complex systems
Most of what I find interesting lives in complex systems — thermodynamics, chaos, language, statistics, why we feel what we feel. The list below is everything I’ve published on Substack that fits this thread, grouped roughly by theme. Each entry is linked; the colored tag is what theme it sits under.
1. Arrow of time On why time appears to flow in one direction — entropy as the asymmetric ratchet built into thermodynamics.
2. Entropy dynamics in centralised and… How entropy behaves differently in centralised vs distributed structures.
3. Why can’t Newton’s physics predict… Where classical determinism breaks down — chaos, sensitivity to initial conditions, the three-body problem.
4. Does God play dice to decide your… Quantum randomness, determinism, and what it means for free will (companion to the consciousness essay).
5. A mathematical look at why language… Treating language as a formal system — what mathematics can and can’t say about meaning.
6. Words are bad. Numbers are even worse. Both of our main symbol systems lose information about the thing they’re describing. A look at where each fails.
7. Chicken or egg — who came first? The bootstrap problem dressed up as a riddle — how things that depend on each other can ever begin.
8. Thinking about the hierarchy of sciences Physics → chemistry → biology → psychology → economics. What does it actually mean for one science to “sit on top of” another?
9. Sometimes science is right, other… When the scientific method gets you to the truth and when it doesn’t — and how to tell the difference.
10. On statistics What statistics is actually doing, what it pretends to do, and where it stops being honest.
11. Why do we find Eren Yeager cool? On characters who break the rules we live by, and why we admire them rather than fear them.
12. Can you compliment your girlfriend? A small communication question that opens up into a bigger one about how affection actually travels between people.
13. I tried to find a solution to feeling… An attempt to treat an emotional problem as a systems problem — what worked, what didn’t.
Index, v1. Descriptions are short and inferred from titles — open the links for the actual essays. New entries get appended here when they fit the complex-systems thread.