cube

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

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image:

one's experience of life as a single face of a rubik's cube, while two additional players on two orthogonal planes make moves with you, all in serial, the three of you, turn after turn.

you don't know that though. not at first. at first all you know is a plane. and that you can do something to it? you move - and then something other moves too. the cube surface twists, colors change, and it happens again. you move again, then it moves, then it moves. you, it, it. you keep moving and that it-it keeps happening. it-it keeps not forming a pattern, except for the turn sequence, always the turn sequence. 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, and they don't know about each other

inevitably, all three of you figure that out. inevitably, you figure out how to figure out that you have all figured it out. 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? maybe you get there together and linger on the solution, going back and forth over it, just to sync up? maybe to refine the language using a known 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 in originally 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