FIRST PRINCIPLES / INSTRUMENTS × PERCEPTION
What becomes visible when we change the instrument?
A wall, a bath, a notebook. Three places to begin asking how a different interface might change what we can notice.
I keep returning to a small question: when something seems invisible, which part of the problem belongs to the thing, and which part belongs to our way of looking? Two research and development projects give that question a concrete starting point. The interpretation that follows is mine.
01 / Light around a corner
A Nature paper published May 20, 2026, by MIT researchers and collaborators, demonstrates hidden-object imaging with consumer LiDAR. Light travels from the sensor to a visible wall, reaches an object beyond direct view, and returns through the wall reflection. The wall becomes a relay surface. This is sensing around an obstruction, rather than looking straight through solid material.
The method combines measurements across frames, using motion to gather information that one sparse, noisy reading cannot provide. The researchers demonstrate three-dimensional reconstruction, hidden-object tracking, and camera localization using hidden objects. Consumer hardware is part of the result; a complete autonomous vehicle demonstration is not.
The open manuscript also makes the assumptions worth reading: reconstruction uses a static object and known camera poses; tracking uses a known object shape; localization uses a known static hidden scene. Those are different experimental tasks, with different prior information. I find the result more interesting with these limits attached. It gives us a specific technique to examine, rather than permission to imagine a sensor that understands every hidden scene.
02 / Sound, water, and a prototype
Midjourney Medical is a new division developing ultrasound imaging. Its proposed interface is strikingly physical: a person stands on a platform that lowers into warm water while a ring of ultrasound sensors scans the body. The water is part of the measurement setup, and the intended experience resembles a visit to a private spa.
The June 23, 2026 development post supplies an essential distinction: the reported prototype takes more than twenty minutes per scan. Sixty seconds is an eventual goal. The initial planned product is a body-composition analyzer for general wellness, with diagnosis and treatment outside that intended use.
This is a company's account of a device under development. It does not establish medical benefit or make the eventual experience a present capability. My interest here is the design question: what happens when a familiar act, stepping into water, becomes the interface to an unfamiliar measurement? That question can be explored while keeping the prototype, its intended use, and its future ambitions distinct. Whether the device succeeds remains a separate question requiring evidence.
03 / The instruments we think with
Here is where I leave the experiments and enter philosophy. I use “extended cognition” as a question about thinking with things: what changes when memory, attention, and reasoning are supported by a notebook, a diagram, or an agent? Neither project above establishes that software is conscious or settles where a mind begins and ends.
I am interested in the everyday version. Clark and Chalmers’s 1998 extended-mind argument offers one philosophical account of cognition supported by external tools. A notebook can hold a question overnight. A diagram can put two assumptions beside each other. An agent might offer another route through a problem. I want to judge these instruments by what they help me understand, including the mistakes they make easier to spot.
A useful instrument should help me notice both a possibility and the conditions under which it disappears.
That suggests a small first-principles practice. Name the thing I want to know. Identify the signal available. Write down the assumptions connecting that signal to the answer. Then ask what observation would make me change my mind. A beautiful interface earns its place when it makes that process easier to follow.
I want room for play in this: a tiny simulation, an odd sketch, a wall that invites a second look. The larger ambition is a life with more attention available for learning, making, and other people. Changing the instrument is one experiment. Learning what it can honestly show us is the continuing work.