Working on Geneosophy, which deals with comprehension and enables the formalization and verification of concepts such as life and intelligence.
Philosophy has wrestled with seemingly intractable problems for millennia: How does mind relate to body? What makes knowledge objective rather than merely subjective? How do we bridge the gap between inner experience and outer reality? These questions have spawned countless theories, debates, and entire philosophical traditions, yet they remain as
We have become masters at mapping the known. Science, mathematics, and programming excel at navigating "closed systems", worlds where the rules are set and the concepts are fixed. But these tools hit a wall when faced with the two most profound concepts: living organisms and intelligence. While logic
Philosophy of science promises to do something extraordinary: step outside the scientific enterprise to examine its foundations, methods, and assumptions with clear-eyed objectivity. From Thomas Kuhn's revolutionary analysis of paradigm shifts to Hasok Chang's sophisticated pragmatist approach to scientific practice, philosophers of science have attempted to
Philosophy has been wrestling with a fundamental question for centuries: How do we bridge the gap between mind and world? Each major philosophical tradition has offered solutions, but each has also revealed new problems. Today, we stand at a unique moment where quantum mechanics has deepened these puzzles while a
The story of artificial intelligence is not just one of increasing computational power—it’s also a story about how machines relate to meaning. Or more precisely, how meaning has been progressively sidelined in favor of statistical pattern manipulation. To understand this, we can trace AI’s evolution through a
We live trapped in a circle of our own making. We reason with concepts about objects and other concepts. We understand objects through concepts. We create new concepts by combining existing objects and concepts. Around and around we go, never stepping outside this conceptual machinery to ask the most fundamental
We live in an age of breathtaking technical sophistication and profound existential confusion. We can manipulate matter at the atomic level but can't agree on what makes life worth living. We've mapped the human genome but struggle to understand human nature. We've built global
We live in a Kafkaesque paradox: the very people we turn to for wisdom about life’s biggest questions—meaning, society, the future of humanity—are systematically selected for their inability to think about such things. Consider this absurd pattern: A tech entrepreneur optimizes engagement algorithms for maximum user addiction,
What if I told you that the deepest mysteries plaguing human knowledge—consciousness emerging from matter, the mind-body problem, infinite regress, self-reference paradoxes—aren't profound features of reality waiting to be solved, but artifacts of a particular way of asking questions? Every academic discipline, from quantum physics to
Something extraordinary hides in plain sight beneath our modern academic landscape. Physics, mathematics, biology, psychology, philosophy—these impressive disciplines that organize our understanding of the world—all rest upon a foundation they can no longer see. Like a great tree whose roots have been forgotten, our specialized fields of knowledge
Marcus Doubtful, a physicist turned philosopher. Richard Trad, a mathematician turned philosopher. Both have spent decades thinking about the foundations of knowledge, but they've reached very different conclusions. Richard: Marcus, I've been reading your recent work on disciplinary self-reference. While I find your historical analysis interesting,
I’m not questioning the usefulness of LLMs and AI in general. What I am questioning is its ability to achieve intelligence. Large Language Models (LLMs) are remarkable tools—tools to augment one’s intelligence—just as a search engine, or Wikipedia have done before them. I use them daily.