Inquiries
Living lines of thought. Not projects: questions that keep moving, and sometimes lead to something that can be built.
Each inquiry keeps its working formulation and every earlier one, what it refuses to claim, the experiments it proposes and how far they have gone, what it reads, and what it might feed.
Where inquiries meet the workshop
What each inquiry already feeds, and what it is looking for: questions on one side, tools on the other, one body of work.
| Inquiry | arsis.dev | Spicilège | NamerKit | Palimpseste | Syntype | Layon | LLMarium |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| frictional realism | ● | ● | |||||
| convergence | ○ | ○ | |||||
| plausible societies | ● | ||||||
| measured living | ● | ○ | |||||
| local models | ● | ● | |||||
| concept genealogy | ○ | ||||||
| language under constraint | ○ |
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Frictional realism
Meaning is born in continuation; truth is born in friction.i
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Michael Levin, spaces of possibility, the geometry of models, and the limits of a Platonic reading
When independently trained models meet the same apparent regularities but not necessarily the same mechanisms, which representations become shared, and which let them predict the effect of an action?i
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What makes an invented society plausible, and what does belief do in it?
A culture is plausible when its institutions change what people can do, and when every event has a cause in its history.i
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What do ecological measurements really contain?
In ecological data, rows are plentiful; independent targets are the scarce resource, and many “measured” values were never measured.i
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What can a local model do on a personal machine?
On a personal machine, what limits a local model is less the model than the method around it: examples, a stable prompt, and a benchmark replayed on the same answers.i
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How does a concept travel, and when does it start to disqualify?
A concept’s meaning is the history of its uses: dated uses show when a word that described something began to disqualify someone.i
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What does power do to language, and how do we read what it forces to hide?
Power bends the words everyone uses, and forces some to write between the lines; the first leaves measurable traces in a dated corpus, the second can only be claimed with evidence.i