At the hour of midnight on 1 January 2000 I was up a tree outside the Tate Modern, watching the fireworks shot from a barge in the Thames bursting through the smoke and London fog. I had become separated from my...
Despite his ineffable charm, Trump has again been shown to be unpopular. What this suggests to me is that if his strategy is to remain in office past the next election, then he is not going to be able to rely on...
The challenge for humanity in this century is to coordinate itself into a single organism. With the internet we now have the beginning of a central nervous system and are able to be conscious of the state of ourselves as a...
The philosophy of tolerance and of tolerating intolerance is of course an interesting paradoxical one, much more interesting than any philosophy of intolerance. The reason I can’t understand ideologies of intolerance, is that they seem to be mired in hopeless contingencies....
Imagine going about your daily life and never being sure if the people you meet around you are real humans. Some of them, no one knows quite how many, are AI powered robots that churn out the propaganda of their creators....
Science is not normally considered to be in the same category of thought as religions. And in some ways, it is in a different category. It doesn’t have quite the same ossified structures of most other religions, and it doesn’t have...
A meritocracy is a kind of evolution, a social evolution. Like biological evolution, its business is to reward the survivors, and winnow out the weak. It is a hard game but the rules are set by Nature herself. For all its...
So here we are. This morning I woke up feeling optimistic for the first time in months. So I revisited this old draft post, and decided to make it live, even though things are moving on already. I live on twitter...
Freedom is a very basic personal instinct. I think all creatures want to be free, free from fear and desire, free from hunger and pain. The protection of key personal freedoms has been central to the rise of civilisation, and this...
Life is suffering, said the Buddha. This seems to me to be true much of the time, and what is also unavoidable is that our aliveness causes suffering for other living things. Even the most careful of us will unfortunately step...
I went to two high schools which gave me two completely different perspectives. The first two years were at a fairly rough local public. At this place there were many individual teachers who were highly engaged with their students, great teachers,...
