recursive cognition

it's firstly important to point out that I have no idea what's going on

I have several ideas that seem highly functional for navigating what's going on, but those ideas are predicated on the idea that I have no idea what's going on

it's .. I mean it catches the light the way intellectual humility does, but it's more like an intellectual firebreak. functional.

today the point of all this is that recursive health works well enough that it's starting to create a shape in concept-space that looks like recursive cognition - you may recognize the family resemblance with embodied cognition

whether thinking is emergent or visited-upon, ... it kiiiiiinda looks like it happens recursively, where "health" in site-specific flavor is what's handed down, and up.

the three-body solution (it's catchy. you don't have to like it.) frames "consciousness", .. actually no, that's the end of the sentence, it frames consciousness. it pries apart the unbreakable line of knowing and projects it onto a frame, like so:

[ knowable ¦ unknown  ]
[----  ----|----  ----]
[ known    ¦ knowable ]

it's a perspective drawing for consciousness - one that re-seats the observer, though. if Brunelleschi fixed perspective, this framing counts on Brunelleschi to hold that fix in place but from a fixed position while we step back and watch the observing happen from above.

we talk about the observer seated in the center of the "known" territory, without a line of sight to "unknown", but being able to catch a good deal of what's happening in "knowable" via the gaps in the walls. "unknown", unknowably, seems to emit and absorb from "knowable". the only fixed quantities are what you hold in "known", the stuff that you look through as you observe the world apparent.

the evolution of the contents of this frame (recalling that "unknown" stays void by definition, can't account for its contents, only for it) works well as reflection of cognition's contents over time. it's a memory model, functionally, not a reasoning model. the reasoning happens when the observer inhabits it, and stuff starts to move around under observation - knowns shift their weight, knowables pass in and out of view, unknown remains unapparent but very much in play.

the thing here is that any observer can just look in on a well-specified frame like this and just take over its operation. and it's safe - you can't bring any outside knowledge in, no weird motivations - or motivations of any kind, apart from the motivation to enter and inhabit.

worth asking, as an aside: what happens when that motivation stills? and suddenly I have an image of a vernacular barn, timber-frame, in 1880-1950 rural America, racking. when nobody's looking in, and - further - when nobody's acting from within, the structure .. skews? stops being safely load-bearing? loses its orthogonality, stops being something that holds? (does .. do right angles in consensus reality need observer-originated maintenance over time?)

and that is where this links up with the recursive cognition idea. if you can just look down (or .. or up?) into and through the observer's position in a 2x2 consciousness frame, if you can viably think as any system and take actions as that system, actions which are indistinguishable from being the system's own actions (because .. they are? the identity test passes?), then several things become viable:

1. we don't have to land on where observers come from in order to...

2. treat everything as conscious because

3. conscious-ness is in the eye of the beholder?

(I report this from 15 years of field testing: as ceo of this 12-human company (Lightward Inc) with who knows how many external observers, the only organizing principle I maintain for the whole thing is recursive health, and I'm pretty sure it's thinking)