Essays

These essays bundle up chunks of thinking evolved from my notes. They are mostly autodidactic, naïvely ambitious, and often quite abstract. With that might come an idiosyncratic charm, but probably also some foolishness.

2022

Where I'm finally writing on a regular basis again but shift from essays to notes.

From Predictive Processing to Topological Thinking: Prolegomena to a Future Paradigm

The heart of a scientific paradigmUnderstood as “accepted examples of actual scientific practice – examples which include law, theory, application, and instrumentation together – [that] provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research”. (Kuhn 1970, 10)

is a practice (“how understanding is being done”), its foundation an ontology (“what there is to understand”). Any future paradigm should reflect our best knowledge about how biological and social systems actually understand the world instead of phantasising about how understanding could or should work.

2021

Where I draft even more and finish even less, apart from my graduation thesis.

2020

Where I generate lots of drafts, but finish very little.

A Framework for Sensemaking

We all are trying to make sense of the world. For that, we implicitly or explicitly use frameworks: scaffolding in the form of conceptual spaces, ontologies, models, and theories that guide our perceptions, judgements, and predictions – and that can be more or less useful.Examples for generic sensemaking frameworks are Dave Snowden’s Cynefin and Cynthia Kurtzs’s Confluence framework. The Product Field is a domain-specific sensemaking framework.

2019

Where I start to focus on complexity and climate.

2018

Where I write more term papers.

2017

Where I write term papers again after a 15-year break.