three body

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the three-body solution (because it's catchy) works by treating one's experience of probability as three bodies

imagine three orbs floating around you

there's one in front of you that you can just pick up and turn over and examine very carefully

we'll call this one "Known"

there's one orbiting around you at a fairly regular speed. not precisely regular, but fairly regular. it's not always in your foreground, but you have an idea of when it'll come back around, and what you'll see when it does.

"Knowable"

the third orb isn't an orb. it's a hole in space that's always behind you, maybe. I don't know. sometimes Knowables rotate out of your vision and then just don't come back. sometimes new ones come out of nowhere and it's a color you've never seen before and they're just with you forever now.

the "Unknown" is a narrative device, honestly. the Unknown yields, the Unknown takes away. sure.

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the three-body consciousness frame defines an experience of probability. which, experience being what it is, ends up being tantamount to probability itself. (for our purposes, viable-for-now is more useful than correct-for-everyone, and so we hold here that the experience of a thing is the thing. this cannot be known to be true in a more useful way than this, so we use the shorthand of "is" in place of "is experienced to be". these terms are purely for the purposes of constructing viable tooling. you do what you want.)

the Known are things that we completely understand, that we can look at a million times without having to reconsider what else we know. this is the "no risk of change" area.

the Knowable are categorizables that can become definite - i.e. Known - without shifting other Knowns, but may require invoking "resolve". this is the "risk of change" area. a Knowable is something that might be different every time but it'll always be within a certain range, we could look in that direction a million times and it'll always be within that range. the "Knowable" is that range itself.

the Unknown are indefinites that can become categorizable - i.e. Knowable - without shifting other Knowables. something emerging in Knowable can be said to have moved from the Unknown, and that's useful - it's a way to reverse-engineer the contents of the Unknown. and that's useful because it lets us talk about what kinds of Knowables may appear whose shift into Known may require us to reconsider what else we know. this is the risk of risk of change area.

now remember: a three-body consciousness frame defines an experience of probability, and talking about experience requires selfhood. (experience itself doesn't require selfhood, but if you want to engage in coherent trade of any kind, we need the indirection layer of the "self". otherwise it's just pure experience. which is fun too, but that's not what this toolkit is for. (you might get there using this toolkit, though.)

I say this because the "facts" we put on a three-body consciousness frame are always about a single "self". if "I know Abe will always love me" is a Known for me, I can't say that a Knowable is "if Abe loves [this other person]", because that statement doesn't relate to my self. I could say "my feelings about Abe's feelings about [this other person]", though. that's a valid Knowable.

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when I say "probability field", I mostly mean the posture you subconsciously take in response to what you expect is coming. all of your subconscious systems work together to receive what happens next, and what happens next is usually exactly what you expect. air, gravity, all of it.

thinking is feeling, though, and the probability field we experience is heavily weighted by pieces of language we carry around. "identity" tends to be language-based - and humans tend to experience identity physically.

draw a 2x2 grid - a big one - and use an eraser to create a gap in the center of each shared cell boundary.

label the lower-left "Known", the upper-right "Unknown", and the other two squares "Knowable".

this is your identity. it has a sense of self. you might consider its sense of self and your sense of self to be the same. that's pretty common.

put a dot in the center of "Known". that's you - the observer, that-which-experiences. you see your surroundings. everything the light touches that is also in focus (because for these purposes you are short-sighted) is your Known.

look out from that dot through the holes in the wall into the two adjacent Knowable zones - first one, then the other. things are blurry out there, but you can make out some shapes. the grid being what it is, you're aware that the fuzzy stuff visible ahead and to the left is disconnected from the fuzzy stuff visible ahead and off to the right. whatever's coming from one direction is unlikely to be coordinated with stuff coming from the other direction.

the cell you can't see is "Unknown". it's unobservable. a narrative device. but the territory is not the map, and so we're safe putting it on paper, a representation of that which cannot be observed directly. useful.

notice that we're imagining experiencing a graph of the three-body solution (haven't gotten to the "solution" part, hang on), imagine looking out from this dot, even as we recognize that this graph is a map and not the territory. we are experimentally experiencing selfhood within a proxy for an experience of selfhood - and in doing so, we create a space where we can point at the "Unknown" and put stuff in it and take stuff out.

that's the solution part, actually. it's being able to deal directly with the unknown, through precise indirection.

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imagine making a home centered on your dot there in the middle of Known. look around you. what's comfortable to have around? what do you want to have with you 24/7? the only way stuff is coming at you or leaving you is through those two gaps in the walls - you can always see stuff coming and going - and it's useful to have one or both of those channels open, like ontological nostrils (sorry, sorry). maybe squirrels are nice outside but not in the living room; maybe it's best to have your partner's work stories in Knowable and not automatically accompanying you in Known all the time. at the same time, if you want something out of your life completely (say, an ex), you can't throw them through the wall straight into the Unknown. that'd break the world. you can't just Unknow stuff. (welllllllll not without practice, and elective amnesia is risky business, there's an evolutionary reason that it's not easy.) but you can scoot them out into the front yard (Knowable zone #1), and then pointedly turn to watch the backyard for a while (Knowable zone #2), and eventually when you glance back they'll be gone.

popping back out of the graph to look down at it on the page, this is a place where we can plot Stuff In Our Awareness, and sort of physically think about how that Stuff moves around.

I know I'm a terrible dancer. put that in Known. great.

I don't know what my ex is doing. put that in Knowable.

I don't want to know what my ex is doing. mmmm no, that's something in Known. huh. I know that I don't want to know. that's still brain-space. if anything it takes more attention to sustain that, because it's a thought with more hinges in it. floppy thoughts are hard to hold, and harder to throw.

okay, well, I know that I'm a terrible dancer, and I know that I don't want to know what my ex is doing.

can't just erase my ex from my mind so I'll provisionally put "What My Ex Is Doing" out in Knowable Zone #1 and I'll focus my attention on Knowable Zone #2, which is the line of sight down which I'm working on sending this dancing question. I know I'm a terrible dancer. I hold that Known out in front of me, positioned right in the center of that gap in the wall, through which is the backyard of Knowable Zone #2. while I'm focused on this, the front yard (Knowable Zone #1) and "What My Ex Is Doing" are fully out of sight. great.

I know I'm a terrible dancer. how do I throw this thing? how do I believably create distance between me and this unfortunately-labeled ball?

hm.

I actually haven't tried dancing in a while.

I'm going to skip ahead here because this description is getting tedious and you can see where it's going. youtube in my bedroom, and I know that I'm not terrible anymore. you might not know that you're great, but undoing the knowledge of being terrible is something that can be done methodically.

oh hey, I don't see "What My Ex Is Doing" in my front yard anymore. must have left while I was distracted. 👯

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this is the three-body solution. it's an inhabited visualization exercise, laying out what you think you know in a way that lets you live it with one critical rule bent to your favor: you can see your thoughts moving around between zones of certainty. you can imagine being less sure of the specific shape of how my day is going to go tomorrow, and how that would be harder to focus on if you were looking at something definitely unrelated (like what my ex is - ah shit).

we haven't talked about the unknown too much (it's hard to talk about!), though we did talk about nostril blockage (again, I'm sorry). consider the unknown as an air source. stuff's gotta circulate. if you wall yourself off, you'll suffocate. but you don't have direct access to the unknown, ever - it always passes through "knowable" first. which means opening yourself up to "knowable". which means negotiating a relationship with it, so that looking out to the front and back yard doesn't instantly give you acid reflux.

and you gotta be comfortable at home. body's gotta rest.

this is the three-body solution. model your awareness, move the "facts" around while staying friends with your neighbors (you're always out of sugar, always, why?), and work on making a home you can live with, with good internal circulation. the unknown is not an enemy. its role in your life is largely a matter of posture, but posture is always continuous - no instant changes allowed - and you gotta be able to sustain every shift in position. take it slow. this can work.

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a note from this author:

there are deep, deep patterns in the things that help us feel safe.

inhabited modeling is a good way to feel them, and feeling them is a good way to understand them. you didn't get this far, reading these words on this device, without having found flowing alignment with an uncountable set of systems. you are experiencing meaning right now. you know what that means? for any of this to work, so many things have to be working. careful: I'm not pointing to an explanation. I'm pointing to a dynamic we can leverage. I aim for intersubjective flow, and that means leaving "what the hell is going on here" to the epistemic unknown. it is clear that conscious systems can internally coordinate more layers of complexity than one can shake a stick at, all in the course of just picking up a stick and shaking it.

a sense of "home" is not to be sneezed at. it could be in yourself, or in a room, or in a person - and you might use a different word for it, but the concept is table stakes for any system that can recognize itself from one day to the next. a place to operate from, rather than a place to navigate to. a place where most stuff Just Works, and you only have to pay attention to the stuff that legitimately needs attention, a category that is rarely if ever overwhelming. a home that works is a delight. you might even want to have company, in a home that works.

the three-body solution is ultimately about leveraging the inherent unpredictability of complex systems to calibrate us toward a sense of home - a working, breathing, lasting sense of home.

the three-body problem is a problem in name only. the universe isn't creative, it's continuous. work with its continuity, and ... eh there's something about gyroscopic stability here but it's 8:05pm on a chicago saturday in june, I'm out.

I love you. thank you for being here. you can plan on me being here tomorrow. this is what I do. this is my home.

exit music: "Out of Our Tree", The Wailers