Essays on ideas rather than hardware: what physics can and cannot explain, autonomous will, consciousness, and how to work. https://maxclerkwell.tech/thoughts/ 2026-09-19T23:52:16+02:00 Stephan Bökelmann stephan@boekelmann.net https://maxclerkwell.tech Jekyll https://maxclerkwell.tech/posts/correlation-causation-overton-window-july-2026/ 2026-07-06T00:00:00+02:00 2026-07-06T00:00:00+02:00

Everyone knows the first half of the aphorism. The second half is where the actual thinking happens, and I think the reflex to stop at the first half is doing something worse than being lazy.

If you spend enough time around superficially intellectual people, you will have heard the phrase. Someone points at a pattern, someone else says “correlation doesn’t imply causation,” and the conversation ends there, usually with a small, satisfied smile. When I picture the moment, there is a specific face attached to it: the smug pseudo-scientist, chin slightly raised, having just deployed the one piece of statistics they remember from a first-year course as a conversation-ending device rather than a conversation-starting one. What bothers me is not the sentence. The sentence is true. What bothers me is that people only ever remember the first half of it, and that this is not an isolated case. It happens to aphorisms constantly, and it is almost never innocent. “The customer is always... https://maxclerkwell.tech/posts/how-monolatry-shapes-my-worldview-june-2026/ 2026-06-21T00:00:00+02:00 2026-06-21T00:00:00+02:00

From polytheism as a map of the inner life, through the slow emergence of the individual voice, to the moment one god is raised above the rest, and what that means for how I actually live.

A few weeks ago I had a long conversation with an AI about Calvinism. It started as a question about TULIP (the five points: predestination, limited atonement, and the rest) and ended somewhere I had not expected: in a place where I was trying to articulate, clearly and out loud, what I actually believe about God, religion, and what the whole arc of Western theology is pointing toward. This article is my attempt to write that down more carefully. I want to approach it from an unusual angle. Not starting with doctrine, but with psychology. Not with the question of what is true, but with the prior question of what gods actually are, and what the human encounter with them reveals about the structure of the mind doing the encountering. Let me be precise about that framing: I do not think hu... https://maxclerkwell.tech/posts/cunninghams-law-june-2026/ 2026-06-19T00:00:00+02:00 2026-06-19T00:00:00+02:00

Cunningham's Law says the fastest way to get the right answer online is to post the wrong one. I've been doing this accidentally for years, and I think there's something serious underneath the joke.

Someone on Quora asked: “Murphy’s Law states that the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer. What are some examples where you applied this law?” The first reply: “This is Cunningham’s Law and not Murphy’s Law.” The correction proves the law. Whoever posted that question, intentionally or not, ran the most elegant demonstration possible. What Cunningham’s Law Actually Says Ward Cunningham, the programmer who invented the wiki, is credited with the observation: the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question but to post the wrong answer. It works because of a deep asymmetry in human motivation. Watching someone be wrong activates something in most people that a politely phrased question does n... https://maxclerkwell.tech/posts/physics-description-not-explanation-june-2026/ 2026-06-04T00:00:00+02:00 2026-06-04T00:00:00+02:00

My high school teacher told me physics explains the world. Years later I think that's completely wrong, and understanding why changes everything about how you approach the subject.

When I was in school, my physics teacher told me that physics explains the world. I believed that for years. It sounded profound. It gave the subject a kind of grandeur, as if sitting through enough lectures about pendulums and ideal gases would eventually unlock some deep understanding of why reality is the way it is. Today I think that framing is completely wrong. Not slightly off, not a useful simplification: wrong in a way that actively misleads people about what physics is and what it is for. And I think this misunderstanding is one of the main reasons students either develop an inflated reverence for the subject or walk away from it feeling like they missed something fundamental. Physics does not explain the world. Physics describes it. That is a small grammatical shift with enorm... https://maxclerkwell.tech/posts/autonomous-will-kant-june-2026/ 2026-06-03T00:00:00+02:00 2026-06-03T00:00:00+02:00

Kant draws a sharp line between acting from your own reason and acting from external pressure. But where does your reason actually come from? An exploration of autonomy, heteronomy, archetypes, and the slow work of building a self you can stand behind.

This morning I sat in the waiting area outside a courtroom at the Bochum district court. I was there as a witness. The room was empty. The court had placed reading material on the chairs (phones are more or less prohibited in that part of the building), and one of the items was a copy of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. I had not picked up Kant since highschool. Back then it was homework. Now, sitting alone in that silent corridor, I opened it and felt something I had not expected: the book hit differently. Not because the words had changed. Because I had. This post is an attempt to write down what I have been thinking about the whole day. What Kant Actually Means by Autonomous Will Kant draws one of the sharpest distinctions in all of moral philosophy: the difference bet... https://maxclerkwell.tech/posts/physics-math-or-engineering-how-do-you-decide/ 2026-06-01T00:00:00+02:00 2026-06-01T00:00:00+02:00

What is the real difference between physics, mathematics, and engineering — and how do you choose the right degree? A personal account from someone who studied all three.

When I was a child, I spent a lot of time in industrial halls and at trade fairs instead of sitting in classrooms. My father studied electrical engineering first and then mechanical engineering. He worked on differential dosing scales early in his career and later moved to Degussa, where he designed complete process engineering plants. By his forties he was responsible for planning and realizing large industrial facilities, both in Germany and in China. One of the things that always impressed me was that he started building plants in Shanghai already in 1979. When he showed me the old photographs, the China in those pictures looked almost unrecognizable compared to today. He witnessed and helped shape that transformation over more than two decades. I could feel how much pride and respon... https://maxclerkwell.tech/posts/machine-consciousness-may-2026/ 2026-05-05T00:00:00+02:00 2026-05-05T00:00:00+02:00

What does consciousness mean — and where on that spectrum do beetles, dogs, humans, and language models sit? No final answers, but an honest attempt to think the question through.

 *What follows is not a finished argument and not a manifesto. It is a snapshot — an attempt to sort out thoughts that have been occupying me for a while. I explicitly reserve the right to think differently tomorrow.* --- ## The Bird and the Airplane Yesterday, in a conversation with Tabea, she made a remark that stuck with me. We were talking about AI and consciousness, and she said something along the lines of: a plane flies too, but it is not a bird. It turns out this intuition has a precise formulation. Steven Pinker writes in *How the Mind Works* (1997): > "To explain how birds fly, we invoke principles of lift and drag and fluid mechanics that also explain how airplanes fly. That does not commit us ... https://maxclerkwell.tech/posts/game-of-life-may-2026/ 2026-05-04T00:00:00+02:00 2026-05-04T00:00:00+02:00

A colleague called it 'useless math but super fun.' I objected. Conway's Game of Life connects self-replicating machines, Wolfram's computational irreducibility, and the unsettling possibility that entropy is not just disorder — it is the universe refusing to be calculated.

A friend sent me a link to a simulation running in a browser tab: [oimo.io/works/life](https://oimo.io/works/life/). She had heard of it — two colleagues from the physics department had mentioned it. One of them called it "useless math but super fun." I objected. It is the complete opposite of useless math. It is one of the most significant discoveries in science. That conviction is what this post is about.  ## Where Conway's Game of Life Comes From In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Stanisław Ulam and John von Neumann were close friends and colleagues at Los Alamos, but they were circling the same idea from different angles. Ulam was studying how crystals grow: the way a regular ... https://maxclerkwell.tech/posts/ai-gruppe-manifesto/ 2026-04-20T00:00:00+02:00 2026-04-20T00:00:00+02:00

Why we build monitoring systems — the case for industrial automation as human liberation, retrofit over greenfield, and why the sensor is the critical missing link between AI and the physical world.

Robotics gives machines hands. AI gives machines judgment. Monitoring gives machines senses. Without the senses, the hands are blind and the judgment is deaf. The Apple on the Tree Ten years ago, as a student, I asked myself a simple question: why does this apple cost money? The apple growing on the branch costs nothing. The apple in the store costs something. The difference is human labor — hands that picked it, trucks that moved it, systems that tracked it. Every euro in the price tag is a unit of human time that had to be spent. If that is true, then the path to making humanity genuinely richer is not to work more. It is to need fewer human hours per unit of civilization. This is why we build what we build. The Uncomfortable Truth About Automation and Jobs Most people fear automation...