Determinism, causality, irreducibility — ideas at the very edge of what we can formalize, sitting right next to the things we can't.
Essays, apps, and experiments that let you engage with these ideas directly.
These aren't experiments you can run in a browser. They're questions that refuse to resolve — and the fact that they're unresolvable turns out to be part of the answer. We think about them anyway.
If the physical universe is deterministic down to the quark — and it might be — then every decision you've ever made was settled at the Big Bang. Does that mean free will is an illusion? Or just that "free will" was always the wrong frame?
Wolfram's uncomfortable idea: some systems simply cannot be predicted faster than by running them. No shortcut. No theorem. Only execution. If true, it puts hard limits on what science can ever tell us.
Chalmers asked: why is there something it is like to be you? We can explain every neural function — attention, memory, planning — but that doesn't explain why any of it feels like anything. That gap might be permanent.
Pearl's ladder of causation — association, intervention, counterfactual. "X caused Y" seems simple until you try to define it rigorously. Turns out we've been using the concept for millennia before anyone could say what it means.
When does "more" become genuinely different? The wetness of water isn't in any individual molecule. Life doesn't live in any single atom. At some threshold, new descriptions become necessary — and irreducible.
Is cognition computation? Turing said you can't distinguish them. Searle said the Chinese Room proves you can. The argument has been going for seventy years and both sides still think they're obviously right.
Smaller, sharper questions that keep resurfacing across different contexts.
The unreasonable effectiveness of math in physics suggests the universe runs on it. But where were the imaginary numbers before anyone wrote them down?
Gödel says any sufficiently powerful formal system contains truths it cannot prove. Does that apply to minds? To AI? To the universe itself attempting self-description?
The fundamental equations of physics are time-symmetric. Nothing in the math requires a past and a future. The arrow of time — the feeling of "now" — is still not fully explained.
We write equations that predict planetary motion, quantum states, and economic behavior. But are these descriptions or constraints? Does the universe follow the laws, or do the laws just describe what the universe does?
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in its strong form was mostly rejected. But something is left — the words you have available change the thoughts you reach for first. Code is a language too.
Shannon gave us bits. Kolmogorov gave us complexity. Landauer showed that erasing a bit generates heat. Information is physical. And physical things are, in some sense, nothing but information.
Not a reading list — more like a list of people whose ideas stuck and won't unstick.
Incompleteness theorems. The idea that sufficiency creates blindspots — that any powerful enough system has things it can't see about itself — feels relevant everywhere.
Coined "the hard problem." Even if you disagree with his conclusions, the question he named is real and the fact that it's still open matters.
Gave causality a formal language. The Book of Why changed how to think about data, models, and what "because" actually means.
A New Kind of Science and the computational irreducibility argument. Whether or not the Ruliad is the universe, the idea that simple rules generate irreducible complexity is hard to shake.
Gödel, Escher, Bach. Strange loops, self-reference, and consciousness as a side effect of a system becoming complex enough to model itself. Required reading for anyone building things that think.
Consciousness Explained and the "intentional stance." A deflationary account of mind that explains a lot — and provokes everyone who thinks there must be more to it. Maybe there isn't.