Philosophy

When I wrote about Donald Hoffman, I was working through one half of a question I keep saying I have not settled: whether consciousness is fundamental, there from the start as part of the floor of reality, or computational, something that switches on once a physical process organises information in the right way. Hoffman is the most serious case I have found for the fundamental side, and I gave it a fair hearing because I genuinely find it compelling. ...

In Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? I admitted to an instinct I have never quite been able to shake: that the laws of physics are discovered rather than invented, and that mathematics might be genuinely fundamental - not a human language we lay over reality, but part of the bedrock. I said that if we ever reach base reality, maths is the thing most likely to get us there. I left it as a feeling. This post is me taking that feeling and seeing how far a serious physicist has been willing to push it. ...

When I wrote about Yampolskiy’s Personal Universes recently, I left a thread hanging. The question underneath that whole post - the one I said I genuinely had not settled - was whether consciousness is fundamental, there first with the universe as something it experiences, or whether it is computational, something that switches on once a process gets complex enough. I said I had only recently started reading my way into the fundamental side, mostly through Donald Hoffman. This is me pulling on that thread properly. ...

First, the thing this is all in service of. The AI alignment problem is the challenge of making a powerful AI system reliably pursue what we actually want it to pursue - getting its goals, values, and behaviour to line up with human intentions, and to stay lined up even as the system becomes more capable than the people supervising it. It sounds simple and is not: we struggle to state our own values precisely, those values conflict between people, and an AI optimising hard for a slightly-wrong objective can produce outcomes nobody asked for. The multi-agent version - aligning one system with all of humanity at once, rather than a single person - is harder still, and it is the specific version Personal Universes is trying to dodge. ...

“Are we living in a simulation?” is one of those questions that sounds like late-night dorm-room talk and then turns out to have a serious literature behind it. The honest short answer to “how likely” is that nobody knows, and that the question may not even have a clean numerical answer. But that is not a reason to wave it away. The reasons we cannot confidently put a number on it are themselves interesting, and they tell us something real about the limits of probability, the nature of consciousness, and what counts as science. ...

There are not many films where the visual effects pipeline produces a peer-reviewed physics paper. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is one of them. The visualisation of the supermassive black hole Gargantua was rigorous enough that it ended up in Classical and Quantum Gravity, co-authored by the visual effects team and Nobel laureate Kip Thorne. That single fact captures what makes the film unusual. It is, on the surface, a story about love, time, and survival. Underneath, it is a serious attempt to take Einstein’s general relativity and put it on a 70mm IMAX screen with as little fudging as Hollywood would allow. ...

TL;DR Over a thousand years, the substrate of civilisation changes beyond recognition, but the human core - love, grief, storytelling, the search for meaning - almost certainly does not Computation and energy will have hit their physical cost floors by 3026; intelligence is ambient, woven into the environment so thoroughly that “using AI” becomes as meaningless a phrase as “using oxygen” The built environment is almost certainly at solar-system scale - with the Earth a protected biosphere and heavy industry, compute, and energy capture distributed across the inner solar system No company, currency, or nation founded in 2026 is likely to survive in any meaningful continuity; the middle layer of institutions gets hollowed out, leaving fewer but far longer-lived structures The decisions being made right now - on AI safety, climate, and coordination - have genuinely astronomical consequences, because they determine whether there is a 3026 worth having at all Most writing about the future of AI stops at ten years. A few brave pieces stretch to fifty. I wrote one of the ten-year ones myself in The Next Decade of AI, and the honest reason the horizon stays short is that the uncertainty gets unmanageable much past that. Forecasting even the shape of the economy in 2040 is already mostly vibes. ...

One of the strangest facts about reality is that there is any reality at all. Not just stars, galaxies, black holes, planets, oceans, or people. Not just matter and energy arranged in complicated ways. The deeper mystery is that there is something rather than nothing. It is such a simple question that it almost feels childish when you first ask it. But it is not childish at all. It may be the deepest question we can ask. ...

TL;DR Modern knowledge work has quietly built identity on producing things - and AI pressure makes that fragility visible without you having to lose your job to feel it History (Keynes’ 1930 prediction) suggests freed-up capacity defaults to “more work”, not leisure - the shift to meaningful work has to be chosen deliberately What stays valuable when execution gets cheap: deciding what is worth doing, taking responsibility, sitting with other humans, craft for its own sake, and growing other people The “everyone will do deeper work” narrative ignores the dignity problem - for many people, work is structure and belonging, not just a vehicle for meaning Put your meaning somewhere that does not depend on being the cheapest producer of an artefact - it was never a secure place to put it, and agents are just making that clearer This is another “thinking out loud” post, in the same spirit as the agent-first architecture piece. I do not know how any of this is going to land. I am writing it partly because the question has been rattling around in my head for months, and partly because I suspect a lot of people in and around software are quietly wondering the same thing without quite wanting to say it out loud. ...

I’m sitting at a desk with two machines. One is a 1981 ZX Spectrum, 16KB of RAM, sitting on a desk in my garage. The other is a 2026 MacBook running Claude Code. Between them lie 45 years of computing history. And here’s the thing that struck me recently: I’m still doing the same thing. On the Spectrum, I’m typing: 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" 20 INPUT A$ 30 IF A$ = "YES" THEN GOTO 50 40 GOTO 10 50 PRINT "YOU SAID YES" On Claude Code, I’m typing: ...