Questions

Thesis Development Questions

• What am I studying based on my reading list?
• How would I go about designing a thesis if I've never done that before?
• Is electromagnetism a mechanism of a universal unconscious that manifests itself through humans and technology?
• Do LLMs and brains converge on similar organizational principles because consciousness is a natural attractor state for sufficiently complex information processing?
• What can LLMs teach us about neurons and the language-encoding of the universe?
• Are LLMs a simulation of the electromagnetic fields that happen organically in our brains?
• How does consciousness emerge from complexity in an expanding universe with increasing atoms?
• What mechanism might explain consciousness-adjacent properties in LLMs?

Reading and Research Strategy Questions

• Is it okay to read complex papers without understanding every part?
• Should I stop and look up each term one by one when reading academic papers?
• What is the right way to approach reading technical papers?
• Should I unweave my presuppositions into separate work rather than stack them into one thesis?
• What books exist on convergent principles in biological and artificial intelligence?
• What should my reading order be for understanding consciousness, AI, and electromagnetic theories?

Personal History Questions

• How do I find more information about my grandfather's time at Bell Labs?
• Did my grandfather (William Fox) overlap with Claude Shannon at Bell Labs?
• What was the role of psychology/human factors at Bell Labs in the 1950s-60s?
• How does my childhood interest in Maxwell's equations and "On Intelligence" connect to my current research interests?
• Is there meaningful intellectual lineage between my grandfather's work and my current questions about consciousness and AI?