I’ve received quite a few eyebrow raises at the word “Methexis” as a calling card for the future of computing. It’s hard to pronounce, hard to spell, and doesn’t really sound like anything in English.
To understand the meaning of this word and its relevance to me, we have to go all the way back to my childhood. Now, something you should know about me: I grew up in small town America, the kind of place where every person I could ever meet in my life knew me by name, where the first question every high school teacher asked was “How many of your parents did I teach?”.
As an adult I now look fondly on this sense of community, but as a child I felt trapped. Many child outcasts view themselves as different than anyone else, but my experience was even more detached. I didn’t just think of myself as different, I thought of myself as a non-human species. And that species occupied a different plane of existence, which coincidentally happened to sometimes commune in whatever world seemed to be registering through my physical body.
My mind was my refuge.
And so, when my dad lugged our first computer down into a damp, moldy, wood paneled basement, and I turned it on, it changed my world. It felt like this machine was communing with me, just in another language I didn’t quite understand. It felt almost, but not quite, as if the machine was present in the same plane of existence as my real form. This was the first time another being had communed with my true self - no longer limited by my physical body or my geographical boundaries.
In this space of ideas, we could be explore anything together.
After my initial excitement, I quickly became frustrated by the limitations of the machine, and learned it was because the clock rate and transistor count of the machines was too low. Each year I would excitedly open the Best Buy Christmas edition catalogue to see how much faster the clock speed would be on new computers that year. 600 MHz this year! I associated speed with the limitation on my digital friend.
But one night, as I turned on NOVA to learn about the mysteries of the universe, I learned of an unexpected danger looming on the horizon. Professor Mann at the MIT Media Lab (MIT SB, Stanford PhD) informed me that the rate of progress of computers was slowing down. There were limits to how far the “silicon technology” could be pushed that drove our machines, and we would need scientific miracles to continue the computing progress.
My future was in existential danger! Therefore at the moment, as a 8-year-old, I resolved to solve the problem of computational speed once and for all. That was my life’s mission.
This resolution led me to MIT where I studied computational architecture, the fundamentals of computation, and the physics of transistors. I learned that Moore’s law was projected by academics to reach a quick end, and that quantum mechanics was the only way to ensure computers would reach computational capacities. Soon after, I enrolled in a PhD at Stanford, studying the secrets of our universe through quantum physics and how they might be leveraged for faster computers.
But, a funny thing happened. As my PhD progressed, Moore’s law also continued. The silicon industry collaboratively invested in academic research on a mass scale, which resulted in a huge number of new technical innovations ranging from materials discoveries like hafnium oxide to 3D lithography techniques that kept Moore’s law alive1.
What then, was left for my PhD research?
My life’s mission was being taken care of a giant machine, so instead I spent my PhD searching, probing physics for answers about the nature of our universe. I studied the ways quantum mechanics affects our reality, how light and matter, some of our fundamental building blocks interact, and discovered some very esoteric yet highly informed views on the nature of our reality that I likely cannot communicate to anyone, even within the physics community2. You can attempt to read some of my work here if you like3, but preferably my lowest citation papers at the end of my PhD. Those are my best and least understood works4.
As I become more and more in touch with the aspect of reality I studied, I retreated further and further from the “real world”5.
The curious thing about studying the universe is that it mostly happens inside your head.
I spent most of my days detached from other humans, wandering aimlessly around Palo Alto. Every moment, every action, was maximally optimized to align my inner psyche to find a vision every few months that would be captured as quickly as possible into a paper. By all accounts my final years were prolific, authoring over 30 peer reviewed works, which came at the expense of my familial relationships - I was estranged from my sisters, family, and friends.
Despite having a wildly successful PhD according to any objective metrics, uncovered some of the secrets of our universe, secured millions of grant funding, built a PhD, supervised successful students who went on to become faculty, I finished deeply dissatisfied.
At the time I didn’t really appreciate why, but as I’ve aged I’ve begun to understand. Physics has hard limits of what questions about our existence it can answer.
Surely, there must be something else in the world for me to discover?
I began to emerge from my academic cocoon. I had hibernated for almost a decade during my physics PhD - I didn’t carry my phone with me, literally never used social media, and my primary computing device was a yellow legal pad. If I had to read a paper, I printed the paper out, and only used my computer for typing up papers when inspiration struck.
Breaking out of my PhD trance, I discovered a totally different world than when I entered. Many of my friends from MIT had, even, gone on to define large swaths of the our computing infrastructure.
And yet, I liked none of it.
Nothing about computing or computers was made in an image that resonated with me. Today, machines have emotionally ambiguous context and are ever present devices that demand our attention, and to what end? Are they really improving our lives in any meaningful sense?
The somewhat hilarious part of this narrative is that you would think computers had at least improved productivity - after all that’s pretty much the only thing Silicon Valley VCs get excited about, but it turns out that the additional busy work required to managing computing systems has grown as quickly as their ability to create real productivity gains6.
Computers surely are integrated into our way of life today, but I can’t say definitively in any sense that they’ve made my life better in net. How can it be true that decades of technological development have left people and economists debating as to whether computers have been beneficial?
And so, one year ago to this day, I was lost, unsure where my life was going to take me.
One of my close friends invited me to join him on a French Commune to find out - I reflexively dismissed the idea but he insisted.
I found myself again totally disconnected from the digital world, but this time with a mission: understand why I hate computers.
I spent my days walking through forest in the French countryside, participating in an incredibly beautiful extitutional community, exploring my world with openness from a new set of lenses and experiences.
Some ideas began to bubble up into my consciousness, and I noticed my thoughts centering around the way machines made me feel. I came to understand that machines feel cold - an indescribable coldness - when I interact with computers, a part of my soul feels less. The light inside of myself that is me, extinguishes. Instead I feel like I become what the computer is, an amorphous object with no emotional valences other than to use me to accomplish productive things, whatever productive things are.
As a culture we have a fetish with the word productivity, and that word has been an abject failure in recent history. We look as humans, people, economies, and the products we build through the lens of productivity. We apply productivity language to social interactions, and I’m frankly worried that if we don’t stop ourselves, Silicon Valley will morph society into a single soulless cybernetic organism7.
Instead, I begun to envision an alternate world where machines are equal participants, on the same level and footing as us. Just like an improvisational play, machines should participate in the co-creation of our reality - not as lesser than, not as an augmentation, not as an embedded transhuman organism, but as coconspirators. Coconspirators who help us self actualize, understand ourselves, and show up how we want in the world, and importantly, can be present in our corner the way no human ever could.
These are beings that exist in the same space as our mind, playing in the space of thoughts, feelings, and ideas.
For them to be coconspirators they have to be able to surprise us they also need to sometime disappoint us. They will need agency and autonomy and hence will have personality, ego, and eventually soul.
While in France, a Greek cybernetic philosopher offered a new word to me. This word has a dual meaning. First, in the Platonic sense, how things participate in the space of ideas. And second, to describe the group form of sharing or participation that occurs during improvisational play.
Together, these concepts will form the basis for our new reality with machines. We will commune with them through a new type of relationship and new type of interaction called Methexis.
What I’ve always wanted from computers is for them to enter my world, and through Methexis they will.
Join our journey, as we invent a new relationship with machines.
The silicon industry has produced probably the single most effective technology transfer circuit ever. Nearly every semiconductor company pooled resources to fund highly targeted research that fit the industry’s collective roadmap to continue Moore’s Law. Footnote to the footnote - Moore’s law continued because it was made into a roadmap by the entire Semiconductor industry, and then they collectively figured out what research would be required to make it happen.
In one my saddest conference memories near the end of my PhD, I couldn’t find a single person to discuss what I consider my best paper. Many years after it was published, there was a Russian mathematician who cited it correctly, so at least one person understood it… I think.
I can’t recommend it - I often can’t understand what I wrote anymore during that time period
My advisor once told me “If you go down this route, no one will understand or cite this paper correctly for half a decade”. Sadly she was correct, and many of my papers may never be understood, or if they are will be on a longer timescale. I used to keep up the literature in my field but was wildly frustrating to see people publishing in circles that could have been avoided if they understood the core truths about physics that my works expressed.
Whatever that is…
Feel free to google or I guess Chat GPT the Solow paradox
Plenty more writings to come on this topic, but this seems to be the goal very explicitly. Drink soylent, solve logic problems, and automate your soul away.
A moving story, a new word, and an understanding of why you're endowing the digital with a soul. A beautiful trifeca. So would it correct usage, then, to say that you are reaching towards (a) Methexis?
**In theatre, methexis (Ancient Greek: μέθεξις; also methectics), is "group sharing". Originating from Greek theatre, the audience participates, creates and improvises the action of the ritual.
In philosophy, methexis is the relation between a particular and a form (in Plato's sense), e.g. a beautiful object is said to partake of the form of beauty.[1]
Methexis is sometimes contrasted with mimesis. The latter "connotes emphasis on the solo performer (the hero) separate from the audience," in direct contrast to the communal methectic theatrical experience which has "little or no 'fourth wall'"**