Essays
Longer pieces in the first person, where I follow the project's questions past what it can yet measure. The rest of this site is careful; here I am thinking aloud.
These essays are mine, and they claim more than the archive does. Project Nikolaos holds itself to what can be checked. An essay is where the same person asks why the work might matter at all, and lets an idea be beautiful before it has been made safe. Each piece marks its science, its theology and its guesses as the different things they are.
Responses: Essays answering the biologist Michael Levin. Their question: can many become one without ceasing to be many? Proposals: Essays that put a question in a form that could be tested, and say what would refute it.
15 October 2026Responses
Five essays, gathered and corrected
Five essays, each correcting the one before. This piece sets out what I withdraw, the argument in seven steps, what I neglected to say about the Father, my debts to Levin and my disagreements with him, and the questions I have not settled.
9 October 2026Responses
Babel, the glue of a collective, and the name that is yours
Levin has described how cells form a collective self by sharing stress and pooling their memories. The builders of Babel did something similar, and Paul called the result a Power. I wonder whether nature has any other way of making a whole, and I write about what a Power does to its members' concerns, their coincidences and their names.
5 October 2026Responses
Embodiment, personhood, and the one body that was asked
If nothing crosses a boundary, a person might seem to be only an interface. Levin suggests that his space of forms may be pressing outward in search of bodies, and Christianity tells of a body that was asked first. I consider what it means that persons can be questioned and can refuse, and that the Word took flesh as his own.
2 October 2026Proposals
Why animals fear the human voice: the planning-agent hypothesis and two experiments to test it
Animals in South Africa's Greater Kruger National Park flee the sound of calm human speech more readily than the sound of lions, dogs or gunshots. This essay argues that the result is explained by learned or inherited association and by how reliable and how near each cue is, and that it shows nothing about the voice itself. It then states a separate hypothesis, the planning-agent hypothesis: that prey can detect an agent that plans, through behaviour that depends on their own, over and above signs of danger, novelty and complexity. It outlines a simulation with evolved prey and a field experiment with playbacks, a responsive source and an exact replay as control, gives the predicted outcome for every stimulus under each account, and says what would refute the hypothesis.
30 September 2026Responses
Jung, Pauli, and the one world
Received, given, arrives, enters: every word I have used so far assumes an inside, an outside, and something passing between them. Jung and Pauli's one world does without the door. I try to work out what that picture would cost me, where it suits my faith better than my own habits of speech, and where I part company with it.
15 September 2026Responses
Acquisition, reception, and the life of a civilization
We know how to accumulate a civilization's equipment. Whether it comes alive may depend on forms of cooperation that preserve the agency of the people in it, a question I approach through Eden, Ezekiel's valley of bones, and a body that keeps its members persons.
12 September 2026Responses
On minds, Logos, and the futures we can reach
Novel arrangements of living cells can do things no one designed them to do. That surprise sent me back through the Logos to the Spirit, to Pentecost as an image of communion that keeps its members many, and to a provisional idea I call a communion attractor.
Keeping up
Two ways to be told instead. Neither of them is a newsletter.
One entry per report, essay and log note, with its own link and its own date. Nothing is tracked, and this project is never told that you are reading.
One message when something new is documented, nothing else.
There is also a third way, and it is the one this project would rather you took: send us something.