First a few words about myself: I am a mathematician and cognitive scientist by training and a philosopher by avocation. I am both an academic and an entrepreneur. These days I run an organization called Socratus that I founded.

Over the past decade my scientific interests and my political interests and my creative interests have all converged on one question:

how do we grasp our terrestrial condition?

I am working on a trio of leaflets - Cellosophy, Planetarity, and Hyperproblems - that offer three takes on that question.

Cellosophy begins at the smallest scale, with bacteria and other unicellular organisms. These are not merely creatures that live on Earth. Through their sensing, agency, metabolism, and collective activity, they transform the atmosphere, oceans, and soils, and, in a literal sense, help build the planet. Read it here 👇🏾

Planetarity begins at the other extreme: Earth as a whole. It asks how we might understand and govern ourselves as participants in a dynamic planetary system, preserving habitability across deep time and for the entire community of life. Read it here 👇🏾

you're here 👇🏾

Between cell and planet lies a dense web of technologies, institutions, models, and methods through which we sense and respond to an interconnected world. Hyperproblems concerns this middle layer. It asks how we can build the collective intelligence needed to work across scales, disciplines, and systems—whether we are studying microbial agency or governing planetary change.

The three projects are inseparable. Cellosophy examines the agents from which planetary life is composed. Planetarity examines the whole those agents collectively produce and inhabit. Hyperproblems develops the capacities through which we can perceive, understand, and act within the relations between them.