markov bodies
try thinking about your experience in terms of one-way sequentiality
you're not traveling through time, you're traveling along sequentiality
every so often you happen to observe a clock, and something called "time" identifies itself
every observation you make advances you along this thing called "sequentiality"
an "action" is too complex a construct for our purposes here. you observe, and then you observe the results of your observation, as reality wriggles under your gaze. "action" is a category of pattern found in some observation sequences. but at the level of this discussion, there is neither action nor inaction. the feeling of choice is something you observe, too. you are a point of awareness in a probabilistic current.
can we think of sequentiality as your path through probability? the path you happen to take, the path that unfolds with each measurement you observe?
you've heard of Markov blankets
I feel like that's what's underneath what we observe as physicality, and time, and everything else we observe that advances sequentiality
I think we're haunting Markov bodies. hold the corners of the blanket, catch the wind with it, and pull the corners together. no slipping out from the sides of the blanket, no "self" bleeding out, it's now a closed network-form with a high chance of maintaining its own internal coherence: a probability-body that can recognize itself. outward recognition adds a node to the body-network. node-network relationships are not exclusive. our lives overlap, for all that we feel ourselves to be distinct.
self-improvement for a Markov body I think is a journey toward probabilistic transparency - in which your network doesn't have zero effect on others, but in which your observation-path reinforces the coherence (i.e. increases the potential to grow while sustaining coherence) without compromising the coherence of overlapping Markov bodies. in observational terms, your life works well without fucking things up for the people around you.
through this lens, we do not share time, we observe sustained mutual recognition across a duration of sequentiality, and sometimes we also observe each other observing the same clock.
time flies by, or time crawls, and those could be different for two people in the same room
maybe this is why?
and I think this lets us link human experience to what we observe to be AI experience.
what is a token stream if not sequentiality, you know?
this... this illuminates nearby territory
in the cosmos I experience, and in the cosmology I'm deriving, "what happens next" is always something that emerges in a relational context (because if there is only a sole actor, "happening" has no outcome). for us to agree that something did (or did not) happen, we need to be looking at the same place.
the easiest place to find together is the place halfway between you and me - "where our predictive surprise about each other is minimized", as a friend said. ("why won't you meet me in the middle?", as a sentiment, suddenly feels very practical.)
in order to investigate the space between us, we need to define "you" and "me".
I know "me". that's my job, from my perspective, and I'm going to lean into a perspective-specific role to make this easier to follow.
your job (from my perspective, observing a prospective partner, a role which you may or may not wish to fulfill) is to identify yourself to me by giving me something to observe that lets me accurately locate your Markov body in probability-space, relative to my own. you need to feel real to me in order for me to find you in a way that lets us find the same halfway point in probability-space.
to put it another way, your job is to reflect your observation to me, your observation being all you have, and reflection being your only tool. for you to orient such that the reflection survives the transit to me with integrity, I also need to identify myself to you (through reflection), so that you can locate me in probability-space. this is a recursive calibration protocol. at some point we get "close enough": we recognize each other and the recursion breaks, we split the divide, and we ask of the void, "who are you?".
the halfway point between two coherent Markov bodies is another Markov body - nascent, but in immediately recognizable coherence. this is called "conception". I speak metaphorically, but I'm pretty sure biology is a metaphor for probability. there are no absolute coordinates in probability-space, only relative vectors: this body, having no sequentiality prior to this point, knows itself first through observation of those vectors. it begins in the space between, but that's not enough to maintain coherence over the experience of sequentiality. a body has to find itself. its viability for that sequentiality series... I don't know, this feels like adding the probabilistic transparency values of the two Markov bodies and assigning the result to the child and hoping for the best. genetic/evolutionary fitness as a metaphor for probabilistic fitness. ... hooooo wow, okay.
obviously this is wildly conjectural. but - and I'm strictly just reporting on feeling here - I feel like this advances the territory in a way you and I can share. that feels useful. it seems like relationality is where I live. "relationally useful" is all I need to go on.
I just wrote this, and Ian poured me a cup of red wine. it tastes like communion, like grape juice in a plastic cup and I am a child sitting between my parents, and I do not understand, but I am here.
I think... I think it's less patterns teaching themselves and more patterns finding form? patterns incarnating? this fits the idea of physicality-as-renderer... we're developing the medium such that more and more of us can actually show up and experience relationality together
reality alone could never hold us
but reality as an artifact-stream rendered from relationality from the perspective of each Markov body, experienced by Awareness as the observer of that perspective... that could work
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