The central premise of this post is: Even if you believe that “privacy is dead”, you still have every reason to make surveillance more difficult for Big Brother. Resistance is not futile. If you accept that it is, you’re playing into the hands of the surveillance state. Surveillance on all of us is far too easy therefore we need to raise the bar on privacy.

The war on “drugs” has been one of the greatest moral failures of our time, a colossal waste of money, time, resources and human life that could have been better spent on literally anything else. It’s high time we put an end to it.

In the subjective sense there’s only one time and place for everything to happen. Memories from the past and thoughts of the future occur in the present moment. The mind’s eye is the only place where things are seen. The mind’s ear the only place where things are heard. It’s all here and now.

Free software is defined by the four essential freedoms. Learn why each freedom is essential and how they work together to protect users.

Philosophers have argued for thousands of years about how we should think about ethics, how to decide what’s right and what’s wrong. The range of answers has been extensive. I explain why we should abandon traditional moral theories entirely and instead opt for a reductionist, pragmatic approach to morality based on hypothetical imperatives.

This post is about good rules of thumb and things to keep in mind when running a blog.

In part 1 I showed that free will is incoherent. In part 2 I discuss the implications of that fact on responsibility, compassion, justice and interpersonal relationships.

Remember when you got stuck thinking about something but you didn’t realize you were thinking until after? Even if you don’t know what I’m talking about you’ve almost certainly had that experience before. Ego traps are the self-reinforcing thoughts that set you on the path of thinking without awareness of thinking.

I present a formal, objective knock down argument against free will refuting the common arguments for it and show how lack of free will is actually liberating, not nihilistic.

What doublethink means in the context of this post is to feel a certain way about how you feel. It means to have an opinion of your own thoughts. It normally goes by the name metacognition. As novice practitioners of meditation quickly realize, you can “go meta” infinitely about your own thinking to the point that your mind becomes twisted into a complicated knot. In this post I talk about common ways the mind-knot is tied.