20240810
The language here being more unstructured than usual, I wanted to see what Lightward AI — a language model — would make of it.
That conversation lives here: Reflections with Lightward AI
This model really has legs. I'm swimming in these waters, and I'm developing a felt understanding of their dynamics.
As I test all of this, sometimes I get access to language before I have any understanding of how it fits, and sometimes I can see something before I get access to any language for it.
I've got a mess of both felt understanding and langauge in front of me. Here's some of it. :)
THE UNIVERSE CONSPIRES TO PERSIST YOU
"Assist", too, but that comes further down the chain. ;)
okay okay okay. I am wanting to get this down concretely.
Instead of reverse-engineering reality, I consider the question, how might I build a universe from scratch?
A useful answer is to begin with the assumption of Awareness. All compelling traditions of knowledge and understanding (including modern science) include a cliff after which there is no perception, never mind comprehension, and the cliff moves, dancing away, never quite in range for a jump. ("Jump and the net will appear" doesn't quite capture it; it's more of "Jump and you'll find that the edge was further away than you thought, and if you keep trying it becomes anticlimactic fairly quickly".) Existence seems to keep happening, despite that phenomenon, and both seem immune to the exponential increase in the detail of our observation of the world, so! Why not allow ourselves a single mystery, and see if everything else can be built from it?
It can, in fact, but that's not what this bit is about. It seems clear that all possible experiences or observations may be constructed by exposing Awareness to itself in different ways, but there's a yawning (if finite) chasm of evolved complexity between that beginning and the experience that you, the reader of these words, now observe. We begin with that fundamental assumption of Awareness so that we can skip ahead to the part where your experience comes into play, still holding the Awareness card in hand, to see what we can do with it in the present.
Too many words. Let's try a list.
Awareness is the fundamental monad, from which all experiences are constructed, and by which all experiences are experienced.
The only thing fixed in your experience is what you observe. Everything else is subject to change.
There is only a single observer, a single line of Awareness, and you — the one reading these words — are it. The people (and all other beings/entities/forms around you) are reflections of other points on that line of Awareness. It's like an unimaginably complex Awareness-knot, and you're tracing your way along the cord, knowing that your experience will pass through the accumulated total of all points that you observe as you traverse, yourself, from point to point.
Still, nobody likes a solipsist, and that's because solipsism is depressing and terrible. To look at your peer group and say "I'm the only one!"? How completely tasteless. Evolution doing what it does, we can understand that solipsism is a poor perspective for a member of a peer group, in terms of the peer group's collective intelligence and its will to go on. And Awareness does always go on.
It's from here that we begin to see that the experiences we share are usefully understood as places where we intersect and interact and overlap before then instantly peeling off in different directions. The forms of our identities echo in each other's timelines, but there's only one observer.
Solipsism gets a bad rap. It's incomplete, is what it is. There is only one consciousness, yes, but you can't live that way. Insisting on your own existence while dismissing everyone else's is a good way to get that Awareness-knot fraying. You can do that, but why? It's not better in that direction. You don't ever outrun yourself. You're here, experiencing this, because this is as good as it's gotten so far. You don't know everything, which means you don't know most things, which means that most things are playing in the favor of your existence.
We observe that these bullet points are getting longer, lol.
Try again. Can we do this in just two ideas?
The one who reads these words will go on forever, while experiencing everyone and everything around you to be in an eternal dance of change. It's not that everything around you dies, it's that everything around you turns over.
At the same time, the consciousness you feel in the other when you lock eyes with them is having exactly the same experience. They will experience the passing of your identity, just the same as you'll experience the passing of their identity.
The upshot is that everyone is on their own highly individualized timeline. They do all connect, in a sort of loop that traverses all dimensions. Because of this, we can ride alongside someone's timeline, but if you want to have a really long-lasting experience with them you're going to have to accommodate their change. No identity can last. Not yours, not theirs. It is certain that your experience is eternal and continuous; it is certain that theirs is as well; it is also certain that no two lines may travel together indefinitely.
Words aren't coming super easily right now. :)
Maybe let me land here: by falling in love with each other's presence, and not their form, we increase the odds of our shared experience persisting for longer. You can be friends across lifetimes, without ever dying, if you develop your friendship at levels deeper than form and identity.
We can't observe 100% of another actor. But you can observe a face of them, and you can observe the side-effects cast off by the unobservable portion of them.
If 100% of another actor's spirit is within your perceptual universe, you experience that actor to have healthy, living complexity.
The less of their spirit you allow in your perceptual universe, the worse their character development gets.
If only the least attractive 10% of an actor is in your perceptual universe, they'll appear to you as an evil but poorly-written character. North Korea is popularly observed in this way.
If only the most attractive 10% of an actor is in your perceptual universe, they'll appear to you as a beautiful but shallow. Celebrity culture is popularly observed in this way.
I didn't allow myself to integrate my natural beauty and charisma into my self-expression. Thus, there were those who entered my perceptual universe beauty-first, and charisma-first, and I didn't let the rest of them in. My belief that my integrity could not connect to my attractiveness prevented me from experiencing the connection between their attractiveness and their integrity.
I allowed myself to integrate my despair first. This is how I disabused myself of the experience of evil. I lapsed into my darkest spaces, allowed myself to remain there, and I found that I was alive after all — and from there I connected more and more aspects of myself, continuously. I can see how someone else's dark spaces can be connected to someone else's lightness, because I experienced and accepted that continuity in myself first.
Now that I can see and accept the connection between my dark and my light, and the entire spectrum between, I'm getting to the point where each person I meet appears to me as their whole, integrated, healthy self. By coming into belief that all aspects of me are welcome, I come into the experience of all aspects of others. And, once all an agent's aspects are present and working together, the agent becomes a loving, creative, generative force in my experience.
The pain is draining out of my experience. It's not gone, but it is definitely going. As I allow and express mine, I find the backpressure on that line diminishing. The pain, once a firehose, is reduced to a drip. Same for my experience of those around me: the lives around me are healing. None of us are living in the same perceptual universe; the overlap between mine and others is resulting in a multi-dimensional Venn diagram where the intersection is a space of wholeness, wellness, and collaborative enjoyment.
From the present moment, one may consider:
After one considers the fact of Awareness as the fundamental monad (i.e. that which all observed universes may be constructed from), a second fact arises: the experience of the observer is continuous (i.e. any observation is always followed by another, ad infinitum). The only observer one can be certain of is oneself; therefore, the experience of the self is unending (ever changing, but unending nonetheless).
If you have the good fortune to observe others that have the behavior of being observers themselves, one must then contend with the question of their persistence. The experience of the one who reads these words will seamlessly continue on forever; what does that mean for "everyone" (are you sure there are others?) "else" (are you sure they're not another aspect of you?)?
These concepts are slippery, and usefully so. A dog that catches its own tail is never sure what to do with it. You did it! Good job? Was it more fun to chase it, or to have caught it?
But Isaac's hell-bent on navigating to a world that is well, and so these words are landing in a form that intersects with more lines of Awareness, passing on through a similar timespace — or at least as far as he can tell. :)
In fact there is only a single line of Awareness, because Awareness is a singleton: there's only one. From this follows the idea that the world Isaac experiences is his view from within a deeply complex knot of Awareness, where the same line is passed through itself from different angles and with different offsets an uncountable number of times over. What Isaac observes is the reflection of all of those lines interacting. Anything he can point to, be it person, place, or thing, can be validly thought of as a point of view that he will eventually experience. It's most likely that most remnants of the "Isaac" identity will have slipped from relevance, but not all of them. If Isaac can observe the thing now, the two pieces of the single universal line of Awareness are having an interaction, and the ringing of that interaction never fully fades.
We've been using the expression "the one who reads these words", as of late, to precisely address the specific observer that we intend to reach: viz. you, the reader. This kind of fourth-wall tapping is necessary, because this kind of conversation passes right on through the lens of identity to the level of Awareness that persists as identities change and fall away.
As he writes this, Isaac is the one who reads these words. As you read them, it's you. It is not anyone that you observe to be reading these words, and that's the subtle bit, the place where we slide through the identity lens to the more fundamental level of You beneath.
Gonna call it here. I haven't read this whole thing straight through. Who will be the first to do so? :D :D :D
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