Hi, I'm Leo, I'm a former neuroscientist, sometimes data scientist and founder of both crypto data and AI companies. In my life I've always been a student of epistemology, or how we come to know things, and I'd argue that most of our understanding come from metaphors.
So, yes, I'm also a metaphor then. We each play many roles in our life, so in many ways we are a rich tapestry of different metaphors upon metaphors.
Cambridge Dictionary defines metaphor as:
"an expression, often found in literature, that describes a person or object by referring to something that is considered to have similar characteristics to that person or object"
"Tapestry" above, of course, is a metaphor.
"The mind is an ocean." is an apt and common metaphor that can help understanding the mind. Conscious mind can be seen as the waves on the surface. The subconscious and unconscious as the ocean's depths. Metaphors of mind and how they relate to AI will be a common subject here.
Another common set of metaphors will be relating minds, thermodynamics and cryptography and even things like the "observer effect" in physics. Our minds hold keys that unlock insights. Metaphors are one type of key and are not completely unlike cryptographic hashing functions. Metaphors can act as "lookups" to ideas and related concepts in our minds. I think we'll be seeing more of this metaphor in the coming years. I suspect because of these relations, we'll see that AI needs cryptography in many ways and I believe that may what finally drives web3... the need for open systems that can pull in a lot of information for AI, but are nonetheless private.
Do I claim to be an expert in all these things? Absolutely not. My goal is to use some metaphor as keys that might unlock better understanding. No metaphors are perfect and all of them break down eventually, but they are stepping stones to a more useful understanding. That's the goal here, to spark additional insights by pulling together concepts that have some interesting relationships.
Metaphors provide a bridge to understanding by linking familiar concepts with something new. And so that's what I want to do on this page in the coming weeks and years: Use metaphor to describe new concepts in hopefully new ways, from AI to crypto to self-knowledge and ancient wisdom. I'll often use a specific metaphor as the theme of a post. Send me your favorite methaphors and I'll try to include them as topics and discussion seeds!
