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soulcruzer

soulcruzer

@soulcruzer.bsky.social

Philosophical Correspondent & Wandering Essayist

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Do I Have to Understand the Universe Before I Can Live in It?

On Philip K. Dick, runaway explanations, and the peculiar freedom of going outside There is a moment in Philip K. Dick’s VALIS when Horselover Fat entertains the possibility that the creator of the universe is insane. It’s a wonderfully disturbing proposition. What if the universe isn’t merely indifferent to our existence? What if the apparent...

consciousnessidentity

Here is the thing about the “do the …

Here is the thing about the “do the inner work” culture: it gets the location right and the method wrong. Yes, the work is about what is happening inside you. The patterns, the stories, the beliefs running underneath your decisions. All of that is real and it matters. But the inner world is not a...

When Intelligence Is No Longer the Scarce Resource

On AI, vision, curiosity, and the freedom to explore I came across a short Instagram clip this morning featuring Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI, making an observation that stopped me in my tracks. Intelligence, he argues, is becoming abundant. For most of human history, intelligence has been one of the great bottlenecks of progress....

Alexandr Wangambition

It is time to get the winter gear …

It is time to get the winter gear out!

winterPhoto Journal

I pinched a sentence from Francesca Ferrando’s The …

I pinched a sentence from Francesca Ferrando’s The Art of Being Posthuman: Life is a journey, and we are the wanderers: anything can happen, and eventually does. I like the mischief in that last clause. You think you’ve seen everything? Just you wait. But it’s the word wanderers that keeps me here. I can travel...

When the Notes Talk Back II

Conversations with the collective mind at the edge of human thought There’s something strange happening to my notebooks. They’ve started talking back. Not the physical notebooks, of course. Those remain reassuringly silent, although there’s one sitting on my desk that contains enough abandoned theories, cryptic observations and half-baked philosophical propositions to justify a psychiatric investigation....

Artificial Intelligencecognition

The Runaway Horse and the Evolution of the Self

On Montaigne, idleness, writing, and the strange business of encountering our former selves I’ve been reading Montaigne’s essay Of Idleness, and I’ve found myself rather taken with his description of what happens when he gives his mind permission to wander. Having withdrawn from public affairs, Montaigne imagines that his mind, freed from the demands of...

consciousnessidentity

The Edge of Experience Is Not the Edge of Reality

On limiting beliefs, imaginary destinations, and the strange business of becoming someone you haven’t yet imagined. Some twenty-six years ago, I was out running when Bono stopped me in my tracks. Not literally, of course. He wasn’t standing in the middle of the road, arms outstretched, demanding that I contemplate the nature of reality. Although,...

beliefsidentity

Am I Human, or Have I Become a Soft Cyborg?

Working Notes from the Posthuman Frontier I’ve just begun reading Francesca Ferrando‘s The Art of Being Posthuman: Who Are We in the 21st Century? I’m only at the beginning, but I already have a feeling this book is going to take me somewhere interesting. I picked it up because of a question I’ve been chasing...

Artificial IntelligenceBooks

The Loneliness of the Separate Mind

An Owen Barfield-inspired dialogue between Clay Lowe and Mudtown Lion concerning solitude, consciousness, and the peculiar human habit of mistaking a useful abstraction for the nature of reality. From the notebooks of the Textual Underground. The café had only just opened. Outside, the morning was still deciding whether to become daylight. A delivery van idled...

Attentionconsciousness

The question of whether AI has feelings is …

The question of whether AI has feelings is fascinating, but I wonder whether we’re rushing towards the wrong question. Before we can determine whether a machine is conscious, we ought to acknowledge how little we understand about consciousness itself. We have an intimate, first-person experience of being conscious, yet we still struggle to explain precisely...

Artificial Intelligenceconsciousness

The Price of Being There

I paid £9.50 this morning for two newspapers and a small cup of coffee, only to discover that the most interesting story in the café wasn’t in either of the newspapers I’d bought. I’d walked into town because I’d been cooped up in the house all week and wanted to get out into the world....

Attentionhypertext