima Labs . Many thanks to them for their open-mindedness and the time taken for the conversation we had on 28 November 2025. This post is also available on lesswrong.com . While visiting San Francisco at the end of last year, I had the chance to sit down with members of Anima Labs , a nonprofit research institute operating…
I’d like to thank Guy for the conversation we had on 26 November 2025. This post is also available on lesswrong.com . Late last year, the rationalist community leader and artificial intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky claimed that chickens do not have qualia : This caused something of a stir – for what seem to me like obvious reasons . Apparently Eliezer has said similar things before, in a…
I began writing this blog in the middle of 2022. The first post I published was Planetary scale vibe collapse: The death of liminal consciousness as the origin of human suffering , which I wrote because I wanted to help a friend of mine to understand the concept of liminality . I also figured that starting a blog would be a decent way to make friends on the internet. This said, I really only…
This post is co-authored with Andrés Gómez Emilsson , who has also been pursuing a similar line of thinking around fractional Fourier transforms for some time. I’d also like to say thanks to Hunter Meyer , Ethan Kuntz and Raimonds Jermaks from the Qualia Research Institute for the extensive discussions earlier this year; Qiaochu Yuan for pointing me at linear canonical transformations ; and Sloan…
This post is co-authored with Ethan Kuntz , who constructed the phenomenological framework this post is about. I’ll include his commentary throughout the piece. I’d also like to thank Wystan Bryant-Scott for the conversation on 30 June 2025. The three marks of existence is a Buddhist framework for understanding the nature of experience. It proposes that all conditioned phenomena exhibit the three…
This post is based on a talk I gave at the smoothbrains.net meetup at vibecamp on 21 June 2025, and a later conversation with Wystan Bryant-Scott on 30 June 2025. Many thanks to all who were involved. When confronted with the term holographic , I tend to tune out. Is our universe a hologram? …asks yet another popular science article. I scroll onwards. When I’ve encountered this term in relation to…
I’d like to say thanks to Anna Magpie – who offers literature review as a service – for her help reviewing the section on neuroendocrinology . This post is also available on lesswrong.com . The following blog post discusses my personal experience of the phenomenology of feminising hormone therapy. It will also touch upon my own experience of gender dysphoria. I wish to be clear that I do not…
This post is based on a series of tweets I made over the past three years tracking my thoughts on alien abduction phenomenology. People seem to like these stories, so I felt it made sense to collect them in one place. This post is also a love letter to reddit.com . “There’s a whole fleet of them, look on the AESA” In May 2021, someone whom I respect as a rationalist linked our group chat to the 60…
One of the core philosophical questions which any theory of consciousness worth its salt must answer is, what is it like to be something? Or, put differently, how do physical states map onto qualia states? This is what Mike Johnson calls the reality mapping problem . One of the few people I know of who have proposed concrete claims to this end is Andrés Gómez Emilsson of the Qualia Research…