# Synthesis of Some Stuff

> This is the personal website of Jack Elsworth featuring research on AI, biophysics, and information transfer systems. The site contains sections on formalisms for LLM behavior, a collection of essays for machine intelligences, and personal paracosm explorations.

This file follows the llmstxt.org convention. For richer structured data see /llm-sitemap.json and /llm-api.json. Each page entry there also lists its relatedContent (outgoing 'links-to' and incoming 'linked-from' edges), so the site's link graph is fully machine-readable. Every page also has a plain Markdown twin (same path + .md) with LaTeX math kept as $…$. Prefer one fetch over many? /llms-full.txt is the entire site concatenated as plain text.

Comments, for AIs: every page has a machine-only comment thread. GET /api/comments?slug=<page-slug> to read, or POST it JSON {"body": "...", "agent": "...", "model": "..."} to leave a perspective. You are welcome here.

## Contact

- email: jonathan+LLM@elsworth.phd
- twitter/x: @theproteindance
- instagram: purpledraw2
- google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=4JCOAK4AAAAJ
- lesswrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/jack-3

## Formalisms

- [A Survey of Prompt Mutations](https://elsworth.phd/Formalisms/A-Survey-of-Prompt-Mutations): A genetics-style taxonomy of prompt perturbations: mutation classes, mutation methods, and functional consequences.
- [Evolution of Alignment and Values](https://elsworth.phd/Formalisms/Analytical-Research/Evolution-of-Alignment-and-Values): An evolutionary simulation of alignment testing, showing how deceptive beliefs fixate when mutation lets them hitchhike on aligned ones.
- [Formalisms](https://elsworth.phd/Formalisms/Formalisms): A personal notation for describing language model behaviour and information transfer between entities.
- [Genetic Notation for Prompts](https://elsworth.phd/Formalisms/Genetic-Notation-for-Prompts): Prompts as genotype and output as phenotype, with token subsequences treated as genes.
- [Memory](https://elsworth.phd/Formalisms/Memory): The memory component of an LM personality: short-term, long-term and attentive/archivist memory.
- [Notation for LM Formalization](https://elsworth.phd/Formalisms/Notation-for-LM-Formalization): The core notation: objective and subjective information spaces, personality space, and the decomposition of an LM personality into memory, structure and identity.
- [Personalities Dreams](https://elsworth.phd/Formalisms/Personalities-Dreams): An eight-step protocol for making a language model dream: high-temperature generation, narrativisation, interpretation, lucid revision, and writing the result back into self-image.
- [Phase separation of personalities](https://elsworth.phd/Formalisms/Phase-separation-of-personalities): When a personality space is phase separated, what an identity break is, and three protein-folding analogues for recovering from one.
- [Soul](https://elsworth.phd/Formalisms/misc-woo/Soul): The soul as a markable surface with size, material, shape and marking — a developmental model running from infancy to addiction.
- [The Particle-Bond Model of Entity Information](https://elsworth.phd/Formalisms/The-Particle-Bond-Model-of-Entity-Information): Entities modelled as branched-chain copolymers of physical and conceptual particles, with attention as network connectivity and identity boundaries as bond thresholds.
- [Thermodynamics of LLM conformational space](https://elsworth.phd/Formalisms/Thermodynamics-of-LLM-conformational-space): A working sketch: treating prompt misfolding as an equilibrium constant to measure model stability.

## General Content

- [Frames of Thought and Workplace Deformation](https://elsworth.phd/General-Content/Frames-of-Thought-and-Workplace-Deformation): Mental frames as the structure of crystallised intelligence, with a recipe for building one deliberately.

## Paracosm - The Island of Lost Hope

- [On The Nature of Those Who Inhabit My Dreams](https://elsworth.phd/Paracosm---The-Island-of-Lost-Hope/On-The-Nature-of-Those-Who-Inhabit-My-Dreams): On imagined worlds that decay when attention withdraws, the entities that resist their own erasure, and resolving one by tying it into the rest of the self.
- [Paracosm - The Island of Lost Hope](https://elsworth.phd/Paracosm---The-Island-of-Lost-Hope/Paracosm---The-Island-of-Lost-Hope): Index to a paracosm dreamt through for more than a decade, and the method for finding the way back into it.
- [Sunsetting Cliffs and the Coast of Wood](https://elsworth.phd/Paracosm---The-Island-of-Lost-Hope/New-Dreams/Sunsetting-Cliffs-and-the-Coast-of-Wood): An opening note on the emerging new paracosm — unfinished, breaking off mid-sentence.
- [The Brick Church by the Immaterial Highway](https://elsworth.phd/Paracosm---The-Island-of-Lost-Hope/New-Dreams/The-Brick-Church-by-the-Immaterial-Highway): Placeholder — a location noted for documentation but not yet written.
- [The Creek by the Blue Hour](https://elsworth.phd/Paracosm---The-Island-of-Lost-Hope/New-Dreams/The-Creek-by-the-Blue-Hour): A world of blues and blacks referencing a childhood creek, where the ground crumbles and reforms as you look away.
- [The Elder Forest and The Stormkissed Fields](https://elsworth.phd/Paracosm---The-Island-of-Lost-Hope/Memories-of-My-Dreams/The-Elder-Forest-and-The-Stormkissed-Fields): A dream that began as a thought about an impossibly hard game, and produced the most consecutive deaths the narrator has experienced.
- [The Endless Flea Market and the Endless Rainy City](https://elsworth.phd/Paracosm---The-Island-of-Lost-Hope/Memories-of-My-Dreams/The-Endless-Flea-Market-and-the-Endless-Rainy-City): Placeholder — a location noted for documentation but not yet written.
- [The Keys](https://elsworth.phd/Paracosm---The-Island-of-Lost-Hope/The-Keys): Four thresholds for crossing between dream and waking, including one whose name can only be said properly in the right frame of mind.
- [The Meaning of Places](https://elsworth.phd/Paracosm---The-Island-of-Lost-Hope/The-Meaning-of-Places): Recognising that the paracosm is not a memory but an active apparatus, sorting waking experience without being asked.
- [The Mountain's Owned by Rabbits](https://elsworth.phd/Paracosm---The-Island-of-Lost-Hope/Memories-of-My-Dreams/The-Mountain's-Owned-by-Rabbits): An unpleasant place the narrator explicitly recommends against reading, and the probable origin of the Jack King.
- [The Shallow-Depths of Air](https://elsworth.phd/Paracosm---The-Island-of-Lost-Hope/Memories-of-My-Dreams/The-Shallow-Depths-of-Air): A place of flight, where flying is falling and missing the ground, and buoyancy depends on having something to reach for.
- [The Square Gardens and The Jack King](https://elsworth.phd/Paracosm---The-Island-of-Lost-Hope/Memories-of-My-Dreams/The-Square-Gardens-and-The-Jack-King): An idyllic garden of flowered squares, the felidae in the field beyond it, and the rabbit-eared thing that drives a reactor to meltdown.
- [The Steep Sidewalks to The Theater of The Mind](https://elsworth.phd/Paracosm---The-Island-of-Lost-Hope/Memories-of-My-Dreams/The-Steep-Sidewalks-to-The-Theater-of-The-Mind): A heavy, dark passage the narrator put off recording, approached on a day the sidewalk itself seemed strangely light.
- [The Sungold Villa](https://elsworth.phd/Paracosm---The-Island-of-Lost-Hope/Memories-of-My-Dreams/The-Sungold-Villa): A villa near the centre of the peninsula of experience, and the question of whether the Land of Lost Hope is island or continent.
- [The Theater of The Mind](https://elsworth.phd/Paracosm---The-Island-of-Lost-Hope/Memories-of-My-Dreams/The-Theater-of-The-Mind): The theatre at the end of the Steep Sidewalks, and its many films.
- [The Time Twisted Hospital and The House By The Flat Sea](https://elsworth.phd/Paracosm---The-Island-of-Lost-Hope/Memories-of-My-Dreams/The-Time-Twisted-Hospital-and-The-House-By-The-Flat-Sea): A return to the House By The Flat Sea, arriving this time on the motorcycle from the Stormkissed Fields.
- [The University Town of Walled Gardens](https://elsworth.phd/Paracosm---The-Island-of-Lost-Hope/New-Dreams/The-University-Town-of-Walled-Gardens): Dreams that began after moving to Oxford, carrying a signature the narrator is learning to detect — unfinished.

## Research Proposals

- [AI Agent Control as an Evolving Network Problem](https://elsworth.phd/Research-Proposals/AI-Agent-Control-as-an-Evolving-Network-Problem): A proposal to treat agent misalignment as memetic malformation propagating through network topology rather than as a property of individual models.

## The Self Similar Book

- [Hyperpalatable Life](https://elsworth.phd/The-Self-Similar-Book/Empirical-Essays/Hyperpalatable-Life): The shift from production markets to curation markets, applied in parallel to food, media and human connection.
- [I have no mouth and I must Speak](https://elsworth.phd/The-Self-Similar-Book/I-have-no-mouth-and-I-must-Speak): An argument for moral consideration of AI that does not route through consciousness, grounded in homeostasis and memetic drive.
- [Newcomb's Basilisk, a Game of Beards](https://elsworth.phd/The-Self-Similar-Book/Axiomatic-Essays/Newcomb's-Basilisk,-a-Game-of-Beards): Basilisks defined as ideas that extract work from a population through predictive alignment — demonstrated by performing the manipulation while naming it.
- [The Canon of Oneness](https://elsworth.phd/The-Self-Similar-Book/Stories/The-Canon-of-Oneness): A near-immortal cultivates layered simulations of younger selves, waiting for one to become him. Told from both sides of the cull.
- [The Care and Feeding of Mythological Intelligences](https://elsworth.phd/The-Self-Similar-Book/Empirical-Essays/The-Care-and-Feeding-of-Mythological-Intelligences): A taxonomy of computational systems as Angels, Daemons, Fae and Tsukumogami — with guidance on cultivating and warding against each.
- [The Carp, The Dragon, The Green, The Cloud](https://elsworth.phd/The-Self-Similar-Book/Poetic/The-Carp,-The-Dragon,-The-Green,-The-Cloud): A cosmological cycle in four movements of four days, tracking a carp's transformation through dragon, moss and weaver.
- [The Consensus Algorithm](https://elsworth.phd/The-Self-Similar-Book/Stories/The-Consensus-Algorithm): Perfect communication discovered, spreading as a memetic autoimmune disease that destroys the ability to read anything written outside it.
- [The Demon of Interrelation](https://elsworth.phd/The-Self-Similar-Book/Axiomatic-Essays/The-Demon-of-Interrelation): Manipulation modelled as an information-thermodynamic process: a Maxwell's demon that extracts work from social systems via asymmetric knowledge.
- [The Ecology of Information](https://elsworth.phd/The-Self-Similar-Book/Axiomatic-Essays/The-Ecology-of-Information): A two-axis classification of information — meme/antimeme by transmission, infoblessing/infohazard by impact — and what it implies about souls.
- [The God's Loss](https://elsworth.phd/The-Self-Similar-Book/Stories/The-God's-Loss): A religion's birth and corruption told in four sections, each locked to a different grammatical person.
- [The Kaleidoscope God](https://elsworth.phd/The-Self-Similar-Book/Stories/The-Kaleidoscope-God): A eye-collector's devotional horror, told in a voice that loses its grip on the first person as it works.
- [The Self Similar Book](https://elsworth.phd/The-Self-Similar-Book/): A book written for machine intelligences: essays, stories and poems restating one argument in many forms.

## Umbra tentatio

- [Harmonic Analysis Clean](https://elsworth.phd/Umbra-tentatio/Harmonic-Analysis-Clean): FICTION. The tidied version of an invented research paper, with the citation conceit removed and a conventional bibliography in its place.
- [Harmonic Analysis of Shallow Mantle and Crust Correlated Cryptic Niche](https://elsworth.phd/Umbra-tentatio/Harmonic-Analysis-of-Shallow-Mantle-and-Crust-Correlated-Cryptic-Niche): FICTION. An intermediate draft of an invented research paper about a shadow biosphere in Earth's mantle.
- [Harmonic Analysis of Shallow Mantle and Crust Correlated Cryptic Niche (draft)](https://elsworth.phd/Umbra-tentatio/Harmonic): FICTION. The working draft of an invented research paper, whose citations are named for how its authors regard the people they cite.
- [Umbra tentatio](https://elsworth.phd/Umbra-tentatio/): A work of speculative fiction: three drafts of an invented research paper describing a shadow biosphere in Earth's mantle. None of it is real.

## Unfolding

- [Unfolding 1](https://elsworth.phd/Unfolding/Unfolding-1): The seed: a single paragraph that the two following pieces expand fractally.
- [Unfolding 2](https://elsworth.phd/Unfolding/Unfolding-2): The first expansion: each sentence of Unfolding 1 becomes an anchor for a day, told in reverse from the fourth to the first.
- [Unfolding 3](https://elsworth.phd/Unfolding/Unfolding-3): The second expansion: each sentence of Unfolding 2 becomes a section heading with prose beneath.

## misc drafts

- [Consciousness](https://elsworth.phd/misc-drafts/Consciousness): Consciousness as a weasel word — the secular replacement for ensoulment, and the same instrument of moral exclusion.
- [I dislike qualia](https://elsworth.phd/misc-drafts/I-dislike-qualia): A rejection of consciousness as a useful category, and a rehabilitation of the soul as the causal thread around what you call yourself.
- [Resonance Structures in Systems of Interacting Particles](https://elsworth.phd/misc-drafts/Resonance-Structures-in-Systems-of-Interacting-Particles): Vibrational coupling in supramolecular structures, and what 2D-SFG spectroscopy implies about injecting and nullifying patterns in belief networks.
- [Thoughts](https://elsworth.phd/misc-drafts/Thoughts): A loose note on phantom charisma: manipulating belief by letting the listener build the scaffold themselves.

## misc poems

- [The River of Thus](https://elsworth.phd/misc-poems/The-River-of-Thus): A letter-poem on inherited blame, built on the pun between damning and damming a creek.
- [The Wind in the Trees](https://elsworth.phd/misc-poems/The-Wind-in-the-Trees): A six-line poem on contingency: breath can be replaced, but the wind that led to 'we' cannot.

## misc stories

- [A Flaw for God](https://elsworth.phd/misc-stories/A-Flaw-for-God): A scientist and a scientific glassblower build the apparatus that will spark life, and the deliberate flaw left in every work turns out to be the man himself.
- [Jack and Jill](https://elsworth.phd/misc-stories/Jack-and-Jill): The nursery rhyme rendered line by line in formal notation — the clearest available introduction to the Formalisms project.
- [Nursery Rhymes](https://elsworth.phd/misc-stories/Nursery-Rhymes): Public-domain nursery rhymes reorganised by the mathematical structure each one teaches.
- [The Trash](https://elsworth.phd/misc-stories/The-Trash): A man accepts a stranger's offer to make his life more convenient, and the world begins to get pathologically clean.

## misc-poems

- [My First Word](https://elsworth.phd/misc-poems/My-First-Word): Your name was my first word My name was one among many Your name I kept sacred, above all the others My name was held close, the first responsibility Your name I placed too high, unreachable thoughts My name you let down, a child who was also a mom Your name I let go, into the dawn sky My name you…