About Me

My influences

Like all people I am a product of those generations who have come before me. As such the influences on my life are plenty but I would be remiss to not mention my mother who gave me unconditional love in those early years, which gave me everlasting courage; my father for instilling in me a feeling of constructive inadequacy, which while potentially harsh sounding, has been the main source of motivation in my life; my sister for always questioning me and thereby making me a critical thinker, which I believe to be one of the most important qualities in life. Beyond my family there are many friends and a few teachers that nudged me. There are, however, many more mostly dead thinkers in many different disciplines whose words have reached from the past into my heart and soul to affect my present day thinking. I owe them an enormous debt, which I shall repay by quoting them incessantly.

An evolving value system

My value system is continuously evolving. I find locking myself into ideas and specific identities claustrophobic. The rate of change is ever increasing and as with the world of a 100 years ago, people in 100 years will find us primitive and clueless. An open mind is, therefore, the only viable approach for me. It doesn’t need mentioning but for the avoidance of doubt - I do not care about your sex, race, nationality, sexual orientation, class, accent, etc. when we interact. I see humans - all trying to make sense of this cosmic coincidence, which allows us to inhabit this pale blue dot at the same infinitesimally short time.

Compassion comes first

We are all either trying to ignore our mortality, have created a story to be OK with it, or are trying to fight the terror head on daily. Compassion is therefore the most appropriate path for me. The cards we’ve been dealt are from a random deck genetically, socioculturally and economically speaking. Manifest destiny makes no sense to me, given the fact that the wider universe clearly doesn’t care about human affairs, as evidenced on the daily by ever present tragedies. Given the callousness of reality I strive to be kinder to other beings because we are all we got in this seemingly empty cosmos.

I am biased

I try to remind myself regularly that I am the implementation of a human self on a monkey’s motivational system. As such my perspective is always skewed and limited to the capacity of my perceptual apparatus. Said apparatus was built for hunting and gathering, while moving around at medium speeds as a medium sized mammal. If I continue to belabour the point I might lose you, so let me summarise it by saying that I am very aware of my anthropocentric bias. Our reality is not real - colours and sounds do not exist. They are inventions by our perceptual hardware to make sense of the world given the setup of our bodies. The ground truth is a very weird quantum graph of too many parts to count, which in the limit presents itself at our scale as geometries we use to navigate the world. It is mind bending that we have managed to figure such things out. While being incredibly far from the truth, we are certain that our human reality is a controlled hallucination. Therefore, I try to approach life with a great dose of humility.

No free will

While it’s hard to live by the next statement I do believe it: I do not possess free will. When looking at the evidence it feels hard for me to come to any other conclusion for now. Those who are trying to find a theory of everything by uniting General Relativity with Quantum Physics fall somewhere on the spectrum from Super Determinism to the Many Worlds interpretation. These theories leave room for a non-deterministic or random universe. Neither allow room for free will. However, that’s OK because it feels like I do have it, so no complaints.

Mastering mind

Intrapersonal intelligence is one of the most important skills I possess but I had to explicitly cultivate it mostly later in life, which is a shame. We are a slave to our monkey motivational system, which hijacks our remembering-, experiencing- and aspiring-self on the regular. Fulfilling the crucial shift to understand that I am not my ideas and I am not my emotions has been the most consequential tool to be a content human. The foundation for this has been an always mindful perception of reality to peel back the layers of experience.

Ideas and connections

All this is to say that I am a pattern of neurons, which is continuously trying to make sense of the human condition and this cosmos. While the abstract is where I like to live, the daily reality of our human civilisation while perplexing is highly entertaining. The ever evolving idea space is fascinating and I hope to contribute to it with my various projects. It is a lot more fun to create or explore ideas with others, so if you find any of this interesting, please feel free to message me. Our journeys fortuitously overlap for a short while, so let us travel together.