Catalog

Books at the intersection of physics, philosophy, consciousness, and artificial intelligence.

Meaning in the Multiverse — print editions
In print

Meaning in the Multiverse

by Justin Harnish

We have been looking in all the wrong places to find a universal meaning for our lives. Instead of searching for meaning in the heavens, this book asks a prior question: what sort of universe would allow for an all-natural universal meaning?

A consilience of the philosophy of mind, advances in artificial intelligence, and modern physics, woven into a conjecture about the way things work — a computational cosmos that, without gods or supernatural creatures, turns out to be capable of giving us meaning. It addresses the Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Heat Death of the universe alike, and points toward a meaning that is moral, that helps our species survive its existential threats, and that still offers a personal path to happiness in the ordinary, illuminated nature of non-dual awareness.

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Forthcoming

Marshal Your Awareness

by Justin Harnish

A book on the disciplined cultivation of awareness as the only ingredient to a satisfactory examined life and nurturing relationships. Where Meaning in the Multiverse looks outward at the cosmos, Marshal Your Awareness turns the same consilient attention inward, to the practice of paying attention on purpose.

Currently in progress. Expected from Consilience Now Press.

In development

(E)merging

by Justin Harnish

A proposal at the seam of complexity science, artificial intelligence, and the study of mind: how emergence turns simple rules into cognition, why complexity seems to climb the same ladder whether it is building cities, organisms, or transformers, and what it would take to build minds on purpose rather than by accident. A working thesis drawing on scaling laws, actor-critic architectures, and hands-on experiments in machine cognition.

A publishable proposal in development.