Podcast Episodes

Lesson 8: The Two Information Ecosystems

Life has developed two distinct ways of accumulating and applying information — operating at completely different speeds, using completely different …

11 hours ago

Lesson 7: The Functional Ratchet

A ratchet permits motion in one direction while preventing it in the other. The teeth catch when you try to turn it back.

The Functional Ratchet works…

1 week ago

Lesson 6: Navigating Entropy

You leave a child's bedroom tidy. An hour later it's chaos. Nobody decided to create disorder. It just happened.

That's entropy in miniature. The univ…

3 weeks ago

Lesson 5: The Recursive Pair

A pattern carved into stone is not, by itself, information.

It becomes information the moment something can read it and do something different because…

1 month ago

Lesson 4: The Case for Inclusive Dualism

The debate between dualists and materialists has lasted four centuries. Both sides were half right.

The dualists were right that the mind is genuinely…

1 month, 2 weeks ago

Lesson 3: Being Objective About Functional Things

Nobody has ever seen an electron. We grant it existence because our best models require it — and those models survive every test we put them to.

The i…

2 months ago

Lesson 2: The Persistence Test

The bicycle rusts. The bacterium persists.

Same laws of physics. Completely different outcome. And physics, on its own, has no language to describe wh…

2 months, 2 weeks ago

Lesson 1: The Missing Lever

The mind-body problem has been framed wrong for centuries.

The real question isn't whether mind and body are two distinct things. They aren't — not fu…

2 months, 4 weeks ago

Lesson 0: Welcome to The Functional Mind

The question that has followed me for fifty years: what are we, exactly — not biologically, but scientifically? This is where the journey begins.

The …

3 months, 2 weeks ago