Investigations¶

Long-running questions about humans, brains, and the substrate this repo runs on. Each page is L0 → L1 → L2 — the reader picks depth.

🌿 budding tended 2026-05-08 research open-questions L0-L1-L2

flowchart LR
  q[open question] --> l0[L0: TL;DR]
  l0 --> l1[L1: overview]
  l1 --> l2[L2: deep dive]
  l2 -.findings.-> q

Investigations¶

Long-running questions about humans, brains, and the substrate this repo runs on. Each page is a Wikipedia-style article: TL;DR (L0) → overview (L1) → deep dive (L2). Reader picks depth; author picks how many levels to write.

MapList of PagesProtocols & Methodology

Map¶

Click any node to open the page.

flowchart LR
 stig[stigmergy] -.-> brain[brain]
 brain -.-> energy[energy]
 brain --> gen[generators]
 brain --> struct[structure]
 brain --> cog[cognition methods]
 cog --> struct
 cog --> gen
 brain --> dis[diseases]
 brain --> axis[body axis]
 axis --> emb[embodied learn]
 emb --> coord[coordination]
 struct --> dis
 struct --> coord
 gen -.-> learn[skills]
 energy -.-> learn
 stig -.-> universe[universe]
 brain -.-> universe
 energy -.-> bureau[bureaucracy]
 bureau -.-> universe
 health[health] --> energy
 health --> brain
 health --> axis
 sport[sport] --> health
 sport --> energy
 sport --> emb
 sport --> coord
 reflect[reflections] --> stig
 reflect --> universe
 reflect --> brain
 reflect --> gen
 universe --> seed[seeding civs]
 reflect --> seed
 expl[explanations] --> universe
 expl --> reflect
 expl --> brain
 nothing[nothing] --> expl
 nothing --> universe
 nothing --> brain
 stig -.-> seed
 energy --> elec[electrons]
 elec --> universe
 elec --> bureau
 axis --> olf[olfactory]
 olf --> mix[mixtures]
 mix --> emb
 reflect --> color[seeing colors]
 color --> olf
 brain --> color
 brain --> intel[intelligent systems]
 intel --> bureau
 intel --> universe
 intel --> learn
 intel --> game[vibe rts-fps]
 stig --> game
 game -.-> learn
 expl --> godot[waiting for godot]
 reflect --> godot
 gen --> godot
 brain --> godot
 godot --> game
 gen --> diff[diffusion models]
 intel --> diff
 reflect --> diff

 click stig "STIGMERGY-IN-DAILY-LIFE/" "Stigmergy in daily life"
 click brain "BRAIN-MEMORY-MANAGEMENT/" "Brain memory management"
 click gen "HUMANS-AS-GENERATORS/" "Humans as generators"
 click struct "BRAIN-STRUCTURE/" "Brain structure"
 click cog "COGNITION-METHODS/" "Cognition methods"
 click dis "BRAIN-DISEASES/" "Brain diseases"
 click axis "BRAIN-BODY-AXIS/" "Brain ↔ body axis"
 click emb "EMBODIED-LEARNING/" "Embodied learning"
 click coord "COORDINATION/" "Coordination"
 click energy "ENERGY-AND-ATTENTION/" "Energy and attention"
 click learn "LEARNABLE-SKILLS-FOR-VARIANCE/" "Learnable skills"
 click bureau "BUREAUCRACY-AND-AI/" "Bureaucracy and AI"
 click universe "UNIVERSE-EVOLUTION-AS-COMPRESSION/" "Universe as compression"
 click health "HEALTH-AS-INFRASTRUCTURE/" "Health as infrastructure"
 click sport "SPORT-AND-MOVEMENT/" "Sport and movement"
 click reflect "REFLECTIONS-AND-RECEIVERS/" "Reflections and receivers"
 click seed "SEEDING-OFFSPRING-CIVILIZATIONS/" "Seeding offspring civilisations"
 click elec "ELECTRON-MANAGEMENT/" "Electron management"
 click olf "OLFACTORY-SENSES/" "Olfactory senses"
 click color "SEEING-COLORS/" "Seeing colors"
 click mix "MIXTURES/" "Mixtures"
 click intel "INTELLIGENT-SYSTEMS/" "Intelligent systems"
 click game "VIBE-RTS-FPS-GAME/" "Vibe RTS-FPS game (project)"
 click expl "GODDING-EXPLANATIONS/" "Godding explanations"
 click nothing "NOTHING/" "Nothing"
 click godot "WAITING-FOR-GODOT/" "Waiting for Godot — one actor, many minds"
 click diff "DIFFUSION-MODELS/" "Diffusion models — text + image"

  classDef stub fill:#fff,stroke:#888,stroke-dasharray:5 5
  class stig,brain,learn,universe,bureau stub
  classDef project fill:#f4f0e6,stroke:#a67b4a,stroke-width:2px
  class game project

Dashed = stub. Solid = at least partially filled.

Pages¶

File	Rating	What it asks
GENESIS-TO-SCALE	medium	Given a viable seed, what governs the climb? Three founding transitions (existence → structural completion → autonomy) and four K_avg regimes (fragmented → transition → connected core → scale-free) — with the binding constraint rotating at each phase and most stalls being phase-mismatched effort.
STIGMERGY-IN-DAILY-LIFE	medium	How do humans coordinate through traces left in shared environments — paintings, post-its, worn paths — and what does that compress?
BRAIN-MEMORY-MANAGEMENT	medium	How does the working-memory stack run with finite slots, why does sleep act like a regression routine, and what makes some compressions reliveable?
HUMANS-AS-GENERATORS	medium	If the brain generates rather than retrieves, are creativity, commitment, obsession, madness, and free-flow five settings of three dials — stack diversity, prior precision, stack churn — on one machine?
BRAIN-STRUCTURE	medium	What is the smallest set of structural facts about the brain (layers, columns, networks, hubs) that lets you predict what happens when a part is damaged?
COGNITION-METHODS	medium	What cognition methods have humans actually invented across history, which ones generalise, what hardware does each recruit, and how do you run several at once (multi-expert) on the same problem?
BRAIN-DISEASES	medium	If diseases are natural lesion experiments, what does each major class (degenerative, psychiatric, developmental, vascular, paroxysmal, autoimmune) teach about the normal brain — and which dials does it break?
BRAIN-BODY-AXIS	medium	Vagus, HPA, gut, heart, breath, immune — which body channels carry enough signal to shape cognition, mood, and disease, and which are background?
EMBODIED-LEARNING	medium	What are the actual circuits and timescales of motor learning, and which practice principles (variability, retrieval, sleep, imagery) produce durable skill versus fast-but-shallow improvement?
COORDINATION	medium	Coordination as nested control loops at four speeds (spinal, brainstem, cerebellar, cortical) — what is trainable, what is structurally fixed, and what do the failure modes localise?
ENERGY-AND-ATTENTION	medium	Breath, sport, attention variance — what do they actually contribute to the brain stack, and how do you direct variance upward?
HEALTH-AS-INFRASTRUCTURE	medium	Which health interventions reliably preserve or expand capacity, and which are theatre dressed as health? Sleep, food, movement, social as the four levers.
SPORT-AND-MOVEMENT	medium	Endurance, strength, mobility — three orthogonal capacities. What does a sustainable amateur protocol look like across decades, and what makes it fail?
REFLECTIONS-AND-RECEIVERS	medium	A tilted mirror, disco ball, soap bubble, spider thread — passive scattering surfaces compress the surrounding light field. How much info is encoded, how much does any one receiver extract, and what combos amplify variance from one environment?
GODDING-EXPLANATIONS	high	From 0D void to Boltzmann brains and the "info farm" — what are the physical and metaphysical explanations for the godding process?
NOTHING	high	What does "nothing" mean across physics, theology, cognition, and godding, and when does "nothing is unstable" become an overclaim?
BUREAUCRACY-AND-AI	medium	How much human energy and time goes to bureaucracy, what does AI absorb of it, and what shape does the system take after AI saturates?
UNIVERSE-EVOLUTION-AS-COMPRESSION	medium	Is the universe's evolution a single thread — dark/light, finite energy per channel, sleep cycles at every scale — managed by multi-meaning compressed messages and stigmergic state?
LEARNABLE-SKILLS-FOR-VARIANCE	medium	Concrete drills (left-hand, weird combos, single-scene imagining, sport+breath) — which produce upward-directed variance in the brain stack, and how cheaply?
SEEDING-OFFSPRING-CIVILIZATIONS	medium	Given current physics — no FTL, no quantum signaling, 1/r² link decay — can a civilisation deliberately seed life across light-years and fuzzy-control its development? Where does control degrade to one-way seeding, and where to pure scattering?
ELECTRON-MANAGEMENT	medium	Energy flow at three nested scales — civilization, body, cell — under one compact representation. World electricity ledger, the ATP cycle, and why the "packet" is the right unit, not the electron.
OLFACTORY-SENSES	medium	How does smell actually work, what odor families exist, what smells warn you of what hazards, and is olfaction shape-binding or vibration?
SEEING-COLORS	medium	What is color, why do different people see different ones, why does the mantis shrimp's 12 cones not beat our 3, how much of the EM spectrum is even visible, and how many senses can a person actually master?
MIXTURES	medium	When two foods (or smells, or sounds) combine, when is the result good, bad, or something else? Taste interaction matrix, smell pairing (resonance vs contrast), perfumery's three-note structure, distilling smells to subcomponents.
INTELLIGENT-SYSTEMS	medium	Neural · fuzzy · symbolic-graph — three substrates for intelligent computation. Modern ML architectures (transformer + competitors), representing mathematics and images, and a self-reflective look at the LLM architecture this repo runs on.
VIBE-RTS-FPS-GAME	draft (project)	Can's side-project plan: a single-player RTS-FPS where the player is a god with finite attention across a procedurally-generated, evolving world zoomable from the Big Bang through cells/mutations to empires. Empire Earth eras + AoM pantheons (historical or LLM-generated) + Minecraft mutable terrain + Spore scales. Covers the sim↔body seam, multi-scale zoom, attention as the scarce resource, evolving ecology + real-resource geology, mythology as sim-compression, AI asset pipeline, swarm protocol applied to game-dev.
DIFFUSION-MODELS	high	What is the shared mechanism behind text-to-image diffusion and discrete/masked text diffusion, why is the text branch suddenly competitive with autoregression, and is the unified any-to-any masked-diffusion substrate the next dominant generative model? First-use page for the `forage` + `swarmgodforage` verbs.

Page template¶

Every investigation page follows this skeleton — see any of the stubs for an example.

# Title

> Status: stub|partial|deep | YYYY-MM-DD | rating: bad|medium|good

## L0 — TL;DR (≤5 lines)

## L1 — Overview
- Core question
- Why it matters
- Mermaid map (≤9 nodes)
- Skeleton sub-claims

## L2 — Deep dive (when filled)
- Sub-section per sub-claim
- Each claim has a ref line

## Open questions

## References

## Inspiration sources

## See also

Why these pages¶

The user asked, in plain language, for investigation of: stigmergy in daily life, brain memory management through stigmergy, sleep, breath / sport / attention, bureaucracy + AI + post-AI, the evolution of the universe as a compressed-message system, and learnable variance-producing skills. Six pages covered that surface without overlap. Two later additions — HEALTH-AS-INFRASTRUCTURE and SPORT-AND-MOVEMENT — go deep on the substrate the original ENERGY-AND-ATTENTION page touched only briefly, since the user kept returning to "more on health, sports."