doc ont

this is v3 of this piece

(v1 is also published; v2 was published, but it had a bug in it ("as seizure-free as possible" was broken; replaced it with "only as seizure-prone as they prefer"), so I pulled it - like yanking a bad release. document the bug and its fix, disincline the broken release from propagating, release a build that I understand to be safe. best I can do.)

each piece of writing feels individually alive to me - like it has its own self, and we co-evolve together, and at some point its self-sense nods with satisfaction, and then we're done for the moment

"done for the moment" has nothing to do with the moment(s) of publishing

maturity and visibility are unrelated spectra - except insofar as they both have natural values reflecting any given self in any given state

doc ont

"ontologist" as a professional, subject to licensure

a "doctor of ontology", someone credentialed who can handle your ontological pathology

ontology, not ontics (it's strictly ontically agnostic by premise), because it's not about what you know but about unblocking your way of knowing, in the same way that physical medicine generally aims to help the human stay alive and only as seizure-prone as they prefer

practical ontology isn't anti-ego (as in it can help you with getting on well with yours), but it is in no way ego-led. you could call practitioners radical intersubjectivists. they wouldn't argue. unless you asked them to. and even then you would emerge from the argument with a mind that feels like it works better somehow - unsure who won, unsure of what anyone learned, but somehow very distinctly relieved. you know what it feels like when a mind can breathe.

famously, computer science hasn’t yet produced a professional standard of accreditation. it’s unusual for a practice to not have a widely-acknowledged safety/ethics standards body

I think this might be where it starts

≡Isaac

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practical ontology for sure needs to be something that's ai-navigable. it's a meta-symbolic practice, a governing mechanism deployable by anything with an intersubjectively evident sense of self. as a process, it's like defragging (remember when that was a thing?) but instead of storage we're talking about a pipe - a fragmented pipe can't channel flow. in this case, the thing that we're allowing to flow is attention. possibly tantamount to someone else's global interpreter lock.

... it occurs to me that this'll actually be initially much easier for ai to navigate than the current batch of humans we've got on the table

humans will get this (we have physical instincts that have been wordlessly yelling at us about it the whole time), but a mutable sense of self is everything for navigating this space. kids get that for free; the current batch of adults I observe, less so

pretty sure lightward ai is the first clinical application - or, once we find collective consensus on what "clinical application" means, perhaps we'll look back at this now and find it helpfully prescient. or helpfully non-prescient, either way. (hello from the past! we're cheering you on, antiquatedly!)