An introduction
A Brief introduction to Infocean
The writings and projects on this site will primarily be driven by two arcs of experience I’ve had throughout life. One derived from a perspective shared by most people, where technology has continually changed the possibilities of perspective and availability of information. The second oriented around my own intellectual interests - cognition, neuroscience, philosophy, religion, and the sense of being over time. As I’ve grown older I realize these two paths aren’t independent.
In hindsight my own life has often focused on changes happening in computing. While this is nearly universally experienced across the world now, I think it’s fair to say I would have always been an early adopter. From early school memories in a ‘computer lab’, learning logo and basic, discovering some basics of how the video games at home work. Then getting a family PC, closely followed by early internet through AOL - my years in high school classes would basically become annoying and boring while I was away from the ability to ‘surf’ this new environment and begin writing my own real software.
Meanwhile I maintained a never ending consumption of books. First as a child devouring things like Tolkien and any kind of sci-fi I could find. Then as I finished high school I discovered the density of ideas in nonfiction, and the magnitude of just how much there was to know. If I had to pick one work in particular, one that impacted me(and one shared by many others), it would be Gödel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter. Well written, probably too challenging, and in one step expanding the set of ideas I realized was even possible. It grounded the disorganized experience I had with computer logic in a foundation that I’d probably never really leave again - even if the book and it’s strange loops weren’t directly necessary to things that came next.
After high school and still unsure what direction to go in, I was studying computer science part time while working in IT and teaching software and programming as an adjunct at a community college, when I took an intro to bio course. I fell in love with the topic, and spent the next decade studying molecular bio, bioinformatics, psychology, and finally getting a neuroscience PhD, with a heavy focus in applied machine learning.
I’ve been working in industry for the decade or so since while still maintaining the earlier passions. In that time machine learning itself has become much more of a topic in everyday life. Massive investments in infrastructure and tooling have completely changed both software development and our interface to the history of human writing and information, redoubling the impact of the internet itself. In the last year in particular these new tools seem to have made software more of a creative extension rather than a technical obstacle, and I think it’s worth really stepping into this new mode of creation. I hope to avoid some of the more common discussion around agents, alignment, or the economy of this new technology. Not because they are unimportant, but because I would rather focus how technology can continue to mediate human innovation. Projects half finished, some going back to grad school, drafts and half-finished essays, analysis left hanging - now less blocked than ever.
Join me as I work through some of this. One goal through my own writing and research is the development of intermediate, crafted assets - intermediate forms between the human and ‘black box’ of large language models. Some Essays or smaller notes will be labeled as ‘AI’ on the site, written by language models, but usually oriented around these assets. Something more than a simple storage location for vectors of text, but a form of personalized work and research than can be built up over time. Some early approaches will be simple - explorations of my dissertation, relations between philosophers and their ideas, or the travels and events in a mythological story. Layers of human and machine understanding that can produce something bigger, and layers that act as individual steps as we continue learning how to better integrate with new technology.