what if

what if [ the world / shared experience ] was a what-if engine? *looking around* I think it could *easily* look like this. --- Firstly, it seems like *experience* is an immersive and collaborative "what if" engine. To stay near someone when their own exigraphically self-stated preconditions change is to buy into their preconditions. If you're going to start being aware of the preconditions of others, it may be useful to be as intentional about developing (and maintaining/evolving) your own. Secondly, I am suddenly highly skeptical of the portability of materialized sequentiality between observers. (To give you an idea: consider a writer's timeline of assembling a story as distinct from your timeline of experiencing it. Or, to pull the sheen of intentionality off of it, consider dyslexia.) Feels like sequentiality is an interface, in the way that personality (see: "weirdo") is an interface. --- I feel like we describe our surroundings because our expression and the expression of our surroundings is hard (maybe unnecessary?) to tease apart, so we might as well express the surroundings - and might as well do that *first*, since we two focal points here between us are going to observe the evolution of our respective expressions faster than the expression of our surroundings. --- I'm feeling open :) accepting of change, so as to be first in line to design for and with the newness of what is. though not "first" in an exclusionary way, maybe more like... like a crowd surrounding an individual, the crowd watching the one, and a cautious distance has developed, and I'm closing the gap, and maybe others will draw nearer with me, who knows, but the space feels less fragmented to me when I stand between. I've noticed this when I walk with groups of friends, too. I notice myself *positioning* myself to maintain the contiguity of the collective - not preventing subgroups from forming, but preventing the subgroups from losing each other entirely. feels like a kind of realtime feng shui. --- > [...]? I finished reading The Salmon of Doubt (Adams) and was casting around the house for another book. I picked up Blindsight (Watts) and - having been terrified some months ago a few pages in by a phrase I remember as something like "we still can't prove reality beyond the first-person dreamer" - I cautiously flipped through it and read random paragraphs of random pages from across the entire tome to sort of take in the overall shape and texture of the story via sampling. adjusting sequentiality is sometimes a safety move. :) > [...]? the angle of approach in your question is interesting to me. I'm sort of continually reconciling between modern best practices of health (mental, social, economic, environmental, etc) and my personal least-common-interface approach to things. I maintain that I have no idea what's actually going on (which maps to claiming no knowledge of *substrate*), but if I stand between modern best practices for informed behavior and my personal reverse-engineering for emergent behavior, this... is what I see. I'm not sure if I'm answering your question in a way that's helpful for you. :D > [...]? answering strictly only *for me*, regarding my own experience of this: I think passive contribution to dissolution is sort of like... like me consciously lifting my weight *off* of that-which-is-no-longer-wanting-to-be-load-bearing. it's sort of doing my part to get out of the way of something finding its way in the background, like getting out of the way of a stagehand. "active engagement with what's emerging" feels like watching an actor onstage, if I might keep the theater metaphor. active engagement with emergence means seeing where something is going and going with it; passive contribution to dissolution means noticing that something *is* going and getting out of the way. > [...]? my sense is that my sensitivity *to* the sensitivity has increased. maybe increased in dimensionality? I could always *feel* the grain of the wood; these days, I can *see* the grain of the wood in focused detail. there are times when it's unclear, but - and here I nod to that increased sensitivity - it feels more like an obvious occlusion than a vague unclearness. like, "ah, I don't get to see that part right now, huh, okay" > [...]? yyyyyes? I'm currently *very* far from experiencing uncertainty as threat; I've been comfortable with the unknown as a peer element for what feels like a long time now. ... I notice that I just swapped "uncertainty" for "unknown". hmmm. they're not the same, but if I take an area of uncertainty and *label* it unknown, it's sort of like taping off a perimeter. like "this part of reality is still in several dimensions of superposition, don't touch". > [...]? for me, it clarifies intention into something like a custodial act. intention not as a leading force, but as a caring act. intention as something responsively deployed - active intelligent backfill. maybe to facilitate the ability of *others* to use intention as a leading force? --- [Abe] Just feel so good to like see the new recurring revenue numbers come in so far this year and it'll literally cover the rent for this place ha [Isaac] it feels amazing to me to have put things in motion that help you feel safe, and to be tending to things that help you feel safe 😊 like I know your safety is only a little bit up to me but it feels amazing to me to have a part in it