CORE is the name for this whole body of work: the books, the essays, and the questions that connect them. Its subject is how human experience takes shape, why it lasts, and how it changes.
Some familiar examples
Some of the most familiar problems in a life share an odd feature. A person can understand a problem and still struggle to respond differently. A routine can support a life and later restrict it. A belief can organize experience while making some evidence hard to hear.
In each case, the pattern alone doesn’t explain much. It helps to look at what keeps it going.
The questions
- What makes a pattern possible?
- What keeps it going?
- How does its history shape what can happen next?
- When can new experience or consequences change it?
The books and essays take up these questions through psychology, neuroscience, systems thinking, and the physical sciences.
How I handle evidence
Words like energy, information, and coherence mean something precise in science and something looser in everyday speech. When I borrow from another field, I try to keep those meanings straight.
I sort what I write into four kinds of claim and try to make clear which is which:
- Established knowledge, credited to its sources.
- Inferences I draw by connecting findings, with the assumptions visible.
- Proposals of my own, offered to be tested, not as settled science.
- Open questions, left open when the evidence can’t settle them.
A resemblance between two fields is a reason to look closer. It isn’t proof that the same thing is happening in both. And a good explanation should show where a different one would fit better.
Ways in
The essays start with particular experiences. The books follow those questions through a longer argument.