I peacefully & mindfully coevolve with all life by collaboratively learning to sustainably contribute to all life's needs in fluid ways and joyfully embodying science and art, in love. This is my mission statement.
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'm connected to, which includes my environment. I choose a life of serving life because if I'm not intentionally serving life, then I'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.
I came about my life's purpose progressively.
First, I became an info addict when young in response to trauma. A few years ago, I entered into recovery. I'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's how I started working on addiction/codependency recovery, neuroplastic healing, nonviolent communication, and mindfulness.
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're sitting still or moving. (http://eqradio.csail.mit.edu) 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's population isn't emotionally responsible and struggles with unidentified codependent patterns/characteristics, meaning they're all ripe for emotional manipulation. It occurred to me we don'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'm a computer scientist), so I started developing what I call a scientific theory of mindful design.
During the first month of working on that, I came across research indicating the brain encodes information in a binary manner (https://singularityhub.com/2016/12/07/this-one-equation-may-...). I didn'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 (https://youtu.be/Hylji4ezQHE). This got me thinking that we could construct a human programming language that's universally usable if we can understand the brain from a category theoretic perspective. That's when I found this book & started working on learning category theory (https://g.co/kgs/jKELdT).
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/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've so far defined sets for science and art.
Differentiable Neural Computers (https://deepmind.com/blog/differentiable-neural-computers/) came out around the same time & inspired in me the idea for a human-oriented self-programmable model. At this point, I realized it'd make more sense to hypothesize things and test them out on myself, rather than develop the skills to prove things theoretically.
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'd been developing for myself led me to join a minority class because I'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's a religion. I figured it'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 & it could be said I was simply discovering the religion & simply putting labels on it.
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're talking about starting a school for learning how to learn and to teach people how to cultivate a loving home/community by setting up the school as a community of homes.