Project summary

I am a 39-year-old bricklayer who has spent decades thinking about the big questions in life that popular literature couldn't explain.

After the birth of my daughter I decided to start taking these questions seriously, I'd noticed things over the years that I believed explained these things so I wrote a book called 'The Universal Algorithm' but although I could describe what I saw with analogies and colourful pictures it was lacking in structural evidence.

At this point I began breaking the patterns down into individual chunks I could work on mechanically. At this point I began inadvertently starting a research program, writting papers on Zendodo and subsequently sending papers to scientific journals for validation.

My first paper which is an 8,000-word overview of repetitive evolutionary patterns across substrates from the atomic level all the way to AI. This was subsequently accepted by the Journal of Big History (9.4) without any changes needed, validating that this was worthy of further investigation.

In roughly four months I have taken a collection of loose ideas in my head and built mathematical and computational models, had my first journal submission accepted, and released four subsequent papers on Zenodo, with two under submission elsewhere.

I've managed to do all this while continuing to work as a bricklayer full-time, often working on my mobile on breaks. I have had no external help and have up until this point worked totally independently outside of normal circles.

What I would like is to take 12 weeks off work, cover the financial responsibilities that entails, buy a high-performance laptop and dedicate myself full-time to developing this framework, I have multiple active lines of inquiry and my biggest bottleneck is currently time.

The goal is to fully unravel the universal algorithm, fully understand how evolution has shaped the development of not only humanity but the Earth and even the Universe itself. The book is on a back burner now until I finish answering these questions and will only resume when I have fully explored all implications.

Currently the work looks at higher-level organisation, causality, heredity, collective agency and reconstructive closure. I want to keep pushing those ideas into forms that can be tested, modelled and potentially shown to be wrong.

During the 12 weeks I plan to focus full-time on developing the theory and building on the validation already achieved via journal submission. I have made a great start and have several immediate directions to go next, the biggest hurdle I have currently is having to stop every time my shift starts or my break ends. I want to see what I can do when the research gets full working days, instead of the odd hours I can fit it in.

How will this funding be used?

The biggest expense is the time itself. Freeing myself from my construction commitments would cost me around $4,000 per month ($12,000).

I would also like a high-performance laptop to help my research costing roughly $2,000. I have achieved the bulk of my current work on a mobile device.

I would also like a budget of up to $6,000 to pay for memory, journal or subscription fees or any other service that may be required.

Any amount would help me towards my goal and will only further my ability to build the already very promising framework.

Simply put, I've already made four papers, I've done the hardest bit and had my first paper accepted for publication within months of starting my research program all while working as a bricklayer doing most of the work on a mobile phone. I want to see what I can do given the time and resources to fully chase my ideas.

The Universal Algorithm full overview (working free book) with attached supplement paper DOIs under related works. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22734656