Issue 40: Readings, Travel to Zion and Strategies

Reflections and notes on the week of [10/06/2025 to 10/12/2025]

Intro

This newsletter is a collection of personal travel reflections, notes on technology, startups and philosophy. It is a kind of public journal, a log of my journey through ideas and places.

This week I flew from Singapore to Chicago, my home base, do some work on my rental property and get ready for another trip to Argentina. It’s been already four years since I took off from this place on the nomad life journey. Strange to reflect on how I had changed. At that time I was thinking I would do the Pilgrimage to Santiago de Campostella in Spain and do an Ethereum Hackathon, but after the hackathon I realized I needed to keep building in Ethereum and traveling.

Transhumanist Readings

What I read on the plane were parts of the Transhumanist history book and Steve Jobs biography. The most compelling ideas found in the first is the chapter on decades of research and proposals on how computers can augment human intelligence and make us super human. This is the topic that to me is the most core to my life purpose as you maybe you have read in a previous entry Issue 38. In this book the most fascinating concepts that lit me up inside were as follows:

The Infomorph

This is an idea from a Transhumanist and computer scientist Alexander Chislenko, he wrote about in a 1996 article, Networking in the Mind Age. It proposes that our identity and mental faculties will blend with a decentralized set of data and functionalities that are tightly integrated with our minds. This proposes that our identity can be liberated from just our material minds, shifting to a digital presence. I imagine this can be implemented with current technology, using knowledge bases on our lives, a “quantified self” databases, similar to personal Notion instances, with AI that is aware of this context and tightly symbiotic with our own minds; in the moment thoughts, goals and emotions. Providing in the moment coaching, advice, relevant data fetching from the internet. This is the direction I going in with my web app LuminaLog.com.

Other Minds

A similar idea to the Infomorph is the concept of how our minds can be fluid. Proposed by the philosopher Aaron Sloman and further developed by Roman V. Yampolskiy, they emphasized the boundlessness of possible mind designs and structures. A mind is defined by the knowledge it contains, it can be expanded, merged and even nested inside other minds. Another aspect of what a mind is, is the goal, a mind can be defined by it’s long term goal, short term goals or not having one, or changed by the will.

The Singularity

This is a concept of a point past which intelligence will expand exponentially and past which our minds can’t imagine. It is explored by Vernor Vinge, a former mathematics professor at San Diego State University, computer scientist and one of the icons of the Transhumanist movement. In 1983 he published an essay in the journal Omni about how we will soon create intelligences greater then our own, creating a process that will cause the Singularity, forming a world we can’t comprehend with our present limited minds. Kurzweil, one of the most well know thinkers on this topic, is known for his spot on predictions, claims we will have immortality by 2032 (recently in a public statement that is not in this book), and believes machines will develop a spiritual faculty, sensing a deeper reality, therefore no longer definable as machines in the sense of the word we are familiar with.

Reality as Fundamentally Computational

This is a perspective on the deeper foundational reality developed by mathematicians and information theorists; Konrad Zuse, Edward Fredkin and Stephen Wolfram. The view the world, that is all time, space, the universe, are nothing but information and the result of the process of calculation. That the universe is the result of some giant super computer. This view proposes that in some post human future, we will be able to ‘hack the universe’ meaning alter the ‘source code’ of creation, and compute another baby universe. Essentially becoming Gods.

Readings on Steve Jobs Biography

The second book I resisted on this flight was this excellent biography by Walter Isaacson, published in 2011. Steve Jobs is often misunderstood, his story is complex and often over simplified. As I browsed through the parts of the book on his time in Reed College to the formation of Apple, I caught a few fragments that I did not catch before. This was about how he overcame his troubling feelings surrounding being abandoned by his birth parents.

By his friends this was described as something that he said it was ‘bothering him’ and that he ‘needed to get a hold of’. Things like the primal scream therapy, the fruit diet, zen meditation, LSD, were ways for him to get a grip on these feelings. His friends described how his confidence improved, his feelings of inadequacy lessened, and that he learned to impart that feeling of confidence in others and push them to do things they didn’t think were possible. During his time in Reed College he met a confident, outgoing, guru like, LSD taking hippie, Robert Friedman that ran the apple farm. From him he learned about ‘selling, coming out of his shell, opening up and taking charge of the situation’. This was his training arc, he saw in others qualities that he lacked, got to know them, could see they had good and bad sides, and learned from them what helped him become better, later tactics he used to achieve his goals, (though not without some mistakes). This is a real hero journey arc, a human being that used his time, his intelligence to go out into the world, and turn his potential into actuality. This is what being human is all about, this is the path of the spiritual seeker of our current modern times. In our current times the great artists and spiritual leaders are those working on the intersection of art and technology. He was not born with the skills and attributes he needed to make this enormously consequential positive impact on the world that he had, he went out into the world, searched, found and acquired the skills, characteristics and knowledge he lacked.

Back in Zion

On Wednesday October 8th, I landed back in Chicago. I visited my favorite cafe in Jefferson Park and continued with some work there. On Saturday I was able to return to my rental property in Zion Illinois to spend a few days here, doing required maintenance and enjoying the beautiful space to live and work. I am departing for Patagonia, Argentina in a few days to join an ‘Edge City’ pop up city around topics of crypto, technology and culture.

During the week I happened to be lucky to visit the downtown area of Chicago. I walked through the Michigan Avenue, by Millenium Park, The Art Institute, and the Harold Washington Library. These areas are near and dear to my heart, the architecture here gives you a monumental feeling, sensing the decades and centuries of souls that passed these streets, and the designs of the buildings here inspiring all with their beauty and harmony. Again after coming from Asia, seeing the budding cities there, raw and early on in their development journey, feeling this contrast, time and time again after going back and forth over the past ten years, you can’t help but wonder, what kind of force can inspire a new cycle of growth in this once innovative city.

You again get a sense of how individuals are limited by their local surroundings, conditioning by the people, information, patterns of their localities, and keenly sensing how travel free’s you from this conditioning. It opens you to the global perspective. I would not trade it for anything in the world. Yes you can feel a lot of anxiety being a nomad, not having certainty if you are really building a solid future, but as humanity evolves, the best bet for your future is being decentralized, being fluid across borders, building connections, seeing the larger patterns in the world, taking the best, the most effective, from wherever it is found.

Post Hackathon Strategies

The team from the Token2049 hackathon agreed we had a good time and we were effective. Currently we’re exploring how we can work together to pursue our project further stages. I proposed using the opportunity of one of the members being at the Network School, to build an AI twin agent that will solve the ‘Dunbar’s Number’ problem, meaning that we only have bandwidth to effectively know about 150 people at one time. With an AI twin that can realistically simulate our way’s of thinking, speaking and be aware of our knowledge and goals, could it then effectively manage discovery, communicate and manage relationships with other peoples AI twins, amplifying our connections and development of relationships? In my experience in this technology, I am convinced it is good enough now and that implementing this will make a big impact on the world. Currently we aim to make this goal a reality.

Conclusion

Ending this week’s newsletter on this thought that like Steve Jobs, go out there in the world, into various areas of human knowledge, spiritual practices, tradition and technology, and find out what your soul and mind need to find out to get yourself free, to get the attributes, attitudes, skills and beliefs you need in order to actualize your inherent potential. To make your dent in the Universe. ✌️