Note: This reasoning is not a fun read, it’s more self indulgent than I would like but I would like to tell the full story.

The history

When I was 4 I was diagnosed with cancer. I spent around 2 years in and out of hospital, more time in than out. After 2 years I was given the all clear and to date I have not relapsed (fingers crossed 🤞). There have been many complications over the years resulting from the tole treatment takes on your body. Most of these issues related to my face. I’ve had most of my teeth removed, had my ear reattached and had holes drilled through my nose. None of these things are particularly pleasant to deal with.

Despite this turbulent start, my life has been incredible. I have an incredibly supportive family, gone to a top university, have a great job and managed to travel to more countries than I can count on my hands. None of what has happened to me has been too difficult to deal with, or had impacts that have impeded my life in a meaningful way.

The news

Everything was going okay until last year. After years of missing scans (I’m not sure why, maybe just falling though the net) I had a scan of my heart. Chemotherapy drugs are incredibly toxic for the body, they are built to destroy cells. Heart scans should be a regular part of follow up for patients that have had chemotherapy as the drugs can damage the heart.

The scan found that my heart function was below the normal threshold and I was diagnosed with Cardiomyopathy, specifically Cardiotoxicity. Cardiotoxicity in simple terms just means that your heart muscle has been damaged in some way by a toxic substance, in my case this was Chemotherapy. Cardiomyopathy is a non-reversible and progressive condition, this means that no matter what I do, eventually it will either kill me or I will need a new heart.

The prognosis is good. With medication, I’ve been given 15 to 20 years before I will need a new heart, this is much better than the prognosis for others. This is something I’ve come to appreciate over time, initially this was not something easy to hear. At 23, the idea of getting a heart transplant at 40 is never a fun thing to think about.

I will go into more depth on my feelings around this in a future post but for now I think this gives a good enough image of where my head was at. For now lets just say I wasn’t in the best of places.

The inspiration

Warhammer 40k is something that I’ve enjoyed on and off throughout my life but have not picked up since I was about 15. It’s a great hobby which truly take over most of your life if you let it. Previously I was mostly into the playing of the tabletop and to a lesser extent painting the miniatures. I got into it again around a month after hearing the news about my heart. This time there isn’t many gaming clubs around and I don’t have supplies to get into the painting so I starting listening to some lore videos on youtube.

One thing lead to another and I ended up spending a bunch of saved up audible credits on books. I had enjoyed the To speak as one short story so started with Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work. I was immediately infatuated with the universe of 40k again, especially the Mechanicus. One of the first quotes used when introducing the Mechanicus faction is “The beast of metal endures longer than the flesh of men“. I’ve always loved the idea of integrating the human body with technology to improve human capabilities.

While I don’t feel quite as strongly about my body as the quote implies. There is part of me that grows tired of how my body has failed me over the years and continues to fail me even more so now. For the first time in my life I’m scared of what my future holds, somethings that I’ve always felt so hopeful about previously. I began to wonder if there was something I could do to regain my hope?

The body

I didn’t need to build something to replace my body. As many operations as I’ve had, going under the knife is still something I don’t enjoy. I wanted to build something to make myself more capable, to make more use of the time that I have.

With some limited experience with FPGAs and some super limited experience with raspberry pi’s I realised I would need some real hands on experience with hardware if I was going to build anything to augment my capabilities. I bought an Arduino Uno starter kit and started working my way through the tutorial.

The more I learned about how easy it was to connect components and build things with Arduino’s the more I realised the potential of creating something truly incredible. Immediately I realised I could create a glove that would sense hand position, then realised I could create an accurate heart rate monitor. The more I learned the more I wanted to build.

I realised there was potential to create a full body suit that could monitor all my body functions and positioning. With all these sensors you body can become the input for a computer, you can control a computer with a hand gesture or monitor what you’re seeing when your heart rate increases. All of these things allow you to learn you learn more about yourself while controlling a computer with your body rather than crude conventional inputs.

The brain

While I was nose deep in hardware the LLM craze was going on, OpenAI had come out with ChatGPT and it was taking over all news. It was impossible to ignore. Quickly people realised that GPTs weren’t all that reliable, they can “hallucinate” or in other words, they can lie.

I started looking into this a little more and found out about something called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Typical LLMs rely on “learned” knowledge from the initial documents they were trained on (and therefore make things up when the knowledge you ask for isn’t part of their initial documents). RAG on the other hand utilises a database of knowledge which is searched and then supplied to LLMs which they can then base their inferences on. The database ensures that the replies are more reliable and that you can select the information that the LLM bases it’s knowledge on.

Immediately this made me think of something I had read about before, Building a second brain (BSB). BSB involves creating a base of knowledge and continuing to add to it every day. The base of knowledge then allows you to search your own knowledge and use it to inform your current self.

Combining these two techniques seemed like a no brainer. I could curate a base of my own knowledge and create an LLM that would know virtually everything I know. I would be doing more than creating a second brain, I would be creating a second self.

QIN

Qin is the idea of combining the body and the brain. Combining the data and feedback from the body suit and the knowledge and understanding from the second brain. I’m not sure exactly how this will work yet but envisage a system that fully integrates with someone, their body and mind and extends their abilities and understanding of themselves. This blog is an exploration of where this idea leads.