inspired by David Cole’s and aarnphm’s
the works that rewired my brain, the people who showed me new ways of seeing. not exhaustive or ranked
Yana Log Notes and its anonymous curator, for showing what knowledge in biochem in the context of Transhumanism looks like through the Digital Garden lense I am familiar with.
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter: consciousness emerging from strange loops, meaning from self-reference. unlike anything else in structure or substance. showed me that intelligence might be pattern all the way down.
Theoretical Neuroscience by Peter Dayan and L. F. Abbott: the mathematics of thought. neurons as differential equations, learning as optimization. the bridge between biology and computation.
Active Inference and the Free Energy Principle from Karl Friston: brains as prediction machines minimizing surprise. everything from perception to action unified under one elegant mathematical framework.
Artem Kirsanov for making Computational Neuroscience feel accessible and beautiful. differential equations as the language of change, theta rhythms as memory’s clock. showed me how to build understanding through visualization.
3Blue1Brown for teaching me to see math instead of just computing it. linear transformations as movement, not matrices. Manim as proof that pedagogy is an art form.
exurb1a for the existential questions and absurdist answers. meaning at the end of meaning. sparked my interest in understanding consciousness from the inside.
Philip Glass for minimalism that builds complexity through repetition. Einstein on the Beach, Glassworks, Koyaanisqatsi. music as recursive process, emotion through mathematical structure.
Bach through Hofstadter’s lens: fugues as conversations between voices, canons as self-modifying systems. mathematical beauty in counterpoint.
digital gardens and the zettelkasten method; knowledge as living, interconnected, always growing.
the idea that understanding emerges not from isolated facts but from the links between them. that intelligence might be less about what you know and more about how densely you’ve connected it.