Myislanduniverse

Introduction

MyIslandUniverse (alternatively rendered myislanduniverse -- all lowercase) is a sobriquet for the notably unaccomplished writer and thinker Nathan Piechocki and a number of his associated projects, to include an unfruitful blog, location-based web service, and others.

The myislanduniverse moniker is often applied to projects concerning cognitive or neurological psychology, computer science, cybernetics, or perceptual control theory, but more often serves as a nom de plume for the aforementioned personality (for example, on Wikipedia).

Origin

The mark's origin is an allusion to Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, in which the author writes:

"We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies -- all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes."

In June of 2008, when Piechocki and long-time friend and colleague John Fugate were discussing names for a possible start-up location-based services company, the latter remarked that the name was "auspicious."