Blog

  • Clock This: Discovering Eternal Structure in a World That Never Repeats

    Mark Tracy Imagine living in a world where patterns repeat in a meaningful sense—but never in exactly the same way. The Sun rises every day.The Moon goes through phases.The seasons return each year. But if… Read more

  • Human Temporal Metacognition: An Explanatory Hypothesis

    On the shoulders of giants “por los siglos de los siglos” History becomes possible when at least three natural cycles repeat with incommensurate periods, producing configurations whose relative phases continually drift and never exactly repeat.… Read more

  • The Moral Principle of Action-Motivation

    Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative is to act according to that maxim which you can simultaneously will to be a universal law. However, I think that there are no maxims regarding actions alone that may be… Read more

  • On Abstraction and Analogy

    I like to publish my most important ongoing works to this blog so that they may be read in the event of my unexpected death. The foregoing text is one example. In it, I discuss… Read more

  • What Is Prior to Time and Space?

    by Mark Tracy The physical notions of time and space—whether understood phenomenologically or theoretically—are ontologically posterior to the co-arising notions of demarcation and abstraction. By saying that one thing A is ontologically prior to another… Read more

  • Let He Who is Without Sin Cast the First Stone

    Let He Who is Without Sin Cast the First StoneTake up space in creation.You already do.Take your place in creation:Your place of creator and creature,As the imaginer, the imagining;What you slow grows; and what you… Read more

  • A Thought to Meditate On

    If we choose to be, then we are reality articulating itself into existence as such. In saying “I am,” we at once give voice to God’s “I AM.” Read more

  • Crystal Teardrops: On Gender and Transgenderism

    Crystal Teardrops (on Gender)My poems are crystal teardropsborn of confusion, crystallizedby its resolution.They work their way out;I cannot push them.Here’s one.I am the lightest amongst womenand I beat the heavy drum amidst the company of… Read more

  • A Few Thoughts on Grace for the Easter Season

    I have been thinking about grace recently. Psalm 42 says, “Hope in God, and you will praise Him again.” This strikes me because it seems that if you hope for grace, then you will have… Read more

  • Systems: How to Model Anything and Learn from Data

    Dear reader, Here is essentially everything I know, distilled into a handful of pages. It is a high-level map of how to model anything and how to learn from data. It is intentionally general, though… Read more

Welcome to my blog!

I’m Mark, a PhD student and researcher at the intersection of AI and cognitive science. This blog more or less consists of free form reflection on whatever I am grappling with personally or thinking about professionally or philosophically. Opinions are my own.