About the author
Writer · Philosopher · Father · Grandfather
The story behind the book
Age fourteen
He was fourteen when he wrote an essay for his English teacher describing the universe as being inside a football. It was badly punctuated, it earned a B-minus, and it drew a look from his teacher that said “abstract confusion”.
Flawed as it was, it was his first attempt to explain reality. The questions behind it never left him: why is there what is, and what is the case for it being the case?
The wider world
Patrick has experienced life from the extremes of busking on the Champs-Élysées in Paris to a career travelling the world.
He came home with a lasting interest in sociology, in how different societies organise belief, family and meaning, and in how people everywhere reach for some account of their own existence.
The reading
He has no academic training in philosophy, and makes no claim to any. Instead, he read old and new philosophical works ravenously.
What he noticed was that most philosophers begin somewhere within the argument rather than at its very beginning. He set himself a different task: to derive the whole of reality and consciousness from first principles.
Synism
The result was an academic philosophical work he called Synism, from the Greek syn, meaning unity. It rested on a single rule: nothing could be allowed into the argument unless it was required by what came before it. No assumption, no convenient leap, no borrowed authority.
I AM
I AM is his attempt to carry that same chain of reasoning to a wider audience, setting aside some of the more austere academic language and physics, so that the argument can be followed more simply by anyone willing to follow it.
In his own words
On faith
I did not come to any of this as a religious person, and this is not a religious book wearing philosophical language.
On writing
Not all writing is meant to reassure; some writing exists simply to say, you are not alone in seeing this.
On being questioned
What I write will be scrutinised. That is the very nature of enquiry.
On the reader
More than any conclusion in its pages, Patrick hopes readers will simply follow the argument wherever it leads and come to their own conclusion, and that the recognition might change them, as it changed him.
The book
How the Universe Comes to Know Itself
One man's attempt to explain the nature of all things: not as a doctrine to be followed, but as an argument to be tested, step by step, against whether it holds.
Get in touch
If you would like to contact Patrick about I AM, he would be glad to hear from you.
