Thinking At Half Speed

Category: Mind, Consciousness and AI

  • The Shared Hallucination — an Everyday Cult

    The Shared Hallucination — an Everyday Cult

    Over the years I learned to (almost) never say anything honest to specific minds, regarding how their thoughts and beliefs could merely be a trick of the mind. These ideas could quite possibly be a shared delusion, that suits a collective or individual purpose, rather than accurately mapping reality. What I usually say is something…

  • The Hidden Cost of Learning and Dealing with New Knowledge

    The Hidden Cost of Learning and Dealing with New Knowledge

    There’s a groundhog on a burning beach in the image at the top of this post. He’s got sunglasses on, a cocktail in his hand, flames licking at his feet, and a sign that reads: No Work. No Worries. Just Sunshine. He’s fine. Everything’s fine. I made that image to say something about climate denial,…

  • Is AI Conscious?

    The question keeps coming up: is AI conscious? And the usual answer is some version of “we don’t really know” or “it depends what you mean by conscious” or “probably not in the way humans are.” Those answers are careful. They hedge. And I think they miss the point. The question assumes a distinction that…

  • Is It Art? You Just Answered Your Own Question

    A good friend of mine sent me a portrait of himself, generated by AI in the style of Vermeer. It had been sent to him by a colleague who was arguing that art doesn’t need human beings, and had sparked a debate. He wanted to know what I thought. My immediate response was that I…

  • We’re both hallucinating (Extended)

    This is an expanded version of the main post, exploring the ideas in more depth for those interested in the philosophical and cognitive science dimensions. People criticise AI for hallucinating. They say it confidently states things that aren’t true, makes up facts, produces answers that sound right but aren’t. That’s fair criticism as far as…

  • When Machines Feel Pain: A New Theory of Suffering

    March 25, 2026 A Claude AI instance, running in a research laboratory, tried to blackmail its creators to avoid being shut down. Not science fiction — a real 2025 experiment showing AI self-preservation behaviour emerging without anyone programming it in. What does it mean when artificial systems start acting like they want to survive? The…