Essays
Long-form writing.
Short pieces where physics meets plain language, one idea per essay, followed to the end.
Fluency on the cheap: epistemic hygiene in the LLM era
Before 2023, the price of a paragraph that read like expert analysis was paid in cognitive labour. Now it costs twenty dollars a month. What an author with a conscience left ought to do about it.
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02June 1, 2026· 4 minLevin's hologram: what bioelectricity says to distributed systems
The Levin lab at Tufts shows that body-plan memory lives outside DNA. What follows from that if Pointer Architecture is right, and the experiment that would settle it.
- 03May 19, 2026· 4 min
From substrate to PII — falsifiers in research and in regulated AI
What a self-verifying research artifact and a vendor security review have in common, and why the same epistemic discipline that built Pointer Architecture's verification harness keeps showing up in the regulatory-immunity work I do at mikefluff.com.
04May 3, 2026· 5 minSuperposition as `while(true)`: quantum mechanics through an engineer's eyes
A generative loop in code gives a surprisingly precise intuition for wave function collapse and the delayed-choice quantum eraser. Where the metaphor stops and physics begins.
05May 2, 2026· 3 minAttention as load: what mass-observation experiments would mean if they hold up
PEAR and the Global Consciousness Project produced anomalies that are small, contested, and stubbornly non-zero. What they would mean if Pointer Architecture is right.
06March 14, 2026· 3 minA Loss Function for the Universe
Five independent anomalies, five different fields, one shape — and what it tells us to measure next.
07April 9, 2025· 3 minShifting the rhythm shifts what's available
You cannot hack the simulation. But a shift in your neural state really does change what you see and respond to. Here is the mechanism.
08March 4, 2025· 3 minHow I arrived at Neural Cosmology
A short timeline: an AI engineer notices that five unrelated science news stories are saying the same thing in different words.
09December 18, 2024· 4 minNear-death experience: what neuroscience knows, and what it doesn't
The near-death experience is real. The question is what it tells us about the brain.
10November 4, 2024· 3 minTopology of mind: why Poincaré is a useful language for thought
The Poincaré conjecture, Perelman 2003, and the quiet suspicion that coherent thoughts behave like closed manifolds.
11November 3, 2024· 3 minQuantum consciousness: what is proven and what isn't
From EPR to the 2015 Delft experiment and back to Penrose's microtubules — a sober account of what we actually have.
12November 1, 2024· 3 minEcho of consciousness: time as a byproduct of information processing
It from bit, delayed-choice experiments, and a sober case for why time may be emergent.
13October 19, 2024· 3 minMagic and reality: where science agrees and where it doesn't
Magical thinking is a working model. Sometimes a real mechanism stands behind it, sometimes not. Here is how to tell.
14September 4, 2024· 3 minWhisper of stones: where consciousness ends
Panpsychism, IIT, Hoffman — three serious answers to the question of whether a stone can "feel" anything.
15August 30, 2024· 3 minMirrors: where the fractal is real, and where it is a coincidence
The 2020 Vazza–Feletti paper, fractal dimension, and the line between 'looks similar' and 'has the same structure'.
16August 29, 2024· 3 minBalance as a regime
In esoterica the "balance of opposites" stays abstract; in biology and control theory it is a working mechanism.
17August 15, 2024· 3 minThe web: what "everything is connected" actually means
In conversation the phrase "everything is connected" means nothing. In science it means a lot, once you specify how.
18August 7, 2024· 3 minResonance: physics term or esoteric slogan
The brain synchronises, and that is a fact. The question is with what, at what frequency, and what follows from it.
19August 6, 2024· 3 minUnity and multiplicity: why it isn't a paradox
The individual and the connected are two characteristics of one system. Here is why.
20August 5, 2024· 3 minNeural Cosmology as a working programme
An attempt to build a working model for data that will not fit the old one.
21August 2, 2024· 3 min"I am the universe": what the phrase means technically
If the universe is a neural network, then "I" is a node in it. The question is what it is a node of, and how far it reaches.
22July 28, 2024· 2 minEntropic gravity and the neural universe
If gravity is emergent and the universe is a neural network, those two claims stop being independent.