reading:
Read/Watch
First 15 pages of Metaphors We Live By- 99 cent audio book -or AI Slop Video 3:16:
Do we currently live in a Multiverse? — PBS Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzKWfw68M5U
Building an Artificial Social Media Network 38:45: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/09/29/330-petter-tornberg-on-the-dynamics-of-misinformation/
How to Build a Collective Mind: https://medium.com/predict/how-to-build-a-collective-mind-that-speaks-for-humanity-in-real-time-eade7f60c292
Or watch a movie that you find relevant or pick among the ones below.
making / writing:
ask:
The challenge is to create an app that allows people to find each other in the vast space of other people.
Could neural networks do a better job of depicting the nuance of what is inside you and relate it more productively to the stuff inside someone else? What we have is an interface problem and you are the perfect person to save us. Can you revisit that interface? Can you expose more the vast number of dimensions in a neural network?
For people to represent themselves in the space they need to be given some opportunity to express themselves. How can you inspire them to write, talk, make images, or just make interesting choices.
In the first week Hoffman talked about ITP (Interface Theory of Perception) where time and space is just a simplifying interface to a deeper reality. You need to create an interface metaphor (like Hoffman's time and space) using something simplified and familiar so people will understand how to navigate this vast “impossible” space.
The most famous interface metaphor is the desktop metaphor but you might want to inspire less business like expression. As we have become familiar with computer interface, that has unfortunately that as devolved into no metaphor at all, every just knows how to use pulldown menus, tab menus, carousels etc. This is what vibe programming will deliver, a corporate looking interface of compute native items. Each of you should come up with a metaphor, the beach, the subway, a snake, the movie Groundhog Day, smoke, atoms. Many of you already have metaphors and you can just go deeper.
If what we depicting is your inner experience (or even an outer world that might really be a multiverse without time or free will) maybe we should thinking past conventional illusions and be more adventurous in our juxtapositions. Writing does this. Cinema did this by taking liberties with the discontinuities of time and space in editing, Computational media does this natively but the interface of DOM elements like pulldown menus for filtering is not inspiring. The “web” is a more promising metaphor, maybe keep going in that direction. Be adventurous, embrace discontinuity, make the multiverse your metaphor!
Many metaphor will be about 3D space but be careful when the only way to scale it is the equivalent of urban sprawl and the only way to navigate it is tedious travel. Many VR interfaces are like this. Instead of traveling verbs, look for conjuring verbs that allow the space to re-render around you instead of requiring to move through it. The space is constructed by your consciousness and appears to be coming out of you instead of you traveling through it. This is the idea that we have talked about of navigation by creation. Again this draws inspiration from physics with the idea of many realities “superimposed” (opposite of sprawl) on each other with the possibilities “collapsing” onto one with your observation.
Conceive of and draw novel interfaces using unexpected analogies and metaphors that might expose a higher dimensional space and allow navigation and creation in it.
If you don’t have another idea about why people want to find each other, make a dating app.
Watch movies, rse a pencil and paper, upload image to blog.
As a practical interface problem, we have one screen and many stories. Are we currently living through a similar problem because there are currently infinite universes that we are walking through all the time. I sounds crazy but many (most) physicist believe this. If not infinite, you can imaging that there around 8 billion universes on earth at the moment. Can you draw inspiration for you interface from the idea of superimposition, where there appears to be only one universe, one screen, one story, but different people depart in small ways from that viewpoint?
Shared Minds are like clouds floating in the sky
Shared Minds are like garden soil
Shared Minds are like planes of glass
Shared Minds are like a forest
Shared Minds are like a jungle
Shared Minds are like a fabric
Shared Minds are like putting you hand outside a car window
Shared Minds are like goo
Shared Minds are like a series of funnels
Shared Minds are like fish
Shared Minds are like a dollhouse
Shared Minds are like food
Shared Minds are like a hallway
Shared Minds are like rooms
Shared Minds are like bars
a few metaphors:
we move viewfinders across an infinite space of possibilities: all cinema; conversations; images; reality is this.
connecting people is a problem of finding dimensional space where two people (or vectors) align. st_experiments_week-6 explores one such representation of this metaphor.
minds are like water-streams that meet at points, but continue flowing in their unique directions; before all of them ending up in the ocean (decay into death). a social-interface an interface is a force (rock, wind, obstacle) that guides the current to either points of peaceful confluence , or chaotic dissonance; or both.
minds, over time, are like infinite lines in space: some meet; some don’t; some move in; some move out.
the more i think about these, the more strongly i believe that this shouldn’t be an app. i think the whole connecting across continents is kind-of an impersonal ruse: we need more people in front of each other, with an interface helping them see each other’s expansion of dimensions; so as to find one that you align with.
borrowing from notes from strangers need strange moments together:
new-york is more explicit with its social differences. i think it’s quite beautiful. back in india, you won’t find many places where the homed and homeless share space together, but you do so in new-york. people write covetous notes to each other on the internet, without knowing anything about them.
really, i mean: what does it take for people to find points of similarity between them? to see that you both may share the same overlap of lyrical-rap, but just the specifics are different (because either of you weren’t exposed to each other’s contexts).
that’s an a good social interface. it is not merely on a screen. it allows people to see what always was, but isn’t apparent. it helps them see beyond visible differences of age, color, caste, creed, gender, identity, preferences, et-cetera. can you — neural network — do that? can you run your multidimensional embedding space to help me find similarities with this person that is oh-so-dissimilar, in a way that isn’t forced? or better yet, can you help me see where they’re coming from; can you open me up to new possibilities instead of shrinking me down to only the one in my head?
you can’t. but a designer can. should. must.
am i that designer? i don’t know. would i like to be? yes. 100%. i think daily-tous-les-jours are that. i can strive to be.
i came into shared-minds wanting to evolve dialectic thinking partner (see sm_experiments_week-2into a physical, embodied form. probably as portfolio-padding.
but perhaps what i write about now is a more noble endeavor.
from class:
- temporality — i’m connected to you now; may not be connected post now
- spectrum vs bucketing / binary?
- jackie says: lock people in a room and they’ll be connected
- lense — spherical
- can we go back from death?