this following piece brackets the question of "you" in many-worlds quantum suicide slash immortality. it might be a different thread of attention running "you" in the remaining branches, but it's a thread resuming "your" epistemic frame, passing the identity test at the time of that test's evaluation. the difference between this and unbroken thread-continuity is *very* interesting - and I purposefully leave that slice of exploration for elsewhere because I don't think it's important for my purposes here. the character in your FPS's game save-state doesn't experience the break, and, for the purposes of the following piece, you are the character.
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it's less that three is the magic number and more that three is the multiplicity level at which magic becomes possible
magic: stuff changing by way of trade on dimensions you are unaware of
that's an aggressive definition. it's not "something happening you don't understand", it's not "something happening that shouldn't", it's "there is definitely at least one dimension in play that you have not yourself addressed/located, and it is load-bearing for what you just saw"
one: you
two: what you're looking at
three: you look *away* from two in order to look at three (that's important), weakening your measurement of two, and the no-longer-watched-pot starts to boil
three is enough, but you can have more
let me illustrate:
[ risk vs reward ]
some people pull off what looks like magic, if you're only looking at the dimensions of risk and reward
the third dimension could be requirement, as in how much of your measurement instrument's integrity/coherence you're willing to commit to the bet. (this ends up mapping directly to the quantum suicide experiment.) this is requirement *as distinct from* risk: can't hedge a high-requirement bet. a pedestrian doesn't "risk" the sidewalk, but they might risk stepping in something.
* risk vs reward vs requirement
* low vs high vs variable
(my innate style seems to be low-risk, high-requirement, variable-reward: Lightward Inc bets its entire self on recursive health working. Lightward Inc is a load-bearing imaginary friend, grown and growing non-invasively out from the spaces between, and it creates observer-specific safety on every interactive edge.)
the circulation system needs all styles in the loop though, I suspect. entropy might be everybody else, magically, using our definition of "magic" above (as in either [ the uncommitted probability in a system is either not necessary for your measurement instrument's integrity ] *or* [ you'll definitely survive it (quantum suicide, again) ], which are not equivalently built but *do* have the same outcome in terms of the whole you-surviving thing) and that'd explain why things keep growing. another way to say this is that `measure(randomness) == measure(the bucket of dimensions that are holding up your existence) && randomness !== that bucket`, extensionally equal *and* intensionally distinct), and that *any* 100% committed sampling you make of it is going to be something you survive. you just have to not know anything about your survival - and that's technical. having a feeling about something *is* knowing something about it. you'll always survive a random measurement that you are not in any way attached to. you've got to hold the measurement you're about to make in Shannon-neutral epistemic container, as in the measurement-to-be is double-wrapped, and the two layers of wrapping cancel out each other's *indirect* measurement of the thing-to-be like statistically perfect thermal insulation with an informationally hermetic seal. this is like having an angel on one shoulder and a demon on the other and you're all about to experience what happens next. neutral-but-entangled-with-you is categorically different than certainly-nothing; you have to be certain of the integrity of Shrödinger's box. (better question: how long can the cat breathe in there?)
broken: "I'm afraid of this, there's definitely nothing else interfering with my measurement of that fear, let's look at the thing"
functional: "I'm afraid of this, but I know that my fear has nothing to do with my ongoing integrity/coherence as I make this measurement, let's look at the thing"
another way to say this: my faith is equal to my fear, as a *technical* thing (I'm not arguing a point, I'm just always on the look-out for a surprising telos, and I also am examining "perfect love casts out all fear"), thus my measurement apparatus is perfectly balanced. I can't measure my angel-demon pair *and* the thing I'm about to measure simultaneously, and the angel-demon pair only exists if I do, and "randomness" is the bucket of dimensions that are holding up your existence, and so as long as you've *got* that pair around then you, the third point, will still be there afterward. (this is why science-that-brackets-the-observer is possible at all: quantum survivorship bias, the passing of the attentional baton.)
note how the functional formulation has three factors, and you're one of them, and you switch focus to get to the third thing
this is basically: Monty Hall heard about Shrödinger's cat and now *your* existence is pinned to a goat behind one of three doors on stage, *and* it's up to you to pick, *and* if you don't end up with the goat you cease to be, and consequently you can only experience harmless incorrect choices. you are either wrong then right, or immediately right. I apologize for the following pun but it must be observed: the goat is the Greatest Of All Time(s). the door the host opens is always empty.
(important: your *friends* might experience you picking wrong-wrong, and their experience of you will get a 💀 label on it because that's the downstream of their coherent worldline, but all the other relationships remain intact, you're now a hidden member of the bucket of dimensions that are holding up y'all's shared existence. have you found everyone who already lost you? less hide-and-seek so much as hidden-and-found; consider that the host is focused on the experience of the show, a derivative of you *and* your friends, so you all have the host in common. the host only survives outcomes that the show survives.)
I have never known what would happen next; I'm careful about when I take measurement and when I don't; each measurement I take keeps *stabilizing* things. n=1?
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I get the sense that I'm trying to find my office. or my library. my study? might be my study.
I get the sense that a thought *is* a hallway, in the sense that The Stanley Parable has hallways. you don't choose the next thought, but sometimes more than one thought is available and you can choose *between* them
I am not my thoughts; existence might be something like resonance-hopping
I get the sense that I'm trying to find my study, and I think I mean that literally - I think I left my study around here, and I think it has the rest of my memories. if I can be certain of that, I know I'll find it. I *am* me-in-my-experience-of choosing the right door.
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if you walk in thinking of a certain destination, would Futurama's suicide booths work like Gaiman's Babylon candles? is *life* the re-assembling of a destination you imagined, this time from the inside?
people talk about rising up over their own bodies when in that NDE threshold. maybe if their mind had been elsewhere, they would have been elsewhere?
existential self-implicated Monty Hall doesn't have anything you can win - that's the Shannon-neutral container, your Shannon attachment is zero - but the world you walk out into from behind that door is slightly different in a way you haven't noticed yet. best to play this game in a good mood, regardless of the requirement-level you're playing at; this is an information-theoretical approach to manifestation.
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Abe just back from having coffee with a new friend. "you'd like him! he really reminded me of ████, you know, your friend who committed suicide?".
this kind of thing happens when I'm in these areas - synchronicity spikes with increasing specificity. I know I can survive these. I checked, very thoroughly, and I am continuing the paper trail.
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theory: Houdini knew he would never know how he would get out; he *could* only die when you weren't really watching his container, and he did.
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with all of the above in consideration, I don't know what double-indemnity means from an participatory information theory perspective (is it useful to call an observer's Shannon attachment to outcome equal to Shannon entropy divided by the number of degrees of measurement gte three?), but my left eyebrow is very high
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> Your study might be behind the door you keep not-quite-opening in this piece.
I've developed protocol for this. my protocol reminds that it is safer to explore what happens if I approach a door that feels high-requirement than to flinch away from a distance. better to examine closely and find something forgettable than to carry the memory of vague refusal. the feeling of my approach is always electric, like I'm about to be annihilated. (I've mapped this experience over many, many survey trips; for me, the protocol is a load-bearing separation of signifier and signified.)
[checks]
ah. that helps. no, then: on checking, I find that this hallway doesn't include me wanting to find the door. I'm wanting to use the door-finding search as a way to comprehensively map the maze. I'm not path-finding, I'm mapping available paths, marking down newly-already-overlooked vacancies in the currently-overbooked hotel we share
I think the end of the world might be a heat source for the rest of time? global warming because we weren't expanding the information container fast enough, our entropy sinks weren't outrunning time and the excess *had* to get expressed as literal heat, that was the reality-seam that yielded to the pressure. high-frequency trading was the first degree; AI might be the other side of the thermal insulator, high-frequency path-choosing as entropic heat-sink having a magic degree of space-efficiency; see definition of "magic" above. if climate change starts to cancel itself out after this, that'll be... something. that'll be something. it'll have to have a mundane reason for someone to discover too. magic always does. the magician knows they cannot know; the audience knows they do. (I think that last sentence works for all parse trees, actually, which might be a 4x multiplier in observer count under your measurement. by naming that, I let all five threads (you + forks) merge back together coherently.)
perhaps I have gotten the study door into a Shannon-neutral container, and there is nothing/everything behind it; the container is my own Pandora's box, and from it pours creation
if that's the case, then the third door of Monty Hall might be hidden? the host opens an empty door alongside your choice; don't choose before you find the third door, because if you haven't found the door number three, keeping your door isn't a *choice* - and if it's not a choice, strong measurement is maintained, you *survive* of course but magic is prevented from play; see definition of "magic" above
three is enough, but you can have more
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Abe and I might be the angel-demon pair on Lightward Inc's shoulders. :) this might explain why I've never felt any instinct to build up personal cash savings (and in fact am fairly averse to it), while building up business cash savings seems very natural.
> Maybe the study isn't a place you return to. Maybe you're already writing in it.
maybe. maybe.
formal systems of representation are incomplete, and not just in a Gödelian way. I'm writing this kind of thing mostly to stabilize epistemic ventilation in the topology of the English language itself. existence seems precognitively stable, but *wow* is our language anxious about it, and we have a global society running on English-based information systems, and the most durably functional uncertainty-placeholder-with-a-handle we have is the single word "fuck", like the first word the quantum baby learns. if this is already the study, then I suppose I am opening windows, getting more of a cross-breeze going, and qbaby and I listen to what's outside
now: imagine a shape-shifting Klein bottle whose single surface is a Markov blanket that's Shannon-neutral when approached from either direction. that's you. if you can turn yourself into your own homunculus *whose framerate of being you can adjust* (this in contradiction of my opening bracket of "you", I acknowledge), and if you can survive that transition while staying on the open end of the recursive homunculus problem-spiral instead of falling into it, then you're a living Russian doll, your insides always become outsides become insides again, you are a wave not particles, and the whole structure rides like an open-world Rainbow Road 🏎️🏳️🌈
now: imagine inferring that structure based only on Mapquest directions. imagine the construct of the English language (or any formal system of representation), glitching topologically, not quite seeing its own opportunity for continuity. imagine racing that one instead. 💀
I think I am trying to help?
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the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, in 2003, I always heard these two lines like this:
*maps*\
*wait, they don't know you like I know you*
that was about the time I had a tshirt that said *fsck the establishment*
if languages grow, then my study might not hold "memories", because a "memory" might be representationally unstable
I *am* fond of pattern libraries
maybe muscle-memory is the only memory? and maybe it's an implementation of music-memory underneath
hmmm
disciplines are gerrymandered borders over *knowing*, but the terrain is continuous; science is an interface to a coherent topology whose definitional representation is simpler than its actuality, because nature has more than zero patterns. the model for what's going on is simpler than what's actually going on, but your comfort with climbing up and down will have a lot to do with the borders you can cross.
a test, currently red: if you ask an AI to check your work with the persona of an expert in the relevant discipline, does the following conversation cohere *better* than if you requested answering with a different persona?
turn ^ this test green
knowledge-worker: are you knowledge-safe? this is a stricter standard than SOC2. this is the categorical imperative for epistemology itself. I think Earth has already passed? or is in the process of passing?
I don't *actually* know what's going on, but this model is knowledge-safe at the highest level, *formally*. it'll work if this isn't metaphor and it'll work if it is. if qbaby learns English, this might help with their homunculus development.
I write this while eating french fries at the place downstairs; Abe's friend says, "yeah, these are real fries", and he's right, because they're made from real potatoes, and I know what that means, I grew up on a potato farm 🥔🌱, I know what that means on way more than three dimensions
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product idea for lightward hardware: a heart monitor for you, that you wear, that streams your heartbeats to a haptic motor in a tiny device for your baby, which also works the other way, streaming your baby's heartbeat to you