In my office I have a small collection of vintage diving gear. Partly items I have used myself in my childhood and also some i bought over the years. I'm deeply fascinated with all forms of diving (from free diving over scuba diving to large submarines) since I can remember thinking. I made my scuba diving license at age 15 on the maldives and was lucky to experience the tropical reefs of many countries since then. But I saw also the frozen surfaces of Swiss lakes from below and visited wrecks in the Mediterranean sea.
But I don’t want to bore you with tales from my diving adventures and even less I want to brag with my (modest) gear collection. This blog post is about something different.
Recently I was watching my collection and i realized that almost none of the instruments, torches or cameras I own are from the later periods when I was an active scuba diver. They are mostly from the 70’s when I could only practice free diving. This was the time when my dream was actually strongest and I desired the items I own now most intensively.
Why is this so? Sometimes the fulfillment of a dream comes also with disappointment. I think this was also the case with me. Not that scuba diving in different oceans was not thrilling and fascinating. It very much was. But it still was not exactly what I had hoped for. My interest for diving was fueled by a deep fascination for the creatures of the sea. They had extremely weird bodies (just think about echinoderms like the starfish or molluscs like the octopus) and in the 70s still little was known about their strange life in the depths. I never missed the TV shows of Hans Hass and Jacques-Yves Cousteau where they met sharks, octopus and other dangerous or fascinating specimens of oceanic fauna. One of my biggest treasures was a worn copy of „National Geographic“ with an article about Précontinent III, a small experimental underwater research village built in 1965 by the team of Cousteau in France.
Yes, I would have very much loved to live in such an underwater house!
But why the slight disappointment when I was finally able to visit my hero animals in their element? I think I was actually looking for something which can be only found inside me, and not outside. The strange animals in the sea were actually mirroring subconscious parts of myself. Watching them in books and movies (and later while snorkeling) resonated with something deep inside me. My first night time snorkeling at age 9 on the island of Elba in Italy was incredibly exciting even if we saw very few animals that night. The ocean was a metaphor for my subconscious: I actually wanted to dive into myself and explore the unknown depths of my mind.
Of course, spending time under water could not bring me much closer to this goal. But it took years to realize this. Even my interest in physics was probably driven by the dream: for my matura (high school diploma) thesis, I built the hardware and software for a diving computer (download: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4).
I later managed (if this is the right word) to actually dive into myself. It was not an easy time. But in a weird way it was also the fulfillment of my old dream.
But the case is not closed yet. Exploring oneself is a lifelong endeavour. Maybe it requires the use of several different methods: the metaphorical poetic method of diving with dolphins and conger eels, psychological methods (like induced psychosis from hallucinogenic drugs) or scientific theory and experiments.
Lately a completely novel opportunity has appeared: artificial intelligence. The world models AI systems must construct in order to be able to be useful for us include knowledge about the human mind. As an example, already the word embeddings used at a low level in large language models encode interesting knowledge about the structure and semantics of our language (visit my 2021 project dissected.it).
I hope that more of this knowledge can be extracted from AI models and I will try to find time to conduct some experiments in this direction.
Stay tuned.
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