Jonathon Keats (born October 2, 1971) is an American conceptual artist and experimental philosopher known for creating large-scale thought experiments. Keats was born in New York City and studied philosophy at Amherst College. He now lives in San Francisco and Italy. Art projects Early work Keats made his debut in 2000 at Refusalon in San Francisco, where he sat in a chair and thought for 24 hours, with a female model posing nude in the gallery. His thoughts were sold to patrons as art, at a price determined by dividing their annual income down to the minute. In 2002 Keats held a petition drive to pass the Law of Identity, A ≡ A, a law of logic, as statutory law in Berkeley, California. Specifically, the proposed law stated that, "every entity shall be identical to itself." Any entity caught being unidentical to itself was to be subject to a fine of up to one tenth of a cent. Deemed "too weird for Berkeley" in an Oakland Tribune headline, the law did not pass. However it did become a topic of debate in the 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial race, garnering cryptic words of support from the Mitt Romney campaign and sparked a copycat petition drive in Santa Cruz, California. In the same year, amidst tightening post-9/11 security, Keats initiated a series of anonymous self-portraits of visitors to the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, created by fingerprinting them as they entered the building. And at Modernism Gallery in San Francisco, he premiered his first musical composition, "1001 Concertos for Tuning Forks and Audience". Keats copyrighted his mind in 2003, claiming that it was a sculpture that he had created, neural network by neural network, through the act of thinking. The reason, he told the BBC World Service when interviewed about the project, was to attain temporary immortality, on the grounds that the Copyright Act would give him intellectual property rights on his mind for a period of seventy years after his death. He reasoned that, if he licensed out those rights, he would fulfill the Cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"), paradoxically surviving himself by seven decades. In order to fund the posthumous marketing of intellectual property rights to his mind, he sold futures contracts on his brain in an IPO at Modernism Gallery in San Francisco. The project attracted interest in Silicon Valley. It was later included in News of