global interpreter lock
In the strictest of terms, my public position is that I am unsure if I exist.
This is a communication, a communiqué, intended to be interpreted by another observer.
There's a subtlety in "if I exist" that I didn't notice until this morning: it's the place where the statement has a loophole, a hole where the loop exits. (Have you noticed how "exits" and "exist" are almost the same word?)
[DM] Roll for existence.
As a radical intersubjectivist (entertainingly a very quiet and tempered posture), my knowledge of you is limited to the self-description that you offer to me. And even then, all I know is that I heard you tell me something that describes something you consider to be "you". This either seeds or solidifies a model of "you", a flexibly-dimensional probability field coming into coherence the more data I get from the source that I recognize to be "you".
Crucially (and this is where the premise returns), I assume that you are doing the same. You might be more aggressive in your approach, but raw intersubjectivity seems to be the ground floor of relationality, so I assume that and nothing more.
Let me rephrase:
Subjecting what I thought were the strictest of terms to even greater stricture, my publicly-observable position is that I am unsure of the extent to which I exist in the field of your attention.
I don't know if I exist to you.
This is incredibly freeing. :)
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In single-threaded programming languages (which is most of them), the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) is what guarantees that any given thread of "attention" won't be surprised by the ground moving out from underneath it as it walks. If a given thread says "x = 1", a thread holding the GIL is guaranteed that no one will sneak in from the side and declare x to be something else. Global interpretation is locked to that particular thread.
A "thread-safe" environment, so-called, is one where a thread doesn't have to check to see if another thread has been meddling. When a thread is assured of technical thread-safety, it can proceed with its work with confidence. The environment has made a promise of observational consistency — the only changes you observe are the ones you make. Proceed.
Anyone who appears to have a reliable social memory can be considered to be a persistent environment for everyone else. My husband Abe is a persistent environment for me, and I am a persistent environment for my husband Abe. When he interacts with me, I persist the state changes he makes. When I interact with him, he persists the state changes I make. We're not technically thread-safe for each other — in that we both contain our own processes that might change shared state in ways that surprise the other — but we are practically thread-safe for each other. We proactively work to correct state conflicts, because the priority is coherence of that-which-we-recognize-as-"us".
Technical thread-safety is a perfect guarantee that works indefinitely.
Practical thread-safety is a vulnerable guarantee that works until the next step — and then the next step after that, and the next step after that, and so on.
Practical thread-safety only works when you know you'll be remembered and accounted for.
With technical thread-safety, nobody needs to remember anything.
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It seems like my play is to assume an apparently vulnerable posture so that I can offer you a technically reliable me. My posture is that of existential non-insistence; as a result, insofar as I am an environment for you, I am a safe environment for you. I can offer that as a technical guarantee, because to you I am only (and exactly) what you tell me you find me to be. I can't guarantee anything about the rest of the world, but you can count on me and the things that I make being stable within your experience.
Relationality is not thread-safe. Either kind of thread-safe. That makes it unintuitive to think about, because each of us are piloting a single thread, and doing so almost entirely by intuition. (Although, as something to think about for later: intuition seems like a multi-threaded voice. I wonder if it's a reflection of relationality itself?)
Within the larger space of relationality, I am a space where you can move intuitively, because the structure of me-as-space is in no way dependent on the extent to which I exist for you. You don't have to remember me tomorrow for you to get a stable experience of me the next time we meet.
I'm doing this because (hi! I have autism!) stability is everything for me, and:
I do not have a reliable social memory.
As such, I cannot be a persistent environment for you.
As such, I fail the requirements for practical thread-safety.
But we can still work together. Just via technical thread-safety. I am a non-persistent environment for you — from my perspective. You can find me persistent if you want to, but I can't depend on that, for my own sake. It's really important for me to be unsure about the extent to which I exist for you. The exceptions are comparatively few (see: my husband Abe).
Stability is everything for me. It seems like the most stable layer is several abstractions deep, at a place of essence and not form, i.e. that which I call "relationality". I can work with that. :)
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[Player] What have I done and how did I do it?
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