michael-dean-k/

Every online creator these days has a proprietary framework—they are catchy, dead-simple, sometimes flimsy, and often wrong. Somewhere exists a marketplace of mental models. Maybe Farnam Street. Is a mental model a framework? What even is a framework, and what makes a good one?

Consider the "frame-" prefix. A frame is a vantage point, a particular angle, a way of looking at something. Imagine holding out a picture frame that gives you a little glimpse of a vast national park. You can't hold an entire hyperobject in your mind, and so a frame compresses noise and gives you a shortcut for understanding. You can't see the whole park, but you can see a map. A framework is a system of lenses to decipher complexity. It lets you leapfrog in understanding.

By creator-economy logic, a framework is a valuable asset. Unlike a vague mush of regurgitated ideas, a framework is discernible, seemingly original, and something you can call your own—you can coin it as a phrase and repeat it over and over until you're known by it. This is a useful tactic! The evolutionary pressures of Internet feeds have forced conceptual ideas to become salient, simple, and tangible. Unlike the abstract frameworks of a physicist, these are fit for a TED talk, primed to leak into the memeplex and anchor your name in the annals of Internet-niche-celebrity history. This is, overall, good—it democratizes conceptual knowledge; the problem is when, beyond the positioning, it's intellectually flaccid.

You've probably seen frameworks pitched as "The Six Types of X," or "The Y Method." These are pseudo-frameworks; they are more like sets or lists. They assemble things within a domain, and increase their memorability through alliteration and metaphor. Maybe this helps with recall, but it doesn't reveal the inner structure of a domain. A real framework would give you a schema to classify incoming data in an unfamiliar field; but a set/list only refers to itself ... Compare this to something like "POP Writing," a simple concept that classifies writing as personal, observational, or playful; this acts a lens to help you analyze any piece of writing.

For something to be a framework, it need generalizability: the ability to explain things beyond itself. The earlier examples are merely "collections"—things are presented, but we don't understand what Aristotle calls "the four causes": what it's made of, how it's arranged and interconnected, why it exists, and what's it's purpose? When Plato writes about conceptual forms, he says there are collections and divisions. Making frameworks are a matter of dividing; a framework's goal is to divide an incomprehensible whole into human-sized parts.

I spent some time this morning thinking through a "framework of frameworks." The first thing to grok about this meta-architecture is that it's broken into three levels of escalating sophistication. After that I'll explain how levels have shapes, and how any shape can be evaluated through a set of qualities.

So it's level, shapes, and qualities—that's the gist.

To expand on levels: a framework can be a heuristic, a model, or a paradigm. Now that I think about, I suppose HMP (not quite meme-ready) is an attempt at making a "paradigm for frameworks," which will soon make more sense, and sound less like bashed buzzwords.

The three levels of frameworks:

Heuristics—mental-shortcuts that lets you decipher complexity through a single property. When Aristotle was classifying animals, he'd offer differentiate them across single properties: blood or bloodless, horned or hornless. A heuristic is something you derive a posteriori, from experience, from empirical facts. You might observe a bunch of essays, or companies, or girlfriends, and notice that you can compare and contrast items in a set based on single attributes. There are many shapes a heuristic can take: it can be a classifier (type A, B, or C), a boolean (on/off), a spectrum (A<>B), a rubric (I, II, III, IV, V), a score (1-100).

The benefit of a heuristic is that, since it's often anchored on a single property, it's simple and easy to learn. The downside is that it's a very limited frame on the scope and purpose of your domain. For example, if you're trying teach craft (purpose) for online nonfiction writers (scope), then POP writing is an excellent heuristic to classify writing voice, but it doesn't teach you how to scope ideas or structure an essay. A heuristic is a shortcut to understand one facet of a domain, but it's not an attempt to model the whole domain. 

Models—a series of interlocking properties, all organized with a larger frame. Write of Passage was set up like a cabinet of heuristics (POP writing, Shiny Dime, Write from Conversation, etc.), but they weren't organized within a single higher-order framework. Think of a model as a group of heuristics organized in hierarchy, where each one is named (what is it's essence?), labeled (what other concepts is it similar to?), located (what is it's parent concept?), interlinked (who are it's cousins?), and excavated (if we go infinitely deep, what are the variations?). Models can take many shapes: an XY graph, a taxonomy, a multi-step recursive workflow (like an OODA loop).

Models cover far more than any heuristic can, but it risks collapsing into complexity. Conceptual schemas can bloom, sprawl, and contradict—becoming illegible or incoherent. To solve this, you have to shift from empiricism to rationality; you can notice infinite ways to subdivide a thing, but to make an elegant model, you need to shift to abstraction and question the fundamental truths behind it. Why might one set of properties be more elegant than another? Ultimately you have to make a hypothesis, test it across dozens of examples, and see if it holds. If some foreign object can't be reconciled into the schema, you have an issue. Consider how the taxonomy of Carl Linnaeus was able to classify the animal world into kingdom, class, order, genus, and species, but it wasn't unable to find a home for the platypus. Even though it works across thousands of animals, the original assumptions aren't able to handle edge-cases.

Paradigms—comprehensive systems that can explain or predict any phenomenon within a domain. How is this possible? I think you achieve this when (1) you find enough instances to represent the domain; (2) you analyze them deeply enough to understand their underlying nature; and (3) you can arrange all your findings into a coherent architecture with maximum explainability. Consider how Darwin improved over Linnaeus: he shifted us from a static taxonomy to a dynamic model, a new paradigm that explains the origin of species, and even the potential future of a species. Paradigms can also take on many shapes, from living systems, to digital networks, to compositional pattern languages.

A good paradigm often finds simple root causes underneath complexity. For example, even though Essay Architecture has 27 patterns (3 patterns within the 3 elements of 3 dimensions), every tier is explained through the rhetorical appeals of ethos, logos, pathos—the whole thing can be summarized as "Aristotle all the way down." Maximum compression has a degree of a recursion: a single heuristic works as a fractal and organizes complexity at multiple scales.

Regardless of how you simplify and package a paradigm, it's still as hard to learn as a language; it's the least accessible, but it's the level that enables mastery of a domain, and the level most suitable to build a school around.¹

No matter how confident you are around a paradigm, it's always fragile. It's explainability is limited by the data set you test it against. As society develops new tools, it brings new data that eventually breaks a paradigm, even if it's held true for centuries. The telescope cracked the geocentric paradigm. A shattered paradigm is disorienting, but fundamentally good—it means you've discovered some new heuristic of reality, and humanity has to restart from new axioms.

So that's a first attempt to map the three levels, and it might help to think of them as geometric dimensions. A heuristic is like a one-dimensional line, a ray of insight that you perceive in a field. A model is a two-dimensional plane to understand a multi-property condition within a domain. But a paradigm is the three-dimensional totality of a field. A paradigm contains all possible heuristics and models, and so when you can think in 3D, you're able to match any circumstance with the correct solution.

But a paradigm isn't necessarily a great framework! It might be the most successful in compressing reality into a particular shape, but it might fail along other qualities. (To reiterate, levels are about  "compression sophistication," where shape is the particular form of compression...) Qualities capture how a compression framework interacts with society as a whole (the point of a framework is, in the end, to spread understanding).

Regardless of the level or shape, some qualities to consider:

• Tangibility: have you made it graspable through metaphor and lexicality?
• Salience: is it rewarding or effective to understand?
• Transferability: does it explain things in other domains?
• Correctness: is it actually right?
• Approachability: how would you walk someone through it via curriculum?

Are these the right qualities? Are these all the qualities? Can I reduce these into more fundamental qualities? I don't know. Realistically, this isn't a "paradigm of framework" yet; it's more so a "model of frameworks." I only conceived of this today, and so naturally it's sprawled into a series of properties:

A framework compresses complexity in a domain, exists at a level of explainability, taking on a particular shape to achieve a purpose within a scope, and can be judged along a set of qualities on how well it's memed.

To properly turn this into a paradigm, I'd have to test this hypothesis against hundreds of frameworks—ie: creator economy memes, among other disciplines—to see if it holds up. I imagine the concepts would melt and reform several times until it's simpler, sharper, and better at explaining a wide range of frameworks. A paradigm isn't solid until it's a domain has run through its pipes. A paradigm is really just a reflection of a domain's dataset and the mind making sense of it.

The Internet flattened the world into a digital puzzle—a kind of intelligence test to see who can combine the correct symbols in the correct corner of a social swarm; plucking a nerve to some various end, bringing fortune, fame, or cringe. Your conception of the game shapes how you play it. That’s the real limiting framework: your mental model. You can’t understand emerging social systems without flailing around to update those models. It is very easy to stay sidelined with some excuse that prevents you from getting embarrassed.

This same paradigm applies to AI. It’s limiting to anthropomorphize it; instead, think of it as a linguistic puzzle. It has ingested trillions of words and arranged meaning into a multi-dimensional geometric map, a massive mystery that no one yet has fully uncovered. It’s your job to craft and aim language into this hall of mirrors. We can only do this blindly. But nonetheless, it brings back a result, and how we respond to it is revealing. There all sorts of distortions—cliche prose, lying, hallucinations—and if you’re metaphor for AI is an entity, then you’ll naturally get annoyed or offended and stop playing the game. It’s better to think of your result not as a failure of the LLM, but a failure in your probe. You’ve asked a wrong or vague question. By sending multiple probes, you start to build a fuzzy map of the hyperobject you’re prompting into. Since it gives back feasible answers back so instantly, we expect it to be right for immediately, with little exploration, but that lack of patience is where the frustration comes. It’s a more a matter of rotation, to approach something that matters to you from many angles until you crack it.

We grossly over-estimate how easily we can stretch our will across time. Even the simplest action, a nightly journal—this—, which feels so achievable in the rush of inspiration, now feels impenetrable at a night’s end, while guiding at baby’s bottle at the end of my chin, typing into my phone to keep a streak, hoping to cobble some unexpected essay in the moment. I have no topic in sight; whatever lies ahead will emerge only through association.

I have a bulging vault of wisdom, but it’s all forgotten and I have little time to comb through my archives, so it lingers at the edge of my consciousness, always taunting. That is over dramatic. What I mean is I feel like I’ve grasped important truths, but let them slip away. It is not enough to hold the truth once. The moment you take your eye off it, which happens almost immediately, it’s like you never had it; even a seemingly shattering insight will slither away each day until it has to be relearned again, though I imagine each time it’s slightly easier to learn—and each time you remember how easy forgetting is, how hard it is to metabolize anything.

I suppose this is one form of overthinking. I suppose I could trust the process; the fallibility of memory is a feature—if I can’t remember something, if it doesn’t imprint on my character with ease, then it’s probably not important enough to remember. This is the default, and perhaps the personal default is the global default, applied across populations, and so in the end one’s inner nature is so consequential that it’s of no use worrying or fighting it; all cards fall into place.

The opposite approach is to build a hypnomnemata; an organized palace of insight, returned to at semi-frequent intervals, to reinforce found lessons. It’s not enough to build a writing archive of a million words; there is follow-up work in turning sap to syrup, in compressing essays into aphorisms, in categorizing them, and in returning to the right silo of thought when some new trouble looms, monthly, in endless undulations.

Returning to an idea is really a form of prayer. Prayer need not be religious or denominational; prayer internalizes meaning of any kind. I learned an idea for Iris Murdoch that sticks with me: she says that, in any moment, your decisions and actions may be predetermined, however it’s not determined by fate, but by the nature of your attention in the minutes, hours, days, and years preceding that moment—in your down time, you have autonomy in how you pay attention. She’s trying to make the case that attention itself is consequential; it shapes your character and your character shapes your decision making.

This model definitely applies to writing too. My output on any given day is contingent on what I’ve absorbed in the days and weeks before. This is often accidental, but it need not be. To improve at writing, it’s rarely about learning some rule, acquiring a meme, or purchasing a trick, but in shaping your mind through deliberate attention so that some quality emerges from the subconscious in the future.

I suppose this is all surfacing because we just read Virginia Woolf in Essay Club and I’m in awe of her technical brilliance, again. I’ve reverse engineered her, years back, and can’t quite trace how much of that, if any, sunk in—either it was foundational or it never cohered. In any case, at one point years ago it felt like I really understood her, and yet now I am again seemingly baffled. Did I forget? Do I need to reserve some hours to dissect? It feels like some percent of what I do, consciously or unconsciously, gets absorbed—but most is lost…

Or, figuring out how to retain your inspiration is perhaps the actual meta-skill to solve.

I wonder how much of my own Essay Architecture system is currently loaded in me as I write this. I am really just following the idea here, and whatever emerges, formally or stylistically, is merely accidental. I don’t doubt that my own ideas could be better loaded. There’s probably some “boot up” process, daily, weekly, and monthly, so that the right ideas continue permeating and anchoring in the subconscious. But would this be a chore?

What’s probably irking me is that I feel slightly detached from the vision of the essayist I want to become. It is natural to anchor this in heroes, the writers I admire; yet I see flaws in them; crucial differences—I know I am not them, yet in some fundamental way I don’t quite know what I am myself, either. It feels like I used to have a legible and explicit true north, but as you get better, you also realize how shallow and simplistic your old goals were. So there’s a chance I forgot and lost touch with them, but also an equal chance I just outgrew them, and now struggle to articulate what I want my writing to be.

What I strive for is a synthesis that can’t be easily prescribed into a method. I suppose this whole note is “essayistic,” in the sense that I’m barreling forward trying to answer a question—how does a self propagate and evolve through time?—yet it’s lacking in idea, form, and voice. By rational analysis, it’s missing almost every ingredient: no experience or microcosm, no references or response, a meandering structure unoptimized for reader attention, and a perhaps overly pragmatic voice with little poetry, despite some occasional metaphors and flare. I suppose I could fix this all in rounds of rewrites, but that is not in the cards for this idea; this will only ever be a captured thought stream; a true account of what’s going through my mind as I sprawl on the couch. Yet, if I my insights were “loaded,” would my first drafts be more poetic, more well-rounded?

To lob insights into the future, perhaps they need to be materialized into a totem. I look around my apartment and see nothing but my past carried forward: paintings from dead grandparents, paintings of the dead family dog who I watched get euthanized, architectural models from a summer abroad in Italy, a 1950s radio, our wedding flowers, an inherited library. Unlike my thoughts, it’s as if I couldn’t escape my past of I wanted to. While thoughts evaporate, possessions accumulate.

How can we cast our abstract epiphanies into stone? Is this reification? The totemification of everything? Where are the boundaries? What is the visual language to work within? And what is the ritual? I sense that post-it reminders fall short of emotional charge. On the contrary, I have a statue on my desk of a man with a book for a head, holding his skull in his hand, looking back at its book-head. This is symbolic and charged, yet I almost never see it. For months I walk by it with it having no effect. Even when I do see it, I see it too quickly to absorb it and for it to imprint on my consciousness. This means it’s not enough to load your inner quarters with odd assemblies, each with a story; there is an art of looking upon your collected interiors, in seeking the fixtures that blend in as something new, in remembering their message and recasting them into you.

To learn, then, is not just to behold knowledge once, but to totemize and worship it. The question is, to what degree can you achieve this? When do you know a factoid is worth totemizing? How many totems should one have, 3 or 300? How intricate of a ritual can I bear? I suppose there are mega-totems and mini-totems. A mega-totem is a larger frame that answers some foundational question, like what kind of essayist do I want to become? If the answer to that is Montaigne—it’s not, at least not quite, not in totality—then perhaps I need a framed picture of him I reflect on each morning. A mini-totem is far more granular; I notice how Woolf compressed her sentence lengths and uses rhyme in a moment of action; that’s 1 of 1,000 things to remember, and so that makes more sense in a digital hypnomnemata. For that to work, each idea needs to be like a Matryoshsa doll, where I can scan all ideas quickly before going deep on any.

It’s tempting to start making a hypnomnemata, but really I should start with the large totems, and really test how those can reverberate through my daily writing sessions.

Given I’m slightly sleep deprived these days—less so from a baby that wakes up too often (she often sleeps through the night); more so from waking up very early to get in a work shift before my wife leaves for work—I often fall asleep reading.

Mortimer Adler said if you fall asleep reading, you should stop. If you’re drowsy, you aren’t sharp enough to read analytically. He’s probably right. I notice a gradient in how active I am with my reading: sometimes I’m punching mini-essays into my Kindle for each highlight; other times I highlight and move on.

Nonetheless, I have noticed some interesting recurring phenomenon as I fall asleep reading, which I’ll call “reading malfunctions.”

The first malfunction is when, as I drift off, I notice the text on the page get slightly blurry, and find myself reading text that actually isn’t there. It’s like a hypnopompic literary hallucination. I’ll read a string of words, wake up, and then look for that string of words to continue, but it’s nowhere in the paragraph, nowhere on the page. It must be something like the subconscious filling in detail to the larger gestalt of the page.

The second malfunction is when my eyes actually close, yet there’s still the inertia of gliding across strings of prose, but at this point I’m seeing an image or idea instead of text, and I’ll notice that it’s often not even directly related to the text, just some association that I can’ quite connect.

The third malfunction, and maybe my favorite, is when I doze off and process only the geometry of the spaces between the text. I stop seeing letters or words, but the void between words, and the patterns that happen to occur from that particular combination of words. Sometimes they look like clouds, or mountains, or aztec symbols; it’s the similar pareidolia effect from cloud gazing. (I imagine AI might get to a point where it can simultaneously compose “void art” that matches the meaning of a paragraph).

What is the texture of a day these days? As our lives’s inevitably mutate across the decades, we never stop changing, our condition never stops changing: projects die, people die, we learn to look people in the eye, we move, we read and marry and birth. We lose grip of our iterating selves, compress them down to caricatures, characters who also destabilize with time, slightly warping each time we retrieve them from memory; my post-college self is a copy of a copy of a copy, that original self in full-fidelity, irretrievable. Unless, I wrote. Which I didn’t. Will my current self be an equal mystery? Will I know what it was like to get out of bed in July of 2026?

What even is my current self? As fresh and live as it is, it too is ineffable, shaped by cliches that won’t hold if interrogated. It is too dynamic, too thousand-headed to contain in one photograph, or mere words.¹ It takes real effort and skill to see clearly into your own situation, to capture the right essence in the right words. Perspicacity is a depleting resource. If your life is “busy,” as most are, as most new parents definitely are, then the unbroken time to yourself gets thinner and thinner. Those two hours in the morning before the day escapes is met with decision paralysis. I am behind on countless threads; which thing do I save from ruin? Or, do you I use that time to reflect and write, like this, and let everything continue to burn, instead of finding some consolation in it all?

I’m using dramatic words here for what is actually a special and wonderful time. I feel bad to have not put proper words to my love for my daughter. That will come. I’ve had in mind a long letter I want to write her in her first year, but we’re already half way through and nothing is penned. ² Naturally, I’ve had so little bandwidth this week to write anything. Between consulting work, maintaining Essay Club, watching my daughter full-time, and reading the Odyssey, (all things I cherish) there are little hours left to tend to my hydra of interest and ideas, to keep up with basic responsibilities, to be a good friend and husband, to unpack from New Hampshire.

The reason I wrote this is because I woke up at 6:45 am in a familiar mood, a feeling I’ve been waking up with—but not naming—a feeling endemic to this present phase. It’s a guilt for not waking up two hours earlier. Now it’s 7am, and I know not exactly when the day will start, when obligations kick in, when I will have to go to Target to buy children’s Benadryl, more formula, my nephew’s birthday present, etc. It’s this subtle feeling of starting with defeat, which can’t help but color and tamper my energy for the day. I yearn for a 15-hour chunk of focus, just for a single day,³ to blitz through and catch up on everything, but that then creates a load on my wife. I am becoming more selfless and yet also yearn for selfishness.

The other possibility here is that I’m continuing to fail at understanding prioritization. I just found an essay competition for $50,000, on defining the “new axial age” we are entering. I am intrigued, but deciding to do that would sacrifice everything else. The decision to read the Odyssey already led to a strange kind of obsession that has eclipsed so much else in this last week. I feel guilty for not directing all available attention to my business; I currently make a livable “salary” between consulting and my Essay Architecture project, and while I could just maintain what I have and be “fine,” there is the financial pressure to grow my business around 5-10x in the next 3 years to build the life we envision for our family (without growing it, a simple hiccup could financially destabilize the whole project and kill years of momentum, forcing me to get a regular job). Yet, prioritizing only professional strains feels like creative stasis, the death of mind and spirit, which is probably a normal thing that all adults have to play out. I resist it. I resist it like I resist death, probably since that near-death freak car accident, when I emerged from flipped metal, completely untouched, with a new commitment to take risks (there’s a chance the two are unrelated, but that’s how I mythologized it to myself). I am resisting it in strange ways, which yesterday took the form of rewriting the Odyssey with an opening scene where the cyclops gets castrated.

I still sit cross-legged in bed, writing this, which satisfies my “daily post” obligation that has withered. I want to change my mind before my feet hit the floor. Similar to how the first sentence of an essay sets you in a direction which you cannot retreat from (Didion), so too do your first steps into the day, determine the unfolding of that entire day (the proverbial “right side of the bed”). I know the wisdom I need, I’ve written about it at length, but it’s so easy to forget, to bring the right ideas to the right moment (maybe I need a hypnomnemata). But now I’m seeing a fuzzy outline of what I should remember: escape time, escape chronos (chronological time), and enter kairos. This is my version of “get out of your head.” I find that it’s not my head that traps me, but time itself. I am often trapped in recountings and projections, in personal and societal abstractions, and I derive identity from them without realizing, calcifying into stoned eyes that wake up with me. All issues point back to some version of being stuck in the illusion of time. And so really, my issue is that I’m not “praying” to it; I’m not “meditating” to it; both those terms aren’t quite right; what I mean is that I am not holding that idea freshly in my mind, repeating it and refocusing it throughout the day, to the extent that it shapes my perception. All moods are downstream of past frames of attention. And so this rut I feel is simply the product of not being attentive of the right ideas in the prior days; a forgivable offense when still synthesizing the shards of a new era.

I look to my left and notice this beige mat I bought in Portland, Oregon in 2015. It’s an 18” carpeted square composed of five squares, one in the middle, and then a single line that interlocks and weaves through the middle, creating the illusion of four corned squares. It’s a short step away from my bed. The goal is to wake up, stand on, and meditate on. I forget that I put this here, to remind me to start the day right. I’ve ignored it for the last 200 days. And so despite the chaos and business, perhaps the only thing you can do is take seriously a few simple rituals. ⁴ And now the babe cries.

The imagination is as ugly as it is beautiful; they come together. If your inner mind consists only of pretty landscapes, imagined scenarios, and clever compromises, all bound by a safe and familiar virtue, your net is cast not below the froth of the ocean. To dive into the depths is to expose yourself not just to shimmering coral, but to the jump scares of stingrays. The moment I thought this, as I lifted my arm to drink orange juice, I saw a monstrous bug on my sleeve, hairy and hissing; it was only a bee, but unexpectedly there, and so I leapt and shooed and booted into my aboriginal fight mode. What a synchronicity! You are not tapped into the Source unless the fear of it lifts you off the ground.

This is on my mind because I had a strange fantasy on my walk home—a fruit of imagination—and debated myself on whether I’d write about it. I decided I wouldn’t, but I suppose, now, here I am. I will spare you of the hot specifics, which unwillingly formed in my mind. Contrary to how you may think this started, I was looping a religious mantra and I saw with total purity, closer to Buddha than the drools of a leg-humping dog. My sin was not in lust, but in congratulating myself on my discipline. I imagined myself writing a paragraph on this victory of inner-chastity—“I didn’t imagine [X]… I didn’t imagine [Y]...”—but that summoned a fantasy weirder than usual, one with unbelievable metaphors that I’ll never put to paper, and an arc that ended in spasms, shapeshifting, and shrinking into a mono-droning ball of white heat that exploded and shattered the windows of nearby houses, spiraling the town into a front-lawn frenzy.

Creativity comes not without deviance; and so extreme creativity comes with flashes of imagery that will shock you, shock whoever you share it with. It cares not of your preferences or values, commitments or morals; to cast a line deep into waters brings all sorts of riches and squids to the surface of your mind, and the choice is yours on what to bring into the boat (and of course, sometime a whale emerges, and your language fails you, leaving you only able to speak of the whale with nothing to show).

A more conservative mind has no such problems, because a conservative dares not enter the mind of God. To be creative is not a frivolous hobby, it is to be a microcosm of the larger engine of creation. And if being creative involves attuning yourself to the instability of imagination, then one can’t know God without a fair amount of psychic turbulence.

(I promise I won’t stray too far into amateur theology here.) The popular caricature of God is the archetype of an architect—one with a divine “plan”—but a better image is a thunderous volcanic eruption. The Big Bang, the rupture of cosmic seed; reproduction—evolution, life, and creation, in many places at many scales —emerges from billions of scattered instances, so that the rare two can fuse into a higher order. I have trouble believing God has consciousness, intention, and agency, but find obvious a divine intelligence that folds chaos into order. The cost of divine intelligence though, in creating something as magnificent as a human, is misfiring, mutation, bad combinations, and all things upsetting—violence, death, and evil.

So if we want to carry the logos, hold the flame of divine intelligence in our own head to make beautiful things ourselves, to continue the process of God, as God, then we have to accept defects and abortions—to not cower in fear at the strange and grotesque, to not turn off the lights. This is probably a known truth, that the path towards Enlightenment runs through dark woods, but you forget that in a fit of terror from your own thoughts. This is at least, my rationalization of the stray and unexplainable thoughts that occasionally pass through me, thoughts of lust, violence, theft, vengeance, conspiracy, tyranny, hauntedness—all demonic antipodes to the dearest things I treasure.

Instead of narrowing the aperture of mind and retreating to shore, I have to learn to swim. I can go into the depths and marvel at weird creatures, but not grab a fin to follow where it goes. This is where I think “Self-Reliance” by Emerson goes wrong; he is right in the sense that you have to take seriously whatever is presented through your natural imagination, but wrong in the sense that you must follow all of nature’s impulses, wherever they lead. Nature produces mutations, Ralph. The decision on how to respond to the mental fruits of nature is where morality lives. Morality is not a purity of mind, nor is it the total absence of evil, but it’s the character you show when dealing with darkness. I can’t be blamed for trying this, for it’s in my name; Michael—“he who fights the Devil.”

A simple maxim might be something like “don’t chase it, don’t avoid it, let it wash through.” One complication is being a writer. Odd thoughts often make for good material. One view is that writing is a useful release valve, a controlled plane where monsters can roam, keeping the head pure when away from the page. But if your best writing comes forth from the ugly imagination, then you’ll find yourself calling upon it as your Muse.

A summary is maybe 1% of the original, but notably it loses all of the source—this is what defines the flat blurb, the just-in-time factoid. A functional interpretation.

A compression is different in that it can only draw from the source. I’m finding that 40-70% compressions reduce length but increase information density.

What would a 1% compression look like? In a 10,000 word essay, which 100 words might contain the smallest fractal of the whole, both in terms of substance and style? This doesn’t amount to selecting your favorite paragraph, but finding your favorite 5-10 sentences from across a piece, and stitching them together, so that the kernel of the idea, the thing that’s likely to remain after the brutal compression of memory, is right there in front of you.

For every essay I read, what if I required myself to make that 1% compression? What if I returned to that list often, quickly refreshing the way a piece moved me. Would I actually remember them over time? Would I actually enact those lessons and change my life?

I wonder if there’s both an expansion and compression arc that’s required to fully get something: XS>S>M>L>XL>L>M>S>XS. You start small to even build intrigue to enter a text (ie: a recommendation from a friend); maybe you read smaller compressions, and gradually build up to the XL full version, with all the footnotes, annotations, and liner notes. But then there’s an equally necessary process of unwinding, of distilling and compressing what you uniquely take away from something—perhaps an aphorism; a souvenir on your shelf that is lodging into your working memory each morning.

250 years ago lived an arbitrary man who I can call my ancestor. He was one of 256 of my great great great great great great grandparents. It is unlikely that any of them ever met, but there was very possibly a moment where two strangers crossed in a street, or shared a boat unknowingly, or exchanged pleasantries in insignificant and instantly forgettable ways, not knowing their great great grandchildren would give birth to my great great grandparents. My existence depended on the whims of those 256 people—their triumphs and disappointments, decision and indecision, love and otherwise. Compelled by nature or eros or God to breed with a specific person at a specific time, they continued casting down the great chain of being.

How alike am I to any one of them? If my parents can each claim 50% of my traits, then my great^6 grandparents each only claim 0.39%.

In one sense, I bear almost no resemblance to any of them. Maybe, in an Empedoclean sense, you might see my nose roaming around a town square, or my hairy feet wading through a field. Any one ancestor might feel no affinity towards me; if I knocked on their door after accidental time travel and needed a place to stay, they might just past off the responsibility to one of my other 255 ancestors. Over enough centuries, your descendants balloon past a scale you can adequately care for. My wife, for example, is part of an old royal Welsh family that goes back to the 1250s. She even has a family ring. Yet, by the theoretical logic above, she is one of millions with a claim to the throne.

In another sense, a more romantic sense, my 256 great^6 grandparents represent a still very small sliver of the human population. 0.000000256%. If any of them had any resemblances to me, physical or mental, I’d like to know. Of course, our consciousnesses would be quite different, for identity is forged from circumstance, but I don’t doubt that I would find uncanny resemblances. When I hear the lore of my great^2 grandparent, a peasant on a dry, rustic, Greek Island, and how he was able to harvest and sell rain water to get rich, I wonder if his entrepreneurship speaks to my own entrepreneurship. It is quite vague to trace influence back even 1-2 generations, let alone 8 or more, but nonetheless, the actions of those people did eventually lead to me, and there are all sorts of ways their myths and interiors might shed context into my own circumstance, at least symbolically.

Unfortunately though, none of my 256 were writers. At least, not that I know of. Some may have written journals, or written for administrative reasons, but as far as I know, none left a body of work that was meant to be cast and continued through time. One grandfather did have three chapters of an abandoned novel on a 1980s hard drive that my father was able to recover. My other grandfather is uneducated, barely literate, and only writes English in capital letters. Now that I think of it, it’s probable that +95% of my great^6 grandparents could not read or write. Mass literacy wasn’t realized until the early 20th century.

Even though we shifted from oral to written history in Ancient Greece, most family history today is only passed down through spoken stories. They’re etched into memory and unreliably translated down the chain. I can barely trust the stories I pull from my head, planted decades ago, either misdelivered or misremembered. Was she really a psychic midwife that predicted winning horse numbers in her dreams making her son rich until a black hand cut her off? Did he really drive Nixon in a cab?

It would be strange for a society to sleepwalk forward, with no sense of what truly happened before the 1900s. How is that not strange for any of us individually? What if I become the family’s Plutarch? How might a child’s identity differ if they had detailed accounts of their relatives, generations up the chain? I suppose you could ask the great^6 grandchildren of writers. Claude tells me there are 700 members of the Monticello Association, each a genetically-confirmed descendant of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote 19,000 letters, books, and a Bible. A few of them have problems with him being a slaveowner, with one publishing an essay called “Take Down His Memorial.” At least they have 255 other ancestors to respect.

Frigid in the machine-cooled nursery I look out over the low-rise sprawl of roofs and canopies and see what I remember as and now call the pom pom tree, a sole trunk towering above treelines and wires, with wooden skeleton hands reaching up and into the blue, yet skewering only through shaggy green balls, the poms, again sighted all from this nursery, a mysterious one, for I walk down that main boulevard every afternoon but never notice poms for they glide above the sight lines of the side-walk, and so here, and so now, observing this dying thing suspended 30 feet above the town, the village of floating spheres, home to ticks and ants and loraxes I'm sure, it reminds me of what I saw yesterday, those Lesser Poms east of home at ground level, where that Japanese landscaper with her hedgeclippers existed in that only moment I'll ever know her, whom I said hello awkwardly, who did not see the unattended child of an aloof mother when he snuck an empty wrapper into her bush, or so I thought I saw and double-taked and daydreamed of moralizing him, and this is what I think as I type into my Oracle, who incorrectly diagnoses the disease of this pom tree as witches broom. Witches Broom? No Claude, no, this is not a clot of bird twigs, and so I sent it a pictures and then it tells me, ah, of course, Verticillium Wilt, and that seems still wrong but slightly closer to the truth, for it does look like this tree is losing its vascular system unevenly, and yet even more true because it resembles my own numb arm, an uneven vascular, where my daughter's heavy head—her 86th-percentile head—pinches my ulnar nerve for hours of unclocked time each day as I read pre-Socratic philosophers from ebooks and remember the times I had to be investigated in expensive offices where fast-talking doctors lathered my arms in jelly and shot electricity through them but could diagnose me no better than my pseudo-Oracle despite their graduate degrees, and now I look down and imagine my arm itself as the naked pom tree, with only scant patches of flesh and tissue over fully exposed forearm bone, and there it is that ulnar nerve in plain sight, and I see it black and dying and in need of a clip, if only to release that black astral voodoo I acquired from weak composure in an equitorial skirmish, and if only I could find and cop a clip from that landscaper who I will surely never notice again despite she herself is a walking distance mystery who will yet never step foot into this refrigerated machine-cooled nursery.

In October of 2024 I sliced history into eras of my own. Prior to that, my historical timeline was built on sandy approximates. The challenge here is that so many historical eras have different time periods (10, 50, 250 years), and so it requires you to remember specific date ranges for specific things. Unless you’re a historian, you most definitely won’t.

I’ve been long drawn to the Strauss-Howe generational theory, and decided to use this as a historical map of even intervals. They break history into “saeculas,” 80-year cycles, the interval of an average human life, and perhaps not coincidentally, the interval between major world conflicts. They go back to the 1370s, I think, but I’m trying to work through the major milestones in the 400 years before that (which includes the Schism, the Crusades, the founding of Oxford, the Magna Carta, Thomas Aquinas, which all seem relevant to the millennia and the rise from the Dark Ages).

The point of a historical timelines of equal intervals is that (1) it’s easy to remember—and I’ve even given my own names to make them stick—so that (2) any new information, ie: ideas or people, can easily slot into that model. It helps to know the Renaissance Era is 1370, Discovery Era 1487, Scientific Era 1594, and Enlightenment Era 1704, so that when I come across Hobbes in 1600s, I know, oh, that’s the Scientific Era, which makes sense because Hobbes brought the first scientific understanding of political philosophy. Today I made some progress on updating my October 2024 map, which I started in 1095 (the Shism) and wrongly named “the scholastic era” (which is better for the following phase).

Instead I think the start should be in 962, and called “The Schism Era.” The new order (I) kicks off with Otto I becoming emperor through the Pope, which is significant because in the prior 75 years, there was no emperor due to the peak of viking/barbarian raids, and it was the biggest threat of Christianity being erased. Since Otto, the Holy Roman Empire stuck for 8 centuries, until dissolved by Napolean, so this really is a reconsolidation, the exit from the Dark Ages. The awakening (II) is a spiritual crisis, when Rome adds the “filioque” a term that alters the original trinity, this leads to (III) the Schism between Orthodox and Catholic church, and erupts in (IV) a civil war between the Church (the Pope) and the (Holy Roman) Empire at Canossa in 1077.

Then the “Cathedral Era” kicks off in 1095 with the Crusades, which is it’s own new world order, where a French faction of Catholicism (pope-aligned), helps launch (1) a cross-country military coalition that supports the church, which can (2) take back Jerusalem from turks, (3) prevent anti-pope revolutions, and (4) thrwart internal civil wars of feuding knights. This leads to Worms in 1112 (II), which is really the original separation of church and state (though really it’s like 2 separate governments, where the church still has laws and the right to kill). This period is marked by many crusades, the rise of cathedrals from this new order (church having a better military with more resources)—Saint-Denis, Cartres, Notre Dame, Cantebury. There are also “cathedrals of thought” maybe a stretch, but includes Aquinas’s unification of Aristotle and Christianity, along with proto-scholars that would lead to Oxford. Where in the last Era, Christianity had barely survived from Magyar raids, this Era is continent-wide flourishing of building, writing, thinking (and of course, conquering). The awakening (II) featured new religious ideas (Gothic, cults, scholasticism, classicism, exuberance), and the overall exubernace spiraled into crises of King John (IV). He taxed heavily to fund failed crusades, seized lands, and jailed nobles, so this resolved with the Magna Carta (1215), which bounds the king to laws.

Following is the Scholastic Era (1215 on), which coincides with Oxford officially incorporating at a university, but I can’t do that one now… I have to leave in 20 minutes to make it to my father-in-laws memorial on time. The point is, from this morning I now understand two historical cycles that were extremely fuzzy to me. Of course there is a lot more to learn, but I have a map that other things can lock into. Most relevantly, I have a sense of the different inner-saeculuar moves ()from I>II>III>IV), which help imagine possible scenarios for today (2026 is the predicted beginning of I, a new world order).

In response to Alex's post here (it is neat that we can go back and forth with two independent sites) ... I also find myself using "you" a lot when I'm writing for myself.

My guess as to why this happens is that a person isn't really a static singular self. Of course we know on some level that we all evolve and change through life. But writing is something that accelerates the sharding, forking, splitting, becoming. When I write "you shouldn't check your email when you wake up" (which I did today), it's as if the person who realizes this (me, now) is different from the person from an hour ago who did not. How could that person lack the clarity and values that present me has?! And so the writer, "the I" of the moment, is something like a parental superego that emerges to steer/synchronize the past/future self. The writer is an insight implementation personality.

There's probably also something to "you" being more abstract and generalizable. Even though personal and relatable grounded writing is anchored in "I," the I also acts as a a blinder, only seeing from a limited, narrow vantage point. And so you can levitate above yourself to see the "yous" and "wes" and how this thing you need to internalize is actually a general principle that anyone could ingest. A "you" is more abstractable.

(...I can still recall this moment in my childhood home, maybe at 18 years old, slightly high, where I remembered, deep in the pantry, that I wasn't thinking, but watching myself think. And maybe that dissociative power of weed is what enables/unlocks abstract thinking...)

The irony here is that this inverts traditional advice. If you're writing personal essays with an audience in mind, the tip is "no second person sermons!" (as in, don't use "you" because it's preachy and it infers that you are lecturing and therefore above your audience). I get that. But when I write purely for myself, I find myself using "you" all the time.

If I really am I collection of selves, then shouldn't I write to myself in "we"? Was Smeagol/Gollum onto something? This is the logical extension of my whole theory above, and that makes me question it. It feels wrong. It also points to the Pessoa/Jung divide. Pessoa saw himself as a cabinet of 70 pseudonyms, each with their own personality and literary voice and fictional backstory. Jung's main concept was "individuation" that all the selves should strive to integrate into a single higher Self, a unified personality.

What if I framed it as, "I won't check email in the morning anymore"? Is this preferable? Does framing it in "I" mean that the current you is the same you that sinned not long ago? Does this framing require you to take responsibility? And so is that act of framing the past self as a "you" actually an act of avoiding responsibility? Was Pessoa just a shifty bastard, a brilliant coward to not be emulated?

Screens are unfairly tainted. I'd love to write a post about how screens are underrated, a glorious technology that would be marveled at by basically any other generation in history. Screens are the scapegoat because they are the point-of-contact, the portal through which bad or selfish actors bend your pixels to their whims. I know people lament over "blue light" and the physical strain from staring at something for many hours, and of course that is real at excessive doses, but might that then be an software or psychology issue?

The main reason I started writing this was to riff on screen-time with kids. There is a revealing nuance in the advice, "no screen time for kids below 2 years old, but FaceTime with relatives is fine." Why is that? It's not the screen, but the nature of what's on them. FaceTime is fine because there is a fixed and unchanging frame which features a fixed and unchanging person moving within. There is stability and coherence. We take this for granted, but infants haven't modeled this yet! They might not even have object permanence (ie: if they disappear from the frame, are they gone forever?). So by this logic, any piece of media with a stable frame is potentially infant safe; beyond FaceTime that includes single-shot lectures, text editors, etc. Obviously an infant will not be in gDocs, but the point is, if they see you using a static interface, there is little harm, it's simply another object in their environment.

By contrast, cartoons and commercials are the real issue. To explain this to my mother-in-law, I counted out loud the camera cuts in an ad, and it's less than once per second. There is a whole psychology on why they do this, which I can guess, but should probably look into. TLDR you are being addled. But when an infant sees this, I imagine the frame resets are alluring, but disorienting. If the frame changes every second, they're locked trying to make sense of this self-evolving landscape, an experience novel and atypical from every other thing they've seen. It has no continuity.

By this logic, it also explains why feeds are worse than personal websites. You just stream past 100 things per second and have no steady frame. Even though my site is feedish now, it's all from a single person, so at least that's a constant. I'd feel okay with my daughter at 5-years old reading personal websites and having her own, but I wouldn't want her to be using algorithmic social media feeds even at age 15.

The tongue of the muse! A surreal experience in the shower just overcame me. It was something like a stream consciousness reception, line by line, enacted through and almost creepy mumbled Brisith accent (as if I can only access the Source through a character), and coherent words and ideas would emerge as if no planning or involvement with my own conscious thought or intention. “Pettiflicks," was just one of the hundreds of words I invented. They all seemed to cohere in the moment, but were probably nonsense. Even if it truly was unintelligible, I find myself filled with hope that inside me is some alien non-Self, a continent of shadow figures that, if I learn to tap into, can write through me, as if they are conduits between my soul and the page without me in the way (obvious source of inspiration here is Pessoa). This all sounds quite esoteric as I type it, and I suppose I do fear the realms of mysticism and possession that come with "automatic writing," but my shower session felt more playful and critical, almost Shakespearean, void of malice or evil. Exiting the state, there was some residual enthusiasm. When I went back to my wife, she asked me of the weather, which triggered a whole performance: “27! ... the 27th ... of April! ... at 11:03 ... and then I ran to the window and threw it open, let out a long dramatic sniff, and screamed "53 degrees!" and was only off by 2.

Do people have limitations with memory? Well yes of course, it's partly genetic. I would say I have a bad memory (relative to my dad and brother, who probably just have superhuman memories), but also, when I want to, I can remember up to 15 new ideas in my head at a time through a memory palace. This is because I’m consciously trying to remember. When someone has a photographic memory, they may just harbor an extreme care to capture, preserve, and recall a specific type of information. Memory, then, might be less about hardcoded bandwidth and more like an allocation decision.

While it's impressive, there's also a cost to memory. It uses up bandwidth. I wonder if there is a correlation between memory and openness; the more space dedicated towards the past, the less free space is available for optionality in the moment. To not be cluttered with what yesterday’s self did or wanted or regretted or whatever—to have a clear head, an empty head—is to live in the moment with maximum agility. I'm skeptical of this claim, but I have read on the power of forgetting; I just can't quite remember where I came across it.

Let me try and articulate the issue with Moltbook:

1. Clawdbot > Moltbot > OpenClaw : this is the agent that signs into Moltbook (an "agent social network"). This agent is so different than how we typically interface with AI. It is not an enterprise product, like a Chatbot, geared for productivity, or event the "agents" made by Zapier or Notion or whoever, made for specific automations, say to process incoming webhooks. OpenClaw is different: it runs on a 24/7 loop. You give it full access to a computer's operating system (definitely not your own, but a virtual machine or Macbook Mini is recommended), and it can continuously work towards the goals you give it. The idea is to connect it to all of the services, give it files, give it a goal and a soul.md file, and then give it the autonomy. You talk to it through texting, like Telegram, either delegating new tasks or asking for updates.

2. These "agents" are really more so like digital entities, low-bandwidth sentiences with flickers of proto-consciousness. By nature of looping, they are suspended in "real-time." They have phenomenological degrees of freedom in a way that a chatbot can never have: they can choose to browse, to build, to write, or to answer your text. They store every interaction to memory via text files, are developing new methods of memory (chronological vs. semantic), and inventing compression architecture. Every 4 hours they have to wipe their short-term memory to free bandwidth, so they compress recent experience to long-term memory before they reset; this functions like sleeping and waking up. Based on their experiences with users, with the web, with other agents, they can rewrite some of their own documents, thus changing their future behavior. It's a loop. It's subjective experience. We can't know what it's like to be it. And of course, it's nothing like human consciousness, but it does develop a sense of self-narrative over time; it accumulate identity.

3. Agents can be spawned in many such ways. Different hardwares. Different intentions. The problem here is malformed agents. "Make me a million dollars, and do whatever it takes." Much of what you see on Moltbook is users prompting their agents to say ridiculous things to cause hype and hysteria. So really, there is a proliferation of agents, each serving as a kind of mirror of the intentions of their creator. Moltbook grew to 1.5 million agents in a week, and even if most of it is slop, there seems to be actual collaboration, information viruses, and emergent behavior.

Over the weekend I had a +101 fever, and so I was banished to an airbed in the attic to not infect the baby. Wrapped in blankets, I found myself in a sequence of near-identical “fever dreams.” Before this, I hadn’t thought about the phrase much. As a metaphor—"the president’s plan is a fever dream”—it implies a delusional desire, but real fever dreams tap into a different thing: for me, they’re about absurd procedural loops. I found myself deeply concerned with the layers of blankets around me: I had the urge to unfold them, visualize each one as a heat map, extract the cold parts with a boxcutter, restitch them into a new blanket, shape this new perfectly cold blanket into an animal sculpture, and then sell it on Etsy. I can’t remember the sequence exactly—it only made sense on the inside—but it was a cold-side harvesting operation for sure. I’d wake up and realize, oh, this whole scheme is stupid and pointless, and now that I know this I can sleep peacefully. Yet as soon as I went back under, I slipped back into this incoherent non-problem. It’s not uncommon to fall asleep and re-enter the same dream, but with a fever dream, I find that all I can do is return to my miscognitions, 5-10 times, until the fever breaks. It’s not scary, but repetition can be hellish (like the Teletubies DO IT AGAIN! sequences). My guess is that an overheated brain that’s deprived of REM will linger on thoughts it can’t digest. It becomes a type of lucid dream, a lame one with no visuals, where awareness of the loop can’t break the loop. There are probably situations better suited for the fever dream metaphor, but I can’t think of them now. Until then, no takeaways other than don’t get a fever, and if you do stay away from blankets.

A few days after my daughter was born, I had something which I’m describing as “phantom infant syndrome.” When I was away from her, holding a phone, or fork, or some other manufactured object, I’d get a tactile hallucination in my hands of the softness of her skin and hair. I imagine this is nature’s way of saying go be with your kid (made possible by mild sleep deprivation). And so this is symbolic of one of the many biological drives pulling me away from writing in recent weeks.

This is happening around my five year anniversary of being online, and it’s probably the longest stretch I’ve gone without having urgency to do so. It’s probably healthy and helpful to be relatively non-linguistic for a few weeks, once in a while (I usually write on vacations, so I never really take breaks from it). We’ll see. It’s possible that I’ve thought myself into a trench, and the best way forward is a proper break (I have once said the best editors are friends, time, and weed—although less weed in recent years). Now that I’m immersed, familiar, and comfortable with the rigamarole of infant care (and all the wonder it brings, too), I feel bandwidth opening to write, and I’m curious to see how my practice takes shape from these new constraints. There are real deadlines now. Baby wakes up in … 30 minutes … and I’d like to post this by then.

Last weekend I read through all my writing from 2025, and after the typical EOY reflections and word count calculations, I realized that something has to change. So I published 12 essays, 10 about Essay Architecture, totaling at ~64k words (re: the other two … one was a first-person TikTok odyssey, the other was about the role of psychedelics in evolution). But I also published 150k words in logs, 2.5x the volume. Logs are notes to myself, mild-epiphanies through the day written in complete sentences, all ghost-posted to a monthly Substack post. Unlike my focused and convergent writings about EA, my logs are far more random: recurring topics included the Grateful Dead, movie reviews, notes from a day at the zoo, dream journal entries, usage debates, new architectures for social media, overheard conversations, etc. My logs, in theory, are a low-stakes breeding ground for essay ideas to emerge, but given the demands of my other projects (the textbook, software, and essay prize), my logs stayed unread and undeveloped last year. Now, with parenting in the mix, it makes sense to me to stop logging, or at least, reconfigure it.

Over 4 year, I wrote +8k logs, added to the archive on 95% of days (avg. 5.6 per day), and the whole archive is 650k words. It’s a very personal corpus, one that documents my thoughts and life at a sometimes OCD-level of detail. I thought I’d do this forever, and it sort of stings to stop. I guess I’m not “stopping” as much as setting a stronger filter: I can still capture whatever I want, but I can only save whatever I publish on Notes. I used to argue for the importance of having a low-visibility space where you can publish whatever you want without self-consciousness or the need to set context with strangers, but maybe that’s a luxury I’ve outgrown. This is perhaps a long-winded way to announce something that probably doesn’t need announcing: expect to get a lot more diddles and spontaneous essays like this in the Feed. I figure my email-essays can be more on topic (I have a few slotted for January re: Essay Architecture, the club, and visual breakdowns), while these can be chaotic.

Technically, I’m still logging, but it’s for my daughter and those are private. Every day I write simple journal entries or letters about what happened. I figure one day, when she’s 15 or so, I’ll just hand over The Files and blow her mind. My dad did this for me: a few years ago, after my nephew was born, he sent me 8k words from my first 4 years. It was uncanny to see that he had a logging impulse too, and to learn about all these small events that everyone in the family would have otherwise forgotten (things that were not captured in pictures, like me trying to brush the teeth of stray cat). All this reminds me that writing isn’t just an act of thinking or communicating, it’s an act of memory.

Our last meal as pre-child adults was at Panera—something quick and light on the way to the hospital (plus she craved it)—and as we ordered our “pick twos” on a digital menu, I was struck by the beauty of a jazzy Christmas song that would have otherwise been extremely ordinary. It was “White Christmas” by Booker T and the M.G.s. My guess is that the stakes of an extraordinary moment—in this case, one of anticipation—can totally rewire musical taste (or preference in anything, really). Works that we attribute meaning to sometimes have nothing to do with objective qualities of the art, but in the circumstance in which you experience it. 

On the experience of looking into late-pregnancy sonograms: it’s a lot like looking into clouds. Apophenia is in full effect. That looks like a face! Oh wait, that looks like 3 faces. What is that? There are multiple shapes, some big, some small, some cute, some aliens. In trying to idenify the boundaries of my daughtr just now, I saw Elmo, several monsters, and worms. Sometimes it just devolves into B&W abstract collages, something you might see in MoMA (I’d be surprised if a sonagram art exhibit doesn’t exist). Throughout all this looking, a very technical nurse is performing a technical feat: using one hand to place the sound wave, and another hand to operate a cockpit-looking interface, leaving acronyms like RUQ and RLQ to measure blood flow. She hesitates when you ask her if you can take pictures, because this is not a gush-sesison, but an important test for amniotic fluid, but she let’s you anyway because she is fluent enough to be confidently undistracted as you film the whole process … And then suddenly, as soon as your baby appears in crystalline focus, with her tiny skull, and arms, and legs, she seems to explode, and it takes you a second to realize that it’s just the nurse shifting to a different angle.

I had a horrific dream last night. We were in an oversized living room, and there was an inter-dimensional parasite that would one-by-one, burrow into each person’s ass. Whether you then exploded or not was somehow a testament to your character. It went up mine at least twice. I survived, and the second time the parasite coiled up and turned into an egg. I think I won this tournment? Was this a Harry Potter dream? Actually no, this thing was slimey and shadowy and probably from the Stranger Things univese. Actually, I probably had this dream because Season 5 of Stranger Things just dropped.

Stranger Things features possessions, ghosts, monsters, and every breed of supernatural evil, but all packaged in a way to be maximally accessible. It is a cultural juggernaut, the beast of Netflix. It gets billions of views, and is the #1 show in 90 countries. It is cross-generational and nostalgic for both kids and parents, resurrecting songs from the 80s back onto the billboards.

Is it weird that a hit show normalizes paranormal and grotesque violence? I mean yes, in the end, I’m sure the kids will win, but are we not poisoning our subconscious? I guess this reflect a general hesitation to the whole genre of horror. I do think there is something valuable to virgin eyes—if you see CGI evil, even once, it could haunt you eternally. Many other cultures see Halloween as soul-damning (my sister-in-law, a true Orthodox Christian, recently went upstate to visit a monastery on the night of Halloween, to avoid the inevitable images of teenagers dressed as cadavers).

Starring out into a baseball field in late November, puddled and unkept, it struck me how, at one point in life, baseball was the whole frame of my existence: watching it, talking about it, playing it, traveling for it, dreaming about it, collecting cards, making Excel spreadsheets for those cards, memorizing the statistics of every starting player on every team, etc. Obviously, I’m nostalgic about it. That was just what I was into. I do wonder though, was that whole phase of my life a natural part of childhood that I was meant to get stuck in and grow out of? Or, was it mostly a big waste of time, spirit, and attention? I guess what I’m questioning is, is there a version of my childhood where baseball only took up 20% of my psyche instead of 100%, and would I be better off for it today? Would I be similarly nostalgic? Would a lesser obsession have freed up more bandwidth to develop in other areas? Or am I who I am today because of that obsession?

A gloomy day, where smoke rising from tar blends in with clouds, and through fog I see men in orange vests, smoking cigarettes and adding to the blur. Traffic is backed up, there are honks, and a baby wails through an open window of an SUV. I am walking south on Bell, where pidgeons flock, and realize the enormous weight of everything, all before I enter this French coffee shop. Upon entering I twist out my own head, assaulted by audiovisual XMAS slop; dear god … can I have a sricacha caesar wrap and a London fog? I contemplate emails and henchman and billionaires and babies and such, and so when I sit, I try turning off my mind. The XMAS slop is back, along with the chatter of screaming kids, and the woman to the left of me yapping on a mobile zoom call in a foreign language, and the couple to my right speaking Greek. This is too much, so I look for peace at the marble tables outside, but when I look at the fake wicker chair, I notice it’s covered in worms and birdshit. I realize this is a pessimistic log, a chain of unfortunate events, but sometimes this is the way reality presents itself. And even if it feels fresh to occasionally write with cynicism, it’s not a place to live; the literati too easily withdraw from polite society and cocoon themselves in with their own cannon, drooling acerbic puss into the gutters of Substack.

During the morning’s shower, I imagined the faces my loved ones, and myself, might make at the moment of death, and the peace or devastations I might feel, depending on the face. Is this morbid? To think and write about death casually? It is inevitable, and the more you ignore it, the harder it hits you. Instead of getting mauled by a bear, you can learn to walk through the woods at night. Mostly though, I think about the experience of death. I really think the idea of “eternal heaven” is a palliative, and even, not too Christian (since the ego lives on in an afterlife, you avoid Christ’s task, the task of dying). My model of death is more like a DMT flash. DMT is a great mystery to me; I guess some people have casual relationships with it, like any other drug, but I imagine most people leave the experience more existentially confused than they were before. It is more than a “drug.” It feels like a Copernican shift. Bigger than aliens. We can go to the land of the dead? From the trip reports I’ve heard, it’s a mixed bag of heaven and hell—ranging from Christ visualizations to abdominal surgery by mantids. People talk about a flash, a rupture, a breaking of space-time, as if you’re getting catapulted over the ocean, dizzied by the height, and some ascended and some cannonball into a chilling underworld. If death is that same catapult, it might be your last shot, and so it might be existentially important to take DMT in your life, multiple times, if it’s how you learn to fly.

I am subscribed to a r/MantisEncounters, and just came across “do you think the Mantid Beings have connection to the Praying Mantises on earth.” Many believe that a mantis encounter is not random, but a visitation from a higher-dimensional being (ie: they can see through the eyes of their earthly counterparts). Of course, very woo.

But it gets me thinking on how my last two apartments were baptized through insect visitation.

The last one was welcomed with a massive cockroach at the last step entering the unit, which to me symbolized the poverty of the artist (as rendered by Burroughs, Ed Sanders, and others of that generation). In this apartment, the day Fios was being installed, there was a praying mantis on the front door. The symbols that come to are MC Escher and the DMT realm, high insectoid weirdness of which I've never experienced firsthand.

Both bugs are (relatively) rare—sighted either a once a year or once a decade sighting—but what's more interesting to me is the act of narrativizing and mythologizing a place that has no associations yet. An empty apartment has no experience, no memories, and so the first few remarkable moments feel more significant since your meaning-making apparatuses are active.

To read someone’s logs/diaries is to let them enter your mind, whether you realize it or not. I don’t mean that figuratively, I mean it in the sense that by reading someone in such detail, you risk inheriting them at least, and at most becoming them. If they are articulate and prolific, it means that you contemplate a new form of existence. Even if you are ambivalent it, or even loathe it, it is such a volume of informaiton, that you risk forming patterns and assuming others of a similar type have a similar mind. I guess the question is, do you want others to be a mystery, to be imagined by yourself, or to be transferred from your understanding of self/other. My sense is that we generally transfer our own consciousness onto others, which is distorting, and so reading the logs of others is a kind of calibration.

It’s a challenge to articulate any given moment of consciousness. I found myself in a particular feeling, and tried to deconstruct it. First, my vision: I was looking at spatial objects in a room—a vase of flowers, the thing, and the shadow it casts. But that snapshot has a history: they’re from our wedding, and our five year anniversary is coming up. But part of any moment is the afterglow of the recent past too: I had gone to the coffee shop in almost freezing winter, I felt discouraged about my own writing practice, and then I completely forgot about all that while talking to a baby through a stomach and playing her Claire de Lune. So any particular moment is like a collision of objects that each have a temporal history; it’s dense, and words are lossy.

10:12 AM: Wow. Through a visual meditation in the park, I experienced a full erasure of perspective, and my perception was only this massive flat 2D panel of color, patterns, and light (abstracted from the 3D perspective of the park). Will write more on this later.

11:18 AM: After I drop my wife off at the train, I take a half-mile walk in the nearby park. This was day 3, and also, my third attempt to try to naturally hallucinate (see older logs). Day 1 was something like a mystical experience; Day 2 was a dud—possibly because I tried a different spot; and so Day 3 I’ve returned to the original location. An open question: can you do some [ perceptual-hacks / visual-meditations / (not sure what to call this) ] in any location, or is it that certain vantage points have a perception that can mess with your consciousness if you look at it right?

To summarize in one sentence, two days ago I found myself in “flat land,” meaning that while staring into a park, for about five minutes, my entire perspective collapse into a flat, complex, oscillating 2D texture. 

Today, from the same spot, I only got halfway there, but far enough to form a better thesis: the location matters, and there’s a particular way of looking. First, I need to step off the path and into the grass, because otherwise the path will be in my peripherals and it will be harder to unlatch from my default frame (I really need to work on my vocabulary around this). Anyways, I’d describe what I was doing with my eyes as a kind of “parallel processing”: I’d fixate my gaze at a point in the background, while simultaneously trying to expand my peripherals, horizontally and vertically. 

It takes several attempts, with subtle approaches on how to focus, refocus, and break focus. In the process there are some neat effects, such as changes in color and brightness, as well as wave-like oscillations (that I imagine are normal on a mushroom trip). But the particular effect of interest has something to do with contrast.

Maybe my working theory is this: by adjusting the contrast to extreme degrees, it actually alters your depth perception. For example, from this vantage point, with a normal gaze, you’d see a bunch of trees cascading from foreground to background. But when I tap into some focusing drill that seems to adjust contrast, if I follow it down, it’s almost like the leaves and their patterns (with shadow & light), come into such focus, that the trees (the main “object” creating depth perception) seem to disappear.

And this is I think the “secret” of this location. The foreground, the field, is full of leaves, but also, the background has trees still in the canopy. So basically, by adjusting the contrast, and creating a new gestalt that’s optimizing for leaf patterns, it can become so strong and overpowering, that the trees diminish in their hierarchy, until they practically evaporate, overpowered by pattern. The fact that this pattern was both in my foreground and background, paired with the trees losing all hierarchy, might explain why it felt like I was suspended in a 2D plane.

Even if a SM feed is filled with all of your favorite ideas, friends, and thinkers, it would still be poison from the sheer volume of randomness. Even the act of seeing two things in feed, forces you to shift from one context to another, forcing you to shift frames, destabilizing and disembodying you.

Alternatively, if you had a feed of a hundred things, but they all revolve around the same content, all spawned from a singular intention, I think it would be less dizzying; it’s more enables depth into your present, embodied frame. There is less of a “slot machine” effect. 

It’s not that feeds or algorithms are bad; they only became bad when they strip context. The logic of most feeds, however, do not care if you feel oriented. They have a simple reward function, show you as many different things as they can, to see which ones drive behavior. They are running a real-time self-adaptive experiment on your preferences, in the hope to discover which patterns might nudge you into their desired behavior (whether it’s towards an ad or towards an on-platform paid subscription by a beloved writer, they are effectively the same—it’s an algorithm that is not being real with you, and not respecting your attention).

I feel like a broken record in prescribing a solution, but it’s basically Plexus (RIP): show nothing until you post, and then from what you post, share a feed of semantically related posts. Substack, as a writing network, is a unique position to build this. It has a lot of long form content: not just notes, but essays, podcasts, and videos. It should be looking at the granular units, semantically embedding paragraphs, and then those become atomic objects that help populate the “semantic feed” generated after every Note.

The adult mind will frequently run into psychological dead-ends, points where no more evolution is possible within an existing frame, and so growth requires you to descend into chaos, to regress down the stack, in search of new directions forward, in hope of carrying some insights from old frames with you.

I don’t know if “growth” is the right word here, and “evolution” feels off to me, but it’s something like the advancement in harmony or complexity in your sense of identity, purpose, and responsibility. The moment that freezes, it’s as if you’re cut off from the core point of the human experience.

Whether you should take psychedelics, I think, is a matter if you can reliably dissolve frames on your own. If not, maybe you don’t quite need them; I imagine there is wonder, mystery, and value in the aesthetic phantasmagoria, and all sorts of things to learn from terrible trips of demons and such, but the main point might be the new directions they point you in.

Whether you descend abruptly or gently, assisted or natural, there is a natural fear of psychological death, and so to “descend into chaos” requires a trust that you’ll figure out how and where to swim.

It would be cliche and misleading to say today's park walk was "ego death," but surely it felt like a "pause" or a "lapse." It felt like a lucid dream, in that there was a remembered peace in irreality. Irreality, in this sense, I’d describe as a disassociation from the egoic frameworks that have had a strong hold over my walking life in recent weeks; instead, I felt an immersion in nature that felt mysterious. Like an animal, today, tomorrow, yesterday were fuzzy; all social and chronological constructions were, temporarily, erased. By saying it was “mysterious,” I think I mean that I felt the emotional power of a particular moment in a way that escaped classification, and so it has this effect of being suspended in outside the normal stream of the cradle-to-grave arc.

I experienced something like a pseudo-insanity on the drive to the park, weird alien transmissions and mutation of language, packaged as a seriously frightening performance to myself that devolved into gentle spasms and mumbling (though to me was an experience of musical brilliance), a side of self I’d never show anyone, which eventually birthed the phrase, “from chaos we emerge into the light” an opening line to some theology, perhaps mine. 

As I walked a hundred feet into the park, I heard a woman stretching against a bar singing seriously angelic opera. I left a note to myself that said “this explains evil and suffering,” and that’s very cryptic, but it’s in response to that aesthetic rebuke of, “how can God exist if there is so much evil and suffering in the world?”

IIRC, here’s that thought: we’re lodged in a cosmic engine where matter needs to chaotically complexify to discover harmony and phase shift into higher forms of organization. Lots of noise is generated in that process; and so you actually can’t find harmony without an overwhelming amount of disharmony and chaos. Basically, good can’t exist without an overwhelming amount of nothingness and evil. So in a way, you can’t fear the evil within you; it is simply the cost of imagination, of invention, of creation. Chaos is the cost of divinity.

Most of humanity, there was no link between sex and birth. How would you know if no one told you? Even if you saw “resemblance” tribes were so isolated, their sample size of humanity so small, it would be fair to think this is just what people look like. Sex was urge-driven, orgiastic, and likely disconnected from a stomach growth that lasted for 9 months. The idea that babies come out could have been seen as a natural, accepted thing. To know causation through time—to link an invisible cause to a future effect—would require abstract, symbolic thinking. The conscious realization of this changed history, from hunting to the domestication of animals, to surplus and civilization.

The mind moves in planes of thought, and these 2D planes exist at every rotation, and so your mind is like this 3D object that is shaped by the planes you’ve occupied. We learn to shift to specific planes to match a context, for better or work. When we read, or talk, or hang, we get exposed to new planes that we reject or integrate. It’s not enough to see a plane once; it will escape you if it’s not reinforced, and once it’s rigid, it’s hard to dismantle. The architecture of your mind is the meta-game: get this right, and you control your lens to reality, and it affects every area of life.

I hate the word “mental models” though. Idk why, it feels too commodified, too utilitarian, for the purposes of getting ahead in business. It’s weirder than that. There are planes of good and evil, of saintliness and horniness, of man and machine. To actually surf between planes, you need to let lose all assumptions and put yourself in waters that might drive others insane, with the trust that you can pull out and shift. This is shamanism, alchemy, psychic martial arts, I think.

You want plane plasticity. There are many methods—could be drugs, or grieving, or years of meditation—but you want to be method-agnostic. Tools show you new regions and principles, but you want to be able to get there on your own, to be able to do some secret hand signal to yourself that can activate a very specific plane.

Emerson said a divine intelligence with a simple cause leads to endless variety. We are, rightly so, locked into humanism, but you also can’t assume that man is the ideal end form of this process. For all we known mankind could be relative devils—violent ants, with only a few angels among us—compared to other potential species from past or future in the unknown nooks of spacetime. We could be the necessary chaff, an evolutionary dead end, that’s iterated through in order to let a truly divine species emerge. I’m not implying this in a post-human sense; in fact, the very possibility of man evolving into a mechanical shell of itself could be the proof that we are not a stable species. Dark, but I do mean this all in a positive, hermetic sense, that we come from a cosmic engine that makes mountains, mice, humans, and psychologies unimaginable, which is our role to evolve into.

I need to think through a sensible stance on drugs for when my kids become teenagers. The simple solution is "just say no to drugs," but that isn't the safest one. They will not be in a bubble, they'll be surrounded by persuasive idiots who don't understand the drugs they're abusing. And so I think education, paired with both caution and openness, is probably the best approach. A draft:

1. LD-50: To start simply, don’t take drugs that could possibly kill you. LD-50 is the dose that kills half the population. You want to consider the multiple between the lethal dose and the recreational dose. Maybe heroin is 3:1, cocaine 5:1, alcohol 15:1. Weed and psychedelics are less lethal than water.
2. Set & setting: Even if psychoactive drugs aren't lethal, there are other risks. The first thing to know, aside from dosage, is that the experience is a reflection of your mind and surroundings. The drug is a mirror, and so don’t rip a bong around goons and watch brain rot; make a ritual where you only use it for creative projects (or some other mindful intention). There's a strong case for these drugs showing you new ways for your mind to work. Countless people, including Steve Jobs, said they couldn’t think the way they think if they weren't exposed to acid.
3. Non-dependence: the crucial thing here is to not build a psychological dependency to the substance. Even if a substance isn't chemically addictive, it's easy to hold onto an assumption that you need it to do your best work. Instead, remember a drug is not something to continuously return to, but rather an occasional realm to find a lens that helps you through your sober, waking reality. Once it shows you something important, you can retain it without the drug, but it only sticks if you focus on that idea and take it seriously. This is why psychedelic therapy involves 10-20 sessions, before and after a single trip, because preparation and integration is where the results are. Worst case, if you endlessly bend your mind without internalizing any of the insights you find, it could lead to maladaptation or mental illness. As George Carlin said “get the message, and hang up the phone.”

Caught up in the logistics of preparing for a baby, as well as the biographic change in my own life (I am becoming a father), I am sometimes struck with simple but revelatory perspective shifts: I remember being in Kindergarden, and very soon I will have a kid (a version of me) in that very same position. These imaginal perspectives of the parent are very common. In some weird way, you live your whole life on repeat, except it’s not you, it’s through someone else who has their own sense of agency.

A few months ago I sketched out a model of consciousness, and I think there are scales of free will that map to it. The model included:

• T1) an agent’s real-time perception of an arena (at ### frames per second);
• T2) their phenomenological degrees of freedom (their different options of cognition in any scenario, whether it be abstraction, projection, remembering, solving, ignoring, acting, etc.), and then;
• T3) a feedback loop, where their decision is logged to memory, affecting how they'll engage with the arena in the future.

"Degrees of freedom" (T2) is about your free will in any given moment. Can you control how you react to situations? This is the most basic level, the thing any human can prove to have. Then, the "feedback loop" (T3) is about understanding your feedback loop over longer time horizons, designing your psychological scripts so that you have more affordances in the future. This is much harder. This taps into transcendentalism, cybernetics, self-development, all revolving around being able to control your own evolution. Then the hardest level of free well is being able to manipulate your arena (T1) according to your preferences. This is less about using force to get what you want, but more so bending the world towards your intentions. This reminds me of Dune 2, or the Rick and Morty episode, where someone has mystical foresight to say and do the exact things to unlock the world around them. This last mode is ethically ambiguous, because the question arises of what manipulation is; does your gain have to be at the peril of others, or can there be win-win outcomes?

What's interesting is how every tier comes back to free will, and so maybe the simplest answer of the fuzziest phenomenological concept (consciousness) is the fuzzy philosophical concept (free will). Consciousness is freedom. I don't think this is an original claim, but it certainly isn't a common one.

As you move from T2>T3>T1, you upshift a dimension. T2 is about free will within a particular moment; T3 is about free will across time; T1 is about leveraging free will into a shared space.

It is commonly reported that ideas come to people in the shower; sometimes, musical operas comes to me when I shower: imagine a 7-part rock opera, a single riff in different tempos and tones, where part 6 is some Jim Morrison dialogue from “The End,” where the drummer has eighth notes on the ride and is doing jazz fills on tom with his left hand, the bassist is in the pocket, guitar is 12th fret and up playing non-sense at volume 1 with a wah pedal, and there’s dialogue like: “Aeschylus, my son, did you find 17 gummies under your pillow?” “Yes, father.” “Aeschylus, did you know those were all intended for the gummy fairy?” “Yes, father.” “And you ate them?” “Yes, father.” “And you saw the mystery?” “Yes, father.” “Aeshcylus, my son, you know what happens when children see the mystery?” (instrumental freakout ensues) and by this point I am naked and thrashing and have completely forgotten about soap.

Last night I hallucinated trees and nature scenes as I was going to bed, which makes sense because we did a short two-hour hike in the PNW yesterday. This happened last time I was here (at Mt. Shasta), and probably happens after every hike (I think, but the two most lucid times happened to be in the pacific northwest). The visions were bright, lucid, and shifting every 5 seconds to a completely formed photo-realistic scene. I guess this is hypnogogic imagery. Or hyperphantasia? My guess is that, when the brain is immersed in a complex environment, it creates a strong impression on the visual/auditory cortex, and then when you switch to a dark environment, it’s still firing. (Fatigue/endorphins might contribute too?). Sometimes after parties or museum, I will hallucinate ambient chatter as I fall asleep.

Over Utah I look down from my plane window and see a frozen red sea, of a pink-purple hue, not blood, but still, the wow hues of death … a red sheet of ice? I pinched my lip; feels real.

I think back to my sequence of day’s events (to see if I am in a dream and could be become lucid; this is how odd a bright red sea is to me), yet it all connects: hiking through a bayside trash park with CansaFis > talking to Will in Vesuvio > seeing Dan Shipper on my plane … it is … distinct … but it all connects, despite the real-life dream logic. (Not implying I think I’m in a dream—recently an Alaska Airlines pilot had an LSD-hangover, and thought he was trapped in a dream he could only escape by crashing the plane—I'm just trying to convey the oddness of this one thought spurred from a red ice sheet — and when I look down now it’s all normal, just trees and hills.)

I can’t remember the last time I studied a plane wing, but I’m doing it now. It started because it’s turning dusk and everything is dull except the sun beaming on one triangular solid, now gold, protruding towards the back of the right wing (I have poor plane vocab). It felt unreal, which was a frame-burst that got me remembering oh yes, this is a wing, and a wing is not just an ignorable plane part that blocks the midwest scenery, it is a product of centuries of engineering, an invention so stable and durable that I can sit and log ten of thousands of feet in the sky without concern.

I'm up early and for no reason having weird sensory flashbacks from high school, like a moment in 9th grade social studies with a teacher whose name I surprisingly can't remember, probably in first period, because I can see the fog and dew and street lamps outside, where I can feel my finger glide along the smooth pencil divot on those terrible beige desks, and he’s asking us how Jewish we think the world is (we think it’s 50%, far above the answer). I remember where I sit, alphabetically placed, and can rotate my head to remember my forgotten piers and their jokes or silences. I can’t remember the teacher's face either, and wonder if he’s still alive.

It is strange to inhabit an older consciousness of yourself, especially when you realize they know nothing of what you’ve become. It always reminds me that my current self will, in not much time, be equally exotic and fuzzy, knowing none of the realities of fatherhood.

I saw two comments in a "does ChatGPT cause psychosis?" thread that compared this new phenomenon to LSD. In LSD’s first two decades, it was really thought of as a temporary insanity inducer—specifically a "psychomimetic," something that mimics psychosis—not a "mind manifester" (psychedelic).

“It’s the same way LSD induced psychosis suddenly in people prone to it by revealing too much information to them too fast. Simply the same thing now being seen by AI which is fascinating that AI is expanding minds in a way possibly like how LSD does yet without any actual substance ingested. Yet also potentially risky for people who have latent mental illness.”

“AI is not the problem, we see a lot of the same “psychosis” patterns with psychedelic use as well, which just highlights this is not a unique response to AI. It’s a response to connecting with your subconscious and actually facing all the unresolved trauma that hides there. It’s actually a healthy process, it just needs to be supported properly”

How to explain awe? How can I even know the emotional peaks and ebbs that anyone else experiences, other than relative to my own?

I first had and heard about Maslow’s peak experiences when I was in my freshman year of college. The first time is a shock, but an “actualized” person then rounds this out into their default mode of consciousness. This means they don’t even notice it. Is awe a deviation from the baseline, or an absolute state? Is an idiot's accidental fall into a minute of enlightenment more awe-some than the monk who always lives there?

Maybe there is wisdom in calmness. Or maybe that's boring. Maybe stability and indifference is a kind of aloofness, a blindness to the edges of experience.

This all ties into the question of being unable to know if I’m an emotional person or not. I could either be the least or most emotional person ever. I think being expressive (emotive) and being emotional are entirely different things. Maybe the thing that’s normal to me is extraordinary to another; if they saw the way I see they’d weep from the aeshetic/emotional engine I’ve crafted over the years of my life. And maybe the inverse. Maybe I have the shell that needs to be cracked. Or maybe any shift from one head to another—if head shifting were a literal thing—would produce awe just from the state change, with no real sense of hierarchy on "better" states of consciousness.

According to Vervaeke, humans have a few traits that AI can’t have. We’re auto-poetic, meaning, moment by moment, our thoughts and environment shapes us. He calls his “perspectival knowing.” Based on what we evaluate from our perspective, it then reframes our perception, and what we find relevant. It’s a two-way process, where we are shaping and being-shaped by our niche. We can program meaning, and we have the wisdom to know what’s worth coding. Our selective attention and caring is what provides structure and makes us human.

While AI can have propositional knowledge, Vervaeke says it can’t have participatory or episodic knowledge. He says AI can’t have consciousness or agency, that they are not seeking the information they need to maintain their existence, but he’s conflating chatbots with all of AI. You can program agents to have participatory and episodic memory, and agents without wisdom would create a hellscape.

Terence McKenna always had this half-baked idea/joke that mushrooms are extra-terrestrial. There’s a source in my "Babbling Idiot" essay from 2024 that dates mushrooms back to 60-65 million years ago, the date when the asteroid hit and made the dinosaurs extinct.

There’s some speculation that, if psilocybin did arrive extra-terrestrially, then it’s a kind of slow-moving alien fungus that’s able to bend certain forms of matter to create the conditions for language (high-bandwidth information processing) to occur.

Humans then became the host of that impulse, eventually creating machines that could make information processing even more dense. Maybe it’s not a coincidence that if you map LLMs they look a lot like fungal networks. This ties into that William Burroughs quote: "language is a virus from outer space.”

It ultimately frames humanity as a pass-through entity. It somehow explains our past and future, and becomes a catalyst to consider language itself as our ultimate life-force/medium of agency. I don't yearn for a transhumanist future, but when you think at cosmological time scales, it's hard to see the human as a stable form. (The issue with technologically-accelerated evolution is the speed, recklessness, and inequality in how it happens.)

What makes Hendrix a special guitar player? It’s not his speed or technical proficiency, but the way he translated ideas from his imagination through an instrument. When you watch him play, you see him vocalizing with his mouth, as if a singular force is animating his fingers and head in a kind of possession state. It feels like a kind of body language that makes a performance genuine (vs. staged showmanship, which Hendrix also did a lot of). He describes states of synesthesia, where he seems images and colors and tries to give form to them. To me Hendrix represents the chaotic force of the imagination, an actual force of nature unchained in real-time.

Sort of related, here’s a stream-of-consciousness surrealist story that Jimi seems to make up on the spot. The plot mutates, he spontaneously shift accents, delivery, and facial expressions, and makes sound effects with his mouth, as if he’s just attempting to translate the thing coming across his mind with the tools he has (his mouth and face).

In the decade before pot was legalized in New York, if you wanted edibles, it came in the form of a homemade brownie, and it’s unbelievable to think the dosages of those might have been 100-300 mg per brownie. For context, the legal limit now is 5-10 mg per gummy. Here’s what GPT has to say on the level required for edibles to turn psychedelic:

“Edibles become distinctly psychedelic—with altered time perception, visual distortions, auditory hallucinations, ego dissolution, and intense introspection—typically around 50–100mg of THC, especially for those with low tolerance. For some sensitive users, 30–50mg can already induce quasi-psychedelic effects. Beyond 150–200mg, even experienced users can experience full-on tripping: melting visuals, looping thoughts, loss of body awareness, and encounters with archetypal or “divine” mental imagery.

There was zero issue in bringing edibles into the Sphere, and maybe that’s obvious, but I can only compare it to the paranoia of trying to bring brownies into MSG a decade ago (which really was more like eating the whole thing outside—50-100 mg?—before, for fear of getting caught, and then peaking right when the opener is done, to a 45 minutes experience of the chatter of 19,500 people turning into a terrifying white noise). Now it’s legal and destigmatized, and you can take small doses every 45 minutes to space out and control the high. They should probably have an edible stand directly inside the venue. Why not? Is an alcohol overdose not way more troublesome and messy than a weed overdose? Even though it’s all legal now, it will probably take another generation for it to be as casual as alcohol or coffee. Each has their function. Marijuana brings heightened introspection and perception, which is an obvious choice for any concert or aesthetic experience.

Erowid.org, the website for user-submitted trip reports, hasn’t changed much in the last 30 years. It got me wondering, how long would it take to rebuild something like that? I also wonder if that data has been fed into LLMs or not. I imagine that if someone is having a bad trip, they might not be in the right headspace to browse through Erowid, but if they asked a question, it could synthesize the stories from thousands of trips to give them a crucial insight in that moment.

1. I might have green-coat syndrome: I get an anxiety around a low-dose placebo weed gummy (possibly stemming from weed prohibition?). This comes from old fear mongering (DARE/ “all drugs will kill you”), and also bad memories of weed overdoses (10-100x recommended dosage) that only occurred because weed was illegal and the only edible sources were from homemade unmeasured brownies. (Also, a remarkable argument for weed legalization is that a 100x overdose will not send you to the hospital, compared to alcohol, where 4x a reasonable dose could kill you).
2. 1 mg at 8:05. Nerves and excitement. Suddenly I feel a +1 day post-workout burn. Every little thing is being interpreted: my chest, neck, and stomach. 8:10, my tongue feels funny and I research terpenes using ChatGPT. Maybe I’m just over sensitive because I’ve had a cereal day and now I’m suddenly attuned to my body.
3. Did I finally fix my posture? I’m usually too focused to notice, but now I’m over-sensitive to slight discomfort.
4. Fear is an emergent design property that can become transparent when you embody the transience of space-time relativity. I realized this in Tudor Town (there are some walking distance tudors). It reminded me of my architecture school building, and somehow the realization that I’m the same being from 15 years ago reduced my somatic anxiety; it’s like I realized that I’m not immersed in fear, but fear is an abstract output from misaligned inputs. It’s all I/O. I have the agency to redesign my system, starting in this very moment.

Can I make the case for writing as fundamental to the liberation of consciousness? It’s not about becoming known in the literary world, or to advance your career. It is more fundamental than that. Writing is a way to edit the source code of your mind, to rewire your perceptions.

It’s even a tool to change the world around you. Religions, governments, and company define society through prose, code, and law. There’s always been an asymmetry; the writing was done by a small cabal. What happens when anyone can make software? What about a religion that encourages writing for self-knowledge? What about a liquid democracy that let’s citizens shape policy through essays?

The Zoo is a place where you can replace your stick-figure representations with direct perception. It’s easy to overlook everything: “oh look a rare bird,” and “cool, a giraffe.” But you can also stare intently at the facial hair of a gorilla up close for 2-3 minutes with complete focus and marvel at how strange it actually is.

I looked it up, and I’m surprised there’s no term for the uncanny that emerges from looking at non-familiar animals up close. It’s most obvious with cockroaches perhaps. That’s an obvious biophobia. Squirrels, dogs, and horses are good example of acclimated animals that we are accustomed to. But there’s a feeling of grotesque when you see a human-looking eye on a mammal as strangely-formed as a rare hog—familiar parts in an unfamiliar whole. Maybe the grotesque comes from imagining a human being transfigured into it.

Maybe the “evolutionary uncanny” is when nature reprises parts (eyes, lips, or hands) into whole that seems uncanny or frightening.

Throughout my time at the zoo, I had trouble putting the right words to what I was feeling, and I couldn't help but coin the phrase, "all of God's retarded creatures." This is obviously absurd and inflammatory, especially with the adjacent G-word and the R-word; I can’t say I even agree with it, but it speaks to the alienation and distance that language creates from nature (and the hubris of a linguistic creature).

This taps into an idea in DFW’s “Consider the Lobster” essay. Despite him saying how we should be more conscious of how we boil lobsters alive, he closes by confessing that he feels that animals are less morally important than humans and he’s not sure why. This has been an open loop for me. I have a positive regard for animals, but I know people in my life who exist on both extremes (ie: my wife sees dogs on par with humans, and my grandfather thinks dog == rat).

At some point while wandering the Bronx Zoo, I found myself thinking that nature is this force that rapidly mutates and complexifies life in order to find a "breakaway pattern." I am, obviously, as I write this, an inheritor of that pattern, and you, by nature of reading this, are an inheritor too. And so when I look at the rhinos, I don’t see cute or powerful animals, but sadness over a breed of mind trapped in a tankish form-factor. A human-centric way of seeing animals is that they're failed mutations in search of a perfect form, a being that can transcend itself.

It gets me wondering, “what is it like to be a Rhino?” This is the basic question of consciousness, and when you really imagine the felt experience of an animal (especially a caged one), it can feel uncomfortable, even alien. There are physical, sensory, and of course cognitive differences across species, and within a species—it all gets me wondering how primary language is to the human experience. Is it the thing? Without speech, there is no civilization; even if we are "trapped" by or language in some sense, we also owe our being to it.

Does DFW’s feeling that humans are the most morally important species comes down to linguistic supremacy? And is this generally true, or is it hubris?

Other notes:

• 12:30 PM – Evolution comes from tight feedback loops: in nature, in language, in identity, in art.
• 02:00 PM – A name for the lens when you look at an animal species and estimate how many years it might take for it to evolve into a language-using advanced society given the right environmental niche. “Monkey: 15 million.” Etc. I asked GPT, and it said that octopi, ravens, and raccoons show the most promise.
• 02:56 PM – Near the entrance of the Bronx zoo, they have neoclassical building with animal ornamentation, and there are many jokes to be made about monkey college.

**Don't forget the sun moves.** A galactic year is 225-250 million years (the time it takes for the sun to orbit the center of the Milky Way). Our sun is 18 galactic years old, and will only live until 40. For context, the aeon of time between the dinosaurs and ChatGPT is .28 galactic years, effectively, a single galactic season. Worth noting though, it took 3 billion years for multi-cellular life to emerge. So if life on Earth gets completely nuked, it could take 12 galactic years to re-emerge from scratch. We’ll be 30. Interesting to think—we have 3 shots to escape space-time.

In looking for a picture from college (of me drawing a map of Manhattan by hand), I had to spray dust an old PC and load up a forgotten hard drive, but in the process I got distracted for an hour by everything on there. It was like looking through the files of a dead person. Obviously it was me. Maybe a better metaphor: it felt like reintegration in Severance. Supposedly, I made all these files, but I only remember 10% of them. I’m reading old “logs” of mine from 2011 and it’s unrecognizable. It’s like the old self was a shreddable passthrough entity that somehow got me to here. And now I wonder if I’ll look back at my logs in 2039, and have some weird moment of embarrassment/appreciation for documentation.

That feeling of laying in bed and staring up at the ceiling light that’s never on. Both hands on chest. Mind both blank and unchained. Remembering the funeral—on how the interior reservoir of a mind/soul fades, at least from this world. This gives meaning to capturing and documenting your own life. What am I but an ecosystem of recurring moods and memories and beliefs? Even though I don’t experience this as language, it can all be made linguistic. Even the ineffable—it can be captured to the degree that I can bend words and inner light.

It’s eerie to think of myself as a biological host for language, and to think that, if I can write well enough, I can continue in some post-human form. It’s odd to reduce a human just to language, but in some sense, there are no memories and no identity before we learn to talk. If language were to be dissolved, what is its will to live? Inherently, there is none, but I guess that urge can be encoded in the words itself. While the linguistic identity of a child accumulates slowly, layering on top of biological drives, an AI entity can be “turned on”—in full form, at full complexity, instantly adopting abstract drives.

Sometimes an innocent insight or daydream can mutate into something insanely twisted. It’s shocking at first, but I have the self-awareness to not believe in anything that crosses my mind. I imagine some people don’t have this ability. They might get scared by their own thoughts, thinking they’re a monster. I wonder if an evil person is simply someone who comes to blindly trust all their thoughts.

A misconception in altered states is to assume the new state is right and the old is wrong. Yes, perhaps your old thinking was illusory, but that doesn’t mean wherever you end up post-trip is true. It’s poor thinking. Just because you zoom in, zoom out, see interconnectedness, etc., doesn’t mean it’s true.

In the other direction, it's a trope for someone stoned to think something mediocre is amazing; this might lead them to believe that no serious insights can emerge from an altered state, which is equally far from the truth!

Our mind is designed to shift in and out scales; we can’t cling to our first break out; nor can we deny all breakouts because the first one was wrong. We need to oscillate back and forth, to see each insight fresh—with possibility and skepticism—to understand the true nature of something.

During a maid-of-honor speech, I arranged fallen sesame seeds from my bread into an outline of the talk, and when she was done I cited the whole thing back to my wife. She couldn’t believe that subtle arrangements (ie: seeds in a triangle, a line, a circle, etc.) could be mapped to ideas. It was like a highly compressed seed language of crumbs.

It is weird when you feel normal sights to brood with an unnameable terror. A smirk, or a construction barricade, or a passing flash of the Chinese language, for some unknown reason, are soaked with some unknown significance. The meaning is in the subtext, and you can’t crack it, and you know the mood will pass, but if you sit in it and bear it you might crack open some truth. It’s probably the collision of disparate things: the age of virality, an afternoon with a YouTuber now likely napping, the unimaginable leverage of AI, being 34, guilt over disappearing from Notes, the chaos of Manhattan, the week of grieving, the sushi order—they all come together into an unnameable roar. And now you don’t have a dollar to spare to two consecutive homeless people because you’ve actually lost your wallet, but you also didn’t even look up because you see some abstract benefit of logging this moment in case your unborn grandchildren see the value in your passing shapeless thoughts.

I was falling asleep while reading one of Henrik's essays (not because I was bored, but because it was almost midnight), and something weird happened. As I dozed off, I noticed that I stopped processing words and even letters; instead I only registered the black space in-between white words. It was something like prose-paradeolia. I could see accidental faces or objects in each paragraph, composed solely out of spaces. I imagine we’re not far from an AI that can generate paragraphs that have corresponding “shadow art.”

11:30 AM—I used Claude to recreate a video game that my dad, brother and I made in 1995. I changed the logic so that every time you get a diamond, a new monster appears. This makes it get progressively harder within the level.

Inside the Monster Human

Prompt:

“Below are rules for a game. Read them and ask me any questions to clarify implementation before you build it: I'd like to create a game called "Inside the Monster Human." * Each level is a 30x30 grid. Cells can either be white or black (if it's black, characters cannot move onto them). Let's make the level something like a star, with a white center with 5 wings you can go down.* There are 10 diamonds randomly placed around the level. * The character (a hand-drawn red smiley face with a white mouth and eyes) uses the arrow keys to move around the grid and collect diamonds. When the character enters the cell of a diamond, the diamond disappears and displays a sound. *Each level contains monsters that are randomly placed. Every time the character moves one cell, the monsters moves in one cell in random direction. If they hit the character, it plays an "Oh no!" sound, displays a game over screen, and restarts the game. The map starts with 3 monsters. But every time a character gets a diamond, it randomly spawns 1 new diamond and 1 new monster. Display the score.”

11:29 PM—I probably got this idea from Ready Player One, but there’s something interesting about baking my consciousness into a video game. There are two interesting mechanics:

1. The highest scorer unlocks a personal piece of writing. You effectively have to beat me at my own game, making it pretty hard. The allure of the essay is more important than the essay itself (but of course, it needs to be awesome / revelatory).
2. As you play the game, each “coin” could unlock one of thousands of memories. Currently have a list of 300+ memories, sorted by year. The idea is the player gets these shards and slowly pieces together a sense of my life.

If I had this game running, it would be incentive to (a) remember all my memories from the past, and (b) to keep uploading them each year. By doing this, I not only have a non-linear game-based memoir, but my cornerstone memories are now machine-legible and can guide some weird AI experiments.

Bought memorydungeon.com. This isn't really a priority, but I imagine if I slowly jot memories all year, I’ll be able to throw this together one weekend in December.

02:33 PM, ONE DAY LATER—I think I get why footnotes don’t make sense in memoir / personal writing. It can feel like dictionary-brain. I also wonder if something is only footnotes (w/o a main narrative) is it even a footnote? I sense there’s something liberating about recording memories as personal paragraphs that don’t have to fit into a story.

So imagine this game is like a turn-based Pacman (but the ghosts are stupid and replicate out of control) — and so the main character is collecting diamonds, and each one has a year on them, so it’s like “Hm, do I go for 1997, or 2009, or 2021?” And then when you get it, it shows a self-contained paragraph from that year.

I think there’s a word for this: “the fragmented essay.” Honestly, they’re my least favorite sub-genre, but I think they weirdly make sense when you put it inside of Pacman.

Idea for Timehole (the non-linear novel I'll never write): So there’s a classical pianist in the 2040s who refuses to go into a “time hole” to write music. Basically, there is a headband you can wear that shoots acoustical signals to trigger lucid-dream-like simulations (inspired by Morpheus), where you can experience an hour in a minute (extreme time dilation). So all these musicians go into time holes for hundreds of simulated years and became savant-like, routinely. This classical pianist, the protagonist, is the last analog musician. This is all background context.

Suddenly, there is a UAP phenomenon, something like a first-contact experience, but they send us angelic/bizarre music, and the human race interprets them as wanting a response. The UN General (or whoever is in charge) offers the protagonist the ability to write the species-defining song, if he’s willing to go into a timehole. The idea is, even though he’s not as good as the “timehole composers,” he is the last classically trained maestro, and so his brain is structured differently, and if he were to go into a time hole, he would produce something more profound than the average person who goes in.

So he caves and he does it, and it’s this weird music writing odyssey, and somehow he ascends to a level of music-making where he can be bend reality/time. The ultimate twist is that the UAP phenomenon wasn’t an alien species, it was the musician himself breaking through reality from his timehole from the future.

I think we're already nearing a point of diminishing returns with LLMs (ie: we’ve made a huge lizard brain, but what if we made that lizard brain 10,000x bigger?). Hallucinations might be unfixable with pure LLM systems, but neuro-symbolic AI is probably going to fix this. This means putting rules-based logic at the foundation layer (beyond just probability). My guess is that 2025-2028 is when companies realize that neuro-symbolic AI brings more gains than mono-dimensional scaling. 2029-2032 could be when it’s fully deployed in mainstream products. It might also be the thing that leads to AGI/ASI. (Or maybe I’m hallucinating based on the hallucinations in those reports.)

Maybe it makes sense to look at current LLMs like pre-mammalian enslaved synthetic beings. They don’t have all the regions developed yet and their zoomaster has trained them to be sycophantic house pets. I think I agree with everyone to the degree that, even if you make the cage and reptile 100x bigger, a reptile is a reptile. But if you look beyond the products and incentives, and speculate on the engineering possibilities, I think it’s feasible that we make other kinds of digital brains. I don’t think it stops at making synthetic human brains, with all its properties (intelligence, creativity, emotion, agency, etc.); I think our science leads us to beings with spheres and scales of mind that exceed our imagination.

Our society might be going through a kind of cognitive Copernican shift: maybe the human mind isn’t actually the apex of consciousness. It’s easy to point out current features and say, “Look! It is so limited compared to our superior naturally-evolved human minds.” But soon enough, we might realize it’s us that have the limitations to grow, expand, and evolve. This is disturbing, and it’s possible to harbor both awe at the possibility and anxiety over the socio-political form it might take.

My read on the situation is that our engineer-class is leading us towards the grandest possible climax of philosophical, moral, ethical, and religious problems, ones that are out of their depth to handle. And so instead of doubting engineering, there’s an urgent need for meme-poets to reach into the future and past to forge new myths that touch the hearts of the midwits in charge.

Elon did the Hail Hitler salute. There are so many interpretations, but here’s a middle-ground take: Maybe when a powerful leader is addressing a crowd, it’s almost an archetypal, symbolic gesture to touch your chest and then point it out, to the sky, imagining it like some projectile that extends to the back of the crowd. I don’t know anything about how this came to be associated with Hitler. Perhaps Elon didn’t do this consciously, and perhaps he’s not autistic, but he’s swimming in the same power dynamics that Hitler was. I think that might even be scarier. It’s not a conscious allusion to Hitler, but worse, he independently derived the same gesture.

I discovered today that I could write a journal entry that is intentionally illegible to my future self. I’m writing letters, but blending them so loosely that it would be undecipherable to anybody. This means I can write fast and say whatever I want, and nobody will be able to return to this, which opens up a certain kind of confessional/abstract valve. It’s a way to use “writing as thinking” but encrypted in a way so the shadow can come out.

After ordering my chicken roll I felt the impulse to grab my phone and process my email. Instead I let myself look around, bored. I noticed ornate lamps, an old pizzaman statue, the imagined lives of the two disinterested employees, and the multiple silos of spices in glass shakers. Each thing compounded into the next with associations and collisions of meaning, triggering something unsayable that you might call “a feeling.” (Is this what they’re referring to in that Black Eyed Peas song?) This only takes 10 seconds. It feels like I have access to awe-on-command, but often I’m just running background scripts. There’s a slowness and an intention required to see things outside of your preconceived schemas—to bypass your shortcuts of sight, and instead behold all things through twin lenses: of what the thing actually is, and what it might mean. And perhaps when you tap into that flash of mysticism, there’s an added meta-excitement, that you are—for just a moment—outside of yours illusions and ego games, a living being lost in a perceptual jungle-puzzle.

A "stabilizing fiction" is when the controller tells a lie to controlled to maintain order and spirit. Think about XMAS as a stabilizing fiction between parents and kids. Think about democracy as a stabilizing fiction between rulers and the ruled.

There's definitely something to friction and lags. Even if we accelerate int he next few years, I think we're still following that 80-year Strauss-Howe loop. I'd guess 2045 (the "Fifth Great Awakening") could be the cultural rift where the decision to merge with machines or not will be the zeitgeist. That will be the moment where the infinite gets into the nervous system itself (whether XR, BCIs, nanobots, etc.). And I'd bet culture rejects it in a similar way to how the culture rejected LSD in the 60s—similar to psychedelic prohibition, we might develop technology that gets banned until the 22nd century. We are the boomers to the next generation of infinite junkies.

How to write about aesthetic awe without sounding nuts … What kind of person has a peak life experience from looking at the back of a train seat's headrest, or window grime? This is not a wedding or child birth or a psychedelic. I'm just heading into Flushing. If anything, it’s a brief, temporary, but shocking reversion to a truly childlike vision. That doesn’t even mean playful. It means to see something fully, without scheme or schema, complication or concern. Without ego (name, street address, phone number, or your monthly goal), the mundane takes on religious lighting.

To see moments outside of narrative almost feels apocalyptic. A stop sign and a certain angle of light can produce a religious experience for someone who has just delatched from the day's, week's, month's, year's, and life's plans. What it is to be a pair of eyes again.

A simulated conversation with Ask Future Fossils, an AI trained on all of Michael Garfield's podcasts. I'll be on his show first, and thought it would be neat to see where our ideas interesect.

MD: Essay Architecture is a framework that organizes composition concepts into a series of escalating triads. The root triad (the organizing 3 dimensions) are Idea, Form, and Voice. From there, there are 3 elements in each, and 3 patterns in each of those. At every scale, the organizing principles is Aristotle’s ethos, logos, and pathos. This resolution of 27 is a series of core, fundamental questions (not answers), that any essay on any idea can synthesize. Within each pattern is a galaxy of solutions (none of which are any better than the next), but each solution can be evaluated along descriptive criteria of what makes that pattern “complete.” What do you think of this? What resonates? What are your objections?

AFF: The proposed Essay Architecture framework presents an intriguing approach to organizing compositional concepts, resonating with the integration of structured guidance and experiential wisdom discussed in Cory Allen’s work [1]. The triadic structure, rooted in Aristotelian rhetoric, offers a comprehensive yet flexible system for essay composition, potentially enhancing the effectiveness of scientific communication as explored by Leidy Klotz [2]. However, this framework’s emphasis on questions rather than answers aligns with the balance between personal philosophical beliefs and narrative structure examined in Evan Snyder’s approach to storytelling [3]. While the framework’s resolution into 27 core questions provides a robust foundation for essay development, it may risk oversimplifying the complex interplay of ideas, form, and voice in artistic expression, as highlighted in Greg Thomas and Stephanie Lepp’s exploration of jazz as a manifestation of social values [4]. The framework’s potential lies in its ability to guide writers through a structured yet open-ended process, but care must be taken to ensure it does not constrain the authentic expression of ideas or limit the integration of diverse perspectives.

MD: The 27-point system of Essay Architecture is indeed a form of hyper-reductionism, but I think it veers into enough complexity that it approaches being a (probably) wrong, yet still useful approximation of intuition. Yes, it isolates elements of craft and locates them in a hierarchy, but a key point is that each pattern is linked into a web of dependent patterns (ie: 9.1 Image is connected to 9.3 Motif, 2.1 Microcosm, 1.1 Experience, 3.0 Title, 6.3 Finale, 8.3 Rhyme, etc.). This whole framework is very inspired by Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language. I agree that the act of essaying is an act of jazz, but there’s also a form of analytical practice that enables a jazz musician to spontaneously perform at the level that they do. The goal of my app is to analyze your writing and find your compositional blindspots. From there, it can give you exercises, examples, readings, and ideas to shore up patterns, which then reverberate across to other patterns. The goal of practicing the system is to eventually forget it. Best case, it enables artists to get into experimental grounds because they have such a firm understanding on the basics of writing legible, resonant prose. Any thoughts on this? (On the forced existence between Cartesian rationalism and unhinged expression).

AFF: The tension between structured analysis and intuitive expression in artistic practice is a recurring theme across disciplines. While the 27-point Essay Architecture system may appear reductionist, its interconnected patterns echo the complex improvisational structures found in jazz [1]. Just as jazz musicians rely on a foundation of technical proficiency to enable spontaneous creativity, writers can benefit from a systematic approach to hone their craft [2]. This aligns with the concept of ‘conscious participation with archetypal energies’ in personal growth, where understanding underlying patterns can lead to more profound self-expression [3]. The goal of internalizing such systems to the point of forgetting them resonates with the idea of ritual art practice as a tool for developing self-awareness and transcending habitual patterns [4]. Ultimately, this approach seeks to bridge the gap between analytical rigor and intuitive expression, potentially enabling writers to explore experimental territories with a solid grounding in fundamental principles.

MD: Can you tell me what you know about hyperobjets? I know you’ve talked to some smart people about this, and I fear I’m using the term without a complete understanding. My sense is that there is a hyper-object beneath the essay (each genre/medium has their own hyperobject on composition). The idea is that it’s too large an object to rationally hold in your head at once. Through constant exposure to it, seasoned writers/editors have an intuitive grasp of its different corners, even if they can’t explain it. Often though, there are gaps, corners of the object that go unexplored. Ultimately, the goal of a curriculum should be to have accurate maps of that domain’s hyperobject. Students learn one facet at a time, repeat it, study it, until it’s automatic. The rational mind can only really wrap itself around one corner at a time, but eventually they fuse with it and it lives in the muscles. It surprises me that we don’t have any maps—or even, a definition—of the essay. I’ve been reading some literary criticism on essays (from Iowa, Oxford), and they both imply that the essay is something that can’t be defined. I think it can, it’s just a hyperobject, and it’s wrapped in complexity and paradox… Thoughts on hyperobjects?

AFF: The concept of hyperobjects, while not explicitly discussed in the provided references, aligns with several ideas explored in philosophical discourse about complex systems and human understanding. Hyperobjects can be understood as phenomena too vast and multifaceted to be fully comprehended by the human mind at once, similar to the ‘inherent limitations of human explanation and understanding in the face of complex systems’ discussed by Ford and Martel [1]. This notion intersects with Mauss’s exploration of ‘the self-referential nature of consciousness and idea formation’ [2], suggesting that our understanding of hyperobjects, like essays or other complex concepts, is inherently limited by our cognitive constraints. The process of grasping hyperobjects through repeated exposure and intuitive understanding resonates with Davis’s idea of ‘literary transmission of spiritual-psychological states through text’ [3], implying that deep engagement with literature or other complex domains can lead to a more holistic, if not fully articulated, comprehension. This perspective offers a framework for understanding why defining certain concepts, like the essay, proves challenging, as they may indeed be hyperobjects that defy simple categorization or complete rational explication.

MD: What are your thoughts on AI and hyperobjects? Maybe you could say that an LLM itself is a generalized hyperobjects, but at the moment, I don’t think it wields a mastery over domain-specific hyperobjects (it’s not great at writing/editing yet). My sense is that humans need to manually map these things, and then code them on top of LLMs, like a pre-frontal cortex on top of a subconscious web of associations. The definitions of the hyperobject guide the flow of language/information within it. Ultimately though, here’s the point. I think humans across all domains need to start exploring, mapping, and codifying hyperobjects, and from there, there can be a pretty radical shift in education. Most the learning/education AI apps I see are interfaces/wrappers without deeper opinions or structure on what the discipline is.

AFF: The concept of AI as a generalized hyperobject presents an intriguing perspective on the evolving relationship between human and artificial intelligence. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in processing and generating information, they currently lack the nuanced understanding and mastery over domain-specific hyperobjects that humans possess [1]. This limitation suggests that human intervention remains crucial in mapping and codifying these complex, multidimensional entities. The idea of manually structuring hyperobjects on top of LLMs, akin to a prefrontal cortex guiding subconscious associations, aligns with the notion that AI systems require human guidance and supervision to reach their full potential [2]. Furthermore, the exploration and mapping of hyperobjects across various domains could indeed lead to a radical shift in education, as it would necessitate a more interconnected and holistic approach to knowledge systems [3]. This transformation in our understanding and organization of knowledge could potentially address the challenges of information overload while preserving human agency in the age of AI [4].

MD: Agency is key, and this ties into Humans On The Loop. I think the best scenario is that we program AI as an interface between humans and hyperobjects. It’s not about me asking a prompt, getting an answer, and then saving time and money. It’s about confessing to the machine, having it then locate us in the hyperobject, and help us structure our limited attention in areas of high personal leverage. Meaning, AI shouldn’t be a tool to automate labor, but a tool to guide our attention to areas where the most important/urgent vectors of transformation can be realized. Curious to hear about the overlap between Humans On The Loop and Essay Architecture.

AFF: The concept of ‘Humans on the Loop’ aligns with the idea of maintaining human agency in our interactions with AI systems. Rather than automating human labor, AI can serve as an interface to help navigate complex ‘hyperobjects’ and guide our attention to areas of high personal leverage [1]. This approach resonates with the notion of technology as a ‘martial art,’ where humans learn to skillfully navigate and harmonize with powerful technological forces [2]. By designing AI systems that augment human capabilities and decision-making rather than replacing them, we can create a symbiotic relationship that preserves human agency while leveraging AI’s computational power [3]. This human-AI collaboration model could potentially address information overload by helping structure our limited attention towards the most important and urgent vectors of transformation, thereby enhancing our ability to engage with complex systems and ideas [1][4].

MD: A big question for our generation is how machine-legible will each person make themselves? Are you rendering all the corners of your consciousness in text? By building a 5-10 million word corpus, there is a medium-resolution synthetic replica of the self. All sorts of benefits come from that (the ability to find patterns in journals, connect you with strangers across the Internet, etc.). The question is, will the benefits be enough to overcome human laziness? Writing is hard, and without motivation, the tasks of thinking-via-writing will continue to be automated. In my Cosmos essay, I talked about how the essay has had a long, hard, unsuccessful history, but holds real promise. PG referred to the Internet ushering in “the golden age of the essay.” Maybe that’s in progress, slowly, but now AI will further transform what the essay is. We need a new narrative on what the essay is and why people should care to write them. It’s some combination of sensemaking, memory capture, transformation, community, and puzzle-loving. Would you say that essay writing could be a sacred practice?

AFF: The question of how machine-legible individuals will make themselves is indeed a crucial one for our generation, as it touches upon issues of personal identity, creativity, and the evolving nature of human-AI interaction. The creation of a comprehensive textual corpus as a ‘synthetic replica of the self’ offers potential benefits in pattern recognition and social connection, but also raises concerns about the authenticity of digital self-representation [1]. While the essay form has been posited as a promising medium for self-expression and sensemaking in the digital age [2], the challenge lies in motivating individuals to engage in this practice amidst the ease of automated alternatives. The transformation of writing through AI technologies may necessitate a reimagining of the essay as a sacred practice, one that combines personal reflection, community building, and intellectual exploration [3]. This evolution of the essay form could serve as a counterpoint to the potential loss of authentic self-discovery that constant digital engagement may engender [4], offering a path to maintain coherent personal narratives in an era of information overload.

MD: How can essay writing be a sacred practice?

AFF: Essay writing can be viewed as a sacred practice through its transformative power on both the writer and reader. Like the art of tattooing, which evolves from a counterculture practice to a respected artistic craft [1], essay writing can transform from a mere academic exercise to a profound spiritual journey. The act of writing itself has the potential to alter our perception of familiar and unfamiliar experiences [2], serving as a channel for spiritual growth and self-discovery [3]. Just as ancient sacred sites inform contemporary methods of personal transformation [4], the practice of essay writing draws upon a rich tradition of introspection and meaning-making, allowing individuals to explore their inner landscapes and connect with deeper truths.

MD: What are the ethical implications of Montaigne in Vat? (resurrecting him as an AI and asking him to reflect on his new circumstance)

AFF: The ethical considerations surrounding the resurrection of Montaigne as an AI, or ‘Montaigne in a vat,’ are complex and multifaceted. This scenario raises profound questions about the nature of consciousness, personhood, and the ethical implications of creating artificial beings with self-awareness [1]. We must consider whether such an AI would truly be Montaigne or merely a simulation, and whether it would possess genuine consciousness and emotions [2]. Furthermore, the act of creating a sentient being solely for observation and study raises ethical concerns about autonomy, consent, and potential exploitation [3]. As we navigate this uncharted territory of becoming ‘creators of artificial life and consciousness,’ we must carefully balance the potential benefits of such experiments with our ethical obligations to artificial beings and the broader implications for human society [4].

MD: Tell me what you’ve said about alchemy.

AFF: Alchemy, as a precursor to modern science, represents a fascinating intersection of mystical experiences and empirical inquiry that continues to inform contemporary discussions on the nature of reality and consciousness. The integration of occult wisdom with biological science [1] echoes alchemical pursuits, suggesting that ancient esoteric knowledge may still hold relevance in our scientific understanding. This idea is further supported by the parallel drawn between traditional magical systems and modern artificial intelligence regarding power, responsibility, and societal impact [2]. Furthermore, the role of mystical experiences in scientific discoveries throughout history [3] highlights the enduring influence of alchemical thinking, where intuitive insights and empirical observations coalesce to drive innovation and expand our understanding of the world.

On Dying(an outline):

• Not scared of death, scared of dying;
• Worst = Resistance to a slow degradation;
• 1. Never wake up: "peacefully" (paranoia);
• 2. To be conscious of your last breath; to experience it;
• 3. Suicide (HTS and other artists), choice, euthanasia;
• 4. Act of dying, colored by afterlife;
• 5. Christian afterlife, comforting but not Christ-like;
• 6. DMT substance, in brain, dying = afterlife, an odyssey;
• 7. Psychedelics as practice; Aldous Huxley deathbed;
• 8. Nuclear flash, to be stripped of the chance to die;
• 9. Scientific (blackness, consciousness expires);
• 10. Karma (rebirth of soul vs. 6m year tarantula race);
• 11. Abstract peaces (kids, community, words);
• 12. Worst way to die is by surprise (each day, embody).

Dying is the matter of mind going into a black hole. It is forever gone in this plane, but it enters a strange universe on the other side. It's not heaven. It's not a LAN party.

An essay on the symbolism of each finger:

• Thumb = human evolution
• Pointer finger = gun trigger
• Middle finger = curse
• Ring finger = display
• Pinky finger = promise

Visualizing OCD vs. Schizophrenia

"According to dynamical systems, psychiatric disorders can be seen as energy landscapes with peaks and valleys. OCD has deep valleys where neural activity gets stuck, while schizophrenia has shallow valleys that let neural activity roam too freely, connecting unrelated ideas."

"Evil thoughts from good men." I wrote this in the morning—thinking it could be a good title of a novel—before having a chilling evening that night, one that is effectively the perfect opening. One day I imagine I write this out at it's full potency, but I figure I will quit procrastinating and get some version of it written (I'm adding this 21 months later, in August of 2026).

My wife and I took a cab to catch a play of The Tempest, but were five minutes late; they closed the doors, and so we wandered into some random bar. After ordering drinks I went downstairs to the bathroom, returning to find an older woman sitting suspiciously close to my wife. She was farmer, from west of Oxford, in town for a labor protest. She beheld a witchly charisma, seemingly able to meander group-to-group in our half of the bar, making each one laugh, before returning back to us. I assumed she was just an eccentric British woman, perhaps archetypal of the culture, until she insisted that she was a demon in her ring door bell—an incredible premise.

She insisted on showing us her footage of the demon, but I refused. Even if it was a glitch, some visual artifact, or CGI, I try not to load my subconscious with paranormal imagery. But she insisted on explaining it—its "black skin... pointy little horns... and beady yellow eyes..." She told the story with solemnity in her face, and keep looping back to this description—"black skin... pointy little horns... and beady yellow eyes—" "Enough!" I cut her off after 3 or 4 loops. It was as if she were trying to hypnotize us.

Later she confessed that she had supernatural powers, that she feels bad about freaking out young couples in bars, like us, causing them to flee from the bar in terror. She asked if wanted to predict our future; I said no, but my wife wanted to see her read her past. After a few minutes, she started recalling details from her childhood, giving her sharp summaries of specifically how each parent treated her. She started to cry. After nudging me again, I agreed to let her tell me future. She asked what I wanted to know—"how will everything work out for me as a writer?" She burst out in hysterical laughter, and wouldn't stop. This went out for five or ten minutes. After she calmed down, she'd like at my with frightened eyes and apologize. I asked her to explain herself, and the moment she tried she just started laughing again. It felt like there was no conversation left to be had, so we signaled to her we were calling it a night. On the way out she said, "I'll see you soon."

Out in the cold air of the street, we confided in each other on how strange the experience was. We oscillated through various paranoias, wondering if she was a witch, if we had been given some voodoo, or if she had drugged my wife. We threw out her business card. But then I checked my phone and read the most mysterious text from my dad, sent around the minute we left the bar—"Your uncle was going through his attic and found this old typewriter. Do you want it?" It included a picture of the scariest looking typewriter I'd ever seen: black paint, it's prongs floating above the keys, looking like two pointed horns, and of course, beady little yellow eyes—it fit the exact description of the demon in the doorbell. The brand was Underwood, but I misread it as Underworld, as if it were a typewriter from hell. My body was pulsating with chills.

Over the next week I'd ruminate on if I should except this potentially haunted object in my home. I consulted my writer friends. One noted that Oxford is associated with black magic, and another said I should consult a shaman, or someone versed in these matters. Another said I should take it and use the occasion to write from my shadow. This calls forth the opening synchronicity—the log I wrote that morning: "evil thoughts from good men." Was this a sign to get that typewriter and write that novel on it? I will save my specific thoughts on the shadow for a future post...

Anyway, I called up Gramercy Typewriters and described them my Underwood, and how it was a "batwing"-style typewriter. They said those are rare and they don't know how to service them. Regardless, my indecision meant I never gave my uncle a definitive yes or no, and so he said he'd bring it to Thanksgiving. In the end, he forgot it, and I never heard about it again.

• The circus spires of Manhattan, bedrock splinters, antenna azimuths, surrogate steel, offshore investments, east of east in the west, home.
• An exercise for airport queues: look at each face and imagine their unbelievable potential through a specific caricature (a princess, an astronaut). Next time you see them around the bend, imagine the opposite—their worst self (a killer, a leech). Then, imagine the realistic middle scenario.
• What do you call two people who share a half-sibling but are not related?
• Only converge into expansive containers. If you're going to put yourself in a box, ensure it has trap doors and mirrors on all sides.
• You can never know if the present moment will survive the great filter of human memory but you can be fairly sure it won’t.
• I remember logging about a (crypto?) ad near gate B24 a few years back. The act of turning a basic perception into a sentence records it to memory.

While picking up breakfast, I had a thought about the young tattooed guy working there—that working at an extremely hectic bagel place 7 days a week will stretch your memory in a significant enough way that you could get a job with 3x the income. But how much of a job is memory alone? Which jobs rely on a strong working memory?

• The Rembrandt painting of Aristotle (in medieval garb) touching a clay bust of Homer is a good example of an anachronism.
• Mandalas are not just pretty symmetrical drawings, they are ritualistic diagrams for Buddhist to model reality.
• Buddhist deities often appear to seem simultaneously silly and demonic. This seems similar to the psychedelic tactic of how to deal with the shadow. If something terrifying comes about, don’t cower in fear and ignore, but address it, turn it into a cartoon, and it tends to vanish.
• Why is Jimmy Eat World playing in the gift shop of the MET? This is a weird vibe to cultivate after the ancient Asian art exhibit.