What is truth?

Maybe an answer came to you right away. Maybe nothing came at all. Either way, something interesting just happened: for a few seconds, you watched yourself think. That small act — noticing your own mind at work — is what this site is about.

I should be honest with you from the start. I don’t have the answers. What I have are questions I’ve carried around for most of my life, and some guesses about them. Everything you’ll find here is exploration. Some of it is speculation. Some of it will turn out to be wrong — and finding out where I’m wrong is part of the point.

But I do have a starting place. It’s a puzzle, and it goes like this:

Every one of us arrives in this world knowing nothing. So how did we become the most successful form of life this planet has ever produced?

Sit with that for a second, because it’s genuinely strange. A newborn doesn’t know language, fire, the wheel — not even its own name. Yet here we are, reading words on a glowing screen. Whatever the full answer is, one piece of it seems undeniable: none of us figured any of this out alone. The words we think in, the tools we use, the ideas we take for granted — nearly all of it was handed to us by people who came before.

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

— attributed to Isaac Newton, 1675

Newton was one of the greatest minds who ever lived, and even he knew his sight was borrowed. So before I criticize the past — and there will be plenty to criticize — I want to begin with gratitude. We stand on those shoulders whether we notice or not. Noticing seems like the honest place to start.

From this root, the questions branch out. What is consciousness? What is free will? Is there any real way to see where humanity is headed? I have hunches about each of these, and I’ll share them on the pages that follow. But I’m not asking you to agree with me. I’m asking for something better:

Think it through with me. Poke holes. Ask what I’ve missed.

Because the real aim of this site isn’t my answers — it’s the thinking itself. If you leave here questioning something you used to take for granted, including something I said, then the page has done its job.