Plankton 💠 Valhalla

The purpose of this last essay is to make sense of purpose.

Feedback is why there are things to talk about.

Here we are, blissfully going about our lives, saying fancy things like "pass me the ketchup, please" and "the projections for our year-close budget ain't pretty, folks," and we're satisfied with that.

Life creates itself, and self-creation is made of feedback loops.

In this thread I'm going to make that point using one of the most beautiful flowers as exemplar: the self-creation of the water lily 🪷

Science is a technology for the mind. What is it for, and who should be allowed to wield it? Science communication, open exposition problems, and our way forward.

A showcase of the word definitions and transformations that I use for Plankton Valhalla's explanations.

Out of the many charming short stories in David Eagleman's Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife, one in particular has stuck with me. Its title is Ineffable and it's short enough to be read in five minutes. This version of the afterlife (each story in the book gives an alternative variant) is not for people, but for...

Regardless of the details, every system is a physical arrangement of matter and energy. The way this matter is arranged is what we call the structure of the system, and it determines what happens when differences pass through the system.

When you want to solve a new, hard-to-define problem, chances are old expertise won't cut it. You either make a groundbreaking new discovery (good luck!) or find new useful ways to combine the things you already know, new connections between things that no one before had thought to be connected.

What would happen if one were to take the argument that the world is one big, intricate network a little too seriously? How would such a person talk about things?