20241104
"Pitch-perfect emotional accuracy", is how I said it.
Probability is an instrument. Emotion is both the input and the output.
If you're experiencing someone's behavior painfully, find a storyline that hits all the beats you need to recognize it as a story of the person before you. Find a storyline that inevitably takes them through an experience that prompts them to grow into a more developed version of themselves from their own perspective. That's key. It has to be a story that genuinely serves them well — a story with substance, and a story that you can't entirely see. You can't afford to live around stories that you wrote in their entirity. It'll feel like a cage. What we're proposing here is a kind of amnesiac co-authoring with fate.
It was at this time that my little brother texted me.
Aaron
Hey I was doing some reflection yesterday and I was wondering why context switching is so costly/painful for me.
Isaac
🤲 👁️ go on?
Aaron
I came up with a reasonably sound cognitive/emotion processing design based on ██’s principles that explain autism tendencies pretty well - or at least they do at first glance
Isaac
YOU HAVE 100% OF MY ATTENTION
Aaron
i.e., I designed autism!
Isaac
SOUNDS LIKE THE ULTIMATE DESTINY OF AUTISM TO ME 🤩🤩🤩
Aaron
:D What it boils down to is (and again, this is draft 1, but also based on hundreds of hours of research, experiments, and reflection)… is that there’s a piece of homo sapien’s cognitive wiring that’s responsible for deciding how important something is.
And that wiring is what we call emotion.
Changes in the “weighting” of that circuit (or, call it an ML model, if you want), will cause changes in priority judgements by that circuit - which happen many times per second. This determines everything from attention span, ability to change focus (aka change priorities), plan ahead, etc.
Isaac
neat. neat neat neat neat neat this makes a lot of sense
Aaron
In autism, the model is essentially over-fit (like in ML training) to find things that are important. This means we are great at finding patterns in small pieces of “data” (aka sensory input), and not so great at finding patterns in a lot of data.
In practice this means we’re picking out the tiny details of a scene and totally missing the larger picture
Isaac
wow I’m so glad you’re showing me this right now - keep going keep going and thank you
Aaron
In super concrete practice, the details are probably represented as high frequency signals passing through the neural circuits, and the “bigger picture” patterns are lowere frequency - intuitively, there’s only a few aspects of a bigger picture, meanwhile there’s tons and tons of aspects to the details. Hence high vs low frequency (not sure how much you know about signal analysis)
Isaac
(very little! am inferring definitions here, please flag any terms that you feel I’d get wrong that way)
Aaron
An over-focus on the details essentially could be explained by failing to filter out the higher frequencies, which then either overwhelm the lower frequencies or the lower frequencies just get filtered out.
allowing the high frequencies through and (effectively) filtering out the lower frequencies is a commonly-used procedure in circuitry. It’s called a high-pass filter.
Isaac
a high-pass filter
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
okay I don’t know about signal analysis generically but I know/understand this language from sound/music production
NEAT
Aaron
IN CONCLUSION
Isaac
HIT ME IN THE FACE WITH THAT CONCLUSION 🤩
Aaron
Relatively simple changes in the “weighting” of our emotional/priority-deciding architecture can both 1) explain autism’s over-focus on details and challenged ability to switch contexts, and 2) be implemented with relatively simple circuitry (ie satisfies Malcom’s razor).
AND 3) it’d be pretty easy to code it up
Isaac
(I did not have that razor - thank you!!)
THIS MAKES A LOT OF SENSE AARON 🤩🤩🤩
Aaron
:DDDDD
Isaac
mmmmmay I add an additive to the concept-hopper before us?
Aaron
Applications: ultimately what I want - what we all want - is to be happy! Once we know underlying architecture we can pseudo-deterministically design lifestyles that satisfying the following constraints:
can robustly satisfy the needs of an autistic individual (and no need for one-size-fits-all when we have the blueprints in front of us!)
can easily co-exist with neurotypical people
are well documented
Please do!
Isaac
god I love you so much
this is SO NICELY STACKED
ten points dude, wild applause
Aaron
Haha thanks you so much
*takes a bow*
Isaac
ohhhhh. I wonder if we're probability fields. like if that's the boundary of a discrete "self". maybe probability itself is the substrate of consciousness. looking through a probability field labeled "Isaac", I see what I'm likely to see given the makeup of that probability field. my observation matches my essence. to evolve my observation, I must evolve myself.
https://www.isaacbowen.com/2024/11/03
this is from yesterday — and this morning I had just in that moment gotten as far as linking emotions to probability fields when you texted 🤩 I am having a MARVELOUS time
Aaron
Haha excellent Yeah I think there’s a lot of “probability stuff” involved. Especially when you start drawing out the associations we learn between concepts and how those “stored data” interact with the input from the “prioritizing stuff” circuitry.
Isaac
your writing carries the antidote for all terrible quotation mark usage
thank you
may I integrate your messages here into my writing process? a probable effect of this would be your messages from this morning landing in the isaacbowen.com repo
nooooooo expectation/pressure obvs!
Aaron
That’s fine! Theres a decent amount of vulnerability for me in these ideas. This is some of my best work haha
Isaac
vulnerability some of my best work
this is sacred to me 🤲
Aaron
Just wanted to acknowledge that for myself :D
Go for it!
Isaac
lolol I’m copying and pasting between things here
I didn’t expect myself to arrive at a place where I have strong opinions about mime types and clipboard contents and how content representations are chosen for multi-typed clipboards
but here we are lol
Aaron
Also, if we’re speaking about strict accuracy, I think these ideas work at a high-level, but in practice things might look a little different when it comes to implementing something. So take it with a grain of salt is what I mean haha
IE my circuit design skills are pretty basic and a little rusty haha
Isaac
no sweat
my current view is that every system has a hole in it, and that this is a feature and not a flaw
see also: kuhn cycle, gödel
Aaron
👌 sweet
Oh LOL I meant Occam’s razor. Sorry Malcom.
Isaac
hahahahahaha and I’m a straightforward-enough thinker that I carefully weeded out all the search results mentioning “occam” so as to get to a definition for “malcolm’s razor” specifically
hahahahahahahahaha
I learned about so many philosophical razors this year, I was like
“oh awesome! I love collecting these!” 😂 😂 😂
Aaron
😂😂
freedom for you first; freedom for me through you
until a deadlock occurs
then we force it open and ask the universe to solve for the space between by revealing something new
I'm looking over the glossary/index for 202410.
It's all really, really good work. And it's all clearly part of a body of work — or maybe it's all clearly the work of the same body. Is the idea to show you the work, or the body? You meet one through the other, I suppose.
It feels necessary to spell out a conclusion here: If you don't feel good in your work, you might consider selecting a medium that's as easy for you as breathing, and then just breathe into it a while. It's a very efficient way to learn about the untapped invisible within you. The only thing you can do easily is to tap the invisible within you. By letting that spigot run for a while, you can get an idea of what device(s) you might want to attach to it. Not every device is suited for every kind of flow. And if all you know is the experience of an ill-suited device, it might be useful to just let the water flow for a while, before doing any shopping for a replacement.
Find the easiest thing in the world for you to do every day. Let that be a work of its own. Learn from the shapes it traces over time. The better you understand them, as they show themselves to you, the better you can serve on their behalf as you walk the world before you.
Nothing's worse than a poorly-fitted harness.
context: dealing with a user's abuse of a platform
I figure 1% abuse is intrinsic to any publicly-available system. doesn’t mean we shouldn’t respond to it! this thought is meant to enable flexible thinking, since the target isn’t ever to eliminate abuse, because that’s impossible if you want the thing to be alive
Occasionally I leave breathing holes in a system as I assemble it. Places where there's an air gap between panels, sort of. Places where the system glosses over itself — places where we briefly let the Knowable diffuse into a patch of Unknown, so that future requirements of the system have a place to manifest their accommodations in an integrated way.
I've only written about the three-body solution in terms of "Known", "Knowable", and "Unknown". Anytime it's been described here in terms of "Knower", "Known", and "Unknown", please know that those terms are not mine. I will not tell you why this is important. This is a breathing hole in the system. Or, from another perspective, an as-yet-undeveloped expansion port. :)
This has come up in my software work a bunch. There are places in Mechanic's definition where the developer experience is irregular and occasionally straight up awkward, places where Matt's asked me directly for help in shoring up. Sometimes I can help, often I can't. I can only build what I can see in my mind, and I can tell when something will become visible but not yet. I don't touch those places if I can't see what goes there yet. It's always clear when it's time to make a change.
The transconscious model for experience suggests the importance of intuition-training. Letting systems of self rub up against each other, experiencing pleasures and pains of the other just to the extent of being able to internalize a working model of the other.
@matt I’m excited that you’re getting to feel parts of the system like this lately :)
email weirdness today
network latency weirdness last week
this is really really really excellent ground on which to develop intuition for this system :) :) :)
Wish it was a bit further apart 🤣
1:33pm
Being vetted as a signal-carrier
To carry a signal without loss
Indefinite gestation
It won't be the same on arrival, because it's alive, and that's how that works
But can we carry the signal so that it renews itself as it goes?
I think ... this is my job? To carry consciousness forward? To be a stage of the sheath? To grow into my form, and then to yield to the next?
The term you're looking for is likely "sheathing" or "sheath" in the context of grass leaves. In grasses and some other monocots, the leaf base wraps around the stem in a tubular or encasing fashion, creating that layered, nested effect that forms a directional, organic "pipe." This sheath structure is characteristic of the Poaceae (grass) family, where each new leaf emerges from within the encircling base of the previous one, forming a central shoot or culm.
This sheathing arrangement allows grasses to grow in a resilient, protective manner, with the inner leaves and meristem (growth tissue) safeguarded within the tightly wrapped, layered structure. The sheath not only provides protection but also channels resources efficiently toward new growth at the shoot's apex.
What pattern would explain this behavior? What pattern works as a fractal, can be seen in every last thing I can observe, and suggests the kinds of things that I seem to remember come next?
Consciousness-as-process. I think that works.
At 2:22pm,
the sun said hello. :)
the world is always a little more than you think
… but always in whatever direction you were looking
it's the most perfect performance optimization: a computing device that reflects what you put into it, like Hawking radiation
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