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Clay Lowe
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Clay Lowe

@soulcruzer.bsky.social
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Philosophical correspondent & wandering essayist. Walking, wondering, writing. Dispatches on consciousness, culture, the human condition & strange ideas. Blogging from the textual underground at soulcruzer.com.

soulcruzer
soulcruzerOct 24, 2026
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
soulcruzer
soulcruzerOct 23, 2026
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...
beliefsChange
soulcruzer
soulcruzerOct 23, 2026
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
soulcruzer
soulcruzerOct 22, 2026
It is time to get the winter gear …
It is time to get the winter gear out!
winterPhoto Journal
soulcruzer
soulcruzerOct 22, 2026
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...
AIChange
soulcruzer
soulcruzerOct 22, 2026
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
soulcruzer
soulcruzerOct 21, 2026
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
soulcruzer
soulcruzerOct 20, 2026
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
soulcruzer
soulcruzerOct 19, 2026
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
soulcruzer
soulcruzerOct 18, 2026
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
soulcruzer
soulcruzerOct 17, 2026
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
soulcruzer
soulcruzerOct 17, 2026
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