Greg Todd

07/29/2026

Marvin Minsky's *Society of Mind* is one of the most ambitious books in the history of cognitive science. It argues that what we call "mind" is not a unified thing but an emergent property of hundreds of mindless agents—none of which thinks, feels, or understands anything on its own.

The problem: that argument needs someone to have made it. A committee of mindless agents does not discover anything. It processes.

Minsky builds his throne with great ingenuity. Then he walks away and wonders why no one is sitting in it.

New essay on the soul, the self-refuting framework, and the question *Society of Mind* was built to avoid asking.

Marvin Minsky, Society of Mind, and the Soul the Machine Cannot Find

07/24/2026

Every generation before ours knew what a man was and what a woman was. Nobody had to explain it. It didn't require a study, a debate, or a hashtag.

This is the first generation that needs an argument for it—and somehow calls that progress.

There's an old idea, straight from Thomas Aquinas, that sin doesn't just make you bad—it makes you stupid. It clouds the mind that's supposed to judge right from wrong until you can't tell the difference anymore. And the more a society normalizes what used to be obviously wrong, the less it seems able to reason clearly about anything that matters—marriage, family, basic biology, right and wrong itself.

We keep getting told this is the smartest, most advanced generation in history. Maybe by some measures. By the measures that actually matter, it's hard to argue that.

Wrote up the full case here. Worth the read.

Aquinas held that sin clouds the intellect. The modern West is the proof.

07/14/2026

You already know something is wrong. You have known it for some time. The people who govern us—across every faction, every party, every credentialed institution—speak the language of obligation while living entirely outside its demands. They invoke the inheritance of Western civilization, or human dignity, or the rules-based international order, and then arrange their lives so that the costs of that inheritance fall on everyone except themselves.

This essay is an attempt to name what has been taken, identify who took it, and explain why the left/right performance exists—not to resolve anything but to prevent you from resolving it correctly.

The room they inherited is still standing. Its dimensions have not changed. That is the indictment.

The Inheritance Every Tradition Built and Every Ruling Class Has Abandoned

07/09/2026

The Supreme Court ruled on birthright citizenship two weeks ago, in Trump v. Barbara. Six Justices held that children born here to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens at birth. Justice Thomas, dissenting, said the majority got the history wrong.

I wrote something that goes back further than the Fourteenth Amendment debates—back to Aquinas, who drew a distinction that almost everyone arguing about immigration right now has forgotten exists: the difference between the hospitality owed to a stranger and the membership earned by a citizen.

Aquinas gets quoted by both sides of this fight. The "welcome the stranger" camp cites his teaching on hospitality. The "some peoples can never assimilate" camp cites his treatment of Israel's enemies. Both are misreading him, and the text says so plainly if you read the whole passage instead of the half that flatters what you already believed.

I apply that framework to birthright citizenship in the U.S., and to what two generations of unmanaged multiculturalism did to Britain and France by never requiring anyone to answer the question at all.

Full essay here:

A Thomistic Reading, and Two Ways to Get It Wrong

06/23/2026

The Supreme Court unanimously struck down a federal gun law last week because it punished what a man was rather than what he did.

Red flag laws do exactly the same thing—and then shift the burden to the citizen to prove the prediction wrong.

Hemani didn't address ERPOs. It didn't need to.

New essay on why the logic of the Hemani decision is a guided missile aimed at every red flag statute in the country—including Michigan's, which explicitly lists drug use as a basis for seizure by judicial forecast.

The loaded question the founders refused to answer has been reissued. Under a different name. With a robe on.

Hemani, Red Flag Laws, and the Verdict Hidden in the Premise

05/25/2026

Memorial Day is one of the few civic observances that asks for something quieter than celebration.

Not gratitude in the abstract. Not performance. Not argument.

Just remembrance.

In courtrooms, government buildings, and cemeteries across the country, institutions continue because generations before us believed some things were worth defending even at personal cost. Whatever disagreements exist in public life now, Memorial Day remains a reminder that the stability of ordinary life was not created accidentally.

For many families, the cost of that stability was not symbolic. It was permanent.

The holiday is easy to treat as the beginning of summer. But historically, it was intended to preserve memory—to ensure that sacrifice eventually did not disappear beneath comfort, routine, and time.

That is probably still its most important function.

Today is a good day to remember the dead carefully, speak of them honestly, and conduct ourselves with at least some awareness that we inherited more than we built ourselves.

04/28/2026

A recurring mistake in how we talk about society is treating the individual as the smallest meaningful unit—as if everything else is optional, secondary, or constructed afterward.

In practice, that is not how anything durable works.

In litigation, I often see the downstream effects when the basic structures that hold people together begin to weaken. The law can respond to those situations—it can allocate responsibility, impose obligations, and attempt to stabilize outcomes—but it cannot recreate the conditions that were never formed or that have already dissolved.

The family, at its core, functions less like a preference and more like a structure. It is where people first learn obligation, continuity, and what it means to be bound to something beyond immediate choice. Those are not abstract values—they are habits formed over time, usually long before anyone encounters a courtroom.

When those habits are absent, the consequences tend to show up later, and often in ways that law is poorly equipped to address. Courts can manage conflict, but they are not designed to replace the foundational relationships that prevent certain conflicts from arising in the first place.

I wrote a longer piece exploring this idea—why the family may be better understood not as a lifestyle option, but as a necessary structure for any stable society, and what happens when that structure is treated as optional.

It’s a deeper treatment than fits here, but the central point is straightforward: not every constraint is a limitation. Some are the conditions that make anything else possible.

Have you seen situations where the absence of those underlying structures changes the outcome entirely?

https://quidestveritas1.substack.com/p/the-molecule-and-the-void