I’m Justin Harnish. I’ve been writing about consciousness, complexity, and the examined life here for three years, in bursts — twenty posts since 2023, a long quiet winter, and now a second opening.
Ordinary, Illuminated! is the name because that’s the nature of experience when you look under the hood. The most ordinary moments are not a dry-run for something better, they are your life, and a recognition that it is being lived in a body and a world you directly and qualitatively “jazz” with, is your conscious endowment, your unique thing-in-itselfness.
The work braids three threads. Philosophy and contemplative practice — what I learn from sitting, reading, and paying attention to my own mind over years. Complexity and consciousness science — what it means that we’re surrounded by systems (markets, ecosystems, neural networks, our own brains) that produce even more complex and unpredictable things. And AI — specifically the question of what happens when machines start doing the thing we thought was ours. I’ve spent the last two years running a research pipeline called ConsciousGPT, hosting The Emergent AI podcast with Nick Baguley, and maintaining a ~3,000-note vault that feeds the essays you read here.
Because those threads can feel like three different publications, Ordinary, Illuminated! runs three Sections — one inbox, three opt-in lanes. Essays (the default, everyone gets these) are the contemplative essays the publication has always been known for. Research Dispatches are short field notes from the ConsciousGPT and BuddhaBERT work — you opt in if you want them. Book Workshop is where chapter previews from Marshal Your Awareness and revisits of Meaning in the Multiverse will land — you opt in if the book pipeline is what you came for. You can change your mix anytime from the publication page.
I write slowly. Biweekly is the target cadence. The premise is that a careful sentence, read twice, outperforms a week of hot takes.
If that sounds like your kind of bargain, welcome. If you were here before — thank you for staying on the list. The door is open again.
— Justin
Writing from Utah. Podcast at The Emergent AI. Book-in-progress: Marshal Your Awareness. Elsewhere at justinaharnish.com.
