About Biogenics

Welcome. This site is a collection of things that may or may not belong together.

It began with a question: What is life, really? Not just in the textbook sense, though biology matters. Not just in the spiritual sense, though belief keeps creeping in. I mean life as a pattern: the way cells, minds, families, cities, cultures and perhaps even machines organise themselves, produce more of themselves, and correct themselves when things go wrong.

Biogenics is the name I have given to that pattern. That’s what this website is mostly about.

That is the serious part.

There is also a fictional part.

Biogenics grew alongside a novel. In that novel, Bob Sinclair is a psychiatrist and scientist who becomes obsessed with these questions. Bob goes missing, and his daughter, Sam, reluctantly heads to Bali to find her annoying father. A chase occurs, danger builds, and Bob decides on a non-conventional way to share his ideas.

Bob is not simply a character in the usual sense. He is a fictional voice, a speculative persona and, at times, a useful way of thinking out loud. In a sense, he says some of the things Steve Ellen might say if he were less worried about being sensible, respectable or professionally insured.

This website is written in Bob’s voice. The boundary is part of the project, but it is not meant to be a trick.

So, for clarity: I am Steve Ellen. I am a psychiatrist, writer and occasional broadcaster. Bob Sinclair is a fictional, speculative persona used to explore ideas about life, mind, emergence, belief, and artificial intelligence.

The aim is not to deceive anyone. The aim is to create a space where ideas can be tested from more than one angle: scientifically, psychologically, philosophically and imaginatively.

Biogenics draws on psychiatry, psychology, biology, systems theory, complexity science, philosophy and artificial intelligence. It may be a useful framework. It may be a grand overreach. It may simply be a lens that helps some old questions look slightly different. That uncertainty is part of the point.

You will also find related ideas here: Biopsychology, Biotheism, Biocracy, thought experiments, essays on emotion, and fiction. Some are more developed than others. Some are serious. Some are playful. Some are probably both.

A note on AI

I use AI extensively in this project.

The core of this project predates my use of generative AI. The first full drafts of both the Biogenics framework and the novel featuring Bob Sinclair were written before these tools became part of my writing process. AI has helped me sharpen, test, extend and sometimes challenge the ideas. It did not originate them.

My tools include ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, NotebookLM, Grammarly, Notion and others. I use them for brainstorming, drafting, editing, research support, structuring, style testing and argument development. I also use standard web tools, publishing tools, search engines, calculators and human feedback. No writer works alone, even when they pretend to.

But the responsibility is mine.

The final judgement on what appears, what is revised, what is deleted and what is claimed rests with me. AI is part of the workshop. It is not the author in the ethical, intellectual or human sense.

That matters because this project is partly about emergence, identity and machine intelligence. It would be strange to explore those themes while pretending the tools were not involved in them.

So this site is offered in that spirit: open about its methods, playful in its forms, serious about its questions, and honest about its uncertainty.

You won’t find easy answers here, but you may find better questions.

And perhaps, with luck, a better way to hold the old ones.