Dilemmas
The atlas, applied.
57 contemporary questions, answered by the atlas's coordinates. For each, the 86 schools are sorted into stances by their attribute signatures — turning the catalogue into a reasoning tool you can open when the question comes up. See the coverage matrix to map which attributes each dilemma exercises, or the argument map to see how stances on one dilemma entail stances on others.
Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do?
When an autonomous AI takes an action that harms someone, the question of who or what is responsible — the developer, the operator, the model itself — turns on whether the model is the kind of thing that can be a responsible agent.
Could an AI have a mind that matters?
When a system writes like it thinks, reports preferences, and pushes back on what you say, the question of whether it has a mind stops being academic. The answer turns on what mind is and what kind of thing can have it.
If a teleporter copied and destroyed you, would you have survived?
The Star Trek transporter problem: a machine scans your body atom by atom, transmits the pattern, builds an exact duplicate at the destination, and dismantles the original. Whether you arrive at the destination or die in the scanner is the question; the answer depends on what you are.
Does an LLM 'know' the things it correctly produces?
A model outputs the boiling point of water, the date of the Battle of Hastings, a working algorithm. Did it know those things, or merely emit them? The question is about what knowing is.
Does deleting your data online destroy something real?
Account deletion, the right to be forgotten, the obsolescence of file formats, the slow decay of digital archives — whether any of this destroys something that was real depends on whether information is the kind of thing that can be destroyed.
Could the dead, in principle, be brought back?
If we had perfect information about who someone was — their connectome, their behavioral patterns, their history — could we, in principle, restore them? The question is partly engineering, but the ceiling on the engineering is metaphysical.
Is reality fundamentally digital?
Pancomputationalism, Planck-scale quanta, simulation theory and Kabbalistic letter-mysticism all say yes — but for very different reasons. The rest of the atlas says no.
Is memory stored or reconstructed?
Engrams and traces — or continuous re-narration each time you remember? The cognitive-science debate has a theological cousin: divine memory holding each hair, or the ancestors' continuous remembering.