I’m not an expert in theology, philosophy, physics, or most of the other subjects that appear here. I’m interested in ideas, particularly what happens when you take an idea or metaphor seriously and push it until it starts to break.
That’s mostly what these essays are: speculative thought experiments.
References to physics, theology, philosophy, history, and other fields often begin with my own memory and understanding rather than scholarly expertise. I try to make them accurate, and I’m happy to revise them when I discover they aren’t. Nothing here should be mistaken for a claim to absolute truth.
I’m particularly interested in what happens when established ways of thinking become boundaries around what we’re allowed to consider. That inevitably leaves these essays open to criticism from within those established frameworks. I don’t take those criticisms lightly. I also don’t necessarily feel obligated to remain inside the framework that produces them. Sometimes stepping outside the frame is the experiment.
AI is an important part of how I do this. I don’t consider myself a writer in any traditional sense. I’m interested in the thoughts underneath the writing, and AI has given me a remarkable tool for turning those thoughts into familiar forms quickly, exploring connections, checking facts as I go, and finding language for things I might otherwise struggle to articulate.
Exactly where my writing ends and the AI’s begins can be difficult to untangle. Sometimes I provide the structure and AI helps with the prose. Sometimes AI suggests the structure. Sometimes it edits something I wrote. Sometimes a conversation produces an idea, metaphor, or connection that neither contribution can be cleanly separated from the other afterward.
I’m comfortable with that ambiguity. What I’m ultimately trying to get at are the ideas underneath, and those ideas, experiences, questions, intuitions, and directions of inquiry are predominantly mine. AI helps me give them shape. And just as the ideas themselves remain open to revision, so does the shape they take here.
Mostly, I’m sharing things I find interesting.
I don’t expect many people to read them, agree with them, or even find them interesting. But I’m writing them anyway, and at some point it began to feel strange to keep putting all these words somewhere no one else could possibly encounter them.
So this is where I’m putting them.
