The Bestiary Grows

TL;DR: I've updated the Plankton Valhalla Bestiary.

Did you know that Aether Mug has an older sister website? It's called Plankton Valhalla and I publish my essays there (go check it out!). I started it back in 2022 as a repository of explanations building up to a book I wanted to write, an ambitious book to understand reality in light of modern scientific theories like complexity science, systems theory, cybernetics & friends, but framed in a way that feels natural rather than complex.

At some point I realized that, in some cases, a powerful explanation requires tweaking how certain words are defined. This is mildly annoying: isn't the point of language to allow you to express any idea by stringing enough predefined words together? Well, language can do that, but its power is overrated. All ways to express a concept in words are not created equal. Concepts seem to transcend language, or at least to be more fundamental than language. The words need to fit the ideas, not the other way around.

Specialists in any field know this well. Defining a term primes the brain to assimilate that word as its own bounded concept, a black box, i.e. something to be treated as a primitive in linguistic or mental manipulations. Tuning word definitions—and sporadically inventing new terms—equips you with a custom-made toolkit to efficiently think about and discuss notions that were previously too fuzzy and slippery to work with. It's like building your own shovel instead of digging with your hands. After the initial overhead, it gets the job done much more efficiently.

This kind of redefinition of terms comes at the cost of confusing people. If I tell you "the dog's teeth are worn out, we need to replace the dog", you might get the wrong idea unless you know the engineering definition of "dog" (#3 on Merriam-Webster).

So in my essays I started using certain words a lot (system, BAEB, difference) with meanings I tuned very deliberately. I made some highly vague terms precise, and restricted or expanded others in scope. The goal of all this boundary-redrawing is to clarify which parts of reality are like that because you, a human, are contemplating them, and which parts have nothing to do with humans. This culminated in a very meaty essay series running from 2024 to 2025 that makes extensive use of many of those customized terms.

The Plankton Valhalla Bestiary has been there since 2023 to avoid the inevitable confusion, but today I've added several new entries to reflect the Purpose series' vocabulary. These are pretty interesting ideas, if you ask me. I hope you think so too.

(Each Bestiary entry has one or more links to the essays that discuss that term. It might be a good starting point for those who want to get into Plankton Valhalla. Also, if you've read this far, you might want to skip the Bestiary's introduction, which says similar things in older words. Click on "Skip to the definitions" on that page.) ●