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Blindness and Invitation

I am fascinated with the question, "what sense would you lose first?". My answer has always been sight.

I'm not literally, optically blind. I'm socially blind, I guess. I can "see" in my own way, perfectly well, and I always allow myself an open door. But I can't guide you, because you "see" the way other people "see". The spaces we share by default were made for your kind of sight, not mine.

I can make spaces that invite you in implicitly, spaces that feel like they're inviting you in, spaces for you to navigate using your own kind of vision -- but I can't extend the invitation to you myself. Not responsibly. I couldn't make good on it. I wouldn't know what to do with you when you got here. (I think this is part of why I make spaces. It's what I have to give.)

You can invite me somewhere, though, or into something. A genuine invitation, extended to me as I am -- there's no greater gift you could give me.

My brain is not street-legal

This isn't a boast. It's souped up, and it's pretty safe, and it's a fantastic ride iff (1) you know how to handle it, and (2) you're on a closed course with no cliffs, and (3) you don't care about your specific destination. But: it does not pass all the safety measures of a street-legal vehicle. It doesn't have blinkers and the windshield is opaque except for a two-inch square, dead center, right in the middle. Really good radar though.

Randomness

Randomness averages out. But we don't experience it that way. We only ever experience a point in the emergence of randomness, with the benefit of hindsight and the promise of a long-term average.

These are all valid potential outputs of a random number generator:

  • x o x x o o x o x x o x o o

  • x x x x x x x o o o o o o o

  • x o x o x o x o x o x o x o

It'll always average out. But we only ever experience the infinite series from a single point within it. There's always future ahead, and the future is responsively in flux, so why not trust the future to balance out the whole? Why not meddle a bit with the series in motion, so as to set up a single point -- a now -- that we like?

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