Month: January 2021

There is a scene at the end of the movie Tenet, in which the main character accuses the villain of solipsism: Protagonist: "You don't believe in a God, or a future, or in anything outside of your own experience!" Villain: "The rest is belief, and I don't have it." In the context of the film,… Continue reading Believing in things you cannot see →

I often find myself wanting to refer to a certain dimension of emotional experience, which I'll call "clinging." This post tries to point at it. I also suggest that understanding this dimension can resolve a common confusion about Buddhist philosophy and other types of spiritual/therapeutic advice -- namely, how "non-attachment" or “letting go” can be… Continue reading On clinging →

Life in the future could be profoundly good. Many people accept something like this in principle. But I think it often goes underestimated in practice, especially once we imagine society's most glaring problems fixed, and ask where we might go from there. The difference in quality of life between a fixed-up version of our current… Continue reading Actually possible: thoughts on Utopia →

This post describes what I see as a basic but powerful objection to treating certain deontological distinctions as justified via some intrinsically important moral difference they reflect or respond to. In brief, the objection is that the distinctions in question are not, in the right way, important to the potential victims of harm. I focus… Continue reading Shouldn’t it matter to the victim? →

This post is about a certain type of normative realism, and a related type of despair (I don't think "despair" is quite the right word, but I haven't found a better one). My aim is to question an assumption underlying this realism and this despair, using a toy robot as an analogy to illustrate the… Continue reading The despair of normative realism bot →