There are undercurrents to all of this. It's all rooted in the fact that I've known since early childhood that my mind is different from others'. And being autistic also conferred a rigid desire for epistemological certainty, which, through repeated and painful failure, taught me deep lessons about the nature of truth, knowledge, reality, and the fundamental limitations of the human mind.

Since I was a young boy, I've wanted to understand how minds work, how they can be different from each other, what they must have in common, how they coordinate with each other, what they are capable of, what they accomplish, and why they exist.

Along the way, I've had some interesting realizations. Evolution is a learning algorithm. The brain is a learning algorithm. Human society is a learning algorithm. They are organized hierarchically. Monetary systems, the scientific method, the internet, and social media are "mods" we've plugged into the massive learning algorithm we all participate in, and, in the process, introduced bugs into the system.

Human minds can never touch the Truth. They can only grasp the image of it through our perceptions... Plato's shadows. And yet our minds are the source of all meaning, without which the Truth cannot matter.

Minds work by crafting miniature models of the universe, based on a priori assumptions embedded in our neural architecture and the meager data we collect through our senses. These models are ephemeral, fickle, fragile, flaky figments of our imaginations. And yet everything we experience as real is mediated by them, to the point that we cannot tell the model from the thing it represents.