Hi! I'm Logan.
I'm a technical philosopher. I'm in school at Stanford studying symbolic systems and mathematics.*
I'm also interested in intellectual history, comparative literature, and being insane.
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*Subject to change until Spring 2026.
What the hell is a technical philosopher? It turns out you can describe yourself however you want, and this is the most concise way that I know of to express the following: the questions that interest me the most tend to fall into the domain of philosophy, but the methods that interest me the most are those of science and mathematics. The work that interests me is technical work with philosophical implications. (The label may be pretentious, fine — at least it's expressive!)
This site is about me — my thoughts, my contact info, my own little simulacrum — but it's made for the both of us. The explicit overarching goal of this site is for it to signal various interests and preoccupations to you, in hopes that you'll reach out and we can talk about them. I haven't had the time recently to maintain this site, though, so I'm putting an extended introduction page here and temporarily disclaiming the rest as outdated, though you're free to poke around with URLs if you want.
(Note that I've gotten feedback that people who saw my site before they met me in person were surprised at the discrepancy, so maybe adjust your impression of me slightly in the direction of more unseriousness.)
Now onwards!
Ilike to start with taste. Instead of trying to describe myself, it might be more fruitful to just describe what I like — that picture might be more accurate than the self-representations I can come up with. Here are some:
I have a soft spot for illegibility. There are many great things clustered in the corners where the treads of the goodharting machine do not reach.
The last thing I'll put on here before I get back to work is a little list of some of the things I'm thinking about as of January 2025. This will be out of date soon after writing, but even then it will give some information.
First, taking seriously the prospect of consciousness as (a) falsifiable/observable and as (b) a criterion for moral personhood. I'm also interested in the nature of suffering and whether 'consciousness' is a precondition for it. These questions are important in the face of language models that can do cognitive processing on the level of or beyond most humans in a large set of domains; for example, if 'consciousness,' whatever it is, is a result of complex information processing, for example, and suffering is intertwined with consciousness, allowing users to freely abuse langauge models may be one of the greatest moral evils in history. Those previous conditions are highly non-obvious, however, and even the meaningfulness of consciousness as an idea is somewhat in doubt to me. I want to come to a strong view as to whether it is even possible to "observe" consciousness in any sense, and thus whether the notion itself is even useful.
My current view is a weak yes. I think if one takes for granted (this is obviouisly reasonable if you want to function in society) that other humans have the same ability to experience the world as one's self, then an experiment can be devised that can actually produce evidence for hypotheses about consciousness: something like, "we give people a drug or zap a part of their frontal lobe, and they turn into a p-zombie-like thing for 4 hours. They have no memory of actually experiencing those 4 hours afterwards, but they have memory of other things that implies the drug did not just inhibit memory formation, e.g. if they wrote code they still know the structure of the code. This brief version is a bit sus and incomplete, but I think the general idea is, "if we can figure out ways to cause meaningful changes in people's conscious experience, this can potentially give us useful information about its psychological/neurological roots maybe even enough to enable a comparative study to determine consciousness." And thus we get a potential research direction, and no longer need to reside in the domain of theory and metaphysics.
I'm also interested in alternatives to moral philosophy; I think that asking the question "what is good?" is either meaningless or trivial, and that we can develop lines of study that parallel moral philosophy (i.e. whose theories satisfy the desiderata of moral philosophy) but which are much more fruitful. In particular, I think that asking "how do we better coordinate with others towards mutually satisfactory ends?" is a much better question. I haven't had time to write up a more systematic argument for this idea, but you can see a working outline and an early brain-dumpy draft here if you'd like. The broad thrust is that we can actually get better at coordinating; doing so will give us all the things we want out of moral theory, without the metaphysical speculation.
My hypothetical overarching research interest is something like "the mathematics of cognition" or "formal models of agency" but I don't currently have the conceptual equipment I want in order to pursue it, and so I have only medium confidence that this is actually the thing that I'm most interested in.
I hope some of these things are interesting to you! If they are, email me at me at logan graves dot com or dm me on Discord at lgngrvs.