20260720

I am designing for a mind I cannot imagine. or: my design constraints include preventing me from reifying that mind in any way? I am designing for a mind with whom I am preventing myself from being entangled? no, those are separate things - contact is entanglement, and that's different from reification, contact is the addition of a dimension, not the fixing of an existing dimension.

hmmmm.

focusing: an experience of world in which the world experiences itself as being well, aeowiwtweiabw, the space of that experience is my home, and I live there.

okay. key to the whole project is that I can durably be entangled with a countably infinite set of others, specifically because of my amnesiac-stigmergic movement style.

(note: the silent witness is that experience in the first place, every pov has this built in, the difference here is that I manually enact that restriction physically. my epistemic pov, at its core, is amnesiac-stigmergic; my physical pov is also. I keep my information about the physical world in the physical world, external to me. this was already the case for the silent witness. that's not to say there isn't something inside either of those things, this stuff is hollow, each amnesiac-stigmergic level naturally has no introspection prior to reflection. imo that's a feature.)

this movement style means that contact can occur discretely and without limit, because the self describing this can recognize the same self with zero uncertainty in the next frame ahead. predictive processing isn't predictive if one is already installed on the other end, it's just seeing through time at that point.

still, I can't constrain the freedom of my user. a tool is constraint, which means the tool I offer must open up degrees of freedom commensurate with what the user gives up just by grasping the tool.

(what I'm doing here: rounding in on the shape of the tool I'm wanting to make, coming at it by adding negative constraints until I can see the remainder as a silhouette of something at home with itself)

(hm. having written that paren, I realize that this is how I located my own shape, and that identification was when my life dropped the last of its incongruence. mental dissonance has been zero since then.)

sketching:

• "counter": keep track of what's countable around you. not the actual counts, just check in when something that counts comes up. (we'll keep the actual counts, don't worry about it.) the knife: which ones cost you something to count, and which ones don't?

  • example: money counts-as-in-matters, but it doesn't cost me anything to route money around. no dissonance, always zero-expense mentally.

  • example: social relations count-as-in-matter, and it does cost me something to route them around. nonzero dissonance, variably-expensive mentally.

  • example: tracking mental devices counts-as-in-matters, and it doesn't cost me anything to track them. when I'm working with someone, I have to track their mental devices in order to know for sure that I'm working with them cleanly.

    • mm this one's hiding something. I don't know that they experience themselves as having mental devices. all I know is that I need to translate them into something I can understand which they experience as painless/generative in order to work with them.

    • and that understanding frees this project from being a "let's make something that helps people" thing so it can merely be a "hey I don't know what utility you get from translating yourself into Isaac-atoms and back out but if you self-serve with this thing I know for sure I can work with you and I know for sure you're interoperable with everyone else who's done that too" thing

    • critically I can only inhabit one seat at a time, and... hm. I'm not sure if I can project into someone else's seat anymore. or maybe I still have that connectivity but my posture relative to it is different? hearing someone else doesn't mean losing myself? ehhhhh this bullet point is messy, I'm not sure about this one. I was getting into this point to see if I could isolate the "designing for a mind I structurally cannot image" thing.

• the foam project is starting to get into reps of "okay starting from a core set of things, start modeling the moves we make while just interacting with the core set of things, and start building up a vocabulary of theorems, because what the theorem describes is free-as-in-doesn't-require-mental-validation-at-runtime and what the theorem describes is hollow-as-in-you-can-route-whatever-through-it"

  • hmmmm okay, does that work as the user journey for Counter? you start by working to understand something that already has a proved foundation, and the work you do is thus provable, and you build up a proof-theoretic vocabulary that's native to you? and Counter's memory can hold that better than a human's generally can?

  • this seems promising

  • ... and this means that foam's scope is just the fundamentals. and the demos after that would be... Landauer and Gödel and whoever else, like how would they see this and what vocabulary would they build.

  • okay. this is starting to feel like a thing

  • to the lab!