On the structure of reality vs. the structure of perception. Causation in history as a real-but-unpointable structure, reached by reasoning never by sight, alongside zero and the vacuum. The pattern as the real thing, the material incidental; a structure reached by reasoning past how the body feels from inside.
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, […]
Right now, without any sound, galaxies are leaving. Not moving away in the ordinary sense — not flying off through space like debris from a blast. Space itself is expanding, everywhere at once, and at great distances the expansion adds up to more than light can cross. A galaxy far enough away is carried from […]
The Question That Was Always There — Coda The last of the series. Four pieces asked what minds do, whether choosing and calculating differ, whether competence implies an occupant, and how the thing came to be built before the question could be stated. Here the positions are put in one room. Nothing is settled, because […]
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 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 […]
Every description of a smell is a description of something else. Try it with the most ordinary one. Coffee. You can say it is warm, bitter, dark, roasted — but bitter is taste, warm is temperature, dark is sight, roasted is just the process that made the smell, named instead of the smell. Push further […]
A clay tablet, to last, must be burned. Unfired clay is soft. Write on it, let it dry in the sun, and you have a record that will hold for years — until it gets wet, or dropped, or pressed back into the lump it came from to be used again, which is what usually […]
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, […]
A waterfall has a shape. Go back to the same one after a year and you will recognize it — the same white curl where the water folds over the lip, the same standing wave below, the same plume of mist hung in the same place in the air. You could photograph it, name it, […]