I’m Gordon Swobe. I investigate questions in the philosophies of mind, perception, and language. I want to know how the mind works, how perception works, how language carries meaning, and whether an AI could ever genuinely understand or feel.

These questions have held me for most of my life and occupied me seriously for the better part of three decades. My road into them ran through a career in information technology, an interest that began in childhood — which has kept the questions here about what a machine can and cannot do from ever feeling abstract.

The position I defend now is not the one I started with. For years I felt certain that no physical story could close the gap between brain processes and felt experience, and I argued the point hard. I came later to see that gap as real but lodged in our concepts rather than in the world — a problem in epistemology, not ontology — and I now hold a physicalist, realist view on which perception puts us in touch with the world itself, not with inner pictures of it. A position I was argued into has worn better than the one I began with.

I write as an independent researcher, which puts the burden of rigor squarely on method. I develop the book against a local research library of primary sources and work with an AI assistant. I decide what the book argues, verify the citations, and accept responsibility for every claim and error. Readers interested in the apparatus can read how I use AI in my research and writing.

This site is the public face of Mind, Matter, and Meaning, a book in progress that works these commitments through in full — engaging the central figures in contemporary philosophy of mind and reaching back, when it helps, as far as Aristotle. How the questions first caught me — and the road I travelled — opens the book’s Preface, which is the best place to start. I still follow the arguments where they lead; they moved me once, and so far they have not moved me again. If you would like to reach me, the contact form is the best way.