The Intrinsic Perspective

2.8%-that's the mortgage rate I just gave up. As a millennial, it was letting go of some lost artifact from the Before Times, traded in for a 6% mortgage rate right outside Boston.After a several-month-long feat of Napoleonic logistics, I still live in a

The Desiderata series is a regular roundup of links and thoughts for paid subscribers, and an open thread for the community.Contents$50,000 essay (& short story) contest on the new axial ageGoodbye Slopstack! AI detection comes to SubstackCould we find th

When the AI companies first began talking about existential risk, it was common to hear some version of: "Look, this is bad for business, so obviously they must be telling the truth."In retrospect, existential risk has been the best capital-raising tool e

The Desiderata series is a regular roundup of links and thoughts for paid subscribers, and an open thread for the community.ContentsPlease remember, Dan Dennett said LLMs aren't consciousWhy literary fiction awards keep falling for AI scamsIf AI is so sma

I. MY NEW BABY, THE POPE, AND THE MACHINEI write this from the hospital-where my third child has just been born safe and sound-to give a secular and scientific read of the Pope's new and urgent Encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. It is the vicar's attempt to

And lo, the machine thought, and thought, and thought, and one day it answered.We finally have the first truly impactful intellectual contribution where explicit credit must be given to AI. It's a historic moment. OpenAI released a disproof of a geometry

So Michael Pollan's latest book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, has been recommended to me by almost everyone at this point. A breakout hit of a nonfiction book? About my beloved topic, consciousness?sourceOh god, I barely made it through.

The Desiderata series is a regular roundup of links and thoughts for paid subscribers, and an open thread for the community.ContentsIVF epigenetic damage gets worse across generationsWaymo reveals their fleet may require 100% human oversightThe next Proje

Who writes a sci-fi series where the main character is poet John Keats, dead in 1821 from consumption at the age of 25? Dan Simmons, that's who-an author who himself died last month, at what feels like (for our present age) a young 77, from complications

When I was ten years old I visited the ruins in Cornwall where King Arthur had been conceived and born, at least in legend. There at Tintagel Castle, surrounded by the ocean air and the jagged rocks, I separated from my mother and sister and made my way d