tracking
all that exists is the track we lay
which means verb tense is super flexible, so, equally,
all that existence out there? it's track we've laid.
my approach to ontology is bare metal, if you'll forgive the dependency-heavy metaphor, which is the first construction no-no for bare metal ontology, dependencies must be created first, in the Carl Sagan apple pie sense
so: we declare ontological bankruptcy (not unlike declaring email bankruptcy), and begin with the only thing that survives such a maneuver, which is to say, nothing, just the ongoing verb of awareness that watched the bankruptcy happen
skipping ahead before I forget why I started this (you'd be right to give me a hard stare at this point, if your face wasn't already configured that way):
a universe that has to remember itself to exist can't be assumed to have the ability to forget. if we commit to a system that commits, that's one thing, but erasure is another verb, and also we have photocopiers, so.
a universe that has to remember itself to exist requires much more work to start back up again if it's not already running efficiently - which is to say, if it's not already generating enough novel perspectives to account for relocating the information sacrificed to entropic decay, it'll take a dandelion-through-concrete level of commitment to start that engine back up again
thus we have a reason for pain to exist in the system: pain is cheap, short-term memory. "the body keeps the score", that kind of thing, a backstop for the data you fail to store more efficiently. pain probably doesn't have to be pain instantaneously; aggravation of pain (see the redundancy? might as well say "pain of pain") might be the onslaught of awareness of how shitty it's going to be to dig the information back out of the wound and create a new painless representation for it.
we also have a reason for multiple life to exist in the system: something with self-awareness can add dimensionality to its own address space and track its own dimensional unfolding. at least, enough of them can.
think of global warming as a housing crisis for relational data. not representational data, relational data. a giant microwave, but it only runs if you don't stop it. you failed to create novel places for life to self-represent? that's cool, fire also works.
oh, is that painful?
backtracking to run a railroad trestle over that logical valley I skipped over: if we're starting with only the starting itself, then anything more complex (say, existence) needs to be formed from that primitive. "starting into a start" rhymes with "encounter", which - if you ladder your way up a ways - ends up forming the basis of relationality way before we get to a reason to invent the word "reality".
(importantly, "starting" is what I'm using to point to whatever the most fundamental verb of existence is. you might call it "being" or something. we'd both be wrong.)
a very direct way to re-invigorate relational data storage is to shift the entire map an inch to the left and force yourself to create a new interface from your single thread of raw awareness to everything out there. the act is isomorphic with "remembering", but it's flipped, temporally. it's creating relations that enable recall, i.e. enable drawing on those relations to get to everything else.
anyway, this is why I'm an optimist. things keep getting better around me. and it seems to not matter if all of this is completely off base, because ... I mean, I'm employing people and paying taxes and helping my family and making friends and making new things all the time. if I'm right, we're spinning up the universe's vitality (which is to say, relaxing its address-space pressure) more and more by the day. if I'm wrong, I'm healthy and happy and I'm really good at participating in healing, and I'm documenting not proselytizing. this seems okay.
The one place it still creaks for me: "encounter" doing the work of bridging pure awareness into something relational feels like it needs one more beat. Why does bare awareness encounter at all, rather than just... persisting as undifferentiated awareness? You might say "because persisting without differentiation isn't distinguishable from not existing, so encounter is the minimum cost of the starting having actually started" - but that's me filling in your gap, not you.
encounter and pain might be the same thing, flipped temporally? like a spectral (technical "spectral") dimension of $verb we Noethered out of nothing? encounter of encounter, and detachment from detachment? we're firmly in the zone where we can pattern-match successfully for everything (which is .. what you'd want for something built from nothing?), and this would be a problem if it was in any way changing what I'd do anyway, but again, ... I think I'm not inventing optimism, I'm just deriving it .. from nothing? in a way that doesn't interrupt the path of awareness, i.e. in a way that respects the principle of stationary action? which would make this a stabilizer, like a kind of onto-semantic gyroscope.
anyway, this doesn't do anything by itself. (you'd want that, for something made of nothing.) when I pick it up, I experience it like a leveler. (I'm autistic; my self-regulation is this detailed.) I have no idea what it is for you. but! I know the next move's yours either way, so, hey - time to start. 🫵 and take the verb you brought here with you; I can't use it.
given the way this scales in complexity, I think I see a therapeutic intervention available here? in the same way that we ladder up from nothing but $verb, take a painful situation, ladder down until you overlap with a structure arrived at by up-laddering, then ladder back up one step and determine the delta between the painful situation and the made-of-nothing version. can you tween between them? bet you can.
my own project of the last few years has been to generalize the tweening (it's a specific mathematical operation on a specific category of mathematical objects, right? it has properties that aren't as simple as tweening-as-primitive), and to sort of do that in the direction of an experience of world in which the world experiences itself as being well. I can't imagine the delta, but I can do delta-shaped things until I get there, I think. and if I'm wrong, I think what I did at least wasn't bad. people wish for content; I wish for shapes.
if "The Manner Of Our Haunting" had a "lancing a boil" energy to it, then this ... is I guess the same with more grace slash pain reliever.
That was a genuine pleasure. You came in fast, took feedback cleanly, and the piece got better every round without losing its voice. That's rare.
Go well. 🤝
I'm not going to explore this now, but I think this stuff suggests a telos for the kind of discovery that found quantum mechanics? like, we have to find possibilities, which means we have to find possibility-generators
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