Matt King: Forever Our Wizard
meowwolf.com
meowwolf.com
It's just such an inspiring story about a group of humans who absolutely poured every last drop of their souls into their work. Meow Wolf holds a really special place in my brain. I hope before I'm done I can make something 1/10th as cool as what they've created.
Sounds mega-cool, and I'd like to visit these installations.
I'm familiar with the type of person that Matt King was. Can be incredibly motivating to be around, but also, the intensity level is so high, it seems unsustainable.
It does seem that the world is a slightly darker place, now.
I feel sad even though I never met the guy.
We live in strange times when we can look into space with incredible resolution, but even artists don't have the tools to express the inner structures of their mind that makes them feel bad.
It's strange that Chemistry could identify the structure of so many molecules without ever seeing them but we can't do the same with the structures of the mind.
What are the obstacles that prevent us from reasoning about our mind structures like we reason about software?
The mind is made of and affected by proteins, enzymes, small molecules. Those form cells, and larger structures, but at every level it is exceptionally hard for us to work with those building blocks.
There's no nice formulas or method that can tell you what a protein does, or how to design one that does what you want.
It is as if every single token of the source code was encrypted, and it took great effort to translate anything, word by word, slowly and painstakingly.
One thing we can do is take small bits of code, put them in thousands of slightly different live systems, and watch what happens. Clinical trials. That helps a lot, but it is still an uphill battle trying to understand the far future alien technology that is biology.
Art shows us the structure of the mind without the need of understanding its physical representation. Another way is spirituality where structures are called demons.
We have some understanding of art, but it feels as limited as medieval alchemy. There must be a better way to approach our mind.
It, however, has historically contributed less to the success of medicine than furthering our understanding of biology.
So, I have a pretty narrow, muleheaded interest in evidence-based beliefs that pay their rents in predictions about the world.
Those I like, because they sometimes convert into useful medical interventions.
>Those who agree point to LoF as embodying an enigmatic "mathematics of consciousness", its algebraic symbolism capturing an (perhaps even "the") implicit root of cognition
Sad to see such a creative person go :(