Essays
Essays on consciousness, computation, and the physics of biological intelligence.
Black Hole Aperture: A Constructed Analogy
What the observer-channel simulation shows, and what it builds in
A correction and audit of an observer-channel toy model. It demonstrates filtered access to shared dynamics, not black-hole time dilation without general relativity.
December 29, 2025 · revised September 1, 2026
Quantum Mechanics Without the Math
What the projection analogy explains—and what it does not
Projection is a useful picture of basis-dependent quantum measurement, but quantum probabilities, contextuality, and state update require more than high dimension or information loss.
December 27, 2025 · revised September 1, 2026
Time, Records, and Dimensional Interfaces
What an aperture model can describe, and what it cannot derive
A correction and reconstruction of the aperture-time idea. Proper time, record formation, statistical resolution, and subjective duration are related questions, not one phenomenon.
December 28, 2025 · revised September 1, 2026
Coherence Dynamics Circa 1890
What Bergson and James saw in the “soup,” and what the analogy can test
Bergson's selection-for-action picture can be translated into intervention-relative dynamical models without treating his metaphysics, dimensionality, or field activity as a theory of consciousness.
December 19, 2025 · revised September 1, 2026
Ferns, Purkinje Cells, and a Useful Analogy
What a visual resemblance can—and cannot—tell us about delay coordinates
Fern fronds and Purkinje arbors both branch, but resemblance is not evidence of a shared computation. A delay-coordinate toy turns that resemblance into a testable cerebellar hypothesis while keeping observation, model, and mechanism separate.
January 10, 2026 · revised September 1, 2026
The Aquatic Cyborg
What old shorelines can and cannot tell us about human social evolution
Aquatic resources did not automatically produce settlement, hierarchy, or cognitive modernity. But maritime tools may have changed the niches, coordination problems, and selection pressures available to human groups. That is a testable affordance hypothesis, not an archaeological conclusion.
December 20, 2025 · revised September 1, 2026
The Philosophy Trilogy
Agency, signaling, and epistemic frustration from bacteria to belief systems
Three linked arguments ask how coordination changes when commitments are only imperfectly observable, and where comparisons across biological and social scales stop being explanatory.
December 29, 2025 · revised September 1, 2026
How a Structured Interface Can Quantize
Gravity, language, and what a bottleneck analogy still has to prove
A specified many-to-one readout plus a discrete codebook can quantize an output. Whether gravity contains such an interface is a separate, unresolved conjecture.
January 3, 2026
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
When Biological Tests Are Underdetermined
Measurement channels, auxiliary assumptions, and how to make a claim lose
Complex biological systems can leave rival models indistinguishable under one experiment. That is a reason to state the measurement map and design new interventions, not to declare biology unfalsifiable.
December 29, 2025
Quantum Gravity and the Projection Analogy
Where level-of-description arguments help, and where they stop
Classical outcomes and quantum states belong to different descriptive levels. Keeping them separate clarifies the quantum-gravity problem, but does not solve it.
December 28, 2025