About

The purpose of the mystical jazz spaceship is a staging ground for the many ideas running through my head. Within, I hope to compile a body of work I have been gradually distilling for some time, and I hope it will help guide me to completing some of the large tasks I have set myself.

My PhD at the University of Manchester, working in the field of soft robotics on Peano-HASEL actuators, has been a large part of my recent life. These are a kind of linear actuator, with properties that mimic the macro behaviours of natural muscle. In my research, looking at power modulation for the actuators, I learned a great deal of biology, neuroscience, practical skills, programming, experimental design, simulation, mathematics and optimisation paradigms. It was also a potent and transformative process from a mental point of view, and I discovered a love for the meta ideas surrounding technology and how we as humans interact. I began, as part of this and my PhD, to study signal processing and communication theory, which changed how I perceive computation and language. I also realised my passion for writing, both scientific and creative, and the overlap between the two.

I am a curious person. It has been a running theme in my life that I see the world slightly differently to most, noticing patterns and connections that I sometimes wonder about myself. After undertaking my PhD , I began to become very interested in how brains work. Initially, how intelligence can allow us to walk was my focus. Quickly, this evolved towards the mechanisms that empower learning. Studying autodidactically computational neuroscience and AI, I soon realised that the missing link for AI is the attribute of learning being embedded in the dynamics. This must be part of the process of the machine doing computation in order for the machine to be realised in any finite energy system. As an extension to this, I have a great interest in network theory, and it’s applications appear to me as exceptionally numerous and with large scope.

For me this was a revolutionary period, and has inspired my thinking since. Discovering the free energy principle, and investigating it in the context of Bayesian mechanics has led me to begin constructing Indra Theory. This theory hopes to frame intelligence and, potentially, certain physics, as the movement to agreement between representations of the local universe. As it stands, this theory is a bit of a philosophical mess, and I am trying to straighten it out. Mathematically however, the theory has legs, taking concepts from fibred gauge theories, information theory, quantum field theory, non-linear dynamics and group theory. On the higher more abstract levels, I believe it also has deep links to Thurston’s geometrization theorem, ADS/CFT, knot theory and high dimensional conformal geometry. I have become fairly enamoured with it, and seek to expand it over the course of my life as a general theory of intelligence, within the context of physics. In light of this, I would love collaborators and questions. Please see the Indra Theory section of this website for articles and more information.

In the future I am looking to expand Indra theory into a mathematically solid framework for exploring systems with perceived agency, and hope to distil my philosophy on the topic further. This will involve publishing papers and hopefully novels on the fictional implications of this idea.

As side projects, I seek to write a book, loosely following the ideas in Indra Theory and interfacing with modern life. This book is called Hyperstition and I will update here when it is finished.

Other mini projects will likely include microscopy, an Eink map, and probably other things.

Books with profound influence

• Foucault’s Pendulum - Umberto Eco
• Gravity’s Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
• House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
• Solaris - Stanislaw Lem
• Rhythms of the Brain - György Buzsáki