The House of Mind: Visualizing a Semantic Engine

Document ID: CNL-FN-2025-XXX
Version: 1.0
Date: December 9, 2025
Author: Michael P. Hamilton, Ph.D.

AI Assistance Disclosure: This field note was developed through evening dialogue with Claude (Anthropic). The conversation explored visualization concepts for a semantic engine built around personal passages. The author takes full responsibility for the conceptual framework and its articulation.

Abstract

This note captures an emerging conceptual architecture for visualizing a semantic knowledge base of approximately 600 diverse passages, each tagged with five or more descriptive terms. The central insight is a spatial metaphor: the house of mind, where the exterior presents discrete passages as a tiled surface (wallpaper), while the interior reveals tag relationships as navigable constellations. This dual-modality approach distinguishes between artifact and association, between what has been made and how thought actually moves.

1. The Corpus as Self-Portrait

The 600 passages are not a survey of knowledge domains. They are a portrait. The topology being visualized is not the shape of information—it is the shape of attention. Seventy-one years of a particular consciousness turning toward what mattered: what captured attention to reflect, to laugh, to inspire, to ignite.

The tags become something different in this light. Not subject classifications but fingerprints of resonance. The passages that cluster together are not merely semantically similar—they are records of the same kind of noticing.

2. The House Metaphor

2.1 The Exterior

The outside of the house presents a tapestry of words—the passages themselves, tiled like wallpaper as discrete entities. Each passage is complete, boundaried, a finished thought. The exterior rewards reading: sequential, crafted, the pleasure of surface and artifact. One could spend an hour with a single tile.

This is the collected works. What has been made. Visible from the street.

2.2 The Interior

Step inside and the architecture transforms. Here are constellations of words—the tags—interconnected by their semantic and topical relationships. Another tapestry, but a semantic web of the essence of the passages rather than the passages themselves.

The interior rewards navigation: relational, unbounded, always pointing elsewhere. One is never really at a tag—one is always between them, tracing filaments. The pleasure is in movement and discovery.

This is how thought actually moves. The living space where the mind dwells.

3. Two Modalities of Awareness

The complementarity is fundamental:

The exterior lets one hold a passage, turn it over, examine it as object. The interior puts one inside the web—one does not hold the connections, one is suspended in them.

4. Toward a User Interface

Several approaches emerge for capturing these complementary modalities:

Threshold approach: One is outside until choosing to enter. Clicking through a passage—rather than on it—reveals its tag constellation, showing where that passage lives in the interior space. The passage becomes a door.

Transparency approach: A slider shifts opacity. Full exterior: solid tiles, readable passages. Full interior: constellation with passages faded to ghostly frames. In between: both visible, text legible but filaments showing through like veins beneath skin.

Selection propagation: Touch a passage; its tags illuminate in the interior. Touch a tag node; its passages glow on the exterior wall. The two views in conversation, call and response.

Scale approach: The exterior is the interior, viewed from far enough away that connections blur into the texture of wallpaper. Zoom in and the web emerges.

5. The Tactile Dimension

The deepest knowing often has a different phenomenology than vision. The texture of a well-worn thought versus something still rough and new. The weight of certain passages.

The wallpaper metaphor carries tactility—something one could run a hand across. Tiles have edges. Interior constellations suggest threads to pull, tension to feel.

The UI might want pacing that suggests resistance or fluidity. Moving between closely connected tags feels like sliding. Moving between distant ones requires effort, traversal through intervening space rather than teleportation.

6. Immersive Possibility: WebXR

With WebXR capability (Meta Quest 3), the interior becomes habitable. Not a visualization of the constellation but the constellation itself, surrounding the visitor. Stand at a tag node and see threads extending into the dark. Reach toward “phenology” and watch connected concepts illuminate. Turn to find “attention” behind, its own web radiating.

The exterior could remain flat—a gallery wall faced at human scale, passages readable. Then step through one, and inhabit the semantic space. The passage that served as door remains faintly visible, but now one stands among its tags, seeing where it lives in relation to everything else.

Room-scale tracking means walking the topology. Closely connected tags are steps apart. Distant ones require a journey. The architecture of attention becomes something traversed with the body, not just the eyes.

Seventy-one years of noticing, rendered as a space one can stand inside. That is not a UI anymore. That is a place.

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