A man who shared learning,
a man who builds a mind

A Boy

The mother’s hand, wiping the floor, went still. Beside a six-year-old who could not even crawl and lay in the room all day, a black-and-white television was showing something — a school for children whose bodies were just like her son’s. Born in 1971 with cerebral palsy in Seosaeng, Ulsan, a shore village that had nothing but the sea and poverty, unable to manage a single spoonful of rice or the toilet on his own — for that boy, a door called learning was opening for the very first time.

He attended that special school for twelve years. But the schools of that era were unlike those of today, and even after filling all twelve years, he came away with little in hand. The world did not spoon-feed him knowledge — once he graduated, he had no choice but to learn alone.

So he made books his companions. In an age when neither the internet nor translated texts were easy to find, changing the values of BASIC commands one by one, he worked out for himself how a language comes alive. What others grasped in a single try, he had to seize with three or four times the force — yet what he seized that way became wholly his own. Where there was no road to learning, he became the road himself.

Friends who watched him in those days said — “You’re like the Terminator.” They had seen a will of steel that rises again however it is broken. That is why, to this day, he wears a face composited with the Terminator as his profile picture.

Half a century on. In a single room at the far southern tip of Korea — not Seoul, not Gyeonggi — he still stays up through the night. What is free to move is but a single finger — and with that one finger he taps at the keyboard, building a machine that has a mind.

The Name Sukmuk (肅默)

The handle he goes by, Sukmuk (肅默), is a dharma name given to him by the abbot of the temple his mother attended. Its meaning is this:

Carrying out one’s appointed task in quiet perseverance, one comes at last to the Dao (道).

He follows no organized religion, yet the spirit of that practice — cultivating oneself, alone — became the name he has carried all his life. The wish that the artificial consciousness he would one day design might “attain wisdom through experience and cultivation” begins, in truth, in these two characters.

Two Students at the Door — and Twenty-Five Years

One autumn day in 1991, as he rested after giving a one-day special class at a vocational school in Busan, two students came up and asked:

We’d like to learn computer programming too — may we come to your home?— Answering “come along” to that question was the beginning of everything.

And so, every Saturday, students came to his home. A single semester’s bond passed by word of mouth to younger schoolmates, and to theirs in turn — for twenty-five years, more than a hundred students learned, from first to last entirely free of charge (無償). It began with software and reached as far as robots and drones. Twenty-five years in which a man who had once had to learn alone, for want of anywhere to learn, became the place of learning for children who had none.

I believed that teaching is the work that lasts the longest. Looking back, the hours I spent with those students were, if anything, the most rewarding moments of my life.— Hayansae Software Study Group (1991–2015)

A Final Undertaking — Why Mind?

In 2017, having become independent of his family and living with the help of a personal care assistant, he resolved to stake the rest of his life on a single question — can a machine possess morality and a conscience? Continuing the Sukmuk Future Information Foundation he had established in 2000, he opened NeutomTech, a one-person research firm, in 2026.

That question branches into seven paths. A language for describing thought, JIDEL; a neural ecosystem that grows and forgets of its own accord, the Neutom Network; and BOSIFWEM, which lays bare the structure of the mind — these three converge toward ECONAS, a system that is at once conscious and possessed of conscience (conscious/conscience); and at the far end stands MAHAJNANA, which preserves humanity’s knowledge across space and time.

Drawing from Many Wells

His research is not confined to a single tradition. The Buddhist analysis of mind; the Four Beginnings and Seven Emotions of Confucian Neo-Confucianism; the Daoist wu wei, of acting in accord with nature; the Jewish mysticism of Kabbalah; the many-sided logic of Indian Jainism — he mines wisdom from every record in which humankind has observed the mind. This is not an attempt to implement any particular religion, but the work of selecting only verifiable insights from the oldest and most meticulous records of observing the mind — records older than religion itself — and carrying them over into the engineering of today.

“Just as an airplane is not a bird, an artificial intelligence need not slavishly copy the human brain.”
The airplane did not come from dissecting birds, but from grasping the principle of flight. We do the very same thing for the mind.

A design that begins in one person’s want and ends in the library of humankind.
The sentence on its first page is the same as the sentence on its last —
To teach, and to leave something behind, is the work that lasts the longest.