A Broader Conception of Memory

2,800 words Header image taken from here. Sign up here for the Blank Horizons mailing list. Supplementary reading: If you are intrigued by the ideas in this article, I strongly encourage you to read “The Intelligent Plant,” a 2013 essay by Michael Pollan that was featured in The New Yorker. Also, this blogpost’s section on plant memory […]

The Arrow of Time and the Anthropic Principle

3,700 words Header image from here. Editor’s Note: Some of the ideas in this article, particularly in the beginning, were inspired by Huw Price’s essay “On the Origins of the Arrow of Time: Why There is Still a Puzzle about the Low Entropy Past.” It’s a great introduction to the subject discussed below, and it’s very […]

Why the Prevailing Hypothesis about Alzheimer’s Disease May Be Incomplete

Kenneth Shinozuka and Dhruva Gupta This article was recently published under the title “Could Alzheimer’s Be a Reaction to Infection?” in the op-ed blog of Scientific American. Header image taken from here. 1,200 words What do people fear the most about getting old? The answer is Alzheimer’s disease. Indeed, a 2014 poll conducted in the UK […]

The Logic of the Sacred

3,100 words Header image taken from here. Sign up for the Blank Horizons mailing list here. “To be or not to be, that is the question.” – Hamlet “To be and not to be, that is the truth.” – Buddhist Hamlet In the Book of Exodus, God chooses Moses as the leader who will […]

Time and Being: Part II

4,800 words Sign up for the Blank Horizons mailing list here. “Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.” – Alan Watts Living forwards and backwards In Richard […]

Time and Being: Part I

6,000 words “And it feels like we only go backwards.” – Tame Impala “There is a trace of realization that cannot be grasped. We endlessly express this ungraspable trace of realization.” – Dogen Zenji “To be natural is something which we must work on.” – Shunryu Syzuki, Zen teacher You are already enlightened. This […]

Time and Complementarity

6,900 words Header image taken from here. “Perhaps all your life you think of happiness as something dangling in front of you, which you’ll catch up with sooner or later … Eventually it becomes clear that happiness was, all along, the one who was reaching. You thought it was some amazing roadside attraction you […]

Strange Loops and Consciousness

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” – Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr “The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple […]

Circularity and Infinite Regress in Understanding

Editor’s Note: Take everything that I say in this blogpost with a grain of salt. I am not an expert on computer science theory, so it is possible that I have misrepresented some concepts, particularly the metacircular interpreter and reflective programming. “There is only the experiencing of experience.” – Rupert Spira A pair of brief […]

Self-Transcendent Systems and the Higher Plane of Awareness Beyond Reason

“It was not just in the Andante of the Second Quartet that I remembered having translated (almost involuntarily) the distant memory of bells which in the evening at Montgauzy — and this is some time ago — came to us from a village called Cadillac when the wind blew from the west. From this dull sound a vague dreaminess arose, which, […]