Salutations and welcome to my humble blog!
My name is Arataki, and this is my corner of the interweb to hang. Here you will find a mixture of philosophy, creative writing, and fun lists of all my favorite things! (I may not look it, but I’m a ruthless optimiser)
My primary interest is understanding the intrinsic nature of phenomenal consciousness – the jewel in the lotus – and promoting its intrinsic value, for the benefit of all sentient beings.
This website is a WIP and will be regularly updated as I build upon its content. Thank you for visiting!
Recent posts
Arataki’s Guide to 5-MeO-DMT
This is a crosspost for one of my contributions to the Qualia Research Institute‘s exciting new HEART research project, originally written 29 February 2024. From 2-20 September 2023 I participated in the world’s first 5-MeO-DMT phenomenology & psychophysics retreat in British Columbia, Canada! All of the activities described were perfectly legal, and while the experience […]
Hair Maintenance (without shampoo)
I often get compliments on my hair, and then astonished looks when I mention that I have been nopoo (i.e., shampoo-free) for ~9 years. Admittedly, I haven’t had long hair until very recently (I stopped cutting my hair almost two years ago), and the difficulty of maintenance does scale with hair length. But after some […]
Popcorn
Serves: 2-6Taste: 5Preparation: 1 Health: 1 Everybody always asks me why my popcorn tastes so good. The short answer is flavacol, a potent buttery-salt that can be found in most cinema popcorn buckets. But the real trick to good tasting popcorn lies in the cooking method, which I describe in this post. Ingredients Method There […]
Qualia Formalism, Non-materialist Physicalism, and the Limits of Analysis: A Philosophical Dialogue with David Pearce and Kristian Rönn
This post contains an edited transcription of an awesome conversation that I recently had with David Pearce and Kristian Rönn at the Swedish QRI Strategic Summit in July 2024. Like all of the best conversations it started with a walk outside, and the topics we covered fell broadly under the umbrella of philosophy of science, […]
The Trinity of Selfhood
“Sometimes it seems like the self – the sense of the self – is actually the collection of all this: body and mind and consciousness, et cetera. Sometimes in different ways it can seem completely independent of it.” Rob Burbea, 2010; ‘The Experience Of Self (Personality and Beyond)’ [45:57] Epistemic status: poetry What is self? […]
From Conceptualization to Cessation: A Philosophical Dialogue with Roger Thisdell
When I’m not monkeying around, I’m typically reading, writing, or discussing philosophy with my peers, and of these activities, I think that philosophical discussions have the highest ROI. This is because (1) it an active process that demands a high level of sustained engagement, and (2) it allows you to outsource your cognition to the […]