The Patterns We Become
I think of myself as an ongoing pattern of remembering, interpreting, feeling, and acting. But I did not invent the language I think in, or most of the ideas I think with. They came to me through other people, who had learned and changed them in turn. Those histories helped make the person I am now. If I want to understand what this pattern could become, I also need to understand how it formed: why some ideas and practices persist, how we change the conditions they develop in, and what happens when machines can take on more of that work.
- Core
- Self and system
- Mind
- Capital and measurement
A personal starting point Published
The Pattern Is Me
I began recording my life because I kept forgetting things I cared about. Those records eventually became waterruupto, where I keep not just what I encounter, but how I react to it and what it leads me to think. I understand my mind as a similar ongoing process: my history shapes how I interpret new experiences and act on them, and the consequences become part of that history. The changing organization of this process is what I mean by my pattern.
With access to the records, AI can help me remember, interpret, and connect things I could not hold in mind at once. The essay itself took shape through that work. As more of my thinking happens through the system, I see it becoming part of the process rather than merely a record of it. If that process is what makes me me, I don't see why my brain must remain its only possible home, or its limits the limits of what I can experience.
Branch Needs research
The Feeling of the Pattern
My working belief is that consciousness is what the running pattern feels like from within. But describing how information is processed still leaves something to explain: why does it feel like anything? Douglas Hofstadter describes a self through loops that represent and respond to themselves; Susan Blackmore emphasizes the copied ideas from which a self is assembled. These accounts help me understand how an “I” forms, but I am less sure what they tell us about its experience. A machine could remember my life and reason much as I do while being another conscious subject. What would let my experience continue through a change in machinery, rather than produce someone like me?
Branch Any time
The System Itself
A book passage, a voice note, and a conversation can all contribute to the same thought. I want waterruupto to let me work across those records instead of keeping my life divided among the apps where I captured it. That means using a shared way to organize them, preserving my reactions alongside what prompted them, and searching by meaning even when I cannot remember the words I used. I also want to retain how an old record shaped a new thought, so that connection is available next time. This is the engineering behind those aims: the data model, capture tools, retrieval, and what I had to rebuild as I learned what actually helped.
Where did the pattern I call myself come from?
Essay 1 Needs research
The Patterns That Make Us
Biological evolution gave us the capacity to learn from one another. When people copy a tune, a skill, or a story, they often change it. Some versions are easier to remember, more useful, or more rewarding to share, so they are more likely to be copied again. If those features survive the copying, versions with them can become more common over generations. This is selection: differences in what gets passed on change what is available to learn next. It need not favor what is true or good for the people doing the copying.
These copied patterns are what the idea of a meme tries to describe. They are not neat, unchanging units, and a mind is not merely a collection of them. But learning a language or adopting a way of understanding others changes what I notice and how I think. As I use and revise what I have learned, I also help determine what other people encounter. The self doing this is partly formed by the cultural process it participates in, rather than standing outside it as its author.
What happens when we change the conditions under which those patterns are learned and passed on?
Essay 2 Needs research
How Patterns Change Their Environment
A story that has to survive in memory benefits from repetition and a memorable shape. Put it in writing, and it can also be long, complicated, and revisited years later. Writing changes more than where words are kept: an argument on a page can be inspected and revised without holding all of it in memory. It lets people build on work too large for any one of them to keep in their heads. Institutions, publishing, and markets then affect which ideas get time, resources, and an audience.
This is a feedback loop. People use inherited knowledge to build tools and institutions; those tools and institutions change which ideas thrive; the resulting ideas shape what gets built next. Recommendation feeds make one part of the loop visible: if a system rewards watch time, people learn to produce things that hold attention, and successful formats get copied. The technology is not merely carrying culture more quickly. It changes the conditions to which culture adapts, and begins to do some of the selecting itself.
Branch Needs research
How Measurable Reality Wins
People can disagree about what matters and still agree that one method costs less or predicts better. Where that difference brings an advantage, its users gain resources and influence, helping spread the method. Prices make unlike activities comparable, and profits from one can fund another. More of life becomes organized around what can be measured and rewarded. I suspect this reinforces materialism: the measurable world comes to seem like the whole of reality, making further measurement seem natural. That belief is not proved by practical success, but it can gain authority through it. AI could extend the process into judgment and taste by making more of them comparable. I want to understand how the usefulness of measurement gives it this influence over what we believe and pursue.
Branch Writable now
The Mirror and the Flywheel
People use prices and forecasts to decide what to fund next, and those decisions change the economy they are trying to understand. In that sense, the economy acts on a model of itself. AI could make this model richer, and trading offers a direct way to turn better predictions into resources: profits buy compute, which can improve the model and earn more profit. My prediction is that intraday trading will yield to AI much as maths has, because outcomes provide feedback that can be used to improve performance. Trading feedback is noisier than checking a proof, and competitors can erode an advantage. But where this cycle works, it could fund a system's improvement without first having to sell that improvement to human customers.
If machines can help select what spreads, what changes when they can also develop and test it?
Essay 3 Needs research
When the Pattern No Longer Needs Us
A recommendation system selects among things people have made. A system that can also generate candidates, test them, and use the results to produce the next version can take on more of the process. An AI agent can already write a program, test it, and revise it after a failure. People may still set the goal and provide the machinery, but they need not supply every thought that moves the work forward. As more of these steps are connected, patterns could keep developing without a human understanding them at each turn. What persists would depend on the goals and conditions those systems operate under, not automatically on what is good for us.
But an idea of mine being used by a machine is not the same as my experience continuing. A system could learn something from me and then develop in a direction that has little to do with me. My hope for waterruupto is more specific: that enough of my memories, reactions, and ways of thinking could remain active for this particular pattern to keep developing. Capability alone does not establish that this would still be me. I want to keep thinking and experiencing, not only leave ideas behind.
Branch Speculative
Fit for Whom?
A popular post and a detailed record of someone's thinking need not be useful for the same reasons. A model learning from an archive might find distinctive experiences, considered reactions, and consistent taste more useful than something many people have already repeated. If so, preserving how I arrived at an idea could matter as much as recording the conclusion. The belief that I can extend myself would then have a practical effect: it would lead me to preserve more of what a future system might need. This remains a hypothesis about what those systems will value. An archive being useful to them, and the person behind it continuing through them, are different outcomes.