Perception
How senses evolve, and how minds, natural or artificial, read the world around them.
5 essays, newest first
- A Mind Is a Way to Spend Less I tried to give my digital creatures eyes. They kept throwing them away. Chasing why led through a wall I had hit before, a life-history I had to rebuild, and a wrong idea about what a mind is even for.
- The Measure of Misunderstanding If two people unpack the same word into different concepts, the size of that gap is not random. It is a distance, and distance can be measured.
- Observation Is the Cut: Quantum Collapse, Memory, and AI A quantum physics analogy for the mind and AI: observation as a cut, memory as a stored forecast, and a language model that braces for the next word. A notebook idea walked as far as physics allows, with the science marked.
- We Are Trying to Save the Wrong Thing Longevity research wants to preserve the body. But what if the thing worth keeping is the state of mind, and time itself is the variable we can bend?
- An Eye for Time I gave my artificial organisms the power to evolve their own senses, then built a world with seasons and waited for one to grow a clock. It grew a noise filter instead. Here is the honest reason why, and the one quietly profound thing that worked.
