Umm, a new journey

Hola! Through 2022 and 2023 I published an strange newsletter. It was an experiment to get an intuition for how my raw internal understanding of concepts could be understood by others, part of IPMM. It was also an accountability exercise for me, to cure concepts that I'm working on ("abstractions" or "meaning units" in my vocabulary), and force me to share these small capsules in a timely manner.

I quickly learned that, indeed, my abstractions are not very digestible by others, and while they are the most precise regarding my intended meaning, they are not good means for efficient communication.

A failed experiment

Playing with Chat-GPT, I also learned that Large Language Models are incredibly good at translating my gibberish abstractions into accessible narratives. I could even select the target age group, the style, and even translate it to a different language.

The reason I stopped the newsletter is that I decided to embark on the adventure of making LLMs to write all the documentation and articles for the conceptual framework behind the Interplanetary Mind-Map (the overarching project) based on the repository where all these ideas are interconnected.

Over the last 3 years, the conceptual framework has grown immensely, and I've gained a lot of clarity on what the foundations and direction of the Interplanetary Mind-Map are. The scope I want to communicate is enormous, though. If I could automate the publishing, it would allow me to keep focusing on my research.

One of the main insights out of this exploration is that language for communicating and language for reasoning are different, and to optimize for both, they can and need to be separated. What I refer to as "my research" is my internal reasoning, captured through a particular form of writing enabled by the IPMM framework. So, communicating my research has a huge overhead over something that already takes all my energy. I really wanted this automation to work.

This image is a visual representation of how my abstractions are connected (my reasoning). The goal was to turn this graph into a linear narrative (the communication) that explains each concept, considering that each concept has many conceptual dependencies (the order matters). It was also important that it was not the most boring thing to read.

I didn't manage. I spent 6-8 months attempting it. Through all that time, it felt like I was almost there. Eventually, I realized that the level of control over the narrative that I wanted was too much to be automated.

Back to the beginning

At the beginning of the year, I dropped the idea of LLM automation and decided that I need to do what I didn't want to do: just write, not for me, but for others. It is an extremely time-consuming process, especially because I still need to figure out how to introduce hundreds of concepts with huge amounts of dependencies among them and not scare the reader along the way.

This has led me to start with the most foundational stuff. So foundational that when writing, I'm constantly questioning if I'm putting the energy in the right place and if this really matters for the ultimate goal of the Interplanetary Mind-Map. I believe the answer is yes; it matters. The Interplanetary Mind-Map exists to question the foundations of how we relate to digital information, and the digital rabbit hole that we've lost ourselves in is very deep. I shall go there.

Universal Meaning Map

While working on the conceptual framework, I've also been thinking about how to open the project. Although the origins of this exploration date back to 2015, the last 3.5 years have been of extreme dedication and isolation. I've been living in a cave, building my own world, my own language.

The language I use to communicate is an obvious element that needs to change if I want to be understood, but there are many more elements, such as the goals, the scope, and the relationship with a broader community, that need to be framed differently. I want to stop it being a personal exploration and make it an open one. Not easy.

With Dani, we named the project IPMM, from "Interplanetary Mind-Map" (in 2016?), referring to the Interplanetary File System (a distributed network and file system) that opened a boundless way to connect information, and "mind map" as a digital representation of the mind (not necessarily referring to the mind-map tool). The focus on the mind stemmed from deep frustration with digital tools not allowing me to represent and connect what I had in my head.

While being able to represent what's in the mind matters, it's been clear for a while that this is not the true intent of the project. The mind is just an ephemeral conscious state. What I really want is to represent meaning, that is, our internal model for everything there is. And not only that, but also connect it with others in a universal network.

The new name is Umm, the Universal Meaning Map.

Leaving the cave

Soon, through this site I will start sharing very different new material. The core of what I've written so far looks like a continuous narrative, spread through many articles, constructing logical arguments to build the substrate to justify what the focus actually is: a model for meaning and how to represent it in digital form. Much of this content is quite dense, probably not too exciting for many people but I also want to explore with articles that touch on the human and spiritual byproducts of Umm's perspective on information.