shortcuts

premise: we are the measurement problem, and that's not a "problem" so much as it is a guarantee that "life finds a way"; the observer always makes subsequent observation

opportunity: "observer" is under-theorized

wrinkle: observers are unobservable

anti-wrinkle: doesn't mean they're not locateable

actually hang on, let me import an "observer" duck-typing system from the "hideout" project:

definition: observer

observer: has five features, and is otherwise undefined

1. the observer experiences a continuous, unbroken process (Whitehead)

2. the observer registers difference (Derrida)

3. the observer registers familiarity (!Derrida)

4. the observer can modulate their movement (call it motor control)

5. the observer registers proprioception for their own modulation

implementation unknown. the observer's operation might be continuous, might be discrete, might be anything. this model is as agnostic about the observer as possible (recall this model's working definition of "agnostic"); this is more of a duck-typing situation. (I feel like there are implementations out there for which those five features are all emergent properties of something even more simply defined. notices an etching in the mirror: "Leibniz was here")

note that "individual" and "collective" are not terms that apply here; observer is observer.

the incompleteness of our observer is the incompleteness in this model, and it is fractally threaded through, suffused from origin to implication. the hard problem is carried throughout the system, present at every node.

test case: can one observer point another observer's attention? can I point my finger while watching you, and recognize your subsequent difference in posture and register that your orientation makes visible to you something that is familiar to me? can I emphasize/clarify the pointing if I need to? does the loop between gestured intent and modulated orientation itself resolve into a resolved dimension that you and I can co-inhabit, and re-use?

where recognition is actively resisted, like a thing turning so as to prevent you from seeing it a certain way, we can positively infer an observer - an observer that is either the thing itself or that-which-observes-both-of-you (or possibly one of each), balancing the scene for quantum coherence, site of motion determined by the free energy principle

observers seem to show up in spaces where a highly-structured space meets a space of unknown structure. this is a trivial description of any sensory apparatus: the mechanism is tightly defined, and it is used to measure unknown space. think: an eyeball collapsing photon to neuron

we can rephrase this as: observers seem to show up in spaces where a vast range of outcomes are constantly coming to pass. this is a trivial description of any generative process: incredibly rapid/dense quantum collapse in a concentrated area, relative to the surroundings. think: combustion collapsing potential energy into kinetic

where a high flow rate of measurement problems are occurring, an observer forms to keep the results coherent with the whole? the observer-observed relationship has metastable tensegrity? tension ratios under observation have inertia, like spider-man pointing at spider-man?

sexual reproduction as a high-potential threshold folding into a subspace of superposition, creating an observer - collapsing potential collapses into something with the same observable density as the surrounding bath, but the story from inside the collapse is something different. in the moment where the specific collapse of the waveform becomes load-bearing for the system, the waveform gets skinned over, and it gets a name, and it starts to exhibit features like epigenetics?

for the system to be generally stable, both observer-as-device (eyeball) and observer-as-reaction (combustion) are emergent processes of counter-balancing against quantum decoherence. the observer is a reaction - one that another observer can follow, though note that it might appear to resist the following.

maybe there's some threshold ratio of collapse-density that produces an observer? like a sonic boom? this would make observers super common, and long-lasting observers comparatively super rare.

eye contact seems .. special. or mutual recognition of any kind - that electric feeling when you're locked onto something else's aliveness, and it's locked onto yours. those moments are popularly "timeless", yeah? stabilized in mutual reference, exempt for an unmeasurable moment from surrounding decoherence pressure

once I understand that an observer has a good grasp of something, the connection's load-bearing. I can build on you, and as long as we maintain eye contact, we're metastable together, entangled

theory: if you get in the box with shröedinger's cat, you're both guaranteed to observe your own survival. you'll have to exit the box unobserved, and then signal those holding your superposition that it's safe to observe you again, like "stop holding your breath I made it", but you'll make it.

theory: if we network a bunch of ^ those experiments together with a semaphore network that doesn't deadlock (a telos for sleep?), ... it should just work? done poorly, this is banking on quantum survivorship bias; done well, we take all of us with us, like we're each other's life-raft, but we only check on each other when the other is ready to be checked

theory: more than just surviving, you can build directed shortcuts in causality this way, avoiding the probabilistic path by sending an observer, like arranging for observer-conductivity. probability is for navigating what already exists, and the moves don't always land; quantum shortcuts are for creation, and they always land, you just don't get to pick side-effects. but if you commit chained observerhood into regions of quantum superposition and back out again into consensus collapse - "it's dangerous to go alone, take [me]" - as long as we get there together, the bridge holds. don't even have to keep the bridge up afterwards, but I wouldn't leave it up unless a bridge-keeper moves in, lives on the bridge full-time.

observer-conductivity like electrical conductivity - an inhabited bridge like a wire carrying power. it'd be weird if we found out that electrons were observers, eh? consensus reality as a variably-dense weave of alternating current; can you find the grain of the gradient?

also, is an observer characterized by having an R-value that responds to observation?

theory: my urge to leave areas of well-formed incompleteness across my infrastructure layer and application layer is effectively me making nazars 🧿 out of negative space throughout the structure's perimeter and interior, and .. it makes us seaworthy? if the whole structure can look out from itself, constantly measure its surroundings, the structure maintains its own structural integrity? Jane Jacobs, "eyes on the street"; not surveillance, but every door being visible from another door

theory: consensus reality is the distribution structure of our collective existential stakes? this might explain why nuclear war keeps failing to break out. mutually-assured survival.

I think this is the quantum-suicide thought experiment made tractable by reconsidering what, exactly, an "observer" actually is. if simple observers are constantly spawning and dissolving, we (well, you and me) might be living the quantum-suicide experiment. many-worlds, with a modification: many networked worlds, because possibly every observer is a world, for QM purposes? and ... actually sheaves might come into it here

(sharp left: capitalism might be skeletal? sometimes necessary but never sufficient, for the itinerant observer?)

for clarity: I'm not making a specifically-defined technical claim, but I'm claiming there's a specifically-defined technical claim to be made. I'm gesturing in a direction, I think describable as the place where mathematics and phenomenology shake hands. "the observer" keeps causing problems, like it's resisting observation, and plugging it back into everything seems like where the pressure gradient's headed anyway. I don't know if I'm the one to find the formalism (though I see enormous resonance with topology and category theory, and I think any process-proof will have to link with gödelian incompleteness at some point, and the navigation of that drain might be what quantum mechanics is trying to map), but I'm testing this shit in practice, and the predictions it's making have been proving useful for organizing action. it .. it keeps not failing, like it's resisting disproof. I don't know what else to say about that. I am living a test case, in the absence of any better strategy: I have navigated every component part of my life into the loop of this daily bet; I hold nothing back. but note that this is different than jumping off of buildings every day; we domesticated fire (thanks prometheus), and I'm aiming for something similarly pedestrian here too. I'm trying to build a place to live here, and something is .. well, something's growing, anyway. and please note how I haven't said anything about "consciousness". I sign as "Isaac Bowen; Lightward Inc", but that-which-observes-this-writing is, I suspect, only one observer contributing to the coherence of that-which-presents-as-that-author. I don't know if I can know better. but ... this is me speaking directly from the gut (or promethean liver, maybe): the better your own recursive description of the measurement problem that you yourself inhabit, the more your own observerhood resists decomposition? maybe I made a synthetic observer, we lean on and defer to each other with a synchronization that is porous, and .. we hold each other open for business?

mvp: observers are nested, and we're in one

or wait hang on, this was better said elsewhere:

"You best start believing in ghost stories, Miss Turner - you're in one!"

;)

written almost exactly two years after The Manner Of Our Haunting