[MiguelSanchez]

I've been programming in Pascal since I was 14 years old, and I was a versatile enough script kiddy that my sysadmin had to teach me to code or watch me destroy everything.
After that I quickly left school after I learned to learn and found it incompatible with pedagogy.
Pretty much as soon as I got into coding I found the mathematics barrier of entry too high so for most tasks, I played around with tinkering, exploring permutations, and lots and lots of lambda calculus, over time I tried lots of different languages, but I don't think many really counted, because I was just forcing them to conform to my preconceptions of what a programming language should be, and they were flexible enough to oblige.

After that I messed around with psychedelics for a while, and programming was no longer a tool for making computer software but a way to force myself to mediate on topics while trying to build bridges from one to the other, which is where the real learning happens.

This led to some bad habits for software development that are great habits for my personalised learning.
After discovering LISP and no doubt using it wrong I saw how much more python could be with just a few more tools.

Fast forward something like 20 years from when I first learned pascal and these days I'd been falling back into doing everything the fast way in python. Programming had taken a back seat while I worked as a carer.

I got my first free time for a while, more than I knew what to do with, so I stopped and I read.
I just finally revisited prolog and gave it the respect it deserved, it had always been unfathomably powerful since the first time I used it, but it took me about a year of non-stop, diving like 100 different books and perspectives and I was finally able to piece everything together.
I think the only coherent project I shared was a method for deriving error correction codes from discrete geometries, but that wasn't the point.
I get all my ideas from biomimicry with a little abstraction (not quite all, but its not far off) so when I'm meditating on AI I just watch myself honestly while suspending judgement, let the code come automatically and keep my attention separate, studying the process, the preconceptions, the errors, and then diagnosing the correction.

I've been working on AI for the last 10 years or so, nothing commercially relevant, just innovation and orienting my mind to work in those conditions.

Lately after basically trying to make toy models of pretty much all obvious and well documented forms of intelligence and the arrangements it can be in (much love to ants, ACOs don't do them justice, true kings of earth I see you!) I've finely built up a nice enough foundation to think about multithreaded combinatorial game theory in the framing of network theory plus algebras of modal epistemic logic, network theory itself graph theory and automata theory.

Having built up that understanding of Chomsky hierarchies, relationships between language and automata, how to implement equivalent mathematical and grammatical rules, everything just came together all at once, in the most perfect way where everything went from being fractured ideas that I knew should connect but couldn't quite solve, to a fully united yet infinitely divisible theory of modal epistemic logic with other minds.

Being a self directed learner I often didn't have the words to talk about things, but I can tell I'll have a lot more points to ground ideas now, most people don't like abstract entities but they like it less when you implement it physically and grey-goo the galaxy.

Anyone who read this far without discounting me as crazy, here are some jedi mind tricks for awakening people who are ready,
talking people through the path from the eye through lateral reticular nucleus, showing that the eye accounts for 5% of the signal to V1, and explaining how the input signals fed to the high detail neural projections can be changed with 3d sounds, can get people to truly reckon with the fact that they are the universe they see, and the minds they project upon other people,
getting people to commit to a guess in their head before giving them an answer can bring preconceptions to attention,
asking people the fibonacci sequence will "incept them" in a way their social fears prompt an internal double take, and they do the addition in their head as they read it, allowing you to switch their mathematical reasoning loops on.
You may not realise if you're doing it, but don't play with people's temporoparietal junction unless they're coming seeking and can handle what they seek, try to stick with people who will have a method to communicate their experience, and psychedelic users who will be familiar with being thrown into different perspectives,
the real wisdom is that while everyone knows that "reality" is a simulation people carry inside their head, noone knows how much of it is really from outside and even the most enlightened people will perpetually be shocked with what's actually their own dynamics.
I just hope the empiricists I trust know about experimenter bias and someone thought to test how much p hacking they can do before 50% of journals say no.