Jessica Flack

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—

Babel Blog Working in the liminal spaces. In the shadow of the butterfly. And the reflection of the peak. If you would like to reprint or commission an essay, please get in touch using lambe.tengwesta@gmail.c…

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

YouTube video by Ella Fitzgerald - Topic April In Paris

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...

A Map of Radical Bewilderment Forget his reputation as a nature writer. Henry David Thoreau was also a highly trained, well regarded, disciplined though eccentric land surveyor.

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

Critical waves and the length problem of biology | PNAS It is pointed out that the mystery of how biological systems measure their lengths vanishes away if one premises that they have discovered a way to...

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.

New to the Digital Library: John Wheeler's Relativity Notebooks | American Philosophical Society Header image: A page from Wheeler's notebook showing his famous diagram of a black hole.The Relativity Notebooks from the John Wheeler Papers are now digitized in their entirety and available to view ...

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. 🤔