Public Biography
Dr. Anders Ruhl is a professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, where his research concerns lattice formulations of quantum gravity and the renormalization behavior of discrete spacetimes. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1999, held postdoctoral appointments at the Perimeter Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, and joined the Caltech faculty in 2008. He has published more than sixty peer-reviewed papers and has never, in any of them, cited a work he did not first reproduce himself.
Dr. Ruhl has not read a book of philosophy. He does not own one, and he does not intend to acquire one. Since 2015 he has instead been deriving philosophy from first principles in a run of eighteen black hardbound notebooks he refers to as the Framework, a 1,100-page manuscript that scholars describe as an unassisted and largely correct reconstruction of Western thought between 1637 and 1785. The Framework contains no citations, no bibliography and no acknowledgments. An audit conducted by the Center for Computational Epistemology at Carnegie Mellon University matched 1,079 of its 1,100 pages to existing published work, with a median lag between original publication and Ruhl rederivation of 238 years.
The Framework’s principal results, as titled by their author:
- “Preliminaries” (2015) — the cogito, derived on a delayed flight to Geneva and recorded on a cocktail napkin now taped into Notebook Two: “I am thinking. Something is therefore doing that.”
- “The Induction Thing” (2017) — the problem of induction. Occupied most of a year and, by Dr. Ruhl’s account, cost him a grant.
- “Ruhl’s Wall” (2019) — the is–ought gap. Named for its discoverer, whom he takes to be himself.
- “Ruhl’s Uncertainty of Compilation” (2021) — the preface paradox, encountered while assembling the notebooks into a single document and abandoned after forty pages as unresolved. It has been unresolved since 1965 for the same reason.
- “Rule 1” (2023) — the categorical imperative, obtained at the chalkboard on a Tuesday afternoon and written at the top of Notebook Fourteen. Dr. Ruhl reports that it fell out of the symmetry.
- “The Truck Situation” (2024) — the trolley problem, derived in stopped traffic on the 210.
He has been given a copy of the Critique of Pure Reason on four occasions, most recently by his department chair. He weighed it in one hand and returned it, observing that it was not a first-principles document but “somebody’s notes.”
Dr. Ruhl is at work on Notebook Nineteen, which concerns how a physical system composed of ordinary matter comes to have an interior experience of anything at all. He calls this “The Consciousness Thing” and expects to close it within eighteen months.
He lives in Pasadena.