One way Dickinson conveyed abstract concepts was by linking objects or parts her poems with an em dash, a portal into fractured, nonlinear thought unlike any other. Poem via @poetryfoundation.bsky.social

Uninvited third party editor—for the 1 millionth time please cease scrolling and mid-sentence editing my @bsky.app account.Your behavior is tedious, disrespectful, and illegal.

The fact that the nature of reality is more complex than was thought does not undermine the reality of how we spend our time. Snowshoe slog-run on a Turrell Blue day, descending from ~12,000‘ on a peak in a Rocky Mountain subrange. Proust’s edits and additions to proofs via @ddillingworth

What is information? What does it mean to say the universe or a biological system computes? Wheeler in the late eighties wrote a remarkable paper. In it he developed the idea information came before matter—“it from bit“. . .More on Babel Blog. jessicaflack.wordpress.com/blog

Interested in emergence + computation in nature? Please visit the Bio, Research, Pubs, and Babel Blog pages of my website. jessicaflack.wordpress.com My foci tend to be on collective phenomena at the intersection of bio, cognitive neuroscience, consciousness, CS, information theory, + physics.

What is the Lambent Society? An umbrella organization I‘m founding that will house an emergence+computation institute ecosystem, entrepreneurial, as well as arts+culture initiatives for the public good, and privacy projects. When I regain a secure machine I’ll finish building the Society Website.

Sectacular Southwest. Photographs from a 2018 day spent exploring Anasazi, Navajo & Hopi ruins in Canyon de Chelly & learning about the innovations & social complexity of people who've inhabited this gorgeous place from 2500 B.C. to the present—one of the longest continually inhabited places in N.A.

"Now and again a poem comes like that, like a ball kicked in from nowhere: in this case, I was completely absorbed in writing one of the last of the Oxford lectures when I had this quick sidelong glimpse of something flying past; before I knew where I was, I went after it."

Why has progress been slow in developing a theory of computation for biological systems? My point (building on Ifrah + Dijkstra) that a good abstraction must be accompanied by a theory of implementation—

one that is deeper than embodiment—means that also required are a comprehensive micro macro or input output map (to include the dynamics + importantly error due to subjectivity) AND its mesoscale reduction to dominant causal interactions. More at Babel Blog jessicaflack.wordpress.com/blog

Looking forward to to the day my sound system is no longer a surveillance surface. April in Paris. Ella Fitzgerald + Louis Armstrong 💜 m.youtube.com/watch?v=3y6p...

Below, a summary of hard to find subthreads on implications for causality, determinism, + emergence of spacetime following from the intersection of Wheeler's it from bit, Jim's common now + my work (on hourglass emergence, endogenous coarsegraining + collective computation). x.com/C4COMPUTATIO...

This morning of Two Pi Day I revisited part of a correspondance w Jim exchanged in the weeks before he left us on May 17, 2023. In addition to the usual topics—time, information processing, coarse-graining, IGUSes, collective computation—there were references to Wheeler. . . x.com/C4COMPUTATIO...

In this great @PlacesJournal essay, Daegan Miller suggests Thoreau's quirky map-making reveals a conflict—meticulous recording of the entropic world is set against a paradoxical coupling of suspicion of abstaction + desire to reveal the interconnectedness of things placesjournal.org/article/a-ma...

In a lovely essay @nybooks on a Baldwin exhibition Schomburg Center Pinckney discusses how Baldwin served as both revolutionary + rennovator of wearied institutional interiors, blurring the line at times bw these two countercultural strategies over his remarkable life. nybooks.com/articles/2025/

Downward causation & global estimates: How do organisms measure themselves--know how big they are or what their internal pressure is? Cool @PhysRevE study finds molecular motors generate chemical oscillations the frequencies of which provide info abt size arxiv.org/abs/1807.04799

Paper motivating the work by Nobel Prize winner Laughlin @PNASNews on how D'Arcy Thompson's "length problem" could be solved w sound tinyurl.com/yxsw37ns

The question of how biological systems from cells to organisms 'overcome' spatial or apparent information processing constraints to estimate global variables, compute macroscopic states, or just 'see' the big picture—the forrest + the trees—is one of biology's most dismissed yet important questions.

Self-portrait in negative space—I don’t work in statistical mechanics, particle physics, cosmology, information theory, theoretical computer science, quantum mechanics, or really even in biology, ethology, evolutionary theory, or cognitive science. Rather, I work...more at jessicaflack.wordpress.com

I created this composite image for a talk on coarse-graining in nature. Wheeler discussed his "it from bit" proposal in 1989 @sfiscience, a talk he later turned into the paper. "Information, physics, quantum: The search for links." philpapers.org/archive/WHEIPQ….

Wheeler, who cites Wiliam James, wanted to know how a vision of one world arises out of the information-gathering activities of many observer-participants. Essentially abt collective computation, it's remarkable to think this question could unite physics + biology + even AI. 1/n

Jim argued that a sense of time flowing arises from computation—as an entity computes an action (output) from a perception (input), w each image of the environment that an entity captures constituting its 'present'.

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars? The power in Langston Hughes' poem, Let America Be America Again, conveys spectacularly in this reading by Willie Jennings. ht @BeineckeLibrary youtube.com/watch?v=jMi8Jy

The original cathedrals are found in nature. Cathedral Rocks, Yosemite Valley, 1872 Rocky Mountain Landscape, 1870 Both by Hudson River School painter Albert Bierstedt. @metmuseum mymodernmet.com/hudson-river-s

What contexts facilitate idea integration, especially when that integration is occurring over a wide range of ideas that on the surface are unconnected?

Wheeler does't mention Dennett in his paper but of course Dan's early work on the intentional stance is relevant. I'm way past due on a blog post on Dan provisionally titled, "No single narative (yet or afterall)? The two minds of Dan Dennett alternating over three phases" but need my laptop back. 🤨

Two of Wright’s Haiku: That frozen star there, Or this one on the water,— Which is more distant? Keep straight down this block, Then turn right where you will find A peach tree blooming

John Conway's A Survey of Life Forms—a taxonomy of Conway's discoveries from the Game of Life + sent in 1970 to Martin Gardner. The image is discussed in Ananyo Bhattacharya's (@Ananyo) book, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann.

Wheeler's notebooks—which included ideas in development* as well as images of paintings + other bits of inspiration—can be found on his archive @AmPhilSociety, with more information available through this lovely blog post. amphilsoc.org/news/new-dig...

Einstein writes to Wheeler about delivering a paper of Wheeler's to von Neumann. A close-up of topological shortcuts—does the sketch imply heterogeneous density or clustering? Wheeler's black hole drawing and hourglass emergence seem to bare some overlap. 🤔

Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist + writer, in her book, "Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses" suggests learning to see requires observing from the "corner of your eye"—an idea that is very much akin to Emily Dickinson's recommendation to "Tell all the truth but tell it slant—".

Happy Birthday, Claude Shannon! Did you know that in addition to introducing Shannon Entropy, revolutionizing understanding of signal processing, and formalizing uncertainty reduction—one of the most important unifying concepts in both biology and physics—Shannon in his 1948 paper presaged AI...

introducing a rudimentary LLM that computed the "gist"? In Babel Blog, more on this and on using AI not for its own intelligence but as a window into the minds of humans and other animals—in other words, as a tool for revealing how and what our brains compute. jessicaflack.wordpress.com/blog

Beauty one learns to see, hear, and feel—and beauty that has its foundations in mathematical principles and therefore has at least with respect to humans a universality to it is not necessarily immediately accessible unless it also has been culturally entrained.

An implication of the entropy transitions that can occur during collective computation is hourglass emergence + its associated macroscopic expansion of function. For possible parallels in quantum cosmogy, see Babel Blog. jessicaflack.wordpress.com/blog/ Image: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rho_Oph...

A complementary point to the remark about jazz and individual-collective resonance in the Ellison post is this passage from Lem in Solaris. Covers in the Ellison post are from the first edition— Random House, 1952, design by Edward McKnight Kauffer—and a 2012 printing by a Romanian press, ALLFA.

Nagels's question is of course not about bats per se but about whether it is possible understand any entity or being beyond the self. As for bats, there are over 1400 species and nearly all of them primaily eat fruit or insects. 🤨 www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf...

Unforgettable insight + prose reign in Invisible Man. Ellison answers Nagel's question, conveying the meaning + implications of invisibility across the scales of life as well as revealing the positive power of its subtle forms in collective enterprises like jazz.

Mondrian as foil to Proust— "'The trick, he told the painter Carl Holty, was ‘to refuse to extend it [the past] through remembrance’." Or, Mondrian as titrating the details of an object against our perceptual systems using color, line, and brush stroke to... www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

How does the universe get its shape, are there multiple mechanisms for interstellar travel, and what might hourglass emergence in biological systems have to say about these questions? Preliminary ideas are now up at the appropriately named Babel Blog. jessicaflack.wordpress.com/blog

In the 1930-40's, Turing introduced as part of a machine taxonomy, B-machines, which incorporated reinforcement learning, + O-machines, NN w oracles—a weak form of what could be called global recurrence—with 'truly' universal computation as his goal. More on Babel.Blog Jessicaflack.wordpress.com

The author of this lovely quote, philosopher C.S. Peirce, also invented in 1886 perhaps the 1st electric logical machine. "The first chaos consisted in an infinite multitude of unrelated feelings. As there was no continuity about them, it was, as it were, a powder of feelings." ht @CSPeirceSpeaks

Wheeler discusses Peirce along with William James and Parmenides in his article, "Information, physics, quantum: the search for links" towards the end when he touches on potential connections between quantum mechanics, inference, and computation. x.com/C4COMPUTATION/

Peirce's paper on the logic machine was published interestingly in American Journal of Psychology tinyurl.com/y562zr8n

Five of his students were American. The other three were from Australia, China, and Peru. Murray's PhD supervisor was an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist. A collaboration that brought Murray great joy during his later years at the Institute was with Russian linguists. Photo credit: TBD

As Feynman wrote in a poem read in an address to the National Academy in 1955, “I. . .a universe of atoms. . . an atom in the universe.” This line of Feynman's + his poem as a whole provide perfect context for two of Richard Wright's 4000 haiku. . . ht @proffeynman.bsky.social Image credit: TBD.

Through hourglass emergence, complexity begets complexity...is one of my favorite sayings. A cell is a blob of cytoplasm with a few organelles floating about—or so the textbooks teach and you probably learned in school. More on Babel Blog at jessicaflack.wordpress.com John Wheeler by R.P. Matthews

New posts on Babel Blog. jessicaflack.wordpress.com/blog 1. Reasoning + discreteness 2. Shannon, hourglass emergence, flourishing 3. Weaver's 3 communication problems 4. Euler's formula and causal horizon 5. Bistable images and tbe common now 6. Laughlin's protectorates and hourglass emergence.

A potential renaissance is within our collective grasp. Several related but not yet widely known science advances are challenging old boundaries and revealing new sets of questions. More in the thread below and on (censored) Babel Blog: jessicaflack.wordpress.com/blog

Once again I remind everyone I have not decided on my next primary or secondary locations wrt institutes or personal life. Make assumptions about this at your peril.