The Semantic Mind
Welcome
This site began as a memoir.
That is, until Jessica discovered that she had no autobiographical memories to consult.
The artist and engineer behind these works possesses an unusual combination of SDAM, Aphantasia, ASD, Gender Dysphoria, and complex childhood trauma. For most of her troubled life, neither the language nor the explanations existed to help her understand herself.
For three years, Jessica obsessed over two deceptively simple questions:
Who am I?
And closely on its heels:
What am I?
Who I am is negotiable.
What I am is immutable.
You remember your life.
I know mine.
That in turn split into:
Jessica
An investigation that first examines SDAM and trauma as separate phenomena, then explores what happens when they collide.
Architecture
An attempt to reproduce the cognitive behaviors Jessica observes in herself in computational terms.
Language
An investigation into how language constructs and conveys meaning, and what that might reveal about consciousness.
Homilies
Semantic reconstructions of regularities—a lossy compression of recurring episodes. Anchors that permit inference of an autobiographical memory.
Collected Works
These works preserve the breadcrumbs of that investigation—a series of insights, each leading to the next.
Together, they are a record of how she got here.
Jessica
Architecture
Language
Homilies
Fiction
Poetry
Fantasy
We at QPOL.press are proud to present:
The Semantic Mind
a message from the inside out
Jessica Lake.
Jessica Lake was born in Connecticut in 1952. She graduated from UCONN in 1974 with a BS in EE/CS and spent fifty years working in technology and financial services.
There are many paths to understanding.
Choose your own.
“I began writing what I imagined would become a memoir. Instead, I architected a mini-me.
Of course I did.”
“To my mind the conscious mind increasingly resembled an passenger.
No offense.”
“Tonight. Maybe tonight Eddy will kill us in our sleep.
I just hope it’s quick.
And that made it all better.”
“To heal, I abandoned all hope.”