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.

The Eternal Recurrence is this: what if every moment of your life - every single one, in exact sequence, with all the same details, including the ones you would rather forget - recurs infinitely? Not as metaphor. Not as a thought experiment you can pat on the head and put down. As the actual structure of existence.

The algorithm learns this about you faster than you learn it about yourself. And then, without malice but with extraordinary precision, it builds you a world. A world where you are mostly right. Where your fears are mostly justified. Where people who think differently are mostly foolish, or dangerous, or both. That's not information. That's a hall of mirrors.

We talk about echo chambers as though they are something that happens to other people. People who are more tribal, more credulous, less intellectually rigorous than we are. But the evidence is uncomfortable and fairly clear: echo chambers do not emerge because people are foolish. They emerge because agreement feels good, and disagreement feels threatening, and this is true for virtually everyone.

Online communication selects for certainty the way certain ecosystems select for certain traits. Hedged, nuanced, genuinely uncertain speech does not travel well. It does not inspire sharing. It does not generate the quick emotional recognition, the "yes, exactly", that makes content spread. What travels is the confident assertion, the sharp formulation, the opinion stated as though it were a fact and the fact as though it were obvious.

Imagine that every single thing you do on social media - every comment you leave, every post you share, every time you subtly misrepresent something to make your point land harder, every pile-on you participate in, every person you quietly block rather than honestly engage with - imagine all of it became the universal law of online behaviour. Not just you. Everyone. All the time. What would that world look like?

I've known things before they happened. Not vague premonitions or lucky guesses, but specific, verifiable information about future events. This shouldn't be possible according to our everyday understanding of time. The future doesn't exist yet. You can't know what hasn't happened. Causation flows forward, not backward. The past influences the future, never the reverse. And yet.

I'm walking through my neighbourhood, thinking about a client I worked with years ago. I haven't thought of her in at least three years. Within five minutes, my phone buzzes - an email from her asking if I'm still practicing. Coincidence? Probably. But it feels meaningful. And that feeling matters. This is what Carl Jung called synchronicity: meaningful coincidences that seem too significant to dismiss as mere chance, but which have no apparent causal connection.