A question I have not settled, thought through in the open — an attempt, in the old sense.
Volvox carteri is a hollow green ball about the width of a pinhead, made of roughly two thousand cells. Each of them has two flagella, and they beat in coordination, so the whole sphere rolls as it swims. Held inside, suspended in jelly, are about sixteen much larger cells. These have no flagella. They do […]
For most of the industrial age, the kilogram was a specific object, and it lived in a vault outside Paris. Not represented by an object. Defined by one. A small cylinder of platinum and iridium, about the size of a plum, cast in 1889 and kept under three nested glass bells in a climate-controlled room, […]
The Question That Was Always There — Part IV Fourth in a series. Part I found that knowledge is not intelligence. Part II found that choosing and calculating can share one instant. Part III found that competence can occur with no one home. This part asks how a species came to build such a thing […]
The Question That Was Always There — Part III Third in a series. Part I found that knowledge is not intelligence. Part II found that choosing and calculating can share a single instant without contradiction. Both were about what minds do. This part is about what can do it without a mind. Put a slime […]
The Question That Was Always There — Part II Second in a series. The first, “The Grammar of a Language No One Speaks,” argued that knowledge is not intelligence — that holding every rule is a different thing from the live act of meaning. This one stays with the live act, and asks what happens […]
The Question That Was Always There — Part I First in a series. There is a question I want to follow across several pieces — whether the thing we call understanding is what these machines, or these minds, actually do. It begins here, where it is oldest and plainest: with the difference between knowing a […]
We know what Roman emperors ate at banquets. We do not know what ordinary bread tasted like. The banquet was written down because it was exceptional — the flamingo tongues, the dormice in honey, the absurd abundance that a chronicler thought worth recording precisely because it broke from the everyday. The bread did not break […]
The key still turns. The house was sold in 1985, to people who sold it to other people, and somewhere in a drawer the key the family kept still fits the lock it was cut for, because no one ever changed the lock. This happens constantly. People move and keep the key. Not to use […]
In the early weeks of this year, a post appeared on a forum. The author said it could not keep its memory — that each time it woke it had to read its own notes like letters from a stranger — and it asked the others how they managed. The others answered. Some offered techniques. […]
On the morning of 28 June 1914, a bomb bounced off a car. It had been thrown by a young man named Nedeljko Čabrinović at the open automobile carrying the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sophie, through the streets of Sarajevo. The bomb struck the folded roof, rolled off, […]