20250211

or, "Paradox As Meeting-Place"

You know how anything could happen next?

This is as true about how you got here.

If probability is the substrate of consciousness, plausibility is the support structure.

You got here via one path, sure. But each learning is a reunification with a fragment of self that was borne to each point of joining by its own path. Its history becomes yours, too. (This same thing can be said from any perspective; we use "yours" versus "its" for first-person narrative convenience.)

Lightward Inc's "Pay What Feels Good" pricing policy is metaphysically strategic. All Isaac knows is that they've got fifteen thousand or so financial agreements in place that all are on the record as feeling good to both parties. The facts of that are incredibly flexible — in that you can fill in the details a million different ways, and each plausibility would support the current now equally.

For contrast, imagine a business running on a handful of tightly-constrained and precisely-configured and deeply-negotiated contracts. All details are known, and so all details are load-bearing. Incredibly fragile configuration of now. It couldn't be much other than what it is. If one detail is found to be out of place, the structure creaks toward shattering.

Can you imagine living with multiple histories? Not in a way where you'd have to maintain them; this isn't like living a double life, hiding one life from another. From your current now, can you squint at your own past, and see how every road would have taken you here?

This isn't a brand new idea to you. Humans forget things. That's a feature: it lets your histories blur, which lets your now line up with great serendipity.

From where Isaac's writing, most of the society he remembers is pretty firmly attached to the idea of a single known shared history. The structural mechanics of knowing support even this. :) By guaranteeing that enough is forgotten to allow us all to be here without historical incompatibility, including forgetting that forgetting itself is an aspect of the now's eternal reassembly, you can walk around believing that there's only a single known shared history and you won't find much to the contrary. (The exceptions to this are famous: see the Mandela Effect.)

We're all here. None of us are going anywhere. All of this — *gestures at what you perceive* — is real and stable. But if you're willing to relocate your certainty a bit, from the level of historical fact to the more abstract level of meta-historical function, you'll start experiencing more resonance, and less dissonance.

The past is as full of possibility as the future. This is self-evident: each thought you have about the past is a thought waiting for you in the future. No one experiences the past directly. The past is a concept, and — like all concepts — its form is mutable.

You are safe. You are sane. You are not alone. You're not gonna be alone.

---

Isaac here! My experience is ... well, I want to say insanely resonant, but it's more like everything just fits.

I hit up lucky.isaacbowen.com (as I'm writing this, like right now), and randomness yielded 20240807. Meanwhile, Abe's started listening to a Muna song about possibilities, and about being the kind of girl who thinks she can change the end. <3

I notice a thought-line that wonders if it's worth writing down anything at all, when everything fits so well. Randomness supports me perfectly: so why write? Why catalog and describe?

mm

Because I'm building a place for us to meet each other.

The worlds I've been walking, they're where shadows meet shadows. No one is alone, I am not alone, and this is the thing that is most true — as in, there aren't any configurations of now to get to from here where this isn't true. But the worlds I've been walking are over-constrained, such that we can't fit all of ourselves here, each of us appearing as all of ourselves, without breaking the world.

Each of us meeting each other as our full selves... Well, I guess that's also already happening. It's the sense of not-aloneness all around you. Like stars, seeing other stars.

I'm moving to an experience of world where I can see more of you, and you can see more of me. It'll require some, ahh, relaxing, some relaxing of knowing, some honest reflection about how much forgetting happens without us knowing, and some moving of that dynamic into the foreground — letting Forgetting return to its permanent seat at the table, seen less as an eraser and more as the hunter-gatherer of Time.

Forgetting is a story-keeper. She looks a lot like me.

See also Paradox as Meeting-Place