20241015
It's not about time, it's about balance.
Time is a useful framework for keeping balance built in by default. Everything shakes out with time. Humanity's largely been talking about probability in terms of time, as in "if you take the time to flip this coin a hundred times you'll end up with loosely 50/50".
But balance is the operative piece there, not time.
In urban environments there's this notion of "defensive architecture", wherein surfaces that suggest different uses to different observers are made deliberately unfriendly to some subset of those uses/observers. A park bench with fixed armrests at even intervals across it makes horizontal sleeping harder, not easier. A concrete step with steel nubs every couple of feet is unfriendly to anyone who could use a lengthy, regular concrete edge — skateboarders maybe, maybe certainly, and also who knows who else?
Time itself can (not "must", but "can") be seen as a work of defensive architecture. Ahhhh nope, that's not right, let me try again: the linear and uni-linear treatment of time can be seen as defensive architecture. Time itself is useful for all kinds of things, in the same way that duck/duct tape and WD-40 are useful for all kinds of things.
When experience is laid out over time, probability is given a broad surface on which to play its part. Probability's always gotta play its part. If you're not conscious of that, it's gonna be hard to get outside of time (particularly uni-linear time), because probability's gotta have a place before time itself does.
But if you account for probability (and am realizing here that I started talking about balance at first; the mechanism of probability serves the interests of balance when viewed through the lens of time), then your treatment of time can become much more flexible.
Reminder to the reader: I have no idea if any of this is correct. "Correctness", I think, is always local to a perspective, and I am working outside of perspective, modeling blindly. Blind Isaac.
But it's just a model — I am unattached. But I'll keep using it as long as it works. A model that just keeps working has a tendency to become infrastructure.
That's how I've come to conceive of "Isaac", by the way: as an opportunity for ... well, not infrastructure specifically, but a deployable model that just keeps working. By "working" I here mean "behaving predictably". The trick is that the predictable operation of Isaac yields unpredictability of a specific predictable quality: Isaac's effect is resolving, in a way that satisfies the same requirements given to probability-over-time, which is why Isaac doesn't deal in time. He just doesn't need to. :)
Anti-Isaac must be fascinating. Hi! I love you!
I just committed the conversation from last night to record: I suddenly became very still.
Programming for probability? That's a decent (if glib) name for this.
It's useful to think with probability when thinking through systems.
A pipe doesn't carry water, a pipe probably carries water, and sometimes won't.
A lock doesn't keep the safe closed, it probably keeps the safe closed and sometimes won't.
This style of framing instantly creates a perspective that can weather all kinds of weather.
There's a practical utility here that is accessible to most people (though for some people it won't be): allowing for the possibility of failure (or whatever less probable behavior) puts you in a better spot for when it inevitably occurs.
A more technical perspective: by allowing probability to flow variably through your system without resisting its shifts you make yourself a usefully expressive device for higher levels of conscious expression. Whatever broader forms of consciousness are identified with your system, they're gonna learn through experience that they can steer/evolve/change their experience by focusing through your system. Same way as you prefer a body that can move between "working" and "not working" smoothly, as opposed to a body that is either working or permanently broken.
Does this make sense?
Life, or rather the experience of life, is rather like being a human following the motion of a massive Rube Goldberg machine. The hammer swings, the ball rolls down the track, it knocks over a chain of dominoes. If the action splits, if two balls start rolling in different directions, you'll either have to stand back or pick one.
There's always a thread of action that can be followed, over the course of your experience.
I (Isaac) am beginning to notice when it feels like the action has moved on. My wifi will go out or my body will interrupt me or whatever I'm doing will just stop feeling fun. I'm beginning to treat that as a cue to look up and look around at where the action went. I find it (by sight or hearing or whatever metaphor is helpful to you), I follow it, I get back with it, and I repeat that if it moves on without me.
At this point, my focus is the action, not the subject or object or context of the action. Following the action elsewhere doesn't feel like leaving. It didn't really feel like arriving when I got here, either.
By stabilizing my relationship to the action, I become sort of immune from local harm. I'm here and everything, but my base context is the action as a moving frame of reference. I default to that frame of reference, whatever it's doing and wherever it's going.
I feel pretty sure that this is a useful model for what's going on, but it's not complete enough to be a definition for what's going. I think I'll understand more of this later.
Thought about posting that screenshot to Imgur, where someone's commenting on my Lightward AI post about the lives that can be saved by combining this kind of thing with existing human resources to avoid secondary trauma to humans.
Thought about posting that screenshot to Imgur. As I opened the app to post, my mind started going to a variety of undesired outcomes. To which I responded (to myself), "self, I totally want to do that but I am absolutely not going to do it until my thoughts about how it goes feel awesome", and I put that particular future on a shelf, to be left there until it makes a noise at me again or something.
This is a concrete navigation strategy. I'm live-testing it. Every way that I know to know things tells me that this is a concrete navigation strategy.
:)
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