Phase Changes, Moral Geometry & Dashboards

One of the temptations of thinking about society through the lens of physics is the illusion of control. Phase diagrams are reassuring. If you know the pressure and temperature, you can say what state a system should be in. Keep the knobs within tolerance and nothing dramatic happens.

That’s the dashboard mindset.

Distributed Systems and Moral Architecture

I’ve noticed something unsettling over the years: the same kinds of failures keep appearing in places that, on the surface, have nothing to do with one another. Electrical fires, institutional corruption, personal moral collapse, burnout in schools, breakdowns in public trust. We talk about these as different problems—technical, ethical, political, psychological—but structurally, they rhyme.

What finally clicked for me was not a moral argument, but an architectural one.

Strange Morals are Still Real

For a long time, one of the standard objections to moral realism has been that moral properties are “queer.” That’s J. L. Mackie’s word. If values were objective—really out there in the world—then they would be unlike any other properties we know. They wouldn’t just describe how things are; they would somehow demand action. They would be intrinsically motivating. And, Mackie thought, that sort of thing is too strange to believe in.

I’ve always thought the strangeness was the point. 

Moral Geometry Maps Possible Worlds

When we argue about morality, we usually argue about rules, intentions, or outcomes. We ask whether an action follows a principle, maximizes a good, or reflects a virtuous character. What we rarely ask is a quieter question: where does this path actually go?

The Self as Apex Sensor

The self turns out to be neither the source of morality nor its enemy, but its most sensitive instrument. In a moral geometry defined by relationship, suffering, and intention, the self functions as a sensor—a way of detecting orientation rather than determining it.

The Self Unchecked

The cultural inheritance of this elevated self has been uneven. What survived was not Emerson’s metaphysical subtlety but his swagger. Integrity gradually became indistinguishable from self-justification. Authenticity became a defense rather than a discipline. The measure of a person drifted away from what they were willing to bear toward how boldly they asserted themselves. The self’s divinity remained, but its constraints quietly eroded.

The Self and Its Apotheosis

The modern problem of the self is not that it is illusory, but that it is unstable. Contemporary philosophy and psychology have done a good job dismantling the idea of a single, permanent core—showing how identity shifts with context, narrative, and situation. And yet the lived intuition of selfhood persists. We still experience ourselves as continuous centers of perception, responsibility, and choice. Even if the self is constructed, it is not optional.