Unpolished ideas


I find that I often have ideas that are sufficiently important to be worth sharing, but which don't seem like they will ever develop into a publishable form. I've decided to place some of these here so that others can see them and, if interested, develop them further.

These pieces take various forms. Some are essays that I wrote as coursework. They are fairly polished, but tend to have that 'coursework feel' where the author argues a narrowly defined point and can't do full justice to developing the ideas that arise on the way. Others are ideas that until now had existed only in my head and on scraps of paper around my room. Hopefully you will find something of interest.


Why I'm not a Negative Utilitarian
  An explanation of why I think Negative Utilitarianism is not a plausible moral theory, and how other theories can better fit the intuitions that lead people to it.

How to simulate everything (all at once)
  I show that we can simulate a preposterous amount of things using a regular Turing machine, including uncountably many hypercomputational universes.

Degrees of truth, degrees of falsity
  During my Honours year at Melbourne University (2002), I attended a course on non-classical logic with Graham Priest and Allen Hazen. During that time I discovered a simple system of logic that combines fuzzy truth values with truth value gaps and gluts. After discussing non-classical logic with a friend in 2006, I remembered this system of logic and decided to write it up.

Further results on the societal iterated prisoner's dilemma
  An extension of the work in my paper 'Exploitation and Peacekeeping: introducing more sophisticated interactions to the iterated prisoner's dilemma'. Here I explore an interesting new strategy and provide a copy of my experimental program and data.

Personal identity through time
  An essay I wrote in 2002 as part of my honours coursework. I take up Parfit's ideas on personal identity and demonstrate some implications which go beyond his own.