I am still by why anything exists. The question found me before I had language fine enough to hold it, and it never left. It drags other questions along behind it: how minds learn, what universal computation commits matter to, whether we might grow a noosphere with more mutual understanding in it, a civilization worth tending and not only inherited. I do not expect to close that file in one life. I am not sure I want to.
Cosmology slows me down. Thirteen-odd billion years from a in the vacuum to anything that could notice it had happened. Matter, then chemistry, then a pattern held open long enough to call itself alive. Nothing in a hurry. I do not read the early universe as a prologue we outgrew; it is ancestry. The same physics that lit the stars writes every nervous system and every city we build to think together in. It all runs toward . The middle is temporary, which is the whole reason it is worth my attention.
You and I are organized matter held far from equilibrium, a small flame of order kept lit while energy pours through and entropy piles up somewhere else. That is not a rebellion against the second law; it runs on the law. Persistence is borrowed time. Strangely, borrowed time turns out to be enough: enough for friendship, for learning, for the small repairs that make a life feel like more than bookkeeping.
Then there is the inside view. : the stubborn fact that experience has a texture from within. I do not file mind, love, or beauty as exceptions to physics. I read them as the reminder that any account of intelligence has to leave room for what it is like to be someone in the world. That is why I care about partnership in software, and about thinking hard before material is committed in a cleanroom. Abstraction is a kindness when it clarifies and a cruelty when it forgets there is a person on the other side.
I have been lucky to meet these questions in rooms, not only in paragraphs. I met David Chalmers twice. The first time was at an NYU conference on the philosophy of deep learning, where I also met Yann LeCun and shared wine with both of them. The second was at Tufts, at a remembrance for Daniel Dennett, who had just died. I had heard about him for years and still had not read him properly. He is on my to-be-read pile now, with more urgency after that room. Qualia is also an inheritance of argument, handed down by people who cared enough to disagree carefully. I am glad to have stood near that lineage for a minute.
The parts I can measure live on the research and work pages. The stance behind them is on philosophy. This page is where I let the large questions stay large, next to the small commits, without making them resolve on schedule.