Blog
Essays on consciousness, computation, and the physics of biological intelligence.
Why Ferns and Neurons Look the Same
What low-D structures look like when embedded in high-D spaces
Ferns and Purkinje cells share fractal geometry—but it's not convergent evolution. Both involve low-D structures embedded in high-D spaces. That's what such systems look like. This reveals something deeper about the geometry of dimensional asymmetry.
January 10, 2026
Why Dimensional Collapse Quantizes
Gravity, language, and the lattice at the bottleneck
Quantization isn't mysterious. It's what happens when high-dimensional dynamics squeeze through low-dimensional bottlenecks with pre-existing structure. Language does it to thought. Gravity does it to matter. The mathematics is the same.
January 3, 2026
Black Hole as Aperture
Simulating observer-relative time without invoking GR
A toy model where the same dynamics produce frozen time for one observer and flowing time for another—just by changing which correlations they can access.
December 29, 2025
The Philosophy Trilogy
Agency, signaling, and epistemic frustration from bacteria to belief systems
Three papers, one question. How do systems coordinate when participants can't verify each other's commitments? The answer connects bacterial quorum sensing to human ideology, and explains why mature institutions resist evidence.
December 29, 2025
Where Did Santa Come From?
What we can know, what we can only infer, and why aliens probably have Santa too
There are two ways to ask where Santa came from. The historical question has a documented answer. The functional question is harder—why do so many cultures independently invent winter gift-spirits? The answer involves game theory, gift economies, and a surprising comparison to ant colonies.
December 29, 2025
Why Biology Can't Be Falsified
And why that's a feature, not a bug
Karl Popper gave us a clean criterion for science—if it can't be falsified, it isn't science. But what happens when the systems we study are too complex for any test to capture? Biology operates in a regime where falsifiability breaks down, and understanding why reveals something deep about the limits of scientific knowledge.
December 29, 2025
Quantum Gravity With and Without the Math
The paradox dissolves as a category error when you stop asking the wrong question
The conflict between quantum mechanics and general relativity assumes gravity must see classical outcomes. If gravity sees the wavefunction, the paradox disappears.
December 28, 2025
Time From Dimensions
Why time slows when the aperture squeezes
Time dilation and dimensional contraction are the same phenomenon. Squeeze the aperture, slow the clock—whether it's a black hole, a spaceship, or a brain.
December 28, 2025
Quantum Mechanics Without the Math
And then with the math put back in
Quantum mechanics feels spooky because we keep asking it to behave like a low-dimensional classical story. The mind looks quantum for the same reason.
December 27, 2025
The Aquatic Cyborg
What 160,000-year-old whale barnacles tell us about the origins of complex society
The standard story says our ancestors were nomadic egalitarians until agriculture forced them into hierarchies. The archaeological record says otherwise. We may have been seafaring cyborgs all along.
December 20, 2025
Coherence Dynamics Circa 1890
Why Bergson and James were right about the "Soup," and how the 20th century got lost in the "Sparks"
The mathematical tools to formalize Bergson's "holographic brain" and James's "transmission" hypothesis have existed for decades. We just forgot to use them.
December 19, 2025