The trolley problem is a thought experiment designed to force a choice between two ethical frameworks. We are now living inside versions of the trolley problem so large, so complex, and so morally consequential that the original thought experiment looks almost quaint by comparison. The trolleys are real. The people on the tracks are real. And we - individually, collectively, politically - are standing next to the lever. The question is no longer theoretical. How do we choose?

The relationship between panpsychism and shamanic animism is more complicated and more interesting than simple agreement. As someone who works in both worlds, studying physics and consciousness philosophically while practicing shamanism, I'm fascinated by where these views converge, where they diverge, and what each might learn from the other.

If Aristotle, who thought more carefully about political leadership than almost anyone in the history of Western philosophy, were somehow dropped into our current political landscape, what would he make of it? My honest answer: I think he'd be appalled. But not for the reasons you might expect. He wouldn't be appalled by the technology, the scale, or the complexity. He'd be appalled by something much more fundamental. He'd be appalled by what we've stopped asking. Let me expl

Here's the thing about play that the serious-faced approach to life tends to miss: it works. Not as a performance. Not as a technique. But genuine, absorbed, uninhibited play - the kind where you forget to monitor yourself, where you're not thinking about how you look, where time does something strange and you surface surprised to find an hour has passed - that state is where some of the most important human experiences happen. Insight. Connection. Creativity. Healing.

Here's something that surprised me about shamanic practice: it didn't give me cosmic purpose. It didn't reveal that everything happens for a reason. It didn't show me a grand plan I'm meant to fulfill. What it did was show me how to create meaning in a universe that offers none. This sounds bleak. It's not. It's actually profoundly liberating. Let me explain what I mean by distinguishing two things that often get confused: meaning and purpose.

I need to say something that might make some people uncomfortable: therapy culture has convinced us that if we're unhappy, unfulfilled, or struggling with life, the solution is to heal our psychological wounds. Process our trauma. Reframe our thoughts. Develop better coping strategies. But sometimes, maybe more often than we want to admit, the problem isn't that we're broken. It's that our lives lack meaning, purpose, or connection to something larger than ourselves. Therapy

Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, faced a problem: Light behaves like a wave in some experiments and like a particle in others. These descriptions seem contradictory. So which is light really? His answer, the principle of complementarity, was radical: Light is both. Wave and particle aren't contradictor, but they're complementary descriptions that are both necessary and both valid. I think this framework is what we need for thinking about science and spiri

Here's a question that makes most neuroscientists uncomfortable: What if the brain doesn't produce consciousness? What if the brain is more like a receiver or transmitter? More like a radio tuning into a signal rather than generating the music? What I'm suggesting is that the dominant assumption, that brains produce consciousness the way livers produce bile, is an assumption, not an established fact. And there's an alternative that deserves serious consideration.

As both a researcher at the University of Cambridge and a shamanic practitioner, I find myself living at the intersection of two worlds that many consider incompatible. On one hand, I engage daily with the rigorous methods of scientific inquiry, such as plasma physics, quantum entanglement, and the empirical pursuit of knowledge. On the other, I work with ancient wisdom traditions, ways of knowing that don't fit neatly into rationalist frameworks. Is rationalism sufficient fo

Philosophers call it 'the hard problem of consciousness': How does subjective experience arise from objective physical processes? How do you get the felt quality of seeing red from neurons firing? Why is there 'something it's like' to be conscious rather than everything just happening in the dark? From the outside, it seems genuinely hard, perhaps impossible to solve. From the inside, it looks less like an intractable puzzle and more like a category error. Let me explain what

There is a paradox at the heart of modern life. We have more access to information than any generation in human history. Within seconds, we can consult the collected knowledge of civilisations, read the findings of peer-reviewed science, examine primary sources that once required years of archival research to locate. The sum total of human understanding sits, quite literally, in the palm of our hands. And yet, by almost every meaningful measure, our reasoning appears to be wo

Rational discourse is an extraordinarily powerful tool for understanding reality, but it has inherent limitations that we rarely acknowledge. And these limitations matter, not just for spiritual seekers or artists, but for anyone interested in what we can genuinely know about the nature of reality.