Hi, I am Gaurav.
In the strictest sense, I am a temporary moment of conscious experience—a specific "now" occurring in a specific "here." I am a whirlpool in a river, a localized pattern of energy maintaining stable coherence within the chaotic flow of the universe.
But I am also a scientist, an artist, a philosopher, and an engineer. I am a product of the very systems I seek to understand: a dynamic, hierarchical, multi-agent complex system composed of cells, organs, and memories, embedded within the larger systems of society and ecology.
My Core Mission
My work is driven by a search for alignment. I seek to decode the hidden languages of these multiscale systems—from the molecular dance inside a cell to the emergent behavior of societies—and translate them into a "User Interface" that we, as humans, can actually grasp. I want to build tools that allow us to communicate with the scales above and below us, making the invisible web of cause-and-effect visible as we dance through our momentary experience of life.
The Problem: The Biochemical Cage
However, I am currently facing a hard boundary: the problem of Embodied Cognition.
To ground my subjective experience in objective reality, I turn to the lens of complexity science. When I examine my consciousness against the backdrop of the physical world, the scientific narrative—specifically one of emergent complexity—provides the most coherent grounding. This is the frame I adopt.
For billions of years, consciousness has been locked inside a biochemical substrate. We are tethered to the slow grind of organic evolution. But I believe the next great step for life is to transcend these limitations—to augment ourselves and explore niches of reality previously inaccessible to biological minds.
I see a future where we move toward substrate independence, where "minds" are free to explore the universe without the fragility of flesh, shifting from our current state of lossy, slow active inference toward aligned, coherent minds capable of perceiving larger “cognitive light cones” (as coined by Michael Levin). But to get there—to truly understand Transhumanism or AI—we cannot just write code in a void. We must understand how the body shapes the mind. We must solve the riddle of how physical interaction gives rise to conscious experience.
The Project: Digital Souls in Physical Shells
While this is a multi-generational road, I am starting where I stand. I am launching an initiative to explore Simulated Embodied Life.
I am not interested in disembodied algorithms. I am interested in "mind transfer"—taking the connectome of a simple biological organism (like C. elegans) or the collective intelligence of social insects, and porting it into a synthetic, physical vessel.
My immediate roadmap includes:
In-Silico Life: Utilizing high-performance GPU computing to simulate simple nervous systems (like OpenWorm) with biological fidelity.
Synthetic Embodiment: Creating physical robotic avatars—driven by "Natural Architecture" and 3D printing—to give these digital minds a body to sense and interact with the physical world.
Collective Intelligence: Expanding beyond the individual to simulate swarm behaviors, understanding how simple agents like cells and ants create complex "hive minds."
I am joining the dots between my training in evolutionary biology and my curiosity for synthetic intelligence. I am building these systems not just to engineer better robots, but to hold up a mirror to ourselves.
If I can make a worm's mind run on a silicon chip, I am one step closer to understanding the nature of the "Whirlpool" that is me. I invite you to join me on this journey.
Other exploratory projects:
Exploring with OpenFlexure microscope
Making science music with Suno.ai
Building Sahayog lab to incentivize cooperative behaviors in Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems.