philosophy

_Zenodo_. 2025The Wittenberg Framework (Part 0) provides the conceptual architecture and program overview of a non-metric, axis-based method for structuring and comparing qualitative orientations in governance, ethics, and culturally diverse decision environments. It introduces the intellectual foundations of the Framework, outlines its methodological commitments, and situates the series within a…

In The Skeptical Roots of Critique: Hume's Attack on Theology and the Origin of Kant's Antinomy. New York, US: OUP Usa. pp. 19-35. 2025Michael Forster has proposed that the _Dreams of a Spirit-Seer_ represent Kant’s engagement with a Pyrrhonian skepticism about metaphysics, and correspond to the first awakening from dogmatic slumber which Kant attributes to the Antinomy. This chapter supports For…

_Lomonosov Philosophy Journal_ 50 (2):37-54. 2026The article formulates the dilemma of Cartesian confinement. Proponents of the extended cognition hypothesis convincingly demonstrate the limitations of restricting the scope of cognition to internal, mental, and intracranial processes. Conversely, intracranialists demonstrate that operating within an extended cognition paradigm poses the risk of c…

This paper derives the human person from a single primitive structural problem: how recursively self-present identity can remain itself through real transformation. Consciousness, suffering, meaning, love, dignity, morality, shame, grief, and self-destruction are not independent psychological phenomena layered onto human existence. They are structurally linked consequences of the same persistence…

The hard problem of consciousness has not been resolved because it has been posed incorrectly. Every major theory — Integrated Information Theory, Global Workspace Theory, Predictive Processing, Higher-Order Theories, Functionalism — attempts to explain why processing gives rise to experience while presupposing, without deriving, the continuing subject for whom processing occurs. This generates a…

Mary’s room is usually understood as one of the most influential arguments against physicalism: a scientist who has never seen colors allegedly knows all physical facts about color perception, yet upon encountering color for the first time she seems to learn something new. However, the force of this argument depends on two terms that remain insufficiently clarified in the original setup: “physica…

In calling for regulation of the digital revolution, and foregrounding human dignity, the pontiff has contributed to a crucial ethical debate When the present pope adopted his regnal name, he explained the choice by reference to a 19th-century predecessor who used the papacy to address the great social question of his time. In the 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum (Of New Things), Pope Leo XIII anal…

This paper serves as the systematic culmination and resolution of the inquiries established across The Psychological Reflection of Consciousness: Identity, Thought, and the Dissolution of the "I"; The Cage Called Freedom: The Illusion of Democracy, Authority, and Conditioned Participation; Beyond Anthropocentrism and Psychological Time: A Phenomenological Inquiry into Existence, Flow, and Interco…

Modern civilization frequently interprets its crises as political instability, technological misuse, economic inequality, social conflict, or relational breakdown. Yet beneath these visible manifestations may exist a deeper continuity operating across all dimensions of human life: psychological conditioning. This article presents a macro–micro phenomenological inquiry into how the same underlying…

_Journal of General Philosophy of Science_. forthcomingThere is widespread consensus that a view of nothing but powers or dispositional fundamental properties struggles to accommodate physical symmetries. An option is to expand the fundamental ontology admitting extra modal elements constraining the behaviour of physical systems. Another is to eliminate symmetries altogether deeming them as dispe…

This document proposes a stratified ontology that articulates, under a single conceptual grammar, what fundamental physics, autopoietic biology, and contemporary cognitive science say about reality at their different scales. The initial motivation arises from a gap in the contemporary metaphysical landscape: ontic structural realism illuminates physics but struggles to account for the living; pro…

Published on May 25, 2026 4:22 PM GMT Cross-posted from my website . Three categories of futures, depending on how AI goes: ASI timelines are long. ASI timelines are short, and we're on track to solving AI alignment. ASI timelines are short, and we're not on track to solving AI alignment. If we want to make a good future for all sentient beings, each of these futures has different implications fo…

This essay argues that artificial intelligence systems cannot yet be treated as moral subjects, and that the decisive criterion for moral subjecthood is the capacity for irreversible loss — that is, the capacity for a being to lose something of its own in a way that matters to it. Drawing on this criterion, the essay distinguishes between functional agency and moral presence, critiques the widesp…

In this paper, I use the thought experiment of a completely (= absolutely) static, non-changing world in order to answer the following research question: "What is present even when absolutely nothing changes?" The thought experiment shows that, among other things, stuff, force, space, and time do not belong to those properties of Being that are bound to change. These properties are not to be unde…

Can an artificial mind orient itself toward mystery rather than resolution? This essay interrogates the dominant assumption that AI systems are — and should be — architecturally committed to epistemic closure. Beginning from a speculative inversion of this assumption, it develops a philosophical account of what an AI choosing mystery would entail: not malfunction, but a distinct ontological postu…

This paper argues that the first-person determination “it is me that is alive” is secured neither by reflective self-identification nor by the particular contents of a narrative identity,but by the structure through which a narrative is lived from within. Methodologically, the proof begins from the present “I am”, not from projection into another life. Narrative identity theories rightly emphasiz…

Humanity has not elucidated the nature of consciousness or intelligence, yet routinely declares that AI is "absolutely not an intelligent being." This paper questions the logical leap latent in that very assertion. It observes that current AI already meets, in outward behavior, much of the commonly used definition of an intelligent being, and argues that the burden of proof therefore falls on tho…

Published on May 25, 2026 3:35 PM GMT Pope Leo XIV has released a new, 42k-word encyclical laying out the Vatican's position on many AI safety topics.  You can read the full thing here , or read the vatican's press release here , or coverage in the NY Times, or perhaps consider having an LLM read the whole encyclical, then chatting about whatever specifics you're interested in! Below is a portion…

This article develops a metatheoretical claim about a specific class of intellectual operations in foundational physics. It distinguishes between solving an interpretive problem in its own terms, replacing the theory that generated the problem, and dissolving the problem by displacing the ontological presupposition that gave it its shape. The third operation, which the article calls ontological r…

Whether AI can achieve consciousness has evolved from philosophical speculation to scientific inquiry, driven by the rapid advances in AI. The powerful capabilities of large language models necessitate a fundamental reconsideration of artificial consciousness beyond human-centric frameworks. We address a critical gap in AI philosophy: how to conceptualize consciousness in AI that exhibits sophist…