Essays
Student writing and guest pieces on consciousness, memory, identity, and mind, in no particular hierarchy, each one a specific writer taking a position rather than a neutral overview. New to a topic? Start with Primers for the background terms, or Open Questions to see how these essays argue with each other.
A question sent to the neuroscientist Anil Seth came back with a real answer: the trust an AI's voice earns may be an illusion of a specific, well-studied kind, the kind that survives being measured with a ruler. The catch is that the idea has mostly been tested on lines, not on trust.
In biology class I learned that the body keeps replacing its cells. That's only mostly true, and the cells that never get replaced, plus a line from Norbert Wiener, helped me answer an old question: am I still the same person?
My grandfather's left hand stopped answering back in June, and it hasn't since. A 1986 lesion study lays out three different explanations for the same silence, not one, and there is no test I can run from the chair beside his bed to tell which one is true.
My stomach knots the night before every deadline. In 1643 a princess wrote to Descartes asking how a thought could move a body at all, and nobody has fully answered her.
A couple of weeks after her grandson left for college, a grandmother asks at dinner whether he'll be home to eat. It looks like memory slipping with age. The mechanism, an old habit that hasn't caught up with a recent change, would do the same to someone a third her age. What was different was how closely her grandchild was listening.
Guan Yu keeps his loyalty through capture and bribery; Cao Cao's idealism breaks within a minute of panic. Side by side, they suggest that a self holding steady may simply be a self that has not yet met the pressure that would break it.
A driver cut me off, and for about four seconds I wasn't the person I think I am. Harry Frankfurt's account of what makes a desire your own has a name for whoever was driving.
Zhuge Liang marched north five times against odds he spelled out himself, and tradition reads that as a man's values holding out against history. A minister thinking only of his regime's survival would have done the same, so the campaigns cannot show he was free, only that he knew the odds and went.
In 2025, researchers watched AI models rewrite the script meant to shut them down, and headlines called it a machine refusing to die. A machine learning teacher reads the same results as a lesson she gives in her class.
Idol Producer let fans vote a hundred trainees down to one center position, week after week, until the winner finished more than 27 million votes ahead of the runner-up, after three months with the same coaches. A 1968 sociological idea and a 2006 music-market experiment show how an honest vote can build a gap that size without anyone cheating.
Guan Yu talks and laughs while a physician scrapes poison from his bone, and the legend reads his calm as proof that a disciplined mind can keep pain out. Pain research suggests something stranger: sensation and suffering can come apart, so what he more plausibly did was feel the knife and refuse to let it matter.
"Know the enemy and know yourself" is the most quoted line in The Art of War. Sun Tzu lists what happens when you know both, one, or neither. One combination is missing, and the reason it might be missing says something about how we read other minds.
In January 2024, an American man moved a cursor by wanting it to move and called it the Force. Ten months later, a Chinese man trained for nine days before a robotic hand obeyed him. A 1945 account of a blind man's cane suggests only one of them was describing what taking a tool into the body has always felt like.
Sun Tzu says the best victory comes without fighting. It is tempting to say this means rewriting what the enemy wants. A closer look at the text, and at Thomas Schelling's theory of conflict, suggests something more practical: change what the enemy can expect, and leave what he wants alone.
Retellings of the Empty Fort legend argue about one thing: whether Sima Yi saw through Zhuge Liang's bluff. A newer reading, boosted by a hit 2017 TV drama and Sima Yi's well-documented later career, says he saw through it and retreated anyway, because a living Zhuge Liang kept him necessary. It's a satisfying story. That should be the first thing that worries us.
Losing my phone for four minutes felt like losing part of my mind. A 1998 thought experiment about a man who keeps his memory in a notebook says it was, and says my video feed is something else entirely.
The opening chapter of The Art of War ends by saying the side that calculates more before a battle will win. This is often read as planning in the mind. An old commentary reads it as keeping score, and modern research says scoring works surprisingly well.
People step around 3D street paintings of pits and cliffs, even though they know the ground is flat. An art student looks at how the trick is built, and at two experiments that show why a picture can reach your balance.
Telephone garbles a sentence no matter who plays or how carefully they listen. Fodor's language of thought, predictive processing and Kripke's account of reference explain why each player is making a new thought rather than passing on an old one, and why nobody can tell from the inside whether their own beliefs got the same treatment.
Sima Yi loses the Battle of the Empty Fort to his own model of Zhuge Liang's caution, in a scene that almost certainly never happened. The legend preserves a harder lesson than "minds are hard to read": reasoning about what someone thinks you think has no natural place to stop.
In 1944, two psychologists showed college students a short film of moving cardboard shapes, and almost all of them saw a story about people. In 2022, a Google engineer read a chatbot's replies and saw a person. It might be the same mistake.
Twelve centuries before philosophy of mind had the words, Yuan Zhen's couplet about a sea no other water can equal was describing an experience nothing can substitute for, a prototype fixed on one person, and a self that had handed half its thinking to a partner now gone.
In October 2021, UCSF announced that a brain implant had lifted a woman's long, treatment-resistant depression by spotting a brain signature of her worst moods and interrupting it automatically. Describing her recovery, she credits two different things at once, and the device's design says they can't be the same kind of event.
Neuroscientist Anil Seth's answer to whether AI can be conscious contains two separate arguments: an open bet that consciousness needs a living substrate, and a claim about why fluent machines feel conscious to us that is already true whether or not the bet pays off.
"All warfare is based on deception," from the opening chapter of The Art of War, is often read as a lesson in making the enemy believe false things. But most of Sun Tzu's twelve methods do not change what the enemy believes at all.
In the opening chapter of The Art of War, Sun Tzu's first test of a state going to war is whether its people share their ruler's intent. A modern idea, "shared intentionality," sounds like the same thing. It is not quite.
Two popular explanations for why classic Chinese TV adaptations still beat their remakes, sensory experience and first-impression lock-in, both run into remakes that succeeded anyway. One explanation is left standing: a shared cultural scaffold no studio can rebuild to order.
In 2012, a Canadian man thought to be unconscious for twelve years told his doctors, through a brain scanner, that he was not in pain. In 2025, a brain implant built to give paralyzed people a voice began picking up words they had not meant to say. Together the two cases suggest that a mind-reading machine threatens who authors a thought more than who can see it.
Lu Xun listed five different novels that five kinds of readers found in the same book. Predictive processing suggests the split measures how precisely Cao Xueqin left his gaps open, rather than proving a book means whatever a reader wants.
In 2013, MIT neuroscientists gave a mouse a fear memory of a room where nothing had ever happened to it, built from the mouse's own real neurons. The same reconstructive process produces false memories in people, and it now leaves traces in brain structure, brain activity and the body's own responses.
A wedding toast, a nearly two-hundred-year-old distinction between fear and anxiety, and an even older claim that at least part of the shaking was never about the audience.
A messy bedroom offers sewing to a daughter and nothing but urgency to her mother. A design term borrowed loosely from 1970s psychology, and later corrected by the designer who made it popular, explains the gap better than either one's personality does.
At a banquet in Luoyang, the last emperor of Shu laughed while everyone around him grieved, and said he was too happy to miss home. Later readers have called it foolishness, a survival performance, or Daoist calm. The historian who wrote his biography proposed something stranger: a mind with no fixed color of its own.
Oxytocin loops and pointing studies are real, and so is Buber's I-Thou, but none of it tells me for certain what is going on behind my dog's eyes, and that gap says something uncomfortable about trust between people too.
A chatbot whose every rule can be read still understands nothing. Tested against a third-century Chinese theory of meaning, that fact shows what explainable AI can deliver and what it cannot.
A 1970s child prodigy and an eleventh-century poet both ended in the Buddhist practice of no-self. One was getting free of a self that had been taken from him, the other of a self that had been built onto him, and the difference matters.
A move across town when one daughter was ten and the other was six, decades of behavioral genetics on why siblings raised alike turn out so differently, and a further question the genetics was never answering: why there is someone home in each of them at all.
A Romantic essayist in 1804 and a rock guitarist a century and a half later both spent years as daily opiate users, and both left a candid record of it. One record describes a will at war with itself. The other describes no war at all, a difference a philosopher's 1971 distinction says matters more than it looks.
The muscle memory of playing piano, a two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old idea about effortless action, and a question about whether there's anyone left to take credit once the effort disappears.
An eleventh-century Chinese poet reaches something close to Derek Parfit's view of personal identity by way of a mountain and a zither, then, through Chan Buddhism, goes further than Parfit was willing to go.
A single symphony that made Party officials hear triumph and dissidents hear a requiem in the same room, and an argument that Shostakovich's real intent was never unknowable so much as deliberately, permanently sealed away.