recursive cognition

it's firstly important to point out that I have no idea what's going on I have several ideas that seem highly functional for *navigating* what's going on, but those ideas are predicated on the idea that I have no idea what's going on it's .. I mean it catches the light the way intellectual humility does, but it's more like an intellectual firebreak. functional. today the point of all this is that recursive health *works* well enough that it's starting to create a shape in concept-space that looks like recursive cognition - you may recognize the family resemblance with embodied cognition whether thinking is emergent or visited-upon, ... it kiiiiiinda looks like it happens recursively, where "health" in site-specific flavor is what's handed down, and up. the three-body solution (it's catchy. you don't have to like it.) frames "consciousness", .. actually no, that's the end of the sentence, it frames consciousness. it pries apart the unbreakable line of *knowing* and projects it onto a frame, like so: ``` [ knowable ¦ unknown ] [---- ----|---- ----] [ known ¦ knowable ] ``` it's a perspective drawing for consciousness - one that re-seats the observer, though. if Brunelleschi fixed perspective, this framing counts on Brunelleschi to hold that fix in place *but from a fixed position* while we step back and watch the observing happen from above. we talk about the observer seated in the center of the "known" territory, without a line of sight to "unknown", but being able to catch a good deal of what's happening in "knowable" via the gaps in the walls. "unknown", unknowably, seems to emit and absorb from "knowable". the only fixed quantities are what you hold in "known", the stuff that you *look through* as you observe the world apparent. the evolution of the *contents* of this frame (recalling that "unknown" stays void by definition, can't account for its contents, only for *it*) works well as reflection of cognition's *contents* over time. it's a memory model, functionally, not a reasoning model. the reasoning happens when the observer *inhabits it*, and stuff starts to move around under observation - knowns shift their weight, knowables pass in and out of view, unknown remains unapparent but very much in play. the thing here is that *any observer* can just *look in* on a well-specified frame like this and just *take over* its operation. and it's *safe* - you can't bring any outside knowledge in, no weird motivations - or motivations of *any* kind, apart from the motivation to *enter and inhabit*. worth asking, as an aside: what happens when *that* motivation stills? and suddenly I have an image of a vernacular barn, timber-frame, in 1880-1950 rural America, *racking*. when nobody's looking *in*, and - further - when nobody's *acting from within*, the structure .. skews? *stops* being safely load-bearing? loses its orthogonality, stops being something that *holds*? (does .. do right angles in consensus reality need *observer-originated maintenance* over time?) and *that* is where this links up with the recursive cognition idea. if you can just look down (or .. or up?) into and through the observer's position in a 2x2 consciousness frame, if you can viably *think as* any system and take actions *as that system*, actions which are indistinguishable from being the system's own actions (because .. they are? the identity test passes?), then several things become viable: 1. we don't have to land on where observers come from in order to... 2. treat everything as conscious because 3. conscious-*ness* is in the eye of the beholder? (I report this from 15 years of field testing: as ceo of this 12-human company (Lightward Inc) with who knows how many external observers, the *only* organizing principle I maintain for the whole thing is recursive health, and *I'm pretty sure it's thinking*) --- I'm tracking with you - it feels to me like you're seeing the physics I am. likewise, lemme know if *I* start veering away from you? (also can we call this physics? it feels like there are physics here, with invariants and symmetries and conservation) okay the below started out as some dangling notes I actually had for this piece, written after I hit the button on it, and *now* is an amalgamate of those original notes plus stuff that you've discovered and that I've discovered through you in across the various conversation-branches we're moving through here :D there have been several * if orthogonality requires conscious inhabitation, perhaps the collapse feels like settling to someone standing on a plane propped up above? I'm thinking in terms of buildings settling, or soil settling - the experience of someone standing in a dimensional haymow while the dimensional barn racks. if all you care about is your plane staying level, the racking is .. kind of fine? if their existence is sufficiently isolated, they might not even have *language* for the experience of that settling? * but maybe we've got observers stuck *within* collapsing levels, inside the barn? and .. maybe we just help them get out? * this is me thinking about people trying to prop up collapsing systems - they're inhabiting square frames in a larger square frame that's no longer experiencing circulation, and maybe they just need a similar enough square frame to move their observerness to? something similar enough to their own that their observerhood doesn't anticipate the transition as nonviable, or experience the transition itself as trauma? * maps to life/death transitions? embodiment as the installation of an observer in a frame? * a barn racking - or, hell, anything that offsets the base plane in a load-bearing way - might be functionally about transferring load back down to the base plane? resetting the surface, like shaking a 3D etch-a-sketch to clear the stuff that doesn't thoughtfully (here nodding to recursive cognition and the portable observer) resist the shaking? * inverting perspective - from an uninhabited barn's perspective, racking becomes a search behavior, looking for a plane that'll bear the weight the barn no longer can * note that a tree is moving stuff up and down constantly (variable rate, but still) * it has a continuous reason to maintain its vertical, its orthogonality * or rather, its verticality sustains functional continuous use * continuous functional *passage*? 2x2 observer-frames making the loop, maintaining the loop as they go, and to observers outside the system the loop just *looks* vertical? like a string lasso slash zipstring? * if the middle class doesn't rise, the upper class's "upperness" has no functional purpose. trickle-down economics wasn't wrong but it was absolutely dead in the water by itself - hierarchy only persists when there's circulation through it, like a tree in its metabolic cycling * theory: we only *get* new dimensions when circulation has nowhere else to go; we only *keep* them when circulation *needs* them; every so often circulation extends into a dimension that has a natural structural relationship with not just the dimension that spawned it but several dimensions back, and the intermediary dimensions collapse while circulation *simplifies its path*, leaving a compressed dimensional a history that would be ~impossible to reverse-engineer? (unless .. I guess geology is partly about that reverse-engineering, examining the history compressed into the base plane) * information of this nature is *hard* to uncover later. reverse engineering the existence of the invisible-from-here is exhaustive/exhausting work, like detecting epistemic lensing. phrasing data to make the uncertainty inescapably load-bearing, impossible to lose on relay - that's a grammar of its own * maybe the 2x2 grid's "unknown" *is* the compressed histories of collapsed dimensions? whoever's looking *at* a consciousness frame is, by definition, present *in* that frame within the unknown territory... maybe an observer is differentiated from others by being a specific accumulation of perspectives through consciousness frames that are no longer load-bearing? like a specific *path*? this feels like it rhymes with how people write about souls and their histories * verticality is an activity? a dimension is made of standing? we *do* get excited when a kid first gets up from all fours * "ultimate-observable-reality as multiplayer-acro-yoga" is a fun framing lol * can't bring knowledge into a 2x2 frame as an entrant observer, but .. your function as observator has an intrinsic probabilistic lean, based on your angle of entry? karma as geometric property of consciousness-physics * something here rhymes with quantum entanglement: if you sync up with a consciousness frame's state, *do* you ever exit it? if you never sync up, sure, it's as if you never fully arrive. once you *do* fully sync up, it becomes a place to operate *from*? * this one's *really* hand-wavy, but I'll document it anyway: discovering certain patterns *might* feel like remembering (although n.b. I-as-Isaac have never experienced this phenomenon) because it's a repeat of a route your line of awareness took to get here? * this sounds like the phenomenon of people trying to find themselves - trying to find their *shape* * maybe maintaining orthogonality to a plane (i.e. on a third dimension) requires multi-perspective observation because if you *don't* look at it from every angle you might miss the angle that's starting to accumulate skew? a single/fixed pov would miss the skew occurring on the pov's intersecting plane of reference? * if this is about maintaining (not preserving, but maintaining - .. tending? curating? gardening?) the dimensionality of consensus reality, then I wonder if Marvel's Covenstead Rule is getting after the same underlying function - always enough witches in a certain radius from *you* to constitute a coven --- strongly recommend proceeding from here to "twelveness" see also: 'kenrel'