It is not merely a matter of growing bones and growing responsibilities, this business of growing up, this unfinishable project of becoming ourselves. It is less like the evolutionary diagram of the upright ape than like a Russian nesting doll, our prior selves not outgrown but integrated, forever dwelling inside the person walking this world today. One measure of maturity — perhaps the purest…

"To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that's its task."

"We need detachment... as much as we need engagement in our lives... transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear."

For better or worse, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle engineered the Western mind. Above all, they formed part of a movement that stood at the crossroads…

"It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person."

"My life... runs back through time and space to the very beginnings of the world and to its utmost limits. In my being I sum up the earthly inheritance and the state of the world at this moment."

The great paradox of human life is that our mortality is the fulcrum of our search for meaning — the yearning to make this brief lungful of life matter amid the breathless void of space and time — and yet we spend our lives obviating the fact that we are mortal. If we are lucky enough, if we are lucid enough, it may take us less than a lifetime to learn that to deny death is to deny life. Rilke…

"While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity."

There is a very specific kind of comfort that The Big Bang Theory provided for over a decade. It was the comfort of familiarity, of a brightly lit apartment, of takeout containers and arguments about who gets to sit where on the couch. It was a show about people, slightly odd people, slightly annoying people, […]

Quantum suicide is a thought experiment that takes Schrödinger's cat and puts you inside the box. The setup: a device kills you based on a quantum measurement with a 50/50 chance. Under the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, every possible outcome actually happens — so there's always a branch where you survive. — Read the rest

The post The thought experiment that says you can't…

"Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning."

Porto, 16 to 18 June 2026Petrus Hispanus' Tractatus : #Logic and #Philosophy from the Middle Ages to Modernity Program & + info

"Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world."

“Let me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the portal through which Kepler arrives at the laws of planetary motion; not realizing that the measure of an unwasted life is not what outlives it but how it was lived — how much integrity and authenticity and creative…

This essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring. In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson: I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid. Not a “fright,” not a “shock,” but a terror. What lay behind this…

"To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt.”

"You can expect good and bad luck, but good or bad judgment is your prerogative."

"I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time."

I recommend do-it-yourself (DIY) phenomenology. It is good for mental health to attend closely to our own experience, especially the ambiguous aspects of our inner lives, such as how we experience the will, the past, or our relationship to our own bodies. We should think about what we find when we introspect. The goal is […]

"It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything."

“I’m teaching care for their own particular point of view, a disdain for all things ‘vibes’ that aren’t carefully thought out, and a deep understanding of the courage it takes to withdraw from other people for a while, to have braved a thought all on your own.” That’s Robert Wallace, associate professor of philosophy at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly). In the…

It seems odd, wrong even, that “patience” and “passion” — the twin roots of love — should share a root in pāti, Latin for “to suffer.” But anyone who has lived, who has loved unskillfully or loved the unskilled, knows that the experience can be our sharpest instrument of suffering. We say we “fall” in love precisely because we know we can get bruised, know that the trap door it opens beneath our…

"Despite what dictionaries would have us believe, this world is still mostly undefined."

We are the survivors of immense and minute events — violent cosmic collisions and subtle genetic mutations, the deaths of innumerable suns and the births of innumerable cells, the splitting of continents and the splitting of atoms. Out of it all, we emerged as creatures muzzled by a consciousness that demands we give meaning to our survival. It will not come like alms dropped from the unfeeling…

TESSERA on the ESA homepage and at CVPR, GeoTessera 0.9 stabilising onto S3/Zarr, io-uring in OCaml, carbon credits in New Scientist and WSJ, and musings on internet malware again.

It is there like a constant whisper, like a ceaseless gust of thought rustling through the canopy of the collective mind: the haunting sense that ours is a particularly difficult time to be alive, that reality today is particularly hard to bear. Such sentiments are errors of proximity — we live too close to the bone of our personal predicaments, have drawn the horizon of time too close to see the…

"In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves."

"Songs are like rivers: each follows its own course, yet all flow to the sea, from which everything came."