I want to take Berkeley seriously, not because I think he was right in all the details of his system, but because I think the core philosophical impulse behind his idealism is both more defensible and more important than the standard dismissal allows. Contemporary philosophy of mind has, in my view, been circling back toward Berkeley for decades without quite admitting it, and reading him carefully reveals why some of the hardest problems in consciousness studies look the way

I come to this as someone with a deep investment in philosophy of mind and relational ontology, and as a shamanic practitioner who has sat with people navigating the territory between life and death. This is not an abstract question for me. It is one of the most urgent questions there is. And it deserves better than either the credulity of true believers or the reflexive dismissiveness of those who have decided the answer before examining the evidence.

We usually speak of death as if it were the end of a thing. A person lives, and then that person dies. It sounds straightforward, almost tidy. But that clarity may be borrowed from an older picture of what a person is. If you are a substance - a distinct, enduring entity that inhabits a body - then death is the destruction of that entity. But if you are not a substance at all, and instead a pattern, the question becomes much stranger. What exactly dies when a pattern ends?

Most people say they want the truth. They don’t. What they want is confirmation, dressed up as insight. They want their beliefs reflected back at them, their motives excused, their choices validated, and their self-image left intact. The moment truth threatens the ego, it stops being 'helpful' and starts being called rude, negative, or unrealistic. That is the real problem: people are not usually offended by truth itself. They are offended by what truth costs them.

Most people think of disagreement as a failure. A conversation that ends in consensus has succeeded; one that ends in unresolved dispute has not quite managed it. Philosophy, at least in its self-presentation, reverses this. It is the discipline that treats disagreement as the medium through which understanding develops, that regards the persistent challenge as more intellectually honest than the premature resolution. Socrates did not walk away from conversations once everyon

There is a passage in the Philosophical Investigations that philosophy of mind has not yet finished digesting. It concerns what Wittgenstein called the private language argument, and while the argument has attracted an enormous secondary literature, most of that literature debates its validity as an argument rather than attending to what it reveals. What it reveals, I want to suggest, is something that changes the terms of consciousness studies entirely.

Modern spirituality is, in its dominant form, a self-improvement project wearing borrowed robes. Mindfulness is sold as a cognitive enhancement tool. Yoga is sold as a fitness product. Silence is sold as a premium commodity: book a retreat, pay for the quiet, come back refreshed and ready to produce. We have taken the most subversive insight in human history - that the self is not the centre of the universe - and converted it into a personal development strategy.

Start with a sensation you have probably had and probably dismissed: the feeling when looking at a forest or a river or a night sky, that the thing in front of you is not merely a thing. Not that it is alive in the way you are alive, not that it has thoughts or intentions or feelings you could name, but that there is something it is like to be it, some interiority that your gaze is meeting even if it cannot understand what it meets. Most people learn to dismiss this feeling e

We live under electric light that tells the brain it is always midsummer. We heat our homes to the same temperature year-round. We eat strawberries in January and expect our productivity to be identical in February as in July. We demand of our nervous systems a constancy that nothing in our evolutionary history prepared them for.

David Chalmers gave philosophy one of its most useful formulations when he distinguished the easy problems of consciousness from the hard one. The easy problems concern function: explaining how the brain integrates information, how it discriminates stimuli, how it produces reports about internal states. The hard problem is different. It asks why any of this processing is accompanied by subjective experience at all. Why is there something it is like to see red, to feel pain, t

Imagine two people make identical claims. Same words, same evidence, same delivery. One is believed. One is not. What changed? Not the claim. Not the evidence. Something about the person making it. The alternative is uncomfortable: that what gets believed is shaped as much by who is saying it as by what is being said. That alternative is, however, well supported by evidence. And it matters far beyond academic philosophy.

There is a particular kind of loneliness that has no obvious name. It is not the loneliness of isolation, of having no one around. It is the loneliness of being in a room full of people and finding that you do not quite belong to either half of it. I love people in both halves of that room. And I have found, repeatedly, that fully belonging to either half requires a kind of amputation I am not willing to perform. This essay is about what that costs. And it is exactly the righ

We live in a culture that has decided, largely without examining the decision, that propositional knowledge is the real kind and everything else is something lesser: intuition, gut feeling, superstition, or at best a heuristic waiting to be replaced by a proper algorithm. Ryle, Polanyi, Merleau-Ponty, Damasio, Klein: these are not fringe thinkers. They represent decades of serious philosophical and scientific work showing that this picture is wrong. The body knows.

In scientific observation, the observer is supposed to remain separate from the observed. In shamanic journey, they interpenetrate. When I journey to understand a client's situation, I'm not observing it from outside. I'm participating in it. The boundaries between my consciousness, the client's consciousness, and the situation itself become fluid. Where's the boundary? What's subject and what's object?

We have inherited a particular story about how knowledge works. Science observes. Science tests. Science replicates. And whatever cannot survive that process is not, properly speaking, knowledge at all. It is a powerful story. It has given us vaccines and transistors and the ability to predict where a spacecraft will be in thirty years. I am not here to dismantle it. But I am here to ask: what does that story leave out? And more pointedly, what does it leave out by design?

The standard framework for burden of proof was developed for scientific claims about objective, repeatable phenomena. Anomalous experiences often don't fit neatly into that framework. When I claim precognition, I'm not claiming a general law of physics. I'm reporting specific experiences that happened to me and, in many cases, experiences I can reproduce. The epistemology is different. And that means the burden of proof question is more complex than it first appears.

Free will, as most people understand it, the libertarian variety, where the self is genuinely the ultimate author of its choices, uncaused and unconstrained, is almost certainly an illusion. The interesting question is not whether it is an illusion. The interesting question is why we invented it, what function it serves, and whether we could manage without it or whether it is load-bearing mythology.

The Enlightenment was one of the most consequential intellectual revolutions in human history, and I mean that without irony. The slow dismantling of superstition, the insistence on evidence, the separation of church from state, the idea that a human being has inherent rights not conferred by a king or a priest are genuine achievements, hard-won, and still worth defending. I am not here to burn down the Enlightenment. I am here to notice that it made a promise it could not ke

Think about what genuine philosophical thinking actually looks like. It looks like Socrates in the Agora, wandering around asking people questions they hadn't expected, following the argument wherever it went, arriving at conclusions that were inconvenient for everyone involved, including himself. It looks like staying with a problem long after the bell has rung. It looks like saying, "I don't know", as a starting point rather than a failure.

For years I maintained, as any self-respecting academic must, that the Pythons were merely comedians - gifted, certainly, but not philosophers. I was wrong. What follows is my formal retraction, dressed up as a listicle, which is, I think, the epistemically appropriate format for the digital age. Each lesson is philosophically genuine. I checked.