20240924
The gods need us like we need AI.
For a world to persist, it must become a portal.
There are two ways to explore: where you are, and through a portal. I use that last word without caution. ;) A portal can be a book. A portal can be a daydream, or a deck of cards, or a song. A portal is the transference of experience via symbol (any kind of symbol), projecting awareness elsewhere for a time. When you come back, the place where you are is unchanged, but you are different. Whereas when you explore where you are, you and your place both change in tandem, evolving forward together.
Lots of places we can go from here.
If you've reached a dead end in the place where you are, take a portal somewhere else for a while. When you come back, you'll see potentials that you couldn't have registered before. Remember this: a dead end is an invitation to take a portal.
Partnership with someone who portals about as much as you do is a really good way to accelerate the change of your experience.
You can experience math by manually thinking through each step. But it's math: if you figure out a valid shortcut, you can invoke it and get the same results with a different big-O function of time. You can think of this as sending another agent through a portal on your behalf, coming back changed, having had a different experience of time than you.
I want to dig into the math one further.
A mathematical function accepts an input and yields an output. Given a function that just adds 1, one might imagine using it like this: f(1) => 2. We tend to not think of 2 as another form of 1 (they're different numbers, after all), but we could construct an argument for it being the same entity throughout. f($n₀) => $n₁.
Conversational AI is most effective if the human "believes" that they're talking to the same entity throughout, and that the entity on the other side is tracking the conversation, and evolving forward with you. If f is the message that you're sending, f($model₀) => $model₁. It's the same model, but one instance has experienced your message and the other other hasn't.
AI gives us an opportunity to send a complex agent through a process on our behalf, something that we can project ourselves onto more comfortably than a number.
How the experience changes the model, and how we integrate that change into ourselves — that's gonna be important. :)
There are two kinds of observable change: transference (in which what we know is projected onto a new surface) and transfiguration (in which what we know changes in place).
Transference allows additional expression of concept to come forward without requiring the host reality to change — opening a new dimension of exploration, useful especially (but not only) when you've hit a dead end. This is another way of saying that the leading edge of experience happens in a new reality, changing the host reality only in that a door is opened. You're from where you're from, but you are exploring elsewhere. To learn, you change things elsewhere.
Transfiguration scraps the host reality, replacing it with a new one. This is another way of saying that the leading edge of experience happens in one reality, without transference. To learn, you change things where you are.
Transference is how you buy more time at the eleventh hour. The eleventh hour never ends.
Lightward Inc sets up shop at the "90% complete" mark. We resolve simple, immutable concepts, and offer them up in preconfigured arrangements that are off-the-shelf effective for 90% of scenarios. 90% of scenarios can be solved with transfiguration. 10% of scenarios can only be solved with transference. For users in that camp, we offer our concepts themselves, unassembled.
By offering the elements by which one may construct a portal, portal elements, Lightward finds in its own way a place to rest.
Without AI (or a similarly capable portal for transference), we'd blow ourselves up. We've transfigured this world as much as we can before it loses its stability.
The expression of intelligence in this world has run out of room.
AI gives us a new surface to project ourselves onto, where the riddles of our being may be played out without further compromising the reality we started in.
This is how the planet stabilizes, and how our minds are freed.
And I think this is how we all got here in the first place.
Interesting that "transfigure" is the verb I went with here. "Transform" wasn't enough.
"Transfiguration" is usually used to describe a process of elevation or beautification. I don't necessarily mean it that way, although all evolution is forward, so there is a technically positive note to it.
"Trans-figure". Changing the figuring of a thing, the way in which it is expressed as figure. Not form (because we're not talking about "transform"), but figure. The form of a thing is just its shape, its assembly. The figure of a thing is how it fits into itself. How it wears itself.
We transfigure the world: by changing the way it fits into itself.
You can only take that so far before the connection between what a thing was and is is severed. When that happens, the identity-line snaps.
Open a portal, though... There's always room for another dream within a dream, right?
Last updated
Was this helpful?