About

I was the kind of child who never stopped asking why. My father encouraged it. He did not always have the answers, but he never told me to stop asking. That encouragement left me with an attitude I have never lost: a fundamental curiosity about the world, the universe, human beings and everything in them. I wanted to know the answers. I wanted to know the deepest secrets of all things.

That curiosity never settled for half an answer. Behind every answer there was another question, and behind that one, another, until I reached the questions at the very bottom: What is real? What can we truly know? What is a human being, and how should we live? Philosophy is the one pursuit that goes straight at these questions, so it was the only thing that could satisfy an urge to follow a question all the way down. By high school I had given my heart to it.

In 1994, in my first year at university, I walked into a bookstore and bought my first book of philosophy: Hegel’s Logic, the shorter one from his Encyclopaedia, often called the Lesser Logic. I opened it and could not understand a single sentence. And yet it held me. I have been reading that book for more than thirty years.

Two lines

At university I studied computer science, and I went on to earn a master’s degree in it. Computing taught me to love rigor. A computer system is a formal system: the code has to fit together without a single gap, and there is real beauty in that precision. But a formal system can only operate inside its rules, its algorithms, its logic. It cannot take one step beyond them. It has no purpose of its own, no drive, no imagination.

Human self-consciousness, our thought, our spirit, is something else. It is free, absolutely free. And dialectics, more than any other idea I know, is about exactly this: what a truly free being is, and what freedom itself really is.

So my life has run along two lines at once: the rigor of the machine and the freedom of the mind. I am not an academic philosopher, and I have never written to earn a title. I have simply kept reading, questioning and thinking, for more than thirty years.

Why TheHumanWorth

Dialectics is one of the most powerful ideas human beings have ever had: vast, profound and, once you see it, beautiful. It is also one of the least clearly explained. I want to change that.

Here I do two things. First, I explain dialectics plainly, step by step, so that any serious reader can understand it. Second, I put it to work on the questions that matter most right now: how other schools of thought look from the dialectical point of view; what AI really is; whether a machine can have consciousness or self-consciousness; and what the real threats and challenges facing humanity are in the age of AI, and how we should meet them.

Many people fear that AI will make human beings worthless. I believe the opposite. In the age of intelligent machines, humanity matters even more, and understanding what a human being truly is has never been more urgent.

What you will find here

Every week, I take on one hard question and think it through to the end. If that is the kind of thinking you are looking for, I am glad you are here.

— T.C. Phan