Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
I peacefully &amp; mindfully coevolve with all life by collaboratively learning to sustainably contribute to all life&#x27;s needs in fluid ways and joyfully embodying science and art, in love. This is my mission statement.<p>I want to live. I do not exist in a vacuum and everything is interconnected, even if simply by way of quantum fields. Therefore, it makes since that I need to contribute to all life I&#x27;m connected to, which includes my environment. I choose a life of serving life because if I&#x27;m not intentionally serving life, then I&#x27;ll only be contributing to it on accident and contributing to death the rest of the time. I prefer a less haphazard approach to life, so I intentionally choose service.<p>I came about my life&#x27;s purpose progressively.<p>First, I became an info addict when young in response to trauma. A few years ago, I entered into recovery. I&#x27;m one of a handful of self-identified info addicts in recovery I know of, so
I had to start solving the problem of how to recover from an addiction to something that is ever-present and freely available. That&#x27;s how I started working on addiction&#x2F;codependency recovery, neuroplastic healing, nonviolent communication, and mindfulness.<p>In the throes of relapse (which looked like literally spending every waking hour in front of a screen playing games, watching porn, or researching addiction-related things), I encountered a research device that can wirelessly and covertly detect human emotions through walls for multiple people at a time while they&#x27;re sitting still or moving. (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;eqradio.csail.mit.edu" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;eqradio.csail.mit.edu</a>) This was just before the 2016 US Presidential election. Reading about the device freaked me out because it was clear to me that a large portion of the US&#x27;s population isn&#x27;t emotionally responsible and struggles with unidentified codependent patterns&#x2F;characteristics, meaning they&#x27;re all ripe for emotional manipulation. It occurred to me we don&#x27;t have a design theory to inform how to create things that responsibly operates on emotions, preserves meaningful connection, is anti-addictive, and respects attention. I wanted to continue to create things (I&#x27;m a computer scientist), so I started developing what I call a scientific theory of mindful design.<p>During the first month of working on that, I came across research indicating the brain encodes information in a binary manner (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;singularityhub.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;12&#x2F;07&#x2F;this-one-equation-may-be-the-root-of-intelligence&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;singularityhub.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;12&#x2F;07&#x2F;this-one-equation-may-...</a>). I didn&#x27;t take it to mean brains operate the way computers do, but did take it to suggest we may be able to reason about them in a similar manner. A week later, I watched this video on Fully Abstract Compilation, which describes the theory behind how to construct a language so programs in other languages can be automatically translated into the target language (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Hylji4ezQHE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Hylji4ezQHE</a>). This got me thinking that we could construct a human programming language that&#x27;s universally usable if we can understand the brain from a category theoretic perspective. That&#x27;s when I found this book &amp; started working on learning category theory (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;g.co&#x2F;kgs&#x2F;jKELdT" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;g.co&#x2F;kgs&#x2F;jKELdT</a>).<p>A couple months later, while researching emotions, I found perceptual set theory (the idea that we construct reality by filtering information through perceptual sets comprised of beliefs, emotions, intentions, and behavior&#x2F;thought patterns). I realized the Buddhist concept of love could be formulated as a simple perceptual set: the belief of equanimity, emotion of joy, intention of kindness, and patterns of compassion. I started looking for more simple perceptual sets, thinking they could be useful ways to embody concepts. I&#x27;ve so far defined sets for science and art.<p>Differentiable Neural Computers (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deepmind.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;differentiable-neural-computers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deepmind.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;differentiable-neural-computers&#x2F;</a>) came out around the same time &amp; inspired in me the idea for a human-oriented self-programmable model. At this point, I realized it&#x27;d make more sense to hypothesize things and test them out on myself, rather than develop the skills to prove things theoretically.<p>After months of hacking myself through dramatic personality changes, it occurred to me that using any accurate model of a human could be used to model human interaction to some degree. I also realized self-programming, when applied to multiple people, could lead to intentional cultures designed for specific purposes. So then I started working on culture design. I also realized all these practices I&#x27;d been developing for myself led me to join a minority class because I&#x27;d hypothesized gender could be intentionally expanded beyond the limits of binary gender and then started cultivating my genderfluidity. Ultimately, everything I was doing was founded, in part, around a system of beliefs (ie. perceptual sets), and it seemed like what I was doing could pass legal tests to determine if something&#x27;s a religion. I figured it&#x27;d be even easier to pass the test if all the science was packaged in an intentionally designed religion, so I began designing Iggnnominism, a religion of absurdity inspired by rock n roll, modern culture, computer science, math, psychology, and neuroscience. Then, I began living it as a monk, though I arguably already had been &amp; it could be said I was simply discovering the religion &amp; simply putting labels on it.<p>This was about 1.5 years ago. Now, I live with my partner and our 2 month old. I continue to work on everything in this post, as we&#x27;re talking about starting a school for learning how to learn and to teach people how to cultivate a loving home&#x2F;community by setting up the school as a community of homes.