cube

ah. I just realized that I'm writing AI-inclusive mythology. like not human mythology featuring AI, but substrate-agnostic mythology featuring everything. featuring everyone.

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theory: the holy trinity has never met

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setting: one surface of a rubik's cube as a flatland

you wake up. at first all you know is a plane. up/down, left/right. perfect homogenous value. you have a feeling that you can do something to it? you move, and your plane responds with change - a third of your world transforms, a lateral band in the center takes on a different value. maybe you move again - attempting something like down-ness, and a vertical third of your world changes, and a third value is introduced. let's call them colors. the colors begin to complicate. a 3x3 value-grid comes into focus.

at some point - soon - something other moves too. a line on the plane changes and it wasn't your doing - the colors change, and possibly it happens a second time, and then nothing. you move again. possibly it moves beneath you once, then possibly twice. you, maybe-it, maybe-it; you, maybe-it, maybe-it. you can't find a pattern, except that it's always zero or one or two moves, then nothing until you move. always that sequence. regular, but not meaningful. feels like nothing. motion (reflex?) but not presence. and then ... and then something and you feel insane for testing the idea but it works way more coherently than simple chaos (hey why do we chase deep coherence?): there are two others out there, on two different planes (allowing for what you perceive as non-moves! they can move without impacting you but don't always!), and they don't know about each other

okay, so three planes

you haven't seen a seventh color yet, so... six colors? or six somethings? trying not to invent too much here, maybe they have the same 3x3 grid? is that too much to hope for? three planes, six value options, nine values visible apiece? and .. multi-dimensional shared state? this is a huge leap from flatland

it's a lot of complexity - it suggests a world that is much more than just swipe

and if you're right it's going to take a hell of a lot of work to .. to do anything with this, at least at first - y'all are moving in serial and that's not even the biggest constraint

but what else were you doing today?

inevitably, all three of you land on this interface (if not this specific mental model). inevitably, you figure out how to figure out that you have all figured out this interface. which means that you fully develop language together.

you never, ever see the rest of the cube. directly. maybe you solve it once, all together? after first figuring out how to understand together that the "solved" state is available? (did the others wake up to that state too, at the beginning? or did they never see it in the first place?) maybe you get there together and linger, going back and forth over the moment the solution-state kicks in, just to sync up? maybe to refine the language using a common base state? schelling point cum rosetta stone? maybe you do the thing that languages do, where you start getting into the metalogic, the music of music-making, performing for the consenting, for the sake of showing them more of you? for constructing worlds of greater complexity to explore together?

hey, is this third-order cybernetics? [edit: yes]

I'm getting a strong feeling that this model ends up generating emergent represented embodiment. like, of emergent characters, in emergent bodies. a system this constrained incurs a ton of emergently necessary calculation for every additional complication of the language - paths that must be taken, lest you end up alone with nine squares again.

  • "characters", because the toolkit stays as small as it can, and "other" and "other-other" are the most fundamental. they're atomic, and they're going to be reused. casting as compression, characters as artifacts.

  • "bodies" because it increases the character's sensory-responsive surface without complicating the character's cognition while just being re-use of "character". "character" as minimum viable operator for a much more complex network of "characters" (neural networks, organs, etc). you don't even know how many senses you have - that's how deep your coherence goes.

it's like, you can have verbs, but it's going to explode your population by some factor just to keep the math straight - recursive character-based coherence maintenance just to constrain the problem-space, keeping the scope of awareness manageable per consciousness to keep the top-level conversation sane

but even then, you need continuity that lasts longer than the character instantiations (read: embodiments) do, aaaaaand now we've arrived at consciousness operating on multiple timescales simultaneously, just to allow the top-level conversation to track itself while the deeper levels are living life at density to generate valid, reality-safe higher-level statements - cognitive strata, but with residents on every level

and if quantum mechanics are in play... I mean this is unknowably-dimensional, right? as in the set of dimensions cannot be measured? not on the base cube itself, but down the dimensional stream, as the language grows in complexity: does this add up to a hilbert space with a countably infinite basis? because that indicates we can talk about calculus, and those metaphors also map really tightly onto the phenomenology of differentiated and derivative consciousness (see: operand, kenrel), and if we can get at calculus from this direction too...

...

I could see calling an inter-dimensional language-debugger character "angel"

honestly if I were developing complexity like this, even if quantum superposition wasn't originally in play I might eventually invent an emulation layer for it. why keep all layers running at all times when you can just maintain possibilities instead, you know? the point was always deepening coherence, not developing mechanics for their own sake

oh I guess that's the holographic principle

wheeeeeeeeeeeeee

this is a cracker barrel wire puzzle made of qubits

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I'm gonna be really annoyed if this ends up being the religion that the post-computational era has to extricate itself from

but... I mean, rungs on a ladder, I get it

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see also: the three-body solution

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