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, my political interests and my creative interests have all converged on one question:
how do we grasp our terrestrial condition in a manner that enables a flourishing planet for all beings?
There's no single answer to this question. Not even in my head. In fact, I am working on a trio of leaflets - Cellosophy, Planetarity, and Hyperproblems - that offer three takes on that question.
Cellosophy
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
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 👇🏾
Hyperproblems
this is the leaflet you're reading 📖
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.
PS: what I like about is that I can create separate publications for each 'way of looking at the world' but weave them together as I see fit.
PPS: about method - my idea of inquiry has a firm foot in philosophy, but equally so in scientific, social or creative practice, what might have been called 'natural philosophy' in the early modern era, but now needs a new name.
Instead of trying to define this mode of inquiry, let me point you to people whose work inspires me (in no particular order): Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstader, Christopher Alexander, D'Arcy Thompson, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Francisco Varela, J.J. Gibson, Jakob von Uexkull....