A small, growing collection of observations, questions and ideas that have caught my attention.
Public notebook · 6 September 2026Questions, observations and ideas in motion.
01 / Consciousness
What is it like to be a bat?
It's interesting, the question Thomas Nagel poses: What is it like to be a bat? It has proved very significant in philosophy since 1974.
But I think it is interesting to ask the same question about another human being. What is it like to be Claire? What is it like to be Lawrence?
We can understand a great deal about people. We can listen to them, remember their history and try to imagine what they are feeling. But can we ever know what it is like to be them, in the same way that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat?
Perhaps that distance between minds is not only a problem. Perhaps it is also the beginning of humility, empathy and care.
When I was young, I thought that if you could explain things, educate people and understand things, you would make the right decisions. I have since learned that people do not operate simply on what the right thing is. The world works differently from that.
I have read a great deal, and I have enjoyed it. Sometimes I can contribute a little knowledge to a conversation because I have read ten thousand books. But being well-read does not make people better people, better judges, more moral or more ethical. It does not guarantee consistently better insight.
People say that if you do not know history, it will repeat itself. But we know history and still repeat it. Historical information can inform a decision, but why assume that a decision based on history is necessarily better than one based on careful observation at the time?
Human beings are extraordinarily adaptable. Put a naked human being almost anywhere and we work things out. We do not need to have read a great deal of history before we can begin to live.
Disclaimer: Human content polished by AI.
04 / The usefulness of reading
Reading is enlarging. It is not magic.
Reading has been valuable to me because it has been enjoyable, enlarging and sometimes clarifying — not because it reliably makes people do the right thing. A book can give us a language, a question or a new way to see the world. It cannot guarantee the decision that follows.
That is an important part of understanding me: I do not think knowledge automatically becomes wisdom, or that a well-informed person is automatically a good person.
Disclaimer: Human content polished by AI.
05 / Democracy
Will AI finally enable true democracy?
I predict that advanced AI could make a much more direct form of democracy possible. If each of us had a personal bot that understood our values, it could research and vote on thousands of public questions for us, asking only when it was genuinely unsure.
That would not guarantee wisdom or remove disagreement. But it could mean that democracy was no longer limited by the number of questions one person had time to read. Our considered voice could be present in every decision.
When people talked about giving up smoking, I used to offer them a completely guaranteed technique. Light a cigarette, take a big drag, then press the burning end against your forehead. I guaranteed they would give up.
It was a joke, obviously. With cannabis, I thought, the plan might fail at the crucial moment. Just before the forehead, you might stop and say: “Wow. Look at the colours. Look at the shape. I wonder what I could use it for.” The joke was about the mind finding a reason to keep going, even when the next step was plain enough.
Disclaimer: Human content polished by AI. This is a remembered joke, not advice about quitting smoking.
07 / At the robotic dairy
The cows had more to say.
I once spent a few hours at a robotic dairy with one of my clients. The cows came up from the field on their own and entered the milking robot, which recognised each one and adjusted to her. I was watching the animals more than the machinery.
One day, a bull was in with the cows. After a brief attempt to mount one, he stood leaning against her. They stayed together for several minutes, their heads turned in opposite directions. It was a quiet, unexpectedly companionable scene — much more than the simple story of a bull mounting a cow and everyone moving on.
Since living in the country, I find myself watching how animals arrange themselves: groups lying down while a couple stand nearby, or cattle forming a circle around one animal. I don’t know what they are doing. That is part of why I keep looking.
Disclaimer: Human content polished by AI. This is Martin’s recollection of what he saw, not a scientific account of cattle behaviour.
08 / Keep going
More questions to come.
This page is the beginning of a public notebook—not a finished body of doctrine.
