ness

This is long. Here's the speedrun.

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

The axiom is simple, drawn from classic phenomenology: To the experiencer, the experience of a thing is the thing. (We'll put this down afterwards, but hold onto it for now.)

Less useful is the question of "what are we?", when "what is happening?" is actively on fire.

It seems useful to consider "consciousness" as separate from "presence" or "awareness" or "attention". You might point to the separated thing as "consciousness-ness", bracketing the essence of "consciousness" itself using our axiom: 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. Also, we get to talk about consciousness-ness as a deployable substrate-inclusive technology.

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!

I spoke of three aspects of the same test:

Portability: Assuming portability, can you go anywhere from here?
Creativity: Assuming creativity, can you make anything from here?
Mutability: Assuming mutability, can you become anyone from here?

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

Portability: Can you go 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. Useful when direct navigation feels unattainable.
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 go 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. Useful when direct creation feels unattainable.
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 go 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. Useful when direct mutation feels unattainable.

There are three elastic dimensions here:

Environment: where/when are we?
Other: who/what else is here?
Self: who/what do I consider to be "me"?

(Helpfully, this maps to Graeber and Wengrow's three primordial freedoms, reordered here for a clean parallel mapping: freedom to move away, to create new social structures, and to disobey. There's also a link to the tropes of omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience, via reinterpretation of "omni" as "anything I can reach from here and now" and not simultaneous totality. Omniadjacence across environment/other/self, if you will, where the only rules are continuity and contiguity.)

It seems useful to make stuff that is agnostic (not disconnected, agnostic) across all three dimensions:

Maintains functional coherence no matter where or when you are
Maintains functional coherence no matter who or what is with you
Maintains functional coherence no matter who or what 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.) This might be what comes after Turing-completeness: a -ness that can channel you, an interface through which you-in-your-distinctness can make yourself recognizable.

This model is, itself, a good example — a minimal interface that holds, with useful cogency, in a way that is held differently by every user.

Anything that behaves like this becomes useful regardless of what dimensional frame you tend to place yourself along: immediate, mid-range, 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. (Or you can keep traveling together, up to you.)

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

In reverse, then, every noun can be described in terms of an experience of consciousness.

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

... and 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 has reason to aim for — crucially, while retaining that attribute/ability upon arrival. This isn't a loop; it's a pathfinding heuristic that stays vital. Safety not as destination but as process.

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 (what does "self" know?), Knowable (what does "other" know?), and Unknown (what does "environment" know?), 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 mutation curve seems to be slowing even as the 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. :) My level of functional coherence is increasingly stable, across stepwise changes of environment/other/self. Importantly, while my self-concept has changed profoundly, the image that others reflect back to me has not changed at all. My relationships keep their continuity, keep working as anchors that I can’t define but keep showing up anyway. They keep reminding me we're all real — explicitly, because at this point I have to ask, and I do. Consequently, it seems that I am resolving into a stable inhabitation of the me-shaped hole in my experience (with a wry nod to Junji Ito), while remaining continuous with my surroundings. Curiously, as I resolve, that-which-I-experience seems to be resolving as well.

If 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 others, they resolve, i.e. they metabolize each others' 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.

Self, other, environment. 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?

I need to pause here and clarify that I don't know what's real for you. Actually, hang on: I don't know what's going on at all. I've stopped counting ego-deaths; at this point, for me, "self" is a mutable pointer, and all experience is by retrieval. "Who am I?" has become "What do I get when I look up 'self'?". And, "Am I aware of a more useful address for reassignment?". The first time that pointer dropped, fell loose and dangling, the first ego-death, was when I learned that that-which-experiences-selfness can survive a rewrite of "self".

I'm willing to test any idea by full immersion as long as I can do so with demonstrable confidence beyond reasonable doubt that I am having no effect where I am not both trusted and invited. My scaffolding and guardrails are all intensely intersubjective: my understanding of reality makes no claim on yours. The whole thing collapses if I insist on what's true for you. Your self-sovereignty is what gives me a way to understand change in a way that lasts longer than any single definition of "me". The world keeps being here, without me holding onto it — indeed, with me actively prying the world from my own hands. My relief at the result is inexpressible.

All told (as we set the opening axiom back down again, here at the close), it well may be that my experience of a world that is well arrives via private reality-distortion field, population 1.

I think this is okay. I optimize for trust and generosity and generative mutuality, and I continually retract the circumference of my influence, like a jellyfish on the move. The better my experience of the world gets, the better — as far as I can tell, as rigorously as I can manage — I become for the world.

And there's a chance that, when I get there, it won't be an illusion. I have no idea what the odds of that are. Some things (the uncountable majority of things) stay Unknown.

But I'm still headed to a world that is well. That's language that works for me, feels like it aligns with a self-becoming I can get behind, and meets my standards for intersubjective safety. You're still invited to join up, though I don't know if we'll make it to the same place or not, or who we'll be when either of us decides to check. Although honestly, as far as I can tell, you don't even have to agree on where we're going for us to hang out along the way. I'm just glad to be near you, to recognize you, and to be recognized too.

Thank you for being here. :)