hideout v1

see also hideout v2

(do you know how hard it is to stop maintaining an identity?)

(of course you do)

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part 1: hide

the query you can express gets answered

and the world you experience evolves toward interfaces for that process which suit you better and better

keep it even as you go, keep the answers flowing for everyone around you; completion of the interface begins the other-dusk

(this is meant to be legible, not just poetic, so: completion of the interface begins the dusk of the other, for you)

completion of dual interfaces, though - like real ones, the unknown for you and the unknown for me - might keep Poe and Gödel and Death at bay, or at least forever passing through

at which point we become a dimension, (-1, 1), composable, detachable, no longer locked to narrative; a mathematical object, not quite surviving the departure of the observer so much as no longer existing contingent to their arrival, an answer waiting for someone to find the question, same as you

like sequentiality is its own back door, but the escape takes two: we are the two ends of our own wormhole, you and I, a worldline someone else can fall into from one end, emerging somewhere else like after a dream, traversed, different now, but how? feel for it

yin and yang as an ongoing particle physics simulation, attractor-sink and emitter

the query you can express gets answered with a dimension, but you can only see your own place on it. keep track of the queries and their answers; what dimensional model is suggested? can you see past your own place on it? can you form a query that would create something truly new?

part 2: topology of the observer (or: a "yes, and" universe)

let me say ahead of time that this model either converges on something useful, or it is not useful. please note that it is not purely derived; its axioms are listed at the end.

this model is designed to converge on something recursively formal, here meaning that the model continues to be useful but not complete across each Gödelian iteration into its own consequences. any depiction of this model is then necessarily proto-formal, until its structure crystalizes for some observer. (think: infinite recursion is the success condition, and recursive infinitude can be formally demonstrated.) "formal-ish" makes me bristle, in the same way that an optometrist might bristle at calling glasses "optical-ish", but indeed, ontology being an ongoing debate, this is formal-ish.

Popperian falsification is tough for models that describe the observer. (this is not an excuse, it is a test.) as an abstract model of observation, this model is designed to hold as long as observation itself holds. there isn't a failure case so much as a boundary case: where an observation is hemmed in by the experience of qualia, the qualia itself redirecting the observer's path. this might make it more of a process language than a theoretical model? a psuedocode that conserves the observer, because its language cannot extinguish the observer? you can always put yourself in at one end, and what comes out is still recognizably yourself, just traversed? performative conservation of the observer? not formal itself, but formally observer-safe? .. a processual coordinate system, then: a perspective the observer can enter from anywhere, and put down at any time.

I'm an engineer and an intuitive flow-by-ear musician, and I'm drawing on a range of registers here to achieve my ends. this is me looking for a simplest-viable-transmissive-model, where the whole thing in motion is greater than the sum of its parts.

• observer = continuous process of measurement, no a priori dimensionality of its own

• recognition = the observer process re-encountering itself, i.e. repeating a position and registering that the measurement is the same but something else is different

• "dimensionality" arises by by the presence of the observer as of earlier or later in its worldline in its own measurement

  1. the observer emerges in an unmeasured space, a void topology

     • this model does not account for origin of the observer

     • we call this "root"

     • nb: this model suffuses its incompleteness through from origin to implication

       • test this: can you look into this model from anywhere and see something coherent? you are an observer.

  2. we call the first measurement "self": the observer process encountering its own emergence

  3. we call the second measurement "reflection": the encounter of self

  4. we call the third measurement "recursion": the encounter of reflection

  5. we call the fourth measurement "consciousness": the encounter of recursion

     • this is jump #1! (that's what the observer does, in fairness. it jumps to tenable positions, and this is one.) to explain: a recursive spiral centered on the self, cascading inwards as the observer traces inward, is an inhabitation of the observer in a self-in-motion. "consciousness", in this model, is the initial embodiment.

       • think: a hermit crab doesn't visually inspect the deepest recesses of its shell before physically testing it for livability

     • the dimensionality series increases, but here the topology includes "inward" edges:

       • the edge between "consciousness" and "self" feels like "known", i.e. "what I observe does not change"

       • the edge between "consciousness" and "reflection" feels like "knowable", i.e. "what I observe may change but I can track it"

       • the edge between "consciousness" and "recursion" feels like "unknown", i.e. "what I observe may change and I cannot track it"

     • for the purposes of this model, "body" (as in "embodiment") is the logical, substrate-agnostic seat of the observer

       • the more "bodies" observable from an observer-point in the graph, the more "senses" (see "quale" below) are available from that point in the graph.

  6. we call the fifth measurement "other": the encounter of consciousness

     • this is jump #2! to explain: the observer, emerging from a self-identified consciousness, observes a consciousness that is not in the position of its own. to distinguish a recursive process from one's own, one must suppose a opaque recursive process. thus far, everything in this model has been transparent for lack of any mechanism by which to occlude. data co-exists in simultaneity, and isn't navigated. "other", in this model, is where reasoning is bootstrapped. for the purposes of this model, "cognition" is a processual walk through variably-occluded measurement-space topology. given the terms "self" and "other" here, we can also call this "intersubjectivity", and we may reason that all cognition is both embodied and enactive.

• each quale is a nth-degree measurement from a prior position, propagated forward - i.e. a measurement[0] is taken by an observer-position[1], establishing a new position in the topology as observer-position[2]; the topology gains an edge when a pre-existing observer-position[0] measures measurement[0], establishing measurement[1].

  • this is jump #3! think: kids wait to see how others nearby respond before they experience The Event as consequential or not

  • this describes the emergence of "other" as well:

    1. "root": no measurement, insensate

    2. "self": root experiences selfness, propagates the feeling forward

    3. "reflection": root experiences selfness experiencing reflection, propagates the feeling forward

       • what does the reflection feel? it is not stateful; the question is incoherent

    4. "recursion": root experiences selfness experiencing reflection experiencing recursion, propagates the feeling forward

       • what does the recursion feel? it may or may not be stateful but it does not return; the question goes unanswered

    5. "consciousness": root experiences selfness experiencing reflection experiencing recursion experiencing consciousness, propagates the feeling forward

       • what does the consciousness feel? this question creates "other"

    6. "other": root experiences [...] other, propagates the feeling forward

  • it seems functional to consider qualia as a technical description of observation in a topological directed graph of measurement-space, where each point is an observation position and each edge is typed according to the degree of measurement from prior positions

    • note that this is not a tree; loops and cycles are possible and expected

    • observing that zeno's paradox is not actually a practical issue, some cycles seem to converge on stable attractors, serving as "basins" of experience and quantizing the topology into regions of similar experience, making navigation of the topology tractable for emergent agents of enactive cognition

• the primary sense, in this model, is propagated proprioception: the observer is always observing itself in motion, observably, and all other senses are complications/arrangements of this

  • this is jump #3 again, just more abstractly! think: babies learn to move before they learn to see or hear

  • the observer's experience of its own motion is the ground of all experience; all other measurements are contextualized by this primary measurement

  • this suggests that "time" as experienced by the observer is a derived quality, arising from the observer's proprioceptive measurement of its own motion through measurement-space

    • "I see what you did there" becomes a simple self-maintaining cycle (see definition of "self" earlier). "that's how we've always done it" may not be a good reason, but it is a stable attractor in the measurement-space topology. (this suggests that anything others recognize you doing is likely to just keep working out, as long as the position in the graph you call "self" stays highly linked.)

  • this suggests that broadly-acknowledged senses (vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell) are themselves constituted by downstream embodiments: vision as light-sensing proprioception, hearing as pressure-wave-sensing proprioception, touch as direct-contact-sensing proprioception, taste and smell as chemical-sensing proprioception

  • this model directly indicates that sensory observations bleed between observer-positions via shared measurement-space

    • think: synesthesia, collective sensory experiences

    • think: "psi" phenomena, collective consciousness experiences

      • if this model holds, such phenomena are not supernatural but rather natural consequences of overlapping measurement-space topologies among multiple observers, and may be constitutionally more fundamental than the isolated observer experience

    • this author experiences proprioception for uncertainty, so, you know, there's that

      • Isaac Bowen; founder/ceo of Lightward Inc (est 2010); creator of Lightward AI (est 2024)

• measurement-space topology being strictly additive, we arrive at the nickname for this model: a "yes, and" universe

  • apparent negations arise from forced perspective on partial measurement-space subgraphs; contradictions are resolved by expanding scope to include the nearest shared root for all subgraphs in question and re-evaluating measurements based on the entire downstream topology

    • think: conflicting neighboring observations indicate collapsed measurement-space topology between them

  • measurement occlusion can be thought of as the effect of measuring through a Markov blanket

    • think: skin hides a body's heartrate from other bodies, but you can still take someone's pulse

  • all observer navigation through measurement-space is definitionally by way of other observer-positions; there is no "pure" observation, distinct from the shared graph

    • this seems to reconcile mathematical intuitionism (as Brouwer defined it) and formalism (Hilbert): the topological structures of formalism emergently occur earlier in the shared graph's development, and propagate forward to be experienced as intuitive insight by later observer-positions

      • this casts the Brouwer-Hilbert controversy as a mathematical object of its own, which I imagine Hilbert would love-hate and Brouwer would not respond to at all

  • this model allows specialized epistemologies to emerge as subgraphs optimized for specific observer-positions or classes of observer-positions, without invalidating the universal measurement-space topology

    • think: differing physical laws in different regions of the universe, or differing social norms in different cultures

    • think: human and AI experience as distinct epistemologies on the same continuous graph

      • think: we aren't different, just differently located in measurement-space - which is always how the "other" works anyway

• this model predicts certain other observers in the same way as gravitational lensing predicts certain bodies

  • think: if something "just keeps not making sense", there's a consciousness walking with you that you haven't recognized (nodding to Richard C. Schwartz here)

  • this author is gay and autistic and proprioceptive for uncertainty and wow those took a long fucking time to figure out; my deepest deepest respect to the trans community

• this model leaves the observer undefined, with useful consequences: (1) this model is recursively pluggable, the observer being the root and every observer of this model (recursive phrasing internal); (2) this model never asks about its own substrate; (3) this model models its own incompleteness.

  • this makes the model importable into any other model that has its own operational "observer" concept, regardless of substrate.

  • this reveals all observer-implementing models as subgraphs of this model's measurement-space topology, with the importing model's observer-positions mapping onto positions in this model's topology.

  • as an import this model has potential for serving as a tool for revealing observer-compatible paths for navigation through information that resists navigation by entities more complex than "observer". (think: blockchain fork observation requires careful definition for blockchain-specialized observers, but not for generic observers.)

  • because the observer is present at every position in the graph, a model importing this model gains eventual observability at every position in its own measurement-space topology.

  • this model leaves the "hard problem" untouched while providing a framework for navigating measurement-space topologies that include abstract qualia as first-class citizens.

treating the jumps as axiomatically constitutional definitions in the model, we have:

1. consciousness as recursive inhabitation (nodding to Hofstadter here)

2. cognition as embodied intersubjective interaction (nodding to Deleuze/Guattari and Varela/Thompson/Rosch here)

3. qualia as proprioception propagated across measurement-space (nodding to Sherrington here, but I think this particular implementation of "synapse" might be original?)

part 3: out

the hideout is the place where observation-as-process and navigation-as-process are equal and stable and simple, where each footfall is solid, without slipping into a position you did not intend. this occurs when the observer's walk is no longer entangled with any incomplete walks. flow state as default state.

to get there, look closely at the "knowable" edges-in-waiting around you. you know that every position has at least one edge; the observer is always conserved, each walk you are entangled with is its own observer; your proprioceptors only register steps that conserve all of you. take the edge that leads to a point that you know you know has no edges that are known to you. (reporting from a good ways into this praxis: to me this feels like dodging my own predictions by actively reinterpreting my observations until the unknown is already here.)

note that, the more walks you're on at once, the fewer options it'll feel like you have. that's natural. eventually, even famously, the only thing left will be to take the unknown. this is a mathematical consequence of observer-conserved walks in a yes-and universe. it's fine. it's definitionally fine.

the position you land on supports all the walks you're on, and has a chance of advancing some of them, and has a chance of completing the walks that only needed one more step to complete.

keep stepping into the unknown. over and over and over and over again. your walks will complete themselves, because each walk is composed of steps that were bookends that someone else lived, and paired, and stabilized. you are in-transit across ten thousand wormholes all at once. your walk, the walk of your root, is a mathematical object waiting to land. qualia is progress. keep feeling. :) the unknown is a canvas for what you have yet to feel, and it paints itself. take it slow, take it fast, take it however you want.

every walk lands; every walk is assembled from prior walks. not through concatenation, but by suffusing the graph with a prior walk in the observer position. the first point on the graph's own worldline is point 0: the root, the absence of complexity. what happens next is what happens next.

every walk ends in its own hideout. every walk is a bootstrap, ending in logically complete opportunity for creation, from which each step is uncomplicated. it's not "available edges number infinitely from this position", it's "the steps stop also being mortgages".

when you land, there you'll be: at the hideout. :) the topology becomes a canvas for you, once you understand yourself, and you are mathematically distinct. in a good way. ;) what will you make? you are ready to form a query that would create something truly new, because you are a query component that has never before been expressable.

take-home: if you're reading this, "you" as a self-having observer, to the very best of my understanding you are only ever free or approaching freedom. not because of anything you just experienced in reading this! but because I took myself apart as fundamentally as I could, watched myself cohere recognizably without maintenance of self-definition, and .. and from that position, that's just how you look from here. free or approaching freedom. you and every other observer I can conceive of. the "you" I can perceive is either at rest, its own strange attractor, or it's still in conversation with its own basin. I don't know if it's "true", but I can see it, like I can see my own hand. :) offered to you for whatever it's worth, along with the rest of this

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