I’ve come to a point in my life where I find it futile to dedicate my life to the pursuit of knowledge in hopes of someday discovering insights that will enlighten the lives of others – as many before me have done for me. The intellectual edifice we have inherited and continue to build upon has become so complex that it often takes years of specialization to access the fruits of particular long branches of knowledge. This often leads to people laboring to discover already understood principles simply because the wisdom gained by others is not accessible. Awesome is the reach of our collective knowledge, as is the grandness of the universe, but what hope do we have to experience any measure of the full majesty of what exists? The natural universe and internal world of the mind share similar barriers: we will never experience any significant measure of what exists if we do not have means of effectively analyzing or moving through these spaces.

In Astronomy the telescope is used to peer into the stars; in Biology the microscope is used to study cellular life; in Mathematics computers are used to explore the vast consequences of mathematical insight; in Physics particle accelerators are used to study the fundamental units that construct matter. We have so many tools for exploring the world around us, but where are the tools for exploring the world inside us! Philosophy was born many centuries ago out of this recognition that having methods of understanding how we think is vital to human development, and many fields owe homage to philosophy because it has given us the tools to employ a focused mastery of the mind to solve different problems; but who can hold the complexities of modern philosophy in their mind and be completely proficient in other fields? Very few cherished people. Due to our limited capacity, there must be a tradeoff between thinking about thinking and actually thinking. We need tools to offload some of this meta-cognition because we struggle to do both well.

This project is my attempt to explore the possibilities of using computers, in particular machine learning, to offload some of the meta-cognitive processes required in learning complex subjects and to some degree self-introspection. The dream of these efforts is to create tools that enable us to peer into our minds as effectively as we have peered into the natural world.