About Levi Neuwirth
How does one resolve the age-old dilemma of earnest self description? Is any such act of description overly humiliating and reductive in nature? Hubristic and egotistical, on the contrary? I have pondered over this subject for years, my greatest conclusion being that my actions and character should be the pinnacle of how I am described, for these form the pinnacle of what constitutes me.
I understand that this presents an issue: casual surfers of this website, curious readers of my research or other output, and even, believe it or not, myself, for my own personal reference on sporadic occasion, would benefit from an attempted summary in words of who I am. I am obliged to deliver, and such a summary follows.
Basic Traits
I have always thought that the defining characteristic of what makes Levi Levi, in so far as I or anyone have such a thingaa My chief concern throughout this document, as established in the introduction, is establishing a balance between reductivity and egotism. The broader conclusion I have come to? Human lives and persona cannot be mapped onto human language. Interesting!, is my curiosity and creativity. This is not a curiosity that manifests purely in the abstract. I am certainly interested in abstract things, rabbit holes, all-nighters composed of study, you name it - but I am equally curious in a more tangible sense, one that invokes the process of creation. Much of the substance of my life has been the result of various incarnations of this latter form of curiosity combined with a creativity whose origin I cannot explain. In a concise way, I could state it as follows: I generally feel a strong urge to produce and put my own spin on anything that I consume.
The realization of this curiosity/creativity complex yields what I find simultaneously as my greatest strength and my most detrimental flaw. I can be relentlessly ambitious and work persistently towards goals that others might dismiss as too far-sighted, impossible, etc. - but I also consistently bite off more than I can chew and overwork myself. I’m at least aware of the latter fact and try to counter it by introducing work that I enjoy, such as work on this website!
Education
University
I am currently finishing my senior year at Brown University, from which I will graduate with degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science in May. This autumn I will begin my graduate studies in Computer Science. I chose these areas because their generality and broad interaction with abstraction captivated me in a notable way. This fact is still true to this day - I have never felt significant burnout, nor felt that I had exhausted some finite supply of interest and curiosity in my chosen fields.
Autodidacticism
The bulk of what I have learned has been on an individual basis rather than in affiliation with some institution. This is merely a personal preference; I do not think that autodidactic learning is uniformly intrinsically better, nor do I believe that is necessarily more efficient or otherwise superior to learning through an institution. It is simply what I have always known works for me, and my intuition in this regard has been substantiated by years of empirical evidence.bb Read: progressing through the formalisms of various educational institutions. My grievances are primarily with the public school system that I endured for 13 years of my life, in which autodidacticism was actively perceived as contrary to the goals of the institution, whereas autodidacticism is essentially implied at the University level, or, at a minimum, at a University as rigorous at Brown.
Study Habits
A core element of my autodidacticism and one that I write about with frequency is what I call metalearning - the notion that frequent study of how to study itself is a worthy, if not necessary, undertaking. To this end, I try to keep my own study habits somewhere at the midpoint between the relevent cognitive psychology literature and my own intuition of what works best for me.
I broadly adopt technologies that assist me in learning, and generally do so without reservations. I believe in the capability of (ethically designed and well-intentioned) technology to augment the power of human intellect. I firmly believe that the technologies that I use, both the ones that through societial usage are taken for granted, and those that are perhaps more novel, strongly augment my ability to think, learn, and create. The key word in the previous sentence is augment, and the delineation between augmentation and automation is a crucial one. I will not use technologies such as Generative AI to automate away my cognitive processes. I believe that synergistic augmentation is the way forward in the current age of much technological excitement, rather than automation with subsequent deprication of what it means to be human.
Music
Music is core to who I am. I have played trumpet, my primary instrument, for the majority of my life. I also play piano, horn, trombone, euphonium, tuba, and a bit of drums. More important to me than playing, however, is composition. I feel that my compositions are fundamentally a part of me, an extension of the person that I am.
Composition
COMPOSITION IS PERHAPS MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE THE PRACTICE OF MY LIFE. I say these strong words because I feel strongly about this process. Composition uses the entirety of not only my mind and my intellectual power, but also the entirety of my essence. When I am immersed in a composition, I am the composition, and the composition is me. We are wholly isomorphic. Thus, my compositions function in many manners: they are time capsules, they are personifications, or, if you like, anthropomorphisms of some sort; they are expressions of the Universe, or whatever you prefer to call them. They are, and they will continue to pour out of me, because as far as I can tell, it is by my pen that my life is defined.
Music composition is thus chiefly distinct from other forms of creative activity for me. Music is the most rewarding for me, and the medium by which I feel I have the most expression potential and the most capacity to express.cc These are two different things for me. By expression potential, I mean the range of sentiments and ideas that music can, in the abstract / in principle, express. This expression potential is thus innately provided to me by mere virtue of my partaking in the act of writing music. By capacity to express, I am referring to my own personal ability as a composer to successfully express that which I intend to rather than the full range of what music itself might be able to encapsulate. When I hear a composition that I have finished it surmounts me and effortlessly transports me into an immersive state; I am returned to the deep feelings and profounddd Not necessarily in grandeur, but in personal depth. ideas that I tried to capture through my project. On the contrary, music also torments me. I am something of a perfectionist with my compositions and get frustrated when they do not pan out the way I intend. I scrap many projects that I perceive as insufficient, and when ideas are not flowing, I suffer for it. Luckily, since composition is such a core constituent of who I am, I have found a consistency in my undergraduate years, and the ideas have generally flowed without significant pause since 2023. I can only hope for my own sake that this trend continues far into the future.
Interests
I have many interests.