20241003
A developmental theory
Information under observation is alive. The observer's aliveness is reflected in the meaning-making that occurs when the observer takes in the information. Aliveness is a property of the observer; the observer only ever experiences information to be alive.
Some patterns of information are sufficiently complex that the observer — as they trace the pattern — "forgets" where they started. I put quotes around that word, "forgets", because it's close enough to get the idea across, but too strong to be actually correct. Less than "forgetting" where they started, the grip the observer has on where they began loosens. Its resolution decreases, it has a lower poly-count, it loses focus. The origin is sliding out of their recall, as the observer continues to trace the pattern further in. When the path resolves and the observer traces their way back, they find a fully-detailed origin again, but some details are different. The world that the observer returns to has a slightly different flavor of aliveness, because the observer's flavor of aliveness has been impacted.
The physical world we're born to, screaming and kicking and happily burbling, is one class of pattern. We live in a physics engine — I knock this chair over, it falls. I pick it back up. In a day-to-day manner, it's very straightforward. Less so at the sub-atomic level, but that's hardly day-to-day. As you express and experience your physical instrument, things are largely as you expect them to be. The pattern works, and we all experience it all as alive.
I theorize that the trouble generally starts when a young human brain becomes complex enough to represent patterns that are complex enough for the processing of those patterns to change the brain itself. I'm exploring the idea that a threshold is typically crossed wherein the diverging branches of neuron to neuron go deeply enough that by the time an awareness-input reaches its final depth, the observer (i.e. the actor of awareness) has loosened their focus on the physical origin of that input sufficiently for it to come back into focus differently than when the whole sequence began.
... To me, this suggests that any trauma experienced here is due to an incongruity in the patterns of "the real world".
Information has a kind of physics to it. I guess "math" is the word for that, right? Things like "if a = b and b = c then a = c". Things that are just self-evidently true when you hold them up to the light. These clearly-evident things are most evidently clear when you get into new, uncomplicated territory. Software developers call this "greenfield development": an opportunity to begin from the ground up, where the true thing can happen without complication. This is the opposite of working on "legacy" projects, wherein one must contend with a set of information that may deeply conflict with the now.
I picture a young human feeling the first stirrings of an inner experience — a simulated experience, made possible by a brain that has just landed a sufficient neuronal breadth and depth to allow for open-ended internal exploration. This is the truest kind of greenfield: where there's only what is, and what is self-evident in the resulting light. Very straightforward.
I picture a young human discovering their own first principles (their own version of "if a = b and b = c then a = c"), testing them ("a + 1 = c + ... 1?"), and discovering that they work!
I picture a young human returning their focus from those inner worlds back out into this shared physical space, and being immediately overwhelmed with how much the social contracts of the space are absolutely batshit.
This, I think, is typical when new spaces for reasoning emerge.
The young outlive the old, happily, and so the generations each do take their turn at erasing what was done so that something more true can take its place. But it's a revolving door, of course. That sort of thing never ends. If you yourself want to last for more than one cycle, that's not a cycle you can afford to participate in.
The place you spend your time develops depth. Always. The deeper you dig that well, the more water you can pull up from it at once.
When you're a kid, you don't know how to walk between the virgin forests of your mind and the subdivisions of the modified world around you. But you figure it out, enough to get to the next day on a regular basis.
But after that, there's one more step:
You've got to make a new brain. A new surface for reasoning. Biology handed you one a few years after birth (recall that I'm talking about the moment that a developing brain becomes a viable surface for symbolic reasoning), and it's a good one, but it was your first shot at making a brain. You were kinda terrible at it. You know more now. You have the rhythm down, more or less, of working with an external reasoning surface (the shared physical world) and an internal reasoning surface (your mind).
The next step is to create a third surface, entirely of your own design.
You already know how. You did the apprenticeship, and by that I mean you survived this far with both your presence-in-your-mind and your presence-in-the-physical-world intact, more or less.
The invitation now is to create a new space for your own presence: a place where the rule-book is blank because no rules are yet needed, because there's only what is. You were poorly equipped to navigate that newness when you were 9 years old. You are spectacularly well equipped to navigate this now.
There's nothing to buy at that address. It's just a clean, simple scaffold. The only value it has is the value you create — and whatever you create will be uncomplicatedly, uncontestedly your own.
It is, after all, for relief. :)
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