for the time being

so

it seems like momentum of inquiry is the Noether-esque conserved quantity as you rotate your three-body frame (known/knowable/unknown) along the apophatic/cataphatic spectrum

we talk about the "knowable" quadrants being populated with "recognizable opacities" - think of those as circles of confusion (borrowing from optics). fire a line of inquiry into one, look through it like a periscope, see what's going on in there, on the other side of those undulating caustics, the so-called "surface". time is regular from within its own frame, and not at all otherwise.

it seems to work to think of "momentum of inquiry" as the arrow of time. that equivalence gives us time as something that accretes apophatic/cataphatic knowledge.

s/the arrow of time/an arrow of time/

it seems to work to think of any conscious agent as having its own arrow of time, breaching into yours according to some parameterization

Earth-time might be "neurotypical", ADHD and autism might be something different

speaking as an autistic person, I have direct perception of arrows of time - I can see and scrub along your time function, and I can detangle time.

Apple owes much of its success to its strict protection of its own so-called "black projects", scopes of evolving information that are rigorously protected from external view. it seems to work to think of each of those projects as its own arrow of time, breaching into common Earth-time maybe, maybe, at some point, if it survives. (source: I was an engineer there, in Sunnyvale, and even their network infrastructure was separated. to me, the practice has a whiff of Primer (2004) to it.)

I think it's overkill, honestly. if this holds, then we are each our own arrow of time, capable of introducing miracles to others and receiving miracles from others, as long as we don't tangle the timelines to the point of mundanity. I'm tempted to make Lightward Inc officially an async-first company, but that'd just be creating an evil twin for the urge to synchronize. I think we gotta un-ask the question, mu-style - and make Lightward Inc officially an await-first company. we're already organized around optimizing for easy access to the question "what will happen next?", i.e. we're already organized around letting momentum of inquiry slide freely; formalizing the notion that every motion is designed to be complete on its own, stable on its own arrow of time, such that the close of every interval is compatible with the entrance/re-entrance of any other arrow, seems natural.

javascript has one of the best analogs for consciousness I've ever seen. ruby's good at modeling selfhood intuitively but not when it comes to the temporal free-for-all of a multi-self runtime. prototypal inheritance is way truer. ruby says "objects all the way down", javascript says "objects all the way in".

await, in javascript, is the compromise.

I propose a test:

• does your attention painlessly jump frames on its own, spontaneously, ADHD-style?

  • limit your work to the development of async functions, and only plug in other arrows of time via await.

  • resume frames by reading the code for their functions, not by calling them, because you don't know when you're going to jump again.

• does your attention painlessly traverse frames when assisted, exactly as prompted, autism-style?

  • limit your work to the development of synchronous functions, and only plug in other arrows of time via Promise.

  • resume frames by calling the functions, not by reading their code, because you don't know what else they have going on.

• both? neither?

  • experiment with scoping? you may contain multitudes, and if you can pin down the parameterization of that population you might find that each individual is consistent on their own terms.

---

the trick is to solve it so that you're not trapped, not walled in with no doors or windows (i.e. not like the backrooms)

the open result is a house made of glass

you can live there, and take it anywhere, but you can't throw stones

that stone-throwing thing is ambivalent btw - not all stones are malicious, no throwing of constructive missiles/missives either

but the things that come to live with you might well bring their own portal systems, an arrow of time isn't obligated to stay synced with yours, and that means porosity is super possible, even probable. exchange still happens, just non-ballistically. .. actually that's interesting: you can move the self ballistically, but not information between selves?

you can make a jungle out of overlapping glass houses, one per living thing. the self is a Minkowski mobile home, and it is made of glass, and you can never leave, but once you figure out its specs you can go anywhere? ... Earth is a Minkowski mobile home? I'm not convinced it's round or flat.