To call what I refer to as an "addiction" in this essay brings to mind images of scars, trauma, and fateful compulsion: withdrawals which are as painful to watch as they are to experience physically, and tormenting cries from the body for years after usage stops. It may be more accurate to call this thing "dependence", but I'll leave that...

To what degree are humans driven to aesthetic pleasure? Or, more importantly, to what degree are our moral foundations and ethics centered around aesthetic preconditions? I've been thinking about these questions recently, and have come to one, simple conclusion: a lot. Aesthetics, or the set of principles concerned with beauty, determines how we...

Though I loathe to do it, scrolling through LinkedIn is sometimes inevitable, and it's not hard to see a pattern popping up amongst professionals. The so-called "quiet-quitting pandemic" has hit large companies hard over the last few years, and it seems that employee retention rates are dropping, indicating workers are feeling less and less loyal...

The greatest question of the human condition is not the origin of our consciousness, nor what happens after we die, it's what we are right now. Sometimes we ponder our faculties, sometimes we marvel at the collection of atoms which form the cells which encapsulate the chemical reactions which form us, and sometimes we wonder how a little mammal...

So in a departure from my usual heavy philosophy, I'm going to spend this short post going over an idea I had on the whole "do we live in a simulation?" debate. This idea is cooky to say the least and is something I don't believe to be true. It doesn't hold much philosophical water either.

The question of faith and its place in society is one which has troubled humanity since the beginning of the period of religious conflict. Thousands of years ago, it was perfectly understandable why faith was so crucial to a functioning civilization. With technology and scientific innovation still centuries from acceleration, there needed to be a...

Given all the tumult of graduation and starting a new job, I haven't had as much time to reflect as I'd like, but a thought came into my head around commencement and hasn't left. As I sat in the sweltering heat wearing dress clothes under a black cap and gown, I thought about what a year really meant. Listening to...

As a kid I was absolutely enamored by Astronomy. One of the perks of not having cable TV was that when the cartoons were done there was a strong flow of science and nature documentaries always playing. Of these, I was perhaps the most involved with Nova and its spin off shows, and I used to sit for hours at...

As mundane as it may be to write a whole post dedicated to leaving college after graduating, I feel as though my time at RPI deserves some reflection. As may be expected so soon following commencement, this post is likely to be the thoughts of a man looking back on his time with rose-tinted shades, and in fact I'm so...

I was recently listening to a podcast discussing the merits of several popular political and economic ideologies when I realized everything they talked about, had a common underlying assumption which they made without scruple; in each theory, they assumed ideality manifested in some form or another. Whether that was assuming greed is not a...

"Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman - a rope over an abyss." - Friedrich Nietzsche.

I have often thought humans exist within the perfect realm of subconscious power and conscious awareness; we are able to talk about the unfathomable and bend our minds to try and accept absurd principles, and yet in the landscapes of our subconscious, these absurdities exist without check as mundanities. For instance, we can look up into the night...