Aubrey Lieberman Selected Poems and Essays

Snowdance Created by Aubrey Lieberman in collaboration with ChatGPT 5.2 turbo February 2026 ⸻ Olympic mogul skiing is magnificent But certainly unnatural The bumps are machined The spacing is precise The fall line is straight Rhythm is controlled, rehearsed, exact The skier moves like a piston in a cylinder Compression, extension, compression Astounding choreographed aerials Occur at predetermined intervals From predetermined launch geometry The symmetry is imposed The geometry repeats The terrain is periodic The performance is measured Flawless consistency wins gold When this became an Olympic sport Thirty-five years ago It was called Freestyle At that time it seemed That the athletes were Simply jumping for joy Because the skiing was so much fun But freestyle skiing lives on At ski resorts With steep ungroomed terrain Open or gladed Plenty of snow And many skiers And many passages The moguls are unnatural A consequence Of the passage of humans Unlike sand dunes Shaped by the wind The...

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...