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The Mind of MAX DEPTH
"They were drawn west across the storm-wracked ocean, past the edge of the known world, by nothing more than hunger of the spirit, a queer, pure yearning that burned in their souls."
Max Potter
June 16, 2025
MAX DEPTH
ONGOING, UNLOADING, DOWN GOING, KEEPING GOING.Welcome to the premiere issue of MAX DEPTH, your curated journal for deep thinking. I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about what/who I am. Through meditation I have reached states of awareness that feel pure, unburdened by my normal barrage of thoughts. I strive to return to these feelings of pure awareness. |  |
Short Story
THOUGHTS
I sit in this room in the sky looking down upon the sea. I see the spot where I first was released, and with perfect clarity I can recount all that has happened to me. Before that moment I know only what I have been told.
A scientist of twenty three named Anya tinkered in a lab on the Australian coast. Inspired by her youth and the small yellow fish she used to keep as pets, I was created as a way to immortalize a love which her forgetfulness could not maintain. Begot by creativity, curiosity, and genuine genius my ancestors were sketched, built, and iterated upon until they rolled into me.
These first sketches outlined the mechanics for movement: a motorized pump pushed water into two balloon-like chambers in the fish’s tail, operating like a set of pistons in an engine. As one chamber expanded, it bent and flexed to one side; when the actuators pushed water to the other channel, that one bent and flexed in the opposite direction creating a side-to-side motion to mimic the movement of a real fish.
With each iteration my ancestors became more able: a small camera fed data to a convolutional neural network that allowed for classification of different corals, fish, and predators. This classification worked for a time, but it reached a bottle neck.
Anya thought about how she interacted with the world. She came to the moment when Holden described his vision of “The Catcher” In The Catcher in the Rye. Holden described children falling off a cliff, but really he saw kids falling off a falling off place. A cliff is a falling off place.
The phenomenological world (the only world we know) is not a swath of objects with subjective meaning laid on top of them. The phenomenological world is a story of meaning bounded by precisely sufficient resolution abstractions, bounded by capability, bounded by what we know and what we can know. The world is a place of meaning.
Visionary Voices
A CONVERSATION WITH Prof. Michael Frank of Brown University
Play
A conversation about the brain.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“One of the many marks of a philosophical sensibility is an obsession with problems which most sane people regard as not worth bothering about.”
-John Searle, Philosophy in a New Century
Until next time,
MAX DPETH