Sugar

I just had my first boba tea in recent memory. I asked for no sugar, yet it was sweet af. I thought, the sugar in my sip does nothing more than make me take the next sip. It has no nutrients other than unnecessary calories, yet the very fact one sip makes you take the […]

How a traumatizing relationship led me to Andrew Yang

Just recently, I finally came out of PTSD over the traumatizing end of a relationship with a sociopath. To summarize my PTSD tenure: I was suicidal for a month, had severe heart palpitations (almost took an MRI), high blood pressure, migraines, not to mention rebuilt my entire worldview from scratch, Descartes style. Looking back to before […]

Effects of Automation

AI will create winners and losers, and it won’t be fair. The middle class will give out first (those are the jobs AI will automate out first), polarizing wealth inequality and leaving most people tending to lower-class jobs like animal carers, baristas, and babysitters. If you believe in some definition of utilitarianism, you believe there’ll […]

When one reaches the end of morality

What is morality? Does it even exist? This lies at the heart of the compatibilism debate – whether the future is determined already, and if that affects morality. Compatibilists believe morality exists in a determined world. Among them, some go further and argue we need a determined world to have morality. Incompatibilists believe morality doesn’t exist […]

Compatible Moral Asymmetry

At the center of the free will debate lies two paradoxical claims: We require free actions from the (deterministic) causal chain to be morally responsible. We require the causal chain to be effective for moral responsibility on our actions. (This is the final paper for PHIL75W, my favorite class ever). Supposing the first is not […]

Evolutionary Pressure

In American society today, males place a lot of attention on the size of their genitals, with the term “Big [slang for male genitalia] Energy” as another way of saying masculinity. How paradoxical, considering the former is an inherent genetic trait adopted at conception, and the latter something that one can develop throughout a person’s […]

If I only I could have, I would have

The colossal problem of free will has captivated professional and amateur philosophers alike ever since the dawn of mankind, when we developed the capacity to ponder our identity and relation to the world. The problem is compelling because finding the balance between freedom and necessity is a question we all face, from planning our future […]