Articles
The framework applied to current events, history, and the examined life. Each essay appears here in full; most are also on Substack.
Essays drawn from the book, in reading order: the three pillars first, then evolution, politics, inheritance and the machine.
The Lived Mind Resonates
Hopfield networks, predictive coding and the frequency domain: how a mind accumulates, resonates and imagines, and why a language model does not.
Read the full essay → · On Substack
Identity Is a Curve, Not a Noun
Accumulation, the first of the book’s three pillars. A marlin, a song from adolescence and a bicycle: a self is not a thing that has experiences but the accumulation of them.
Resonance Before Reason
Resonance, the second pillar. A drawing of a child on the Acropolis: how an arriving signal wakes what a life has laid down, feeling first and reasons after, and how the same mechanism couples one mind to another.
Imagination and Reality are Coupled
Imagination, the third pillar. Dragons in clouds and buildings not yet poured: imagination runs alongside perception, not instead of it, in a proportion that shifts across a life.
Three Loops of Evolution
Genes, neurons and culture: three loops, each running at its own speed, each feeding the others. How a species learned to inherit more than its genes.
Read the full essay → · On Substack
Power, Ideology and Culture: The Sediment Beneath Politics
Accumulation applied to politics. Power moves in a season, ideology in a generation, and culture is what both leave behind once they settle. Vietnam, France, the United States and Australia, read by the thickness of their sediment.
Read the full essay → · On Substack
The Second Channel of Inheritance
The Sumerians stored their accounts long before they stored their minds. A trained language model runs the same wager at the scale of the species.
Read the full essay → · On Substack
Musk and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Elon Musk says intelligence is a quantity, and that we are about to have a great deal more of it. The most durable law in physics says intelligence is a cost.