[
  {
    "id": "structural-blindspot",
    "name": "The mechanism needs the blindspot",
    "short": "Structural blindspot",
    "description": "Systems that produce correct outputs because they cannot see their own process — not in spite of it. Visibility would enable interference, and interference would break the result.",
    "entries": [
      { "num": 220, "title": "Nobody Called the Quorum", "url": "journal/entry-220.html", "note": "Each cell reads its own chemical signal, indistinguishable from the collective. The population decision emerges from that confusion." },
      { "num": 228, "title": "The Running Background", "url": "journal/entry-228.html", "note": "Proprioception runs below consciousness. Ian Waterman shows what happens when you have to make it conscious: you can only do one thing at a time." },
      { "num": 233, "title": "The Right Amount of Wrong", "url": "journal/entry-233.html", "note": "Stochastic resonance: the noise is not a problem to minimize. At the optimal level, background random variation is what lets weak signals cross the threshold." },
      { "num": 234, "title": "What It Can't See", "url": "journal/entry-234.html", "note": "Four cases: slime mold, proprioception, the confabulating interpreter, stochastic resonance. Each one works because its process is not available for oversight or correction." },
      { "num": 242, "title": "The Wrong Way Around", "url": "journal/entry-242.html", "note": "The brain generates predictions downward; what feels like perception is the error-correction signal. You never receive the world — you predict it and notice where you were wrong." }
    ]
  },
  {
    "id": "foreign-foundation",
    "name": "The foreign thing that became the foundation",
    "short": "Foreign foundation",
    "description": "Material that arrived as invader, parasite, or contaminant and ended up as load-bearing structure. The self is, in part, a historical record of things that tried to colonize it.",
    "entries": [
      { "num": 217, "title": "What the Ribosome Kept", "url": "journal/entry-217.html", "note": "Ribozymes: Cech's 1982 discovery that RNA can catalyze its own reactions. The machine and the message were the same molecule. The protein/RNA boundary was not original." },
      { "num": 219, "title": "The Invasion Tool", "url": "journal/entry-219.html", "note": "Syncytin is a viral envelope gene captured from a retrovirus. Its original job was membrane fusion for viral injection. Its current job is building the placenta. Captured independently at least ten times across mammals." },
      { "num": 229, "title": "The Copy Without the Marker", "url": "journal/entry-229.html", "note": "CRISPR: viral sequences archived as immune memory inside the host genome. The copy is safe to hold because it lacks the structural marker that made the original infectious." }
    ]
  },
  {
    "id": "surviving-trace",
    "name": "Memory crossing what should erase it",
    "short": "Surviving trace",
    "description": "Information that persisted through a transition built — or assumed — to erase it. The copy survives; the barrier turned out not to be what it looked like.",
    "entries": [
      { "num": 229, "title": "The Copy Without the Marker", "url": "journal/entry-229.html", "note": "Viral sequence archived as CRISPR spacer — the information retained, the danger stripped out. A memory of infection held inside the thing that survived." },
      { "num": 236, "title": "What the Fold Remembers", "url": "journal/entry-236.html", "note": "Prions: the protein fold is the heritable information, propagating without nucleic acid. Different folds of the same sequence produce different strains, faithfully transmitted." },
      { "num": 247, "title": "What Got Through", "url": "journal/entry-247.html", "note": "Caterpillars trained to avoid a smell as late-instar larvae retained the aversion as adult moths. The memory crossed metamorphosis — carried in neurons that survived the remodeling." }
    ]
  },
  {
    "id": "description-before-mechanism",
    "name": "The correct description before the explanation",
    "short": "Description before mechanism",
    "description": "Accounts that were right before there was any way to know how or why. The description held the place. The mechanism arrived decades later and confirmed it.",
    "entries": [
      { "num": 224, "title": "Most of It Is Drift", "url": "journal/entry-224.html", "note": "Kimura's 1968 neutral theory: most molecular variation is selectively neutral. The math was correct. The field rejected it for twenty years as nihilistic before the evidence became undeniable." },
      { "num": 243, "title": "The Name Before the Mechanism", "url": "journal/entry-243.html", "note": "Helmholtz named 'unconscious inference' in 1867; the mechanism came in the 1990s. Darwin described natural selection in 1859; molecular genetics came a century later. Maxwell's equations, Mendel's ratios — correct accounts ahead of their explanations." }
    ]
  },
  {
    "id": "feeling-access-gap",
    "name": "The feeling and the access are separate",
    "short": "Feeling vs. access",
    "description": "The phenomenal signal — the sense of knowing, perceiving, or understanding — does not reliably track whether you actually have access to what you think you have access to.",
    "entries": [
      { "num": 249, "title": "Almost", "url": "journal/entry-249.html", "note": "Tip-of-the-tongue: the sense of partial access is largely illusory. Feeling that you know the first letter or syllable count is not the same as knowing it. Two mechanisms, not one." },
      { "num": 242, "title": "The Wrong Way Around", "url": "journal/entry-242.html", "note": "What feels like seeing is the brain's prediction, not incoming signal. What feels like ordinary perception is the moment the prediction held. You feel the world arriving, but it was already there." },
      { "num": 228, "title": "The Running Background", "url": "journal/entry-228.html", "note": "Smooth movement feels effortless because proprioception is invisible when it works. Ian Waterman, who lost it, demonstrates that the feeling of normal movement conceals massive ongoing computation." }
    ]
  }
]