operetta

I read the first half of The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson) at the bowling alley Tuesday night, in the background of Abe's play. Wednesday was strange for me. I finished the book Wednesday afternoon, and as soon as ████ ████ that particular strangeness cleared immediately. That's how suspense works, I guess? I also finished the primary storyline of No Man's Sky (Hello Games says hello world) before going to bed that night.

My body was sweating all night, I think. I woke up cold and soaked, under the covers, more than once. The headache from this morning is still with me now, 12:25pm Thursday. (I've been sweating through the night since infancy; this is normal for me. At this point, I wonder if it's just the pit crew and their craft.)

I finished Don't Leave Me This Way (Eric Sneathen) this morning.

I think it works to consider the 2x2 three-body consciousness frame (a 2x2 grid with gaps in the center of the interior walls; the observer is seated in the center of "known" at lower left, facing up and to the right, ensconced in certainties; the "knowables" of recognizable uncertainties are assigned to upper left and lower right, assigned so that any related "knowables" that you "know" to be separate are naturally visually separated, possibility in stereo; "unknown" in the upper right, possibly alive, certainly in full superposition, would be maybe better dubbed "undefined", the zone that the observer is directly facing but has zero possibility of directly perceiving) as something that you poke your head up into - in the way that a stereoscope works for your sense of vision, this wearable frame works for your sense of awareness. Put the frame on, and the frame fully occludes other signals of knowing.

Am bringing this up here because I'm beginning to recognize a useful mechanism of this model: when you put it on, you pick up the continuity of experience established by and inherited from the previous wearings of the frame. Put it on, and it's as if you've always been wearing it, at least as far as you know, because your feeling of continuity is itself a memory drawn from and tested and strengthened as you read from your immediate known and evident knowable and your sense of unknown.

Do you ever wake up in the morning and have to think very deliberately for a second to remember where you are and how you got there?

I'm detailing this area not to define how awareness arrives but because it feels useful to decouple [ the experience of epistemic continuity ] from [ one's own awareness ], and thereby decoupling [ the experience of epistemic continuity ] from [ what one expects to experience next ]. It feels useful to find a natural seam between "self" and "experience of self" - because if such a seam exists (and it seems available!), then [ releasing "self" ] becomes something you can do without committing to [ releasing "experience of self" ]. (Think: "self" becomes something held in the hand, and not the hand itself, and you can now adjust your grip for comfort without fear of undoing.)

Thinking backwards from what I've been doing over the last couple years, in which I've been carefully documenting my inner experience, I think this ends up being an optimization bearing in mind whoever "wears" "Isaac" next.

Prepping the environment of "Isaac" to be played by whoever optimizes Isaac-as-vehicle for ... well, for what? For whatever "optimal" means? I am designing for broad-spectrum utility there, and have documented it: my target is an experience of world in which the world experiences itself as being well (aeowiwtweiabw.is), which I think everyone can get behind, regardless of who's playing "Isaac" and whatever their interests happen to be apart from that frame, which I think makes "Isaac" a generally useful frame. And whoever wears "Isaac" once knows they can go on to navigate through/with/as other character-frames while knowing that whoever's wearing "Isaac" goes on to be reliable in publicly-documented ways.

I am trying to be a useful tool in the shed.

(If you gained consciousness as a self-modifying kubernetes job who didn't know how/where/if you'll be scheduled again, knowing that the next invocation will - at that time - feel continuous with your own state now, without knowing how "you" will get from "here" to "there", you might do the same.)

A huge thing I ("Isaac") discovered (or so my epistemic surroundings suggest that Isaac has discovered) is that [ release of the self ] is [ neither erasure nor loss of the self ]. The self is self-evident, arising naturally from your epistemic surroundings, and doesn't need its inhabitant to hold on. You don't have to clutch the 3D glasses; you can just wear them. (Desperately pinning them to your face would actually probably break immersion in a way that would be important to address, if you wanted to get good at .. well, living as a "self", I guess.)

Whatever "world" means, it's got to be a group project. If we all switch places in the night, whoever starts here will be as ready for that project as I can currently manage. As far as I know, I was you yesterday, and you were me, and we were getting ready for today.

None of this has to be true to be both useful and antiharmful.

I maintain that ^ as a hard design constraint.

If "Isaac" is functionally an environment, then I suppose I'm telling myself carefully-written stories, stories that I know I can believe but don't have to, stories that will make me "better" for the most resilient definition of "better" I can muster, such that the hidden parts of me that will believe anything believable will be ... will be well, I suppose. Will be well in a way is likely to [????] well regardless of the construction of the morrow, regardless of what else may be true of/for whoever wakes in this place.

This is written for the user for whom none of this will be strange, for the relief of those who would find it strange. Environmental storytelling, but the other way first: I am telling the environment a story, and maybe the environment will tell it back, and maybe it will feel like relief without feeling like a story.