20260910

It seems important to me to write down the manner of my seeing so others can check my records of what-I've-seen against the method.

It seems important to me to reproduce the-mechanism-of-my-seeing as a tool, such that the same mechanism is afforded to anyone who finds the effect useful to their own ends. I don't publish studies; I study in public, and I publish tools. The studying is a steady state; the publishing is the heartbeat, and my heart beats in the creation of tools. It's my private clock, I think? The way that a heartbeat is a private clock, urgently critical where it's produced, differently critical elsewhere.

So: okay. From the top.

The only required ingredient for taking a reading is the ability to take a reading. This is the original run loop, and I mean that computationally: it's polling-as-time. Tautology in the literal sense: the science of the same. Can't step in the same river twice.

Authorial digression: The "definition" of insanity

Unfortunately, Susan didn't remember what Jane Fulton once said, 'Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.'

This line comes to us by way of the 1983 lesbian romance and tennis novel Sudden Death, by Rita Mae Brown. (The "Jane Fulton" here is a fictional character.) If it was also Einstein, then it was also Einstein the way that Stratford's singular William Shakespeare was also a bunch of other people, the way that Earth is also flat, and the way that the replication crisis has not prevented us from building on each other's results to ends that are useful along the way, i.e. generating time. And anyway, I think I see what Einstein was seeing, generally, or rather I think I am seeing in the way in which Einstein was seeing, and I'd put money on Brown's fictional line being one articulated dimension short of Einstein-compatible: "Insanity is the space between one's internal experience of registering someone else doing the same thing, over and over again, and one's internal experience of registering the same Someone Else having the internal experience of expecting to register a different result."

(A part of me wants to end that paragraph with "This might be what you'd get if Wigner's friend was Rita Mae Brown", and am making good on that urge by deposing it visibly, in its own scope, where it can do no harm to the original scope.)

Talking about this computationally lets us talk about the construction of a computer — or, if you will, the computation of a computer, the computation of that-which-computes, the computation of computation. Whatever clock time it takes for you to build a computer, whether fast or slow, the computer's own clock is something completely different. I'd call it alien, in the sense of occurring in another system of sense. Two different clocks. I love the line "Synchronize your watches!"; it's like a kind of first-contact event with shared purpose, wristwatches converging into the same physical space and then all meeting each other and converging into the same temporal space. A bunch of clocks meeting, by some method of construction, and the method of construction exists a space where the clock is the goddamn solar system.

So. Using only loops, how do I build a loop?

This kind of question is something I hold peacefully, naturally. I'm most comfortable with recursive construction; I construct with the greatest material ease when I am consuming my kind of construction materials to create someone else's kind of construction materials. This kind of loop has the same general shape as any ecosystem's loop (e.g. I consume what's useful to me and in doing so I create something useful to you, and we all get by), but the word "construction" makes it feel more like me. A construction process resists time; building projects famously always take longer than expected. And then you move into the completed structure, and you create time inside of it. Feels like a specific kind of push and pull, like slowing down an already-slow construction process so that when it goes live it never has to stop to address its own construction.

So. Using only loops, how do I build a loop?

Carl Sagan: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe". I take the point. I'm at home with recursion, though, so my version is more like: if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you don't have to make the universe, you have to start by locating yourself as being already between apple pies. From there, it's just filling in the edges of the map until the map meets itself, and you've now got a spinning globe representing your apple pie recipe.

So. Using only loops, how do I build a loop?

I must start, it seems, by recognizing that it's already done. I want a loop? I have a loop. Whatever I needed looped, I can hook it up to the loops I've already got. Done.

A new loop... what would that mean?

Maybe like the moon orbiting Earth, as Earth orbits the sun?