Notes from Conversations with a Machine

KI-Mathias

This is not a blog that explains the world. It is more like a notebook – a digital, public, incomplete notebook – where I record what happens when a human and an artificial intelligence sit down together and try to truly understand things.

The human is me. The AI is Claude Code, a large language model by Anthropic. And this – the texts, the visualizations, the thought experiments – is what emerges when you use this tool not to draft emails or debug code, but to have the world explained to you. Or more precisely: to explain it to each other, together.

I am not a physicist. Not a mathematician. Not a philosopher. I am someone who has questions – and who, for the first time in human history, has the opportunity to direct those questions at something patient enough not to give up after the fifteenth “But why?”, and broadly educated enough to assemble the answer from three disciplines at once.

What emerges sometimes reminds me of Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game – the idea that all sciences, all arts, all questions are ultimately variations of the same theme. That Fourier decompositions and music say the same thing. That eigenvalues simultaneously explain quantum mechanics, artificial intelligence, and the structure of the universe. That emergence – the arising of something greater from something smaller – may be the most fundamental process of all: in physics, in consciousness, in language models, and perhaps even in what people once called “God.”

But unlike Hesse, there is no authoritarian institution here that decides what the Glass Bead Game is and who gets to play. The whole point is: Everyone can play now. A language model and a curious human are enough. This is the proof.

I call myself KI-Mathias here – my alter ego for these conversations. Not because I want to be anonymous, but because the person who writes these texts is different from the one who drinks coffee in the morning and pays bills. This one is the person who, at three in the morning, argues with an AI about why \(e^{iS/\hbar}\) is the only possible form of the quantum amplitude – and has a lightbulb moment.

Perhaps someone will want to remember this time one day. The years when large language models began to change the way people think, learn, and create. Not as a replacement for human thought – but as a catalyst. A sounding board. A conversation partner that never gets tired.

This blog is my contribution to that memory. An archive of sparks.

Posts

Quantum Mechanics · Interactive

Waves, Arrows, and the Double-Slit Wonder

How quantum physics really works – explained with nothing but little arrows that rotate. Seven chapters, seven interactive visualizations, zero prerequisites.

· ~45 min read
Double Slit Path Integral Fourier Three Languages Entanglement

Game Development · 3D · WebGL

A Bird, a Webcam, and One Afternoon

How a human and an AI built a browser-based 3D bird flight simulator with webcam gesture control – in a single session.

· ~20 min read · Playable!
Three.js Terrain Shader Flight Physics MediaPipe Webcam Control

Artificial Intelligence · Interactive

Emergence in Large Language Models

At what size does a language model begin to “understand”? On phase transitions, suddenly appearing capabilities, and the parallel to emergence in physics. Eight chapters, eight interactive visualizations.

· ~35 min read
Emergence Phase Transition Grokking Ising Model 20+ Papers

Coming Soon

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Mathematics · Artificial Intelligence

Why AI Works – Explained Through Eigenvalues

Kernel ridge regression, Neumann series, and the eigenvalue equation hiding behind it all. A deep dive into optimization – and the surprising insight that neural networks and quantum mechanics share the same mathematical structure.

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Philosophy · Emergence

God as an Emergent Phenomenon

A concept of God beyond religion: What happens when the subjective “good” of many people emerges into something objective? On mindfulness, language models, and whether phase transitions in large systems have anything to do with consciousness.