AI & the Mind

I spend a lot of time thinking about AI and the mind and how these tools are changing the way people think, where the self stops and the system begins, and what that does to society and the economy. Most of it lives in 2am voicenotes to my journal or in conversations with the few friends patient, crazy or wonderful enough to engage with my ideas — some of it ends up written down.

Some things I have written

19 AUG 2026Idea Loops in the Person, The Organisation, and the World

The companion piece to my Idea Loops framework.

 27 JUL 2026The Extended Self: Everybody’s happy now

What happens when Claude helps author your goals, and what is the edge of a self? What should you be happy to outsource?

 18 JUL 2026Writing in the Age of AI

On deciding which cognitive work to hand to an AI, which skills quietly atrophy when you do, and deliberately practising the ones worth keeping — through the lens of two very different writing processes.

 15 JUL 2026Strange Loops, AI, and the Telos

Could a language model have a self? What is a self? Humans can reach down and rewrite what they want, but a model's goals never pass through its self-understanding. Co-authored with Claude.

 13 APR 2026Dionysian Energy or Apollonian Reason? Live in Fragments No Longer.

The dichotomy, or complementarity, of the rational and the creative, through the lens of literature.

 13 APR 2026Escapism In The Arts

A somewhat meanderingly long essay on the urge to escape selfhood, and art, religion, and intoxicants as doors in the wall — and how all of this is represented in the arts themselves.

My frameworks

The cognition auditA framework I developed for what running my life through an AI is doing to my cognition, function by function, with the map explorable inside. The idea loopsHow ideas move through a mind, a company, and the world: AI takes over the connecting, humans keep the choosing and the leaps, and the boundaries between loops are made of taste.

Some interesting reads

I Am a Strange LoopDouglas Hofstadter: the self as a self-referential pattern that comes to perceive itselfBOOK A World AppearsMichael Pollan: a journey into consciousness, from plant neurobiology to engineering feelings into AIBOOK Emotion concepts in a large language modelAnthropic: emotion-concept vectors causally shift Claude's behaviour; the character you talk to is derived from human archetypesARTICLE Next-Token Predictor Is an AI's Job, Not Its SpeciesScott Alexander: why “just a next-token predictor” confuses levels of descriptionARTICLE The Landscape of ConsciousnessRobert Lawrence Kuhn’s map of the theories of consciousness — hundreds of them, from Descartes to neuroscience to the contemplative traditions, organised and explorableSITE Closer to Truth: Chalmers on Virtual WorldsSimulation, digital existence, and what virtual worlds do to the problems of philosophyPODCAST Brave New World: Michael Pollan on ConsciousnessConsciousness as something precious and under threat, from social media and AI alikePODCAST