My third yearly article about the Eurovision Song Contest, where I argue that the contest is set up in a way that maximizes return on investment in terms of meaning experienced in context vs. real world meaning out of context. Read more (17 min, 4300 words).
"The Elephant in the Brain" had an interesting effect on me, which made me think up a typology of ways reading can change the structure of your mind. Read more (10 min, 2500 words).
Our words' relationship to reality is far more complicated than we realize. Thus, when we say things we think we state facts but we also endorse certain uses of words. That has consequences, which causes public discourse to become a war zone where we fight for control over our common pool of mental and social equipment. Read more (13 min, 3300 words).
In response to an article by Kevin Simler I complain about how often people mistake "selfishness" in an evolutionary sense for selfishness in the normal sense. Read more (12 min, 2900 words).
We feel there should be a clear answer to the question of whether some thing exists or not. I argue that often there isn't, because follwing our self-contradictory intuitions leads us to weird places. Instead we should interpret talk about what exists as talk about how we best represent the world. Read more (12 min, 3100 words)
Part 7 of a series adapted from my 2009 Bachelor's Thesis in philosophy. This last part is a summary and some thoughts on how to deal with the problems described in the series, why a hardline attitude is counterproductive and how we want freedom and responsibility to be metaphysically real. Also criticism from present-me. Read more (15 min, 3700 words)
Part 6 of a series adapted from my 2009 Bachelor's Thesis in philosophy. The reasons why the traditional view persists when prescientific thinking on other topics often doesn’t: freedom and responsibility. Read more (9 min, 2300 words)
