Aubrey Lieberman Selected Poems and Essays

Rings, Flow, Signals, and the Intelligence of Living Systems Produced by Aubrey Lieberman in collaboration with ChatGPT 5.2 turbo — February 2026 ⸻ Abstract This essay explores intelligence as a property of durable systems rather than conscious minds, tracing continuity from geology and cosmology through plant biology, animal nervous systems, and artificial intelligence. Using tree rings, wood, plant hydraulics, electrical signaling, and growth direction as anchoring examples, it reframes intelligence as constraint navigation and error correction under uncertainty, with consciousness emerging only in mobile organisms requiring rapid centralized prediction. By distinguishing intelligence, consciousness, and information integration, the essay situates mind as a late, contingent phenomenon layered atop far older organizing principles. ⸻ Trees taught us to read time before we invented clocks. In temperate and boreal forests, growth proceeds in pulses separated by enforced pauses. Each paus...

Archimedes and Airplanes Weight, Balance, Trim, and the Geometry of Flying Created by Aubrey Lieberman in collaboration with ChatGPT 5.2 turbo — February 2026 Archimedes of Syracuse, who lived in ancient Greece more than 2200 years ago, is often remembered as the mathematical genius who leaped from his bath shouting “Eureka!”, when his ideas about buoyancy gelled. But his enduring scientific contribution was a method of thinking that allows complex physical systems to be understood reliably. Archimedes showed that a complicated object, no matter how irregular, could be treated as if all its weight acted at a single point. He also formalized the concepts of levers and moments. A moment is a mathematical concept involving a force acting through a distance. He lived in a world of shipbuilders, soldiers, merchants, and rulers with practical demands and competing intuitions. Those tensions stimulated his ingenuity. Calculus, presaged by Archimedes, did not arrive until the 1600s, so the for...