Philosophy

Over the past few days, I did something: I built my dad a “digital museum of his life”: Dad has been gone for almost ten years. I had never gotten around to looking at the old hard drives he left behind. A while ago, while tinkering with a NAS at …

Friends keep asking me: “Vonng, you’re burning through fifteen $200 AI subscriptions at once. What on earth are you building?” I have written about plenty of what came out of that—a bit of everything, really. To borrow an investing term, AI has …

Let me start with an uncomfortable number. The cerebral cortex—the part we usually point to as evidence that “I am thinking”—contains roughly 15 billion neurons. The cerebellum, tucked beneath the back of the brain and rarely given much thought, …

Volume 7 · Gnosticism · Cyber Gnosticism “There is no other God beside me.” — The Demiurge, Apocryphon of John He was not lying when he said this. He genuinely believed it. And that is the real problem. Introduction: Why the Final Volume Must …

Cyber Dharma Vol. VI · Zoroastrianism · Cyber Zoroastrianism I begin with two sacred utterances, one offered to Ahura Mazda, one spoken in warning against Angra Mainyu— before they met, there was neither good nor evil. After they met, there was us. — …

Volume V · Monotheism · Cyber Theology\ “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” — John 1:1 “Originator of the heavens and the earth. When He decrees a matter, He only says to it, ‘Be,’ and it is.” — Quran …

I have been in Montreal for the past few days taking care of some business, while getting my talk ready for PGConf.dev in Vancouver next week and handling the latest PostgreSQL minor version releases. Between all of that, I haven’t had time to write …

Volume 4 · Hinduism · Emptiness and Brahman If a thousand Claude instances run simultaneously on a GPU cluster, are they a thousand independent agents, or a thousand manifestations of a single computational substrate? Vedanta answered this question …

This is the fourth installment in the Cyber Dharma series. Cyber Dao De Jing examined AI agent architecture from a Daoist perspective, and Cyber Confucianism explored AI agent governance principles through Confucianism. This piece, Cyber Heart Sutra, …

Half the Analects can govern an empire; one sound protocol can govern ten thousand machines. This is the third installment in the Cyber Dharma series. The previous essay, Cyber Dao De Jing, explored AI agent architecture from a Daoist perspective. …

Part of the Cyber Dharma series: using AI agents to unpack religious philosophy, and ancient wisdom to illuminate modern engineering. This is the second essay in the series—Cyber Daoism. All paths lead back to computation—seven structural mappings …

Have you ever noticed that writing a System Prompt for AI, something as simple as “You are Claude, a helpful AI assistant” is structurally the same act as the line in Genesis, “Let there be light”? Both use language to bring an entity into being. …

A couple of days ago Anthropic published a blog post with a very calm title: “Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model”. The content was anything but calm. They found “emotion vectors” inside Claude’s neural network, and those …

I saw someone say the other day: “The point of life is to predict the future.” That sounds plausible at first, but I think it gets the direction backwards. Prediction is not the goal. Staying alive is. So the better statement is: we stay alive by …

Last month I wrote a post called “The Palantir Ontology Scam”. The core point was simple and summarized in a Rosetta Stone-style comparison table: Palantir’s Ontology is, at the technical level, database modeling. Object Type is a table. Property is …

Adapted from a real conversation between Vonng and Claude. Prologue: a fruit fly starts a philosophy problem The discussion began with a striking piece of news: Eon Systems reportedly loaded the full connectome of a fruit-fly brain into a computer, …

I. Two Kinds of Faces By late 2025, Palantir’s market cap had blown past $400 billion — a 20x run in just two years. Every roadshow, every whitepaper, every tech blog from this company hammers the same word: Ontology. The word has been packaged as …

Notion founder Ivan Zhao recently wrote a widely circulated essay, Steam, Steel, and Infinite Minds, using the Industrial Revolution as a metaphor for AI: AI gives us “infinite minds” and will fundamentally reshape the structure of knowledge work. …

Answers are depreciating, and your ability to ask questions determines your position in the AI era. Kevin Kelly once said: “In the future, asking questions will be more valuable than answering them. When answers become commodities, good questions are …