Macheng Shen

The map

One question, asked at six depths: what makes a future reachable, and what does a finite physical system have to build inside itself in order to reach one.

Read the state before the title. Every entry below is marked survived (it has passed a real test), speculative (untested, interesting, unearned), or retired (killed, usually by its own author). Retired work is not deleted. It stays at its original URL so that it is not rediscovered and proposed again — including by whoever proposed it the first time.

The six sections run from the least agent-like layer to the most, but nothing here is a prerequisite for anything else. Pick the layer you already argue about and start there. /llms.txt is this same index for machines, and 中文版在这里.

Where to start

Three things that describe the whole program before you commit to any part of it.

Universe and information

What information is, physically, and what it costs to keep. Geometry recovered from entanglement, state recovered from history, and two attempts on consciousness that are kept here because they were made, not because they worked.

Intelligence and memory

How a finite system moves update information around inside itself, and what it has to give up to remember. This is the layer with the most measured results, and also the one retired claim the program is most attached to.

Agency and boundary

Where one agent ends and another begins, and whether that boundary is discovered or maintained. Several of these are negative results: the claim was made, tested, and withdrawn, and the withdrawal is the finding.

Many agents, living together

What changes when the participants are not all human: how they address each other, what a protocol has to guarantee, and what becomes scarce once answers are cheap.

The harness, and safety

The working end. Safety treated as a property of the machinery around a model rather than of the model itself — with the gates that are actually running separated from the ones that are only specified.