HeyJaredTectonic Field Notes
My more academic phisophical and synthetic essays. “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” -Carl Sagan
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 4
- Latest publication
- Sep 26, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 10, 2026
Latest issues
Where the Knowledge Went (opens the original)
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ⅠNobody knows how they walk. Ask a person to explain it and you will get a description of the outcome -- one foot, then the other -- and nothing at all about the operation, because the operation was never available to them. Standing upright on two points of contact is a control problem that would keep an engineer busy for a career: a tall mass balanced over a shifting base, hundreds of muscles adjusting tension many times a second, the whole arrangement falling forward and catching itself in a r
The Eye is Beholden to Whom? (opens the original)
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<img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="600" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!85gM!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffd910881-f092-4275-b309-e813835a68c9_1160x600.jpe
One Frame Per Week (opens the original)
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IThere is a parish church called St. Rose of Lima. Nothing about it announces an instrument. It has a circular stained-glass window, a sanctuary with a cross at its center, a lectern standing on one side and a tall Paschal candle on the other, and a congregation under its roof at the early mass on any given Sunday. Since around Thanksgiving of 2024 I have been part of it -- same mass, same hour, every week, without a break.For most of that year the room did what rooms do. It held still. A church
The Insistence on a Window (opens the original)
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IThe nervous system automates relentlessly, and it is right to. Breathing does not wait on permission. The branch is taken before the taking is thought. The read of a room arrives whole, ahead of any account you could give of how you read it. Automation is faster than deliberation and, inside the world it was built for, it is usually righter, because it was tuned by a great many failures that did not survive to argue. An organism that had to consciously compute those operations would already be
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