I’m going to talk about one of my favorite topics, the totalitarianism of knowledge. You can imagine that we’re living through a science fiction where knowledge achieves total control over the physical world. I think this goes even beyond the transhumanist dream or transhumanist nightmare. I would say transhumanism is just a subset of the idea of knowledge taking over the world. More

I just want to chat about what is creativity. I’m not going to say what it is, because nobody knows what it is, but I will share some thoughts. So there’s a lot that can happen in the universe without creativity, but there’s a lot more that can happen with creativity or conjecture. More

I believe I’ve refuted the meditator’s idea that only the present moment exists: You can always get a brain implant that can record everything and play it for you backwards, forwards, sped up, slowed down, or even pause and restart your perception of the passing of time. Or it can give you the experience of all time at once, or just a random sequence of events. More

This is a summary of the first half of ‘Time: The First Quantum Concept’ from The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch. This half covers time in classical physics. Time is change. In classical physics, it consists of moments, and change is the difference between those moments. Time is also the structure of change: Moments are arranged in a geometry that is determined by the laws of physics. More

I just started this Twitter space to talk about why LLMs are and are not creative. Mostly it’s going to be about why they’re not creative. But I’ll also be providing some defenses of LLMs. And if I say anything interesting here you can assume that I stole it from David Deutsch. More