I like studying and exploring new things in the spirit of science. The science that happens today in institutions is more than just science and involves a lot of ancillary efforts directed towards the formalized production of research.

I respect formalized scientific efforts but feel like humanity as whole is losing out on the idea of having personalized problem statements to work on without worrying about applications, citations or what the next big thing is going to be.

All those are definitely important.

But, the joy of conducting research sweeps without any intentions of publishing the findings or pressuring yourself into working on what you believe is worth working on leads to stifling your childish sense of curiosity and wonder.

I am interested in the full stack of computer science and although conventional performance indicators might suggest that targetting expertize in all of it at once is me being delusional, why shouldn’t one consider drawing their own intellectual boundaries around domains.

I do invest with depth into what I do professionally but that isn’t reason enough to sacrifice breadth into remoter areas of the root domain, especially if I like being an intellectual vagabond and noticing symbolic patterns spanning over vaster territories (is orthogonal to enjoying microscoping down molecules with rigor).

Rigor shouldn’t be an excuse to entirely discard play is what I mean to convey.

How ..

.. do you actually go about strolling randomly down divergent lanes of ideas?

I find it useful to not think of domains to have distinct boundaries between them but to be different facets of the same epistemological essence.

Just today, I explicitly realized (via a podcast) that enzymes could be interpreted as electronic breadboards, facilitating circuit assemblies, aiding electron transfers, producing newer molecules, ready to churn out the next set of transferences.

Despite knowing all those scientific components well individually (the chemistry and the physics of it), those 30 seconds yielded a “hmmm” from me that sparked me to write this post.

I’m not going to be able to publish a paper on that or derive a seeding idea for a potential unicorn from that particular moment of intellectual deviance.

Still, I’m more than okay with that and just might consider picking up a textbook on nanotech soon just so that I could learn more.

I might conduct some thought experiments, imagining manipulating molecules programatically in a fundamental manner, trying to abstract those into higher order constructs to build some sort of intelligent swarms that I could later use to take over the world by controlling neurotransmitters in humans…

All that is me hallucinating, having fun, being delusional and I know that…

I still choose to do it: I might not be able actually take over the world but I just might be able to have a couple of interesting weekends messing around with domains that are already well looked into and might just be able to find applications into what I’m doing professionally while being childish about it.

Have a good time strolling about your own intellectually hallucinated landscapes and hope you return with fresh fodder to your main quests.