The Octotypic Mind

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Scholars of Dejima #

In the 1770s, a samurai, a physician, and a Confucian scholar gathered around a Dutch anatomy textbook none of them could properly read. They were attempting a translation of the Tabulae Anatomicae. Sugita Genpaku and his collaborators, the rangaku-sha, “Dutch studies scholars” of Tokugawa Japan. The shogunate had sealed the country for over a century. European knowledge trickled in through one pinhole: the Dutch trading post on Dejima, a fan-shaped artificial island in Nagasaki harbor.

The End of Identity: AI, Plasticity, and the Divergence Machine

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 06:28:21 +0000

Over the past year, the Contraptions club has been reading through history—from Giordano Bruno and Montaigne to Spinoza, Adam Smith, and Hume. We are now using using Venkatesh Rao’s Divergence Machine framework as a lens to make sense of the modern world.
For context, Venkat posits that human history operates through massive “world machines”. The “modernity machine” was constructed around 1200 and operated at a steady plateau of capability from 1600 to 2000. It is now in a state of rapid, partially scheduled disassembly. In its place, the “divergence machine” was constructed around 1600 and has been operating in fully deployed mode for about 25 years.
Looking at this transition through the philosophers we’ve studied, my feeling is that over the centuries, we’ve witnessed a gradual peeling back of the layers of imagination that were once heavily layered on top of nature. We can map this peeling back directly to Rao’s divergence concepts.

Plasticity on Aneesh Sathe

The Octotypic Mind

The Scholars of Dejima #

The End of Identity: AI, Plasticity, and the Divergence Machine