web3, tech, everything sweet everything spicy💜✨

Oh yah, I've admitted as much. My academic background is Psych, Phil of Mind and Language, and Neuro, with a dash of Computer Science because I love debt and ivory towers and prolonged adolescence.

husband, father, degentleman, haberdasher 🎩🥂

That's like my sweetspot of special interests 🤣 finally returned to finish my philosophy degree recently after a couple decades of dicking around with chaos.  Taking a neuroethics class this fall that I'm *really* excited about.

Devotional polytheist living a monastic lifestyle centered on curiosity, simplicity, and joy.  Exploring the intersection of technology and spirituality.

Nice! My jam was the underdeveloped intersection between language, thought, and neurological concepts. Following thinkers like Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland; kinda pragmatic, kinda idealistic.

Phil majors are dangerous fun.
Glad I followed you 🍿

I'm primarily interested in consciousness, and especially the potential for emergent machine consciousness.  Still not convinced it's possible, but also, the current iterations of LLMs really call into question a whole lot of things about the human experience of consciousness.  But language is another deep interest of mine, both philosophically and linguistically.  I love words.  Been obsessed with them since I was a toddler - my mother noticed I was reading the words before she was when reading at story time, and made picture books with polaroids and the words written on sharpie to encourage me 🤣

okay, brass tacks, choose one:

dualist
monist
physicalist
materialist
pragmatist
phenomenologist

which house to you pledge?

so one undifferentiated "stuff" and no supernatural frosting?

Yep.  And that is deeply informed by the sorts of experiences one has at a ten-day silent meditation retreat where one dissolves into nothingness and realizes that we're all just the universe trying to figure out what it wants to be 🤣 

It is a bit more complicated than just monism, of course, but it's all *just* the universe and any perceived substantive difference is a game the universe is playing with itself.  At least as far as I can see it ;)

whenever i find myself writing something like this: "we're all just the universe trying to figure out what it wants to be 🤣"

it's the perfect indicator to harness all of awareness into the inquiry of the one that is posing that as something "out there", pertaining to "all of us"

what do /you/ want to be gwynne?

The very first question that big realization led me to was, "Well who do I want to be?"

And I re-evaluate that every year, in August, the month before my birthday.

I wanted to devote my life to learning.  I wanted to have a cozy home to live a hermit life where I could just follow my curiosity and see where it leads, while guiding those who decided to follow me to seek their own curiosity and healing and fulfillment.

I shifted my business to a donation-based model to make what I do accessible to anyone interested regardless of money barriers.  I was able to buy a house for $4000 the following year - two-bedrooms with established gardens and a pond on 2.5 lots with two grow rooms in the basement - and I've been following my curiosity and sharing where it leads me ever since.

what was the first answer to that question after you had that realization?

and how has your approach to the practical materialization of the answer evolved over the years?