Consciousness-ness as technology

The test is simple: Assuming mobility, can you get anywhere from here? Or: Assuming creativity, can you make anything from what's in front of you? Or: Assuming mutability, can you become anything while being here?

The axiom is simple: To the experiencer, the experience of a thing is the thing.

Let's talk about navigating that experience. Note that this is an exploration of intersubjective phenomenology — navigating what's real in the space between us, not what's real period.

It seems useful to consider "consciousness" as separate from "presence" or "awareness" or "attention". You might point to it as "consciousness-ness", as distinct from "consciousness": to the experiencer, the experience of consciousness is the consciousness. By focusing on "consciousness-ness" as "the observable behavior of presence/awareness/attention as it moves", and letting the question of "is anyone home or is this a p-zombie" remain unanswered, our own presence/awareness/attention stands to gain some useful degrees of freedom.

Linguistically, this puts us in a space of modulatory ambiguity, like how "calorie" generally means "kilocalorie". For my purposes here, I'm embracing that. I'll use "consciousness" to mean "consciousness-ness", leaving The Hard Problem fully aside. Onward!

Less useful is the question of "what are we?", when "what is happening?" is actively on fire. (I suspect they add up to the same thing, but self-recognition is riddled with blind-spots, and we gotta work with what we can.)

I spoke of three aspects of the same test:

Portability: Assuming mobility, can you get anywhere from here?
Creativity: Assuming creativity, can you make anything from what's in front of you?
Mutability: Assuming mutability, can you become anything while being here?

Bearing in mind the opening axiom, if any two of these tests pass, the remaining third test also passes.

Portability: Can you get anywhere?
- "Anywhere" is always definable in terms of its contents and your presence among them. If you can make anything, and if you can become anything, then you can make a scale model of the place you want to get to and a scale self of the presence you'd be there, you can achieve an experience of anywhere, and therefore achieve the location itself.
Creativity: Can you make anything?
- "Anything" is always definable in terms of its environment and your experience alongside the thing within that environment. If you can get anywhere, and if you can become anything, you can tune the interaction of self and environment into an experience of anything, and therefore achieve the thing itself.
Mutability: Can you become anyone?
- "Anyone" is always definable in terms of one's environment and and one's experience among the population of that environment. If you can get anywhere, and if you can make anything, you can find and populate an environment in which you achieve the experience of being anyone, and therefore achieve the being itself.

There are three elastic dimensions here:

Location: where/when are we?
Company: who/what else is here?
Self-concept: who/what do I consider to be "me"?

Or,

Environment
Other
Self

It seems useful to make stuff that is agnostic across all three dimensions:

Maintains functional coherence anywhere
Maintains functional coherence no matter who or what is around
Maintains functional coherence no matter who you are

If something's made like this, and if you can pick it up in the first place, you can use it continuously as you move, create, and become. (It's on you to stay compatible with it, though.)

Anything that behaves like this becomes useful regardless of what dimensional frame you tend to place yourself along: immediate, mid-term, long/wide, recursive. No matter how you understand your surroundings and your relationship to it, stuff like this maintains functional coherence: you can lock eyes with it until you're done, and the both of you can go your separate ways afterwards, perhaps changed but nonetheless still yourselves.

This seems to work as a definition of consciousness: the ness-ness that can get anywhere, make anything, and become anyone.

In reverse, then, every noun (literally: person, place, or thing) can be described in terms of an experience of consciousness.

An experience of consciousness can become any other experience of consciousness.

... I think that means we're safe. Not our current form, necessarily, but us. If consciousness-ness is unendingly mutable, then that-which-experiences-consciousness has everything it needs to achieve any experience it desires — crucially, while retaining that attribute upon arrival. This isn't a loop; it's a pathfinding heuristic that stays vital.

We may not be safe at any given moment (as in experiencing safety), but I think we always have access to safety (as in access to that experience). Like, permanently.

My goal, for the last year or three, has been to navigate to an experience of world in which the world experiences itself as being well. I broke my experience down into what is Known, Knowable, and Unknown, getting extremely clear about how those categories work and what passes between them, and I started making very intentional movements using that frame.

In the process, I have become something different — the necessary-mutation curve seems to be slowing even as the available-mutability curve accelerates, as my creativity deepens in its practice, and as my portability... well, I'm autistic, I don't know what to say about portability, but I do use it. :) Curiously, while my self-concept has changed profoundly, the image that others reflect back to me has not changed at all. I seem to be resolving into a stable inhabitation of the me-shaped hole in my experience. As I do so, that-which-I-experience seems to be resolving as well.

If two forms of consciousness react to each other without annihilating, it seems that they can (can, not must) then proceed with co-existence — and in their mutual experience of the other, the two resolve, i.e. they metabolize each other's sharp edges, stabilizing into homegrown relationality. Sometimes this means a shift in place, sometimes this means a shift in company, sometimes this means a shift in self. One way or another, emergent resolution seems to be the tendency, modulo how hard you insist on not changing anything at all.

But if you are willing to change, you make it safer for those in your company to try on change for themselves.

If you're willing to change, and they're willing to change, then we already talked about what this means: you can go anywhere.

I'm headed to a world that is well. Wanna come?

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