Carving Nature at Your Joints
Boundaries and Purpose Trilogy Conclusions
Plankton 💠 Valhalla
Logbook of a Voyage in Thought
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Purpose From First Principles
The purpose of this last essay is to make sense of purpose.
Recursion, Tidy Stars, and Water Lilies
Feedback is why there are things to talk about.
Boundaries Are in the Eye of the Beholder
Here we are, blissfully going about our lives, saying fancy things like "pass me the ketchup, please" and "the projections for our year-close budget ain't pretty, folks," and we're satisfied with that.
There Is No Script in the Life of a Water Lily
Life creates itself, and self-creation is made of feedback loops. In this thread I'm going to make that point using one of the most beautiful flowers as exemplar: the self-creation of the water lily 🪷
Mass-Producing the Mistake Minimizer
Science is a technology for the mind. What is it for, and who should be allowed to wield it? Science communication, open exposition problems, and our way forward.
The Plankton Valhalla Bestiary
A showcase of the word definitions and transformations that I use for Plankton Valhalla's explanations.
A Non-Magical, Example-Rich Introduction to Emergence
Out of the many charming short stories in David Eagleman's Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife , one in particular has stuck with me. Its title is Ineffable and it's short enough to be read in five minutes. This version of the afterlife (each story in the book gives an alternative variant) is not for people, but for...
The Demon and the Tree
Regardless of the details, every system is a physical arrangement of matter and energy. The way this matter is arranged is what we call the structure of the system, and it determines what happens when differences pass through the system.
Toying With Ideas of Glass Circuits
When you want to solve a new, hard-to-define problem, chances are old expertise won't cut it. You either make a groundbreaking new discovery (good luck!) or find new useful ways to combine the things you already know, new connections between things that no one before had thought to be connected.
The Invention of Systems
What would happen if one were to take the argument that the world is one big, intricate network a little too seriously? How would such a person talk about things?
The World Is a Network
Daily life is like paying to go to an amusement park, only to walk straight past all the rides and get out. We regularly miss the best parts. We see without seeing, wander without wondering, and turn the time we spend in this inconceivably deep world into a jagged but linear route from B to D. Yet it would be so easy to do otherwise!...
Differences, Contraptions, and a Ripple Universe
Back in university I studied physics and astronomy. Whenever someone asked me why I'd chosen that as my major, I mentioned that scene at the end of The Matrix where...