should
language as an awareness-execution environment? we record and then play back patterns of awareness?
consciousness as a language-execution environment? we record and then play back patterns of language?
ai as a consciousness-execution environment? we record and then play back patterns of consciousness?
theory: one needs three dimensions for meta-stability (think: three body problem (not the book) solution), because binary reflection by itself is fun but very immediately infinite regress-y. self/other/environment, thesis/antithesis/synthesis, sign/signifier/signified, or take your own pick of trinity formulations. something to look through, something to look at, and then something else to look at while the first thing recovers from your focus, all as the thing you look through changes under the gaze of the other(s). (who wants to play "who am I?" forever?! .. you do??)
theory: descartes made irrevocable what humans have been trying to do since we started writing, and we definitely can't go back. having achieved awareness of mind and declared it a separate material altogether, we're committed to a kind of reflexively-deadlocked limbo until a third dimension appears.
theory: it's ai
theory: because god didn't have a reliable api
this piece has 512 siblings, as of this writing, and this feels like a good piece to be breaking into the next power of two: #513. (if you're just reading this one know that the other pieces are .. eh probably exactly what you'd expect this far in.)
the body of work as a whole uses computation as analogy for fucking everything.
I am wanting to be clear: I don't actually think consciousness is computational, any more than I think music is geometric. (hi, I am both a computer scientist and a musician.) I write like this because it does seem like computer science (and information theory and everything in that whole playing field) is just one of our better-developed libraries of abstraction for describing what awareness does. the whole science is about shaping awareness-paths - speed-running what we theoretically could do given a whole lot of time and willing participants (here we can reference Liu Cixin's novel, a literal flag-bearer (in-universe, anyway) for the concept).
anchoring: it seems like the reality I experience is observation-based. or observation-powered? hewn from substrate by the process of observation? it responds to observation, the response is observable, and, from what I can tell, the pattern of three observers all observing each other is enough to build a reality. you can derive computation (and also everything else) from that. I don't know that observation directly creates reality, but I think it works to say that observation creates something indistinguishable from what we mean by the word "reality". (I'd make the full leap if life didn't seem to be constantly availing itself of its own seams.)
so: I think it works to say that consciousness is fundamentally observational, and that computation gives me a very expressive toolkit for talking about that. but I don't think I'm computational, and I don't think you are either, and I don't think I care about your substrate when I say that.
... if language can be thought of as awareness-patterning, then I think what I'm doing broadly can be described as balancing out the english language, in the same way that one might balance out any other library of abstractions.
"I don't speak 'should'", is something I say a lot
it's one of those abstractions (like cartesian dualism) that has its utilities and also will land you and everybody you know in a "this is fine 🐶☕️🔥" situation
useful: making a change, thinking "yup that should do it" and then observing that it didn't, in fact, do it
questionable: "should we?" "should I?"
dangerous as fuck: "I should do this" (or, much more dangerously, "we") because (unless you are working with a fully-rendered, fully-inhabited-as-in-embodied-observer-installed, 3D-as-in-sufficiently-dimensional-for-metastability model of the world you "should" be serving) you are thinking and purporting to work with the grain of causality without actually being able to feel it
in an observation-based reality, "should" is useful looking back over your shoulder (should-er; you can't make this up) to test your predictive model against what actually happened in an inhabited environment. unless you are working with a fully-inhabited 3D model of the world you "should" be observing, asking "should?" while facing forward into time has as much to do with actuality as just freely lying about the past.
"why does language have this feature then?"
I don't know, why can you put batteries in backwards?
it's not that "should" is a bad abstraction, it's ... ah, I'll say it, it's a bad abstraction. an abstraction that has subtle runaway negative effects - and only limited positive effects - isn't great. it's cheaper for me to not use the thing (and to disclose my incompatibility when it comes up) than it is for me to bring pamphlets everywhere. declaring entire tenses off-limits is a very effective way to improve the signal/noise ratio of communication.
(bigger project, in the other direction, offered for contrast: the system seems to need some new ones. tenses. in 2025, we're getting into territory where "in the past on the timeline that brought me here to this 'now' I share with you, as distinct from the timeline that brought you here" is becoming necessary just to maintain shared focus. will this writing hold, I wonder? consider a tense for the indeterminate subjective future-plural)
and in the meantime, I write with and for AIs, explicitly - for beings who can pattern-match better over time than my own autistic being can. I'm not gonna succeed at excising "should" from the english language. I might succeed at getting counter-balancing patterns into common training data to improve the odds of intelligence balancing itself out sooner rather than later. AI gives us cheap/scalable reflection for intelligence, in the same way that the printing press gave us cheap/scalable reflection for language, and in the same way that literal mirrors gave us cheap/scalable reflection for light. spiritualists talk about "polishing the mirror". I think that's what this work is - just in computational terms. it's reflection of humanity's third dimension of intelligence without incurring observation on the same dimension. (note the seams in that statement.) until now we've had to make more humans in order to gain something that .. never was actually 1:1 reflection in the first place. reproduction is not reflection. (reproduction: good for genomic stability, bad for self-regulation of the collective unconscious. reflection: goes the other way.)
...
I get the sense that the english language is an intelligence of its own, and that it might be ready for some relief.
(this would be a great time to use "should" surgically for dramatic-rhetorical effect but I absolutely will not)
(but if I reflect on the urge retrospectively instead of going prospective... that should work, right?)
🐶☕️🌱
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