The Contemplative Life
I am about to leave on a one-month meditation retreat. Here is why....
Emptiness and the Real Blue Sky
Hello everyone, I sincerely hope you are as well as the laws of nature allow. Today's letter will be a little different. More casual. I want to share with you two stories, that I believe will shed light on some concepts in Buddhist philosophy. These are both stories I have...
On Cynicism
Hello everyone, I trust you are all well. At the very least, you are well enough to have the leisure of reading this letter. It is a good start — contemplate for a moment how many people are living right now that do not have this luxury? I want to cut...
Taking Children Seriously II
Taking Children Seriously (TCS) is simply the philosophy that it is both possible and desirable to raise a child without coercion. That's it....
Taking Children Seriously
Hello everyone, I hope you have all been doing as well as the laws of nature allow. I certainly have been. I have been helping test a user interface called Material Shell, very slowly trying to teach myself Japanese and reading through the short stories of Ted Chiang. It is...
Determinism, Randomness and Free Will
In this piece I write up my thoughts on the useful concepts of determinism and randomness, and how they impact on our conventional sense of free will....
A Beatific Vision
Hello everyone, I hope you are all doing well. I have made some technical updates to the website in the past week, I made what are called embed cards which allow me to style embedded content so that it is more streamlined with the rest of my website. You can...
If reincarnation were real
Hello everyone, I hope you are all doing very well. Last week I was at an Effective Altruism social event and the topic of death came up. I was speaking to a practising Buddhist who was curious about what I thought about reincarnation. I was able to respond to her...
The Seed of Certainty
Hello everyone, I hope you've been doing well — I certainly have. My new article is finished. I have now left it with the wonderful Iona Italia for editing. It should be published within a week, you'll receive an email when it is. Who knows? "The lunatic who believes he...
The four thoughts that turn the mind
Hello everyone, Are you in high spirits? This email will be long and fun. I hope you have had a good week, for you will never get it back... This week I launched my first major update to the website in a while, you should have all received an announcement...
Book Recommendation
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The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears.Karl Popper
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All life is problem solving.Karl Popper
The lies we tell
Hello everyone, I hope you are all doing well. Yesterday I had a conversation with a good friend about Sam Harris' book Lying. Sam's position was that we tend to be skilled at rationalising that it is justified when it is not and that we tend to deal needless harm...
The Real and the Seeming
Hello everyone, We are living in very peaceful times, I hope you are enjoying them. My question for everyone this week is simple. "What is real?" What does it mean to say that something is the case? What is the difference between saying something is a certain way,...
What is consciousness?
Hello everyone, I have a question for you all. "What is consciousness?" It's not a trick question. In fact, I don't think it should be a hard question. The hard problem is how consciousness arises, not what it is. I have had conversations with otherwise intelligent people who...
Book Recommendation
Journey to the Present
Life is suffering. This statement is widely recognised as the first of the four noble truths of Buddhism. The only thing is, it’s wrong. The Buddha never said it. The word he used to describe life was the Pali word “dukkha”. This word often is mistranslated as suffering, but...
Musings against god
My mother was having trouble opening a drawer. She pulled and pulled, but it wouldn’t budge. Frustrated, she yelled “Jesus!” and it finally opened. “Did you see that? Because I asked Jesus I was able to open it.” This didn’t impress me. “So what you are saying is...
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The evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane, when asked whether he would lay down his life for his brother, replied, 'No, but for two brothers or eight cousins.'Steven Pinker