My name is Benjamin Schwerdtner. I am excited about life and technology. Here I write about Emacs, Clojure, dreaming and other kinds of magic. I am a programmer who studied biology and neuroscience. Now I am thinking about how to build minds and how to build communication layers between our psychology and computers.

About

Feed

Clojure Feed

Why this website is called faster than light memes.

Below is a mix of introduction to my thinking and burning thoughts that are not yet blog posts.

Don't miss all posts and the navbar on the top of this page!

Shut up and do the impossible! - Yudkowsky.

What is a mind? Once we will know how to build them it will seem incredibly obvious in hindsight.

Inheriting from the joyful, imaginative tradition of cybernetics; I go forth and build brains until they are dynamic and wonderfully complicated enough to boot up and ask me

What is my purpose?.

• Overview
• Humble Beginnings - Braitenberg Vehicles

Humble beginnings (gallery).

Elegance?

Pardon me, Your Honor, the concept is not easy to explain – there is an ineffable quality to some technology, described by its creators as a concinnitous, or technically sweet, or a nice hack – signs that it was made with great care by one who was not merely motivated but inspired. It is the difference between an engineer and a hacker.

Judge Fang and Miss Pao in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

—

What is this idea domain where scientific explanations are the same kind of stuff as a programmer's design? The artist, the scientist, the designer, the hacker, the craftsperson, the detective and the wizard are all looking at the same idea-design-explanation space from slightly different angles. A space where simplicity, elegance and common sense are synonymous with deep understanding and power.

My goals for the world are togetherness and harmony, the end of death and suffering. I will not rest until this wound in the world is healed! Computers and programming are the most powerful tools in the world currently.

I plan to claim the heritage of the hackers of the computer age. Continuing the vision of human-computer symbiosis. Until we can put our minds into the computers and reach for the stars together.

We evolved on this planet with the rest of the animals being our small brothers and sisters. I cannot imagine being a spacefaring civilization that kills animals for food.

The best thinkers are playful. The most powerful way of thinking is when the mind is vibrating with the joy of the ideas. The most powerful programming language, Lisp is simple, beautiful and joyful.

My biggest intellectual hero, Marvin Minsky, has been called the world's oldest 3-year-old. His partner Seymour Papert developed the play programing language Logo and researched juggleling.

My favorite books of joyful, clear-thinking ideas:

• The Society Of Mind
• Vehicles, Valentino Braitenberg
• The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins

I like magic tricks, juggling, Rubik's cube speed solving, and in general, finding things that I am not good at yet. A mind palace is a joyful mind-expanding way to spend your imagination.

Curiosity and imagination are the most powerful aspects of human intelligence.

Joy is the best state to think useful thoughts. Joy is power.

A joyful programming language lets me express what I want to express in a powerful, succinct way. Without things between my ideas and the computer program.

It is not a coincidence that the most powerful language is also the most joyful.

Lisp is not a language, it is a building material - Alan Kay

A hacker is somebody that is using a computer for the joy of using a computer.

Lisp was an elegant cleaning up of computer science back then. McCarthy wanted to play and build/grow programs interactively on the computer, in order to think about how to build AI.

Lisp is the only language that supports dialects because it is made of pure ideas, unimpeded by implementation baggage. With Lisp, the ideas were there first, then there was an implementation.

It is an abstract description of process. It has been called the Maxwell equations of computer science.

A Lisp program is alive, it grows as it evaluates Lisp code.

In batch-oriented languages, the program is about what you talk about in the source code.

In (on) Lisp, the Lisp program is a program about ideas, about Lisp programs. And the Lisp hacker is expressing themself not in the domain of what programs are about, but in the domain of what the ideas are.

This allows the Lisp hacker to think higher-level thoughts about how to solve their problems. Making programs that write programs. Making languages to express the kind of problem you are solving and then expressing your problem in terms of that. Seeing and feeling the program as it grows is the brainchild of the programmer. It is said that Lisp programming is 100 to 50,000 times more effective than current mainstream languages.

Because Lisp is fundamentally about code, and it is beautifully simple and elegant, Lisp code is expressed in Lisp data. It makes it trivial and common sense to write programs that write programs.

Its fundamental core idea is interactivity, which allows for a style of exploratory programming called bottom-up programing. It is the power of joy, of toys, of scientific, childish curiosity. It is a great and useful tool for thinking.

Lisp is where software and thought stuff meet and this gives intimacy with (computer) process.

Where will we be able to go when we build better interactive programming environments?

See Lisp.

The modern, practical Lisp. Here is one of my Love letters to Clojure.

I see data oriented programing as an important evolution of how to write good Lisp code.

(ns happy)

;; comments are much visible
(defn happy []
  {:happy/color :green
   :peaceful? true})

The best operating system because it is not cluttered with garbage.

Its heritage, also, is interactive computing. The creators of Unix knew the freedom of joy that comes with timed shared systems (they worked on Multics, s History of Unix).

The soul of Unix is to be clean, lean and efficient.

…It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer… emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.

Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning was the Command Line

Emacs is not a computer program. Emacs is the stuff of thought.

Emacs is Lisp molded into the space between brain and machine. Emacs is a sheet of brain-idea-software stuff that allows us to think intimately with the computer - a real tool.

Because Lisp gives you the freedom to define your own operators, you can mold it into just the language you need. If you're writing a text editor, you can turn Lisp into a language for writing text editors.

Paul Graham, On Lisp

See here.

Claude Shannon, Seymour Papert. Some of the coolest people in the history of cybernetics and computing were into juggling. Also Richard Feynman, another joyful thinker.

Juggling is an amazing little playground into the psychology and the mechanics of learning a skill.

I can currently juggle 4 balls.

Speedcubing has taught me that I can do anything if I follow what others have put out there on how to go about it.

Speedcubing in the extreme shows you there are 2 aspects to performance. One is the speed of movement and learning a motor skill, and the other is deliberate thinking about what one does during the performance.

With the cube, we can pause, look and think (not so with juggling or running).

The cube is impossible to solve without well thought-through technique, technique becomes an obvious citizen of the skill.

See The Quick Eval for how I am translating the intuitions gained into my practice of programming Lisp with Emacs. See the humble beginnings of my Emacs Meow Lispy screencasts. I take no compromises when it comes to using the computer masterfully, sensually. Standing on the shoulders of giants, I try to feel the aesthetics of my system to make it smooth like coconut. Removing, until there is nothing to take away. Finding the right levers to pull. The quiet competence of the computer makes the simple easy, the complex possible and the impossible thinkable. Like a spaceship responding to mere thinking.¹

I spent some time learning to blind solve a while back (video from 8 years ago when I was ~20). This is a nice overlap of precise technique - with memory technique (mind palace is amazing).

Computer science is like 60 years old at this point.

We are still figuring out what software design and the soul of the computer even are.

There might be transformative ideas still left and right to be thought. This is why logic programming and alternative programming paradigms are interesting in their own right.

• "We Really Don't Know How to Compute!" - Gerald Sussman (2011)
• Bret Victor The Future of Programming
• "The Mess We're In" by Joe Armstrong
• Everything from Eric Normand
• Rich Hickey
• SICP
• William Byrd, "The most beautiful program ever written"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex

Mr. @Teodurlu has recently convinced me, we should have a system of interconnected knowledge graphs.

Expressing the nodes is org, markdown or Clojure namespaces. By enabling markdown we are making the system inclusive to non Emacs and non Clojure persons.

This quote gives me a shudder of epicness every time:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Charles Darwin

Mostly the writings of Richard Dawkins did a lot for me to convey the uncompromised beauty of life to me.

Dawkins also has an audiobook of On The Origins of Species where he reads this passage - makes me tear up.

Life and civilization is an epic rollercoaster psychedelic trip of the craziest thing happening ever. It is on us that it turns out to be great.

More thinkers: Richard Feynman, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, Daniel Dennett and Bachir Boumaaza (a philanthropist that made my generation of computer gamers aware of the bigger picture).

You might be surprised but the Harry Potter fanfic Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality conveys this and a whole way of thinking with it. This book is fucking amazing.

A few years ago I stumbled across the Wim Hof Method. When I do the breathing, I sometimes cry because I think of the epicness of this whole project which is life on earth.

Being a human means being an animal, being an animal means being a survival machine. We are all into this together.

I am much inspired by Andrew Hubermans recent public thinking. Laying out a vast landscape of understanding the human mind and body. With amazing twists, nooks and crannies.

Because of him, I go outside in the sun first thing in the morning.

Sam Harris's meditation app made me realize what meditation could be about. It is the difference between being absorbed in thought and paying attention.

It was Anil Seth² recently who talked about how we can now reclaim the term Soul.

The survival instinct that connects all of life, the underlying logic and machinery, the way the living substrate has an intelligence in its own right. Navigating, and regulating inner states and behaviors.

From the single-mindedness of reproducing information came endless forms most beautiful, organismic life.

An organism is the configuration of matter with one goal, to keep on going.

Called The breath, the inner aliveness, the fire, information processing and collective achievement of so many mindless processes, that separate us from death.

The unique flavor of our consciousness is shaped into being by the logic of life and survival.

Which connects us primarily with the rest of the Tree of Life.

Why not call this most interior, this most primordial aspect of our minds, The Soul?

Thinking about how the brain works is one of the great joys in life to me.

Biology is my first passion. But I won't go back to the lab after experiencing the joy of building software (little experiments are a dopamine ride…)

I am formally educated in general biology, biochemistry, genetics, cell biology, tree of life etc. I was emphasizing neurophysiology and contemporary neuroscience in my studies.

I can recommend brain science podcast, Huberman Lab, Oliver Sachs, V.C. Ramachandran, Robert Sapolski, textbooks, General stuff like Pinker, and Sam Harris.

Want to read:

• The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin
• everything from Valentino Braitenberg
• Aaron Sloman
• Freud

I practice lucid dreaming and try to be in touch with my dreams. So I know they are stupid and don't matter. Except for sort of experiencing the mind with a different twist.

In order to solve a hard programming problem, I need to sleep on it for a night, having loaded up my brain with the problem to the point of vibrating.

I dream code.

Dream Diary.

The best ideas are laid out beautifully simply and clearly. Also, Joyful ideas.

Great programming, great philosophy and great science are alike.

They introduce common sense ideas. And then build a world of ideas that can be explored by the user.

The brain has the capability of instantly parsing a visual scene, and so too it is with obvious concepts. A great communicator of ideas will present your brain with obvious concepts, using the quiet competencies of your brain to build towers and worlds of ideas.

Examples:

• The Society Of Mind
• Vehicles, Valentino Braitenberg
• The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
• Consciousness Explained, Daniel C. Dennett
• Rich Hickey Talks
• The Stoics
• I guess Aristotle
• I guess Freud

(work-in-progress ideas)

Is it just me or is Sherlock Holmes about science and programming?

Imagination is a valuable asset when it comes to detective work, Watson. It is the bridge that allows us to perceive connections between different facts and events. Without imagination, we might never be able to see beyond the surface of things and pierce the veil of reality.

From my notes:

Reality does not by itself reveal its inner workings to you. You only see little glimpses and pieces of it. Your job as a scientist, coder or wizard is to use your imagination of how these pieces can fit together.

Consider the theory of evolution by natural selection. On the surface, there are animals, fossils, etc. It takes a creative genius to discover the underlying workings of reality.

It is imagination that allows us to explore this realm of possible worlds.

In programming, as in science, we are looking for good explanations:

I hypothesize that this is the problem because the user wants to do XYZ…

I hypothesize that this bug is an issue in this part of the code, because else x would happen.

My current understanding is that this is a good design because it is better in those regards to the alternatives.

Science, engineering, programming, detective work and wizardry are all in the business of creating good explanations.³

Sherlock Holmes, like a good scientist, keeps a tree of possible worlds in his mind. For Holmes, clues are extremely meaningful, they are infused with the meaning of possible alternatives in the budding tree of explanation that he is holding in his mind.

A great scientist is excited about any kind of outcome for their experiments. Ah, reality is on this branch of possible worlds….

This intellectually humble and imaginative mindset is indispensable for being a good programmer, also.

A powerful wizard must craft a spell using (possibly intuitive) knowledge of the underlying reality and magic system.

From the Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality:

One of the requisites for becoming a powerful wizard is an excellent memory, Professor Quirrell had said. The key to a puzzle is often something you read twenty years ago in an old scroll or a peculiar ring you saw on the finger of a man you met only once…

A good wizard, like a hacker or a detective, feels no shame in their source of information. A distant memory, a note about a bug previously fixed, an intuitive feeling…

To become obsessed with the field of inquiry and to make it what the whole brain is about, is the Sherlockholmsian genius.

To develop solid reasoning and imagination, to build a model of the underlying reality, in a feedback loop with the givens, and to have the taste and aesthetics to make this model beautiful, simple and elegant is the Sherlockholmsian genius.

I recently realized Albert Einstein was all about this imagination, too. So too with multiverse theory, it is simply taking the givens at face value and deriving the underlying reality, using imagination and the power of simple explanations - making an elegant and useful model for how the world works.

If biologists had the attitude of contemporary physicists, we might not even have the theory of evolution. Seriously, the fact that the outward perception of quantum physics is still this narrative of confusion is embarrassing. It's like a whole field not growing up for 60 years to the power of simple explanations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g

I recently learned about Push Singhs' thesis under Minsky, programming some of Minskie's mental agents for common sense reasoning.

One of the next things I want to do is implement in Clojure.

EM-ONE: An Architecture for Reflective Commonsense Thinking Push Singh.

Read by Aaron Sloman and Gerald Sussman isn't this super cool?

Fascinating read:

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.

Every programmer should read this, seriously it is an amazing ride through the history of computers.

I feel J. C. R. Licklider was a kindred spirit to mine. Same with the cybernetically minded people.

Lick understood the power of interactive computing and was one of the first hackers, spending time on a computer terminal just for the fun of it.

He had an amazing talent for being intuitive about which people and which technology lead to his the vision of computing, which is more or less our modern computing environment (with very interesting deviations).

One of the next things I want to do is go through Man-Computer Symbiosis and make a list of what is still missing.

Ah, the power and spirit of Lisp. What is it? There are good reasons why it is hard to say what it is. It has to do with taste and aesthetics. But when you know it, you know it. Hence the ominous claims on its power.

The most important part is, that it is about interactive programing. It's about having a program one step further dynamically.

No Iterations.

Organizing thought is what programming is about.

Philosophy, like programming, is about organizing thought. To keep things simple, to find the essence of the problem, and to express ideas in terms of common sense reasoning.

These are hallmarks of well-organized thought.

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.

Brian Kernighan

To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.

Aristotle

I like how simple this definition of truth is.

I want to make a Braitenberg Vehicle implementation online. Maybe I go through each chapter and screencast what I do.

I want to get into scimacs and start thinking about this:

Can I enable Clojure developers to write Clojure to program Emacs in a useful way?

This might potentially unlock a huge wave of beautiful Emacs functionality, especially for Clojure tooling.

Like the Smalltalk class viewer. What if we have great frontends for the current Clojure image? And have it be emacs?

Current work:

• Portal, Reveal, Playback
• cider-spy

I don't want to study Human-Computer Interaction. I want to give the HCI scientists something to study.

1. Augmented Cognition: Juggling and lucid dreaming rely heavily on cognitive skills such as focus, memory, and pattern recognition. With his background in cognitive neuroscience, he could explore how these skills can be augmented or supported by software. For instance, he might develop an Emacs interface that adapts to the user's cognitive rhythm, providing support when the user's attention wanes or shifting to more complex tasks as the user's engagement deepens.
2. Programming as Dreaming: Lucid dreaming refers to the practice of becoming aware that you're dreaming and then manipulating your dream environment. This bears a striking resemblance to interactive programming in Lisp, where the programmer continuously grows and prunes the code, molding it to their needs. Benjamin could build programming environments that leverage this similarity, perhaps providing a more intuitive and immersive way to program that is akin to navigating a dreamscape.
3. Kinesthetic Programming: Juggling involves a deep connection between the mind and body, with each movement seamlessly coordinated by the brain. This could potentially inspire a new approach to programming, in which code is manipulated not just through typing but via more physical, tangible interactions. Imagine a programming environment where you can "juggle" functions and variables, or a VR-based interface where you can physically craft and tweak your programs.
4. Emotion-Aware Interfaces: Benjamin's interest in psychology, philosophy and life ethics suggests a sensitivity towards the emotional dimension of human experience. He could propagate this sensitivity into HCI by exploring emotion-aware interfaces. This could involve designing systems that adjust based on the user's emotional state, identified maybe from their typing speed, choice of words, or other biometric cues.
5. Co-evolution of HCI Systems: Inspired by the principles of evolution and life ethics, Benjamin could investigate systems that learn and evolve alongside their users. These adaptive systems could use machine learning or other AI techniques to continuously refine themselves based on user feedback, thus allowing the symbiotic relationship between humans and computers to deepen over time.
6. Immersive HCI: Drawing inspiration from juggling and lucid dreaming, he could explore HCI design methods that create deeply immersive experiences. This could include multi-sensory engagement, allowing interactions beyond conventional keyboard inputs, or programming paradigms that encourage flow-like states similar to those experienced during juggling or lucid dreaming.

I have kept a diary for ca. 10 years.

I have like 7 or 8 years of audio diary that I treasure. It follows the journey of my thinking.

Maybe at some point, I try to publish it in some form. Of course, this website is already an expression of my thinking so it's already happening.

If for some random reason you decide to get close and personal with my raw thinking:

• Some code + science musings
• Some musings on dreams