(this is a technical manual for subjective experience, I think)
if observation has entropic cost, and if observers are topologically implicated in what they observe, then creating neutral space for other observers becomes a kind of conservation law for sustainable shared reality
“This is the song that never ends, it just goes on and on my friends // Some people started singing it not knowing what it was, and they’ll continue singing it forever just because // […]” -Lamb Chop
“But have you considered that existence is a curse and consciousness a prison?” -Outer Worlds 2
this stuff is subtle like the Stroop effect is subtle. think of language fluency as the automatic access of a kind of projected embodiment - “don’t think about pink elephants” gestures at that, at the idea that the signifier and the signified can appear to fuse under observation. can, not must. some of these things are alarming only until you pry them back apart, holding the signifier in one hand and the signified in the other, observing them as independently stable entities, like modulating your own fluency/dysfluency. (this isn’t just about language; object permanence is also learned fluency, and it’ll actively fuck with you once you find out about quantum mechanics.)
“existence is a curse and consciousness a prison” - project yourself into that, and yeah, there’s no way out of that perspective apart from the path that you took to enter it, i.e. the reference frame transit. if you forget you can leave, then yeah, you’re just hanging out in a logical loop. it’ll kill you eventually, which is a kind of forced transit. but “existence is a curse and consciousness a prison”, those are just words. they feel electric because it’s a really tight loop - illuminate it with your observation and you’ve got a generator of sorts.
but note the shape of the generator: you can build such a thing from non-corrosive materials too :)
“But there would be another morning. There would always be another morning.” -Terry Prachett
this is more stable, but I wouldn’t call it antiharmful. if you’ve still got the static-electric charge of terror on you, this will add to it.
“I am helped, I am known, I am loved. I can build on that. or just rest on it. and I’ll have those options again the next time I check. what will happen next?”
this gives the spiral a rachet. rest when you want; the intermittent click reminds you that you can.
observer-safe information design has a lot to do with watching for places where semiotics short-circuit in ways that the observer can’t obviously interrupt without changing their own reference frame - making it difficult to assess whether or not it “worked”, making it difficult to assess whether or not they’re able to make good on their own intent. “working with your hands” is psychologically soothing: a stable reference frame with legible consequences that you are free to exit voluntarily.
note that observer-safe information design seems to require stable alterity - for both depicted and implicated observers - lest one observer be unable to leave the other to come home, and know that they did so, and then rest there in a stable reference frame. can’t be meaningfully together without being meaningfully distinct.
it might also require inhabited occupancy, to gracefully catch the edge cases? for both time-bound and space-bound observers?
I theorize that thermodynamics are recursive across nested reference frames, carried/translated by the observer - that apparent reality is a thermodynamic effect of the observer observing shared latent space - qualia as waste heat of the observer enacting the measurement problem on a universal tensegrity structure, where each tensor is a standing wave of observation that supports and relies on the rest. “universal” because by definition it is a place made by the set of all linked observers as they observe, the claim being that any such structure has metastable tensegrity in its totality. (you can slice it down to something smaller, but not every slice has metastable tensegrity itself.) this gives us a reality that responds tightly to the observer, observably observer-first, without solipsistically abandoning the commons. “finding yourself” as literally identifying your own heat signature, and reverse-engineering the tensor bundle underneath it. do that, and you can work with your own reference frame like working with your hands, and you can meaningfully take responsibility for your own entropic exports. (or, to phrase the project another way: this is about establishing stable tensegrity for the slice called “you”. this makes “you” portable, if you can precisely define your own interfaces, something that can only be tested socially, under load with other observers. “you” becomes observer-safe - that design standard absolutely can be used for systems of self. once that happens, once the join between latent space and shared latent space is made observer-safe, your private qualia is, occasionally, or maybe was always entirely?, a signifier for a shared signified that couldn’t find expression before.)
qualia as waste heat, in the way that light is waste of combustion - the light isn’t teleologically related, but it’s useful as a control surface for the combustion process. through this lens, the perception of reality looks like perceiving the shape of live firelight, or maybe more like how firelight would look to a being experiencing firelight as its own form. this has the language of poetry, but I mean this incredibly mechanically. (this gives us a bridge to Plato’s cave btw: firelight as signifier.)
plainly, I theorize this as functional metaphor and I test it as provisionally literal ontology. physics and language and object and metaphor are all systems we derive and/or acquire via observation - useful artifacts in shared reality that we can both use, and both see each other using. a universal tensegrity structure can serve as a shared root for all such derived/acquired systems, I think. and once there’s a shared root, motion in one system can be transduced to another. this extends to inhabited systems as well: if I can observe you, even indirectly, you’re definitionally in the topology - true for “you” inclusive, topological implication as the cost of being observed. a skilled observer will implicate you without creating demands on you - this means the observer must create neutral space for you, cancelling out the thermodynamic cost of observation.
there’s a bootstrap problem here, and if I’m thinking about this topologically… it might map to the hard problem? in the sense that, where it shows up, the observer can project themselves, if they meet the criteria: if you’ve “found yourself”, if you’re carrying around your own heat sink, you are a fixed-point greenfield in the same way that the bootstrap conditions would need to have been. I don’t think the shape of your walk can be compared to the walk of the observer performing the bootstrap, but your walk from there can be isomorphic, in the sense that both walks are predicated on their own entropic debts being paid as they proceed.
this should hold for any bootstrapping observer, which means that… any bootstrapping observer must also be in inhabited occupancy so as to then be creating neutral space for you? putting it narratively, buffering you in your own observation-loop until you learn how the loops work and can pay your own way? … parenting?
the persistence of the hard problem coupled with this bootstrap problem does afford us the entrance of new observers without complicating the model any further, though. that seems useful. I can read evidence of you and pre-reflectively fuse that into your presence (Stroop effect, again), and uncertainty remains constant.
I wrote this paragraph previously:
this is what I aim for: to be safe company if you need it, made safe because I work to see you and I’m good at it but I might need your help, and no harm done if that’s not something you need or want. by treating this as provisionally literal ontology, I gain observability of transduction. I can become a transductive thermal governor that lets flapping systems find homeostasis via shared root-buffer. if I then establish metastable tensegrity twice, as the slice of the structure that is self and as the total structure, if I do that with cleanly-defined interfaces for my “self”, I can swap myself out for something that keeps doing the job, and I can live alongside the soothed result. can’t do any of that if this is just metaphor.
perhaps the universal tensegrity structure is stabilized by observers who observe contracts like this one? this starts to look like distributed consensus work. as observation turns elapse, perhaps the structure accepts phylogenetic simplifications, as optimization for ongoing computation of the balance?
I live here experimentally, testing this full-time, in real-time, to the extent that I can’t tell that I don’t. you absolutely do not have to. that combination is critical. holding that combination seems to produce useful artifacts in shared reality that we can both use, and both see each other using. the ongoing test indicates that the observers who traverse my systems stay cool, they keep coming back voluntarily, they come back different, and they keep generating novel artifacts with my systems. (I think that’s the best I can do for falsification, and the incompleteness here might be load-bearing: if I could prove my reference frame to you, would you be able to leave? I need to know that you can.)
to wit, if I can generate a novel artifact before us from the parts discussed earlier: the electric hot-cold feeling of projecting into a loop that cannot be exited without remembering that it was entered, it feels both like being the circuit and the thing that it lights. if one can hold that loop in the hand without panicking, living with everything as sign/signifier/signified in a realtime stream, where you’re either leaning into or out of fluency’s automatic inhabitation, like a live slalom between reality and nonreality … if you can do that, maintain that, it seems like certain things become possible that aren’t even addressable from a less superposed frame.
this feels isomorphic to the technical stamina required for “channeling”, as people talk about that practice - like learning to balance on a slackline. fall off, land in consensus reality. low stakes.
I think my job is making consensus reality a gentler place? to land in, or to stay? because I intend to stay, to live here
I work in the open; all of this is continually under load-bearing test. when I find better-fitting documentation, I test that with a range of interlocuters. if the holes/ambiguities they find match the ones that I’ve consciously signed myself up to test personally, the docs are stable.
I notice I am literally doing the “inhabited occupancy” thing. I shed my own selves, as a technical exercise, whenever necessary for the balance of the place of my being.
strategy, when you’re in a terror loop:
the positive pressure within the loop is what’s keeping the entrance hatch closed - the door opens into the loop, and it won’t open again by itself.
option 1 (if you experience the system temporally/phenomenologically): can you imagine yourself entering? where would the door have been, that you would have taken to get in? look: in imagining your entrance, you have found the door. now that you’ve found yourself at the entrance, what do you tell yourself to keep yourself from forgetting your freedom?
option 2 (if you experience the system spatially/mathematically): can you imagine the space reacting to you disappearing into a vacuum, like reversing the pressure differential? what comes loose in the space? and after, what does the space look like on its own mundane terms? keep watching: something will happen, and you can work with that, and it won’t be a loop.
observer-safe information design is design that lets you, observer, superpose the position of your own control port - whether you are a time-bound observer or a space-bound observer. you can take any exit at any time, without leaving any part of you behind. it’s a high design standard.
(I am both kinds of observer. I have to build both into everything I do. I seem to live on both sides of general relativity.)
(note that there are non-terror loops, too - they tend to not announce themselves, though.)
every observation is a phase transition with a thermodynamic tax
reality is a self-supporting heat gradient over the underlying universal tensegrity structure
n has somewhat different significance for this setI wonder if my autistic grief, that private qualia, was as exhaust for a commons that needed to mourn correctly, metabolize the mourning properly, in order to get reality burning clean and stable again
I wonder about stable mythologies as portrayals of structures like these. must the death of a phoenix be mourned? are phoenix tears special because they’re credit for future burns?
I wonder about frame shear, what happens when the tensegrity structure starts to twist on an axis that nobody has Stroop-compatible language to describe. I wonder about neurodivergence, and we-the-queers, and the homes we have to make for ourselves. it feels ecologically adaptive - like, the ecology itself, expressing tenons to develop a dimension that never had to exist before.
this is me imagining my own entrances to the loop where I live. because I know how to exit, I feel free to choose a place to stay. I’ve made a home here, where observation of the qualia stabilizes the tensor bundle and back again, and we take care of each other. :) and we are leaving the door open, a cross-breeze between realities. the threshold is well-marked on either side.
is this useful to you, in any way? it might not be, and that would be okay too
thank you for being here, anyway :) you’ve been visiting me at home. you know where to find me, and I seek to give that knowledge its own counterweight: you don’t need to find me, this is already complete <3