Cyberspace

I've built my life around learning about computers. More specifically, I'm fascinating with how information is handled by them. Information is not just handled by computers, though. It's also handled by our brains. Before I knew that I wanted to study information technology, I wanted to study cognitive science. The way humans communicate, how we leave each other with "pieces" of information with words, is a wonderful topic. I don't know if I'm going to be able to explain how I fully think about these ideas, but I'm going to try my best.

Computers process information in ways not entirely too different from our own. Humans created computers after all. The main advantage of computers is that they do everything correctly, but that's also their biggest weakness. We tell computers exactly what to do, and they do it, even if it leads to them breaking. The main advantage of using computers is that information is processed at speeds incomprehensible to us. It's how a large language model (LLM) can read an entire 100-page document in seconds while it would take an average person a lot longer.

Information, to computers, follows a system. The common saying is that it's all just ones and zeroes. That's how everything is really represented down at the core of a computer, but that doesn't do it for us humans. We don't comprehend information like that, so we tell computers to give it to us in a way we understand, which is by translating those ones and zeroes into other values. Programming languages convert those values to text that is readable to us and displayed on the screen as individual pixels.

This may seem mundane to some, but to me, this process of converting information between our biochemical brains and the electronic transistors of devices that we invented is amazing. It's just incredible that a piece of information can pass from my fingers to the key and send a signal to a CPU that then tells a storage device to change a certain block of numbers to something else is beautifully incomprehensible. Every day, I want to try and understand it better, but I know that I will only ever be able to understand one aspect of working with computers. I can't ever understand the physics of how electricity moves inside the motherboard or how exactly the computer knows which pixels to change and when, but I can understand how to translate the information in my mind to a form that a computer can understand. That is the power that I know lies within me.

I want to design programs that make this process easier. This sort of field I think I'm describing is called Human Computer Interaction. I took a class on this a while ago (it wasn't taught very well unfortunately), but I digress. For a long time, humans have been trying to develop virtual reality (VR), a new way to interface with our machines. VR changes the way information is displayed to the user. No longer is information displayed on a single plane of existence -- it can be accessed by physically interacting with a three-dimensional object.

I think that VR has far more implications for how people use computers than most realize. VR headsets could replace monitors entirely by emulating an infinite number of virtual displays. But that implies that the headset could display the computer's video output at all times. There are no headsets that do that yet, except for the operating systems built into all-in-one headsets, like the Meta's version of Android for the Quest headsets. There is no three-dimensional operating system that you can install onto a personal computer. Even the idea of a three-dimensional operating system has barely been explored.

Imagine that. What I'm trying to express is what is sometimes shown in movies like the Matrix, I guess. Imagine having all of your programs controlled by nothing but your eye movements or your voice -- being able to find the information you're looking for and having appear all around you effortlessly. You can get the same sort of experience right now by typing up a search in Google.

It's hard to really put into words what I have in my head. What I really want to express is this idea of the noosphere. The noosphere isn't really a place, but we as humans live in a physical place, so the best analogy is a library. Imagine that you're looking for a book in a library, but by just knowing its name you can immediately find its exact location, open it, and read it. Right now, you can do that with the internet. There's a lot of friction to that, because your actions need to be translated to the computer through various graphical and physical inputs (for example, clicking on an on-screen button with your mouse). You can't just think of what you want and have it. Computers, on the other hand, can sort of do just that. They just need to be told what it is that they're looking for.

The Library of Babel is a book written by Jorge Luis Borges. It is a hypothetical library that contains every book that could ever be written; essentially, each book contains a different combination letters in a ~400 page format. Imagine being able to inject your mind into a computer and sift through all of the knowledge it contains. Computers connected to a network of computers know everything that could possibly ever be known, but they can't do anything with that raw information. Being able to just move that information around, process it, make something out of it, with just your mind, is the ultimate idea that comes out of reducing the friction completely between you and the computer.

This was a big ramble of a post, but I like thinking about information. I might sound a bit silly with these little words, but these are the ideas that exist in my head. The point of this place is to be a "place" for my thoughts, after all. I send this out to the computers so that other humans can take it and make something out of it. My thoughts are nothing but raw information without you to read it at the screen.