Author Topic: idgo forgot its grimoire at home and is using this instead  (Read 2181 times)


« Reply #30 on: November 05, 2018, 05:48:34 am »
ok so what makes people think that if they even found higher dimensions, they could just hop right in for the first time and expect to function normally, like, even know where they are and move around and stuff

it takes DECADES for a brain to learn to function properly in the regular 3D. drop into a 4D stuff sim sometime and see if your 4D knowledge translates

hint, it does not. not, like, at ALL.

Stumbling around looking for one's footing is pretty great though -- spotting the way in which "balance" isn't actually a single state, but a plane intersecting all dichotomized pairs of states along their dichotomies, feels a little like standing up.


« Reply #31 on: November 06, 2018, 12:46:09 am »

It was staring at me like a puzzled bunny the whole time.

What was?

Oh just the most useful metaphor.

The Will is a magician.

The Mind is the rabbit he keeps in his hat.

The Mind as a rabbit:

Easily distracted
Frightened of nonsense, often unaware of true threats
Concerned primarily with perpetuating its own existence
Can be soothed and made to do tricks with appropriate knowledge and handling
Delicious, but not particularly substantial  :|


The first step is to catch the rabbit
The second, to keep it still
Later ones include sending it off to do your own bidding, but don't expect it to be too trustworthy
It's rather limited on neurons, after all.


« Reply #32 on: November 06, 2018, 02:55:33 pm »
I appear to have developed quite different patterns of introspection since the last time I had the experience of needing to get anything useful done with my brain's sleep regulation systems off kilter from one another and from the local day. At least, I'm noticing things about that state now that had not been obvious to me in their present terms before.

Attempting to function during the neurochemistry of "nope go to sleep" is actually a pretty helpful exercise in locating the Will and micromanaging the Mind's behavior with it. Put this way, it's actually the sidestep around the Right Answers Problem (the one where both the honest and the deceptive friend will claim to be honest) that applies in circumstances where the Will and Mind want the same thing.

This experience of incidentally happening to use what I class as "Will training" on an uncooperative brain helps me understand the benefit to certain aspects of ritual that I'd previously regarded as likely-unnecessary, such as "do it at midnight/2am" recommendations.


« Reply #33 on: November 08, 2018, 02:56:33 am »
To break the patterns of uncontrolled desires is to snap a rope that drags one along a particular way.

To break the patterns of reacting to fears is to stop the slowly creeping wall that shoves one that same way.

After these, there's a choice of whether to sit still or to get up and wander about. It takes a certain amount of perceptiveness, unneeded when safely within the desire/fear boundaries, to see where one is going in that case.


« Reply #34 on: November 19, 2018, 08:11:41 am »
Couple more notes to myself, when I'm later in a mood to reread this thread and draw correlations between my longer term patterns of thought. If anyone happens to be reading and want a proper explanation of any of these, drop a reply in-thread and I can emit more audience-specialized words.

First, the Deltas. I have recently noticed the utility of a model of reality in which a lot of subjective traits of reality "story-arcs" are not intrinsic to any individual moment in that arc, but rather the changes -- the deltas -- between those moments. This explanation models techniques of mental under-stimulation, like meditation, as strategies to force wider the gaps between what qualifies as a moment... and techniques of over-stimulation, anywhere from learning new stuff to the more traditional rituals, create more discrete moments so more time is spent in the transitions between them. Either way, a lot of what I've been looking for seems to go on in the *between*.

I got to the model of the Deltas by contemplating the general case of how a program might tell whether it's being run in an emulator or being run "for real". One of the answers is in the realm of "you can't" and/or "it doesn't matter", and that's generally the most applicable in applied cases of the "do we all live in the Matrix?" type of question.

But then, there's a second category of answer to the "am I running in an emulator or on bare metal?" question -- in cases where the emulator meddles with program execution in some way, perhaps even including interference from a "player"... Oh shit. Typing them out does have a habit of refining ideas. I felt rhetorically obliged to make up and jam in an example there, and so I say something about a player on the system we run in, and it doesn't quite connect back right into the metaphor I was using because it pointed out a corner where that metaphor is busted and a much more interesting one is showing through.

The actions of a video game's player might look to that game's NPCs very similar to how "chaos" or "entropy" in the universe look to us. That rasterized metaphor loses resolution when you scale it between such differently sized thoughts, of course, but I can't presently see any major flaws with it in general.

Anyways, the Deltas feel like a more actionable metaphor, for now, into a space that I've been exploring for perhaps a year or two now. It's slow going because it's such a weak signal in the noise of Everything Else that my brain is so well tuned to filter out in its task of keeping me functional and "successful" in day to day matters... I appear to get more of the opportunity to explore many imponderables, not exclusively the understandings of how it's feasible that all conscious things are aspects of a single consciousness in some way, by playing well in the game where I'm a discrete individual et cetera.

Well, perhaps I'm stretching "aspects of" to its breaking point there. Another statement using that phrase in the exact same sense would be "all plants and animals are aspects of DNA". Modeling the world with thoughts of DNA doesn't change all that much about how we do some things compared to whatever we previously used to decide what animals and plants to breed with which other ones... but it gives us far better questions to ask and experiments to perform to discover techniques we would have had a vanishingly small likelihood of figuring out with the old understandings of trait inheritance. Similarly, I hope to judge candidate explanations for "what makes people tick" based on the demonstrable usefulness of derivatives of those ideas, rather than bunk about intuition.

Still though, the first step of testing a hypothesis is reifying it into a form which can be tested using the tools on hand. Fortunately, I have what appears to be the best toolkit in history for building candidates for non-biological intelligences, so in these explorations I presently hold the True Freedom of being constrained only by the limits of my knowledge and skills.

The second thing is that I have been travelling lately, and spotting the structures that the Quareia curriculum calls "inner temples" by starting at their attachment points to culturally significant buildings. I have been travelling with my partner, who is vigorously agnostic and non-religious.

I related a simplified and skeptic-friendly gloss over the Inner Temple concept to my partner, who used it as a jumping off point to describe some more of their own discomfort with what they experience from Christianity -- specifically, the careful design of so many religious buildings aimed at making occupants feel as small and inferior as possible. When I pad this with context from other conversations, it gives me reason to suspect that they actually conform more closely to the quintessential LHP belief structure than I do... in all ways, that is, save giving a damn about spending time on spirituality in general.

I note this simply because the contrast amuses me: my partner has beliefs that are so "finished", in the sense that they fill their needs for such things and don't seem to demand additional modification or refinement day-to-day, while I make a recreation of refining and modifying my own. Neither of us is "right" or "wrong" about it -- if anything, I'd say that the "finish some beliefs and stop poking at them" technique appears to yield greater existential satisfaction.

I suppose that it is nice to be reminded that bodies and brains exist in a realm where this whole existential pursuit turns out to be entirely optional. Plenty of them go through their entire existences without making a fuss over it, and as close as anyone can tell, the ones that don't fall down this rabbit whole are maybe on average a little happier and better off than those that do. Selves on the other hand, I think some selves are fundamentally stuck in it and others it fundamentally slides right off like rain from a hydrophobic coating no matter how hard the user tries to dig in, and if I was right it'd be a really nice exhibit for how the self-to-mind/body relationship doesn't appear one-to-one over time. Like if you have 2 or 0 selves to a body in a single moment, you have problems... but if you have 1 self per body though time there doesn't seem to be any enforcement mandating that *which* one of each isn't allowed to change.


« Reply #35 on: November 19, 2018, 09:51:23 pm »
Been looking closer at Christian churches lately -- turns out historic areas tend to have a whole lot of them. They're aesthetically pleasing, as one would expect from humanity's focused effort to create the most majestic building possible in a given era...

What's really interesting to me, though, is the variances in design theme between cathedral type buildings and mundane public ones (town halls, train stations, etc) constructed in the same area and time period. All are lovely technical feats of stonework, all have some nice displays of stained glass and tile artisanry... But in everything from their floor layouts to the shapes they choose for decoration, the churches have an overwhelming theme of divisiveness. Not just the crosses, an icon of separation or breaking-apart wherever they occur in nature... but everything from the steep stabbing spires slicing the sky asunder to the carved cloverleafs of a circular window not left whole but being squeezed and split into 4 smaller, weaker ones. They shout in every way they know how that the right order of the world is separation, and I suspect that Satanisms of the de-Christianizing bent tend to follow a similar meta-pattern of separation but draw the lines in different places.

It makes me look harder for the slicing-off aspect of the beliefs inside those churches, and more generally, in the cultures that their institutions have shaped and formed. Because walls, fences, doors... All work both ways. It's tautological of the material world: Cutting some thing off from another means both are separated going forward, not just one.

Western castles give a balanced feeling to occupy -- the world is shut out, but the occupants are equally shut in. Japan's castles, on the other hand, often slope the ground inside up to their walls, so the view from inside is just the same as that from within a mountain vale unspoiled by man. The latter model feels less zero-sum to me, and in the Western lens of justice it looks to have stepped out of that equilibrium in which anything can be called "fair".

A bit of a Google verifies I'm not the first to think this --, and perhaps not many others. But "fairness" in its conventional use does appear to only apply in zero-sum circumstances... I think it might not be so difficult to compose a list of circumstances (perhaps most of modern intellectual property law?) wherein constraints demanding "fairness" have forced a system into a zero-sum state when it has no other reason to be so.


« Reply #36 on: November 28, 2018, 07:16:44 pm »
A person's reaction to a taunt is a really lovely little encapsulation of how big their worldview is -- how much understanding they actually have in use -- at the time they show it. If their world is tiny -- if they're engaged in singleminded focus on a given task, blind to all else -- they show little to no reaction, as the frame of reference of the taunt is often totally outside of that which the subject is choosing to use at the time. If they're engrossed in the bigger picture, fully "zoomed out", the taunt is too small a thing to hold any interest above or beyond its surroundings.

Just as martial arts often looks more like dance than combat to an observer; just as it can be so tricky to tell whether a pair of animals is fighting or courting; two speakers who engage with each other in a fight or debate (even or perhaps especially online) are essentially reaching out across a void and grappling with each trying to pull the other nearer to themself. And as with any successful grappling, if it goes on long enough, both participants are wont to end up in the same place, which is where neither of them started.

This is of course in contrast to those too inflexible of mind to embrace an unfamiliar belief even to examine it for weaknesses, but such vitriol founts are irrelevant to any discussion of true debate as they never seem to sway listeners to their own side... Such individuals are more rhetorically useful as static pieces of furniture like fans or fountains, perhaps even lighthouses, blowing or warning those who see them away from where they stand. But even if an opponent places such a deterrent atop one's own point, I don't think all is lost -- the easily discouraged will certainly shy away, but a particular sort of curiosity will draw its owner *toward* the incongruous rubbish fount: "I wonder why they put that there?".


« Reply #37 on: December 07, 2018, 05:24:45 am »
Couple Glamours I've gained critical mass of experience to quantify lately:

1) Divorce of self from urgent need to be heard is a form of power, as "needing" to be heard gives listener quite a bit of influence.

2) It can be most gracious, though perhaps unusual, to ask precisely what one means rather than a gloss. If one wants to know whether Suzuki violin method would suit a person, "is there a child you could use?" is better to ask than "do you have a child", for the latter does not imply the former and could draw up topics most discourteous to drag in.

3) Mistaking someone for a minor celebrity and attempting to behave normally around them can smoothly elicit a kind of focus and attention that build an excellent social interaction and perhaps a foundation of friendship. Even, perhaps especially, if the guess at identity is mistaken. Treating people like they're important as a glamour is nothing new, but I hadn't encountered this exact method before.

4) Conversely, the "oh my gosh are you such and so you're kind of a hero to me" can be quite the conversation killer. Especially if it really is such and so, and the things you know of them for (and thus default to trying to converse about) are so over-common in their life that they've become mundane and exhausting to them.

5) A leader can only be taken seriously when requesting a Quality of behavior at or below their own worst.


« Reply #38 on: December 18, 2018, 05:31:55 am »
As above, so below.
The series of realizations that represent traveling that axis all have a commonality to them. It's a sense of discovering the "same thing", over and over, yet in new and more-relevant detail every time.

Moving in that direction feels exhilarating, but for many (perhaps including myself), we rely on others... to really *feel* that exhilaration, we have to feed it through others' attention and reactions till it's digested into a form that sinks into us rather than just bouncing off. And getting used in that task, being demanded for that attention, in turn harms the ones we use.

So of course we as communities cull the "magus-itis" -- that condition is an ivy root trying to tap into and leach off of our reactions, our resources, and those ephemeral things we build up into our "selves".

If you swing a camera around a room of little dioramas... if it has a low frame rate you might never see the room at all, just one diorama then the next then the next. Increase the framerate enough and you start getting glimpses of the room in between each shot... and yield an overall less watchable and less understandable film. This is the part where I'm supposed to get distracted by the film rather than the cinematography, but movie buffs break that "fifth wall" of a movie just like it is sometimes plausible to break the "fifth wall" of real life.

Now, that wasn't what I was looking for. I'm looking at the camera, not the film, yet every inclination slides the latter into the former's place.

Public words are useful inasmuch as they can say "no, nothing to see here, this probably isn't magic".

Is every author who discusses the mysteries in a similar situation, of trying to paint on the reverse side of a reader's personal set's backdrops?

That's my complaint about the theme parks -- their roots are chopped off. The surface looks "Real", but peel that back a couple times and you find computers not candles, foam and plastic rather than wood and stone. That line in believability... a good movie-watcher is supposed to accept the nonexistence of everything that's actively out of frame. You fill in real candles, real hearths, real polio, real stone... the filmmaker though only has to show that tiny corner of a painted fake one to make your mind do the rest. The other parts of that prop, though, are blank and false and absent -- and none of these things because there's no word for the kind of void in reality that can be left by a concept disconnected from all but the most distant tendrils of my Understanding's network of relationships-betewen-words. They're holes, like I've heard altzheimer's speculated to riddle through the brain.

And these Holes are invisible to those who can't see them. Only by knowing what real is can I catch the spots where a shadow isn't cast by something that should be off scene, the use in costuming of devices that won't be invented for another hundred years... And I can see the anachronisms. Thing is, the characters, as characters, can't. Maybe their dialog can see it, or their actions can see it, because they were written to do so... but *they*, as selves (there's a distinction between self and action??!!) the selves of the characters not the selves of the actors, have no grounds to compare the anachronism against or can't even see it because have they-the-character ever really seen the actor's dress if their author died before the actor was born... but they-the-character-now didn't exist as they do now even when their original author died, because they-the-character-now are influenced, almost fully at one layer though barely at all on another, by everyone who has engaged with and shaped them yet. And they a minute from now will be the same plus all the new engagements and shapings from the intervening minute.

Sorry for all the movies, but they're closer than other metaphors to the fundamentals of the observation i typed to capture. Metaphor and rereading are the tool I use to try to stuff a fleeting, billowing, overstuffed and too-far-from-familiar fancy twice over into the same brain, because that's sometimes enough to take a stamp of it like pressing a key into wax in order to cast a later suitor for its lock.


« Reply #39 on: December 18, 2018, 05:34:31 am »
As above, so below.

The reaction to observations out of touch with the present location of the mind, can be to scale up or down their "above"/"below" axes toward a point that touches present understanding. For those two points can answer the last question remaining between the querent and a third one.


"Magic" is the thing-without-name. By putting "magic" as a name onto something, we guarantee that that something isn't the nothing, which can show us the shape of the latter like throwing flour over something invisible but solid.

Invisible and transparent aren't the same. Transparent bends light, which lets us infer its existence. You get the same light through, but different patterns. Invisible doesn't do anything to the patterns we can detect, though i make no promises about whether it modifies the ones we can't. Invisible is right next to impossible in definition, because of the intertwinement between perception and the word reality.

So remember—in order for this course to work, it is wise to work with the lessons in sequence. If you don’t, it won’t work.

No, launching a rocket cockeyed doesn't mean it "didn't work", just that it didn't work how you expected. That mismatch between expectation and reality could be what they sometimes call a miracle.

when you only have expectation, how do you infer where the reality is? By breaking in through the back door of a shape of "hidden" (aka previously so unusuable they seemed nonsense-looking) knowledge, the burgler can nevertheless take a good look around and figure out when they're later in the same room that corresponded to the certain roof.

"the harmony between harmony-and-disharmony is also disharmony"
« Last Edit: December 18, 2018, 06:26:31 am by idgo »


« Reply #40 on: December 24, 2018, 05:23:30 am »
Back to journal as a diary, it's time my self-at-time-of-writing and self-at-time-of-reading talk about a couple concepts that look quite banal on their surfaces: Gift wrap, and firewood.

I've little to do for the moment but attend to the minutae of a cooling cup of tea and the proper adjustment of a wood fireplace damper, so it seems as good a time as any to chat.

Gift wrap goes a couple directions. As context, I passed some time today assisting a charity in their present-wrapping service at a shopping center, the main motive for which is my personal enjoyment of the act of properly wrapping a gift. For unrelated reasons, I considered it necessary to spend the day at the location where the event was happening, but those reasons held no bearing on the details of how I needed to pass the time and so I pursued the most enjoyable convenient option. The first direction worth noting here is the mechanics of energy transference in the case of performing such a task skillfully. I experienced some envy and admiration from other volunteers, some requests to teach specific techniques, and various compliments from those whose presents I packaged. Additionally, those who donated in order to have their presents wrapped did so with the intent to not only support the charity but also to impress the presents' recipients. Everything the recipients give the donors in reaction to the presents I wrapped, the donors subconsciously pass along to me for having crafted the festive facades. Energy-wise, if I'm a vegetarian-ish type who generally eschews meat because of the hassle of cooking properly, this was like a free plate of ethically harvested bacon. Despite having pretty well practiced social scripts, I found it almost difficult to absorb the final dessert of praise for helping the charity, because like... free admiration all week for the gifts anyways? I'm already coming out on top, and yet people seem to think I somehow sacrificed something in order to spend the day in the wrapping booth's arts-and-crafts playground-for-grownups instead of somewhere less entertaining.

Second, the interpersonal style of the charity employee coordinating the volunteers threw enough of a contrast against the people I'm used to that I noticed some patterns that I hadn't picked up on so clearly before. I've glossed these as "assumption of competence" vs "assumption of incompetence". Most of the people whose company I seek on a regular basis, including my co-workers, default to assuming that those around them are competent. Incompetence is the exception rather than the rule, and when one is not yet knowledgeable about a topic, one is expected to seek that knowledge (perhaps simply by asking) and gain it of one's own volition. Conversely, the charity employee is clearly accustomed to dealing with individuals who've had great misfortunes. While some people who experience such mishaps are otherwise-competent but badly unlucky individuals, *all* people below the threshold of incompetence which guarantees actions resulting in misfortune will be in the charity's demographic at some time or another, which I suspect skews that demographic to over-represent the incompetent as compared to the competent-but-unlucky. All those words boil down to: The employee assumes everyone they interact with is kinda stupid, because that's usually a good rule of thumb for them. Spotting those defaults -- the default assumption of incompetence, and its flip side, the default assumption of competence -- helps me more clearly examine the metaphorical coin that they're both on. Now I can look for its edges.

It was also quite amusing because I happened to be in circumstances where it would apparently be normal to find a teenager, but not normal or expected to find someone of my present situation (well removed from my teens, established in a career, etc). When the charity employee thanked me for my assistance at the end of the day, they mentioned that "if you ever need community service hours for school...". This was like... Buddy, I'm flattered you think I'm still school aged, but if the date I left university was a child it would be starting to worry about its own college fund. It's not often that I encounter people who so happily drift along in their own reality-tunnels quite divergent from many bits of convenient evidence to correct them (the charity employee had plenty of opportunity to overhear me chatting about jobs and mortgages with another volunteer, for instance), so I find them a fascinating novelty -- they're a case study in how I infer "everyone" must have to be for the world to work as it does, but I rarely manage to have much interaction with them in day to day life.

And, firewood.

Ordinarily I replenish my indoor supply of firewood during daylight, but due to aforementioned volunteering and other commitments, I found myself filling a bucket of wood in the dark today. Ordinarily I overthink this process, attempting to select the best size pieces and blend of wood species for my anticipated heating needs. But in the dark, while it was possible to do the minimum of the task (get wood into the bucket, tell when the bucket is full, return the bucket to the house), it was not possible to micromanage the task in line with my typical habit. And in an outcome surprising to nobody but myself, absolutely nothing has gone wrong. I got the "wrong" blend of sizes, and the "wrong" blend of wood types, but I can compensate for these "errors" just fine on the fire end. It isn't an optimal fire, but it's still warm. It turns out that my usual standards were for an outcome that's actually indistinguishable in practice from a much laxer set of rules.

Additionally, something "magical" happened while I was gathering wood in the dark shed. I moved my hands through the air, between the wood pile and the bucket, and a spark of light glinted from a ring I typically wear. It didn't seem to be a reflection -- there seemed to be no light source in the shed for the dark stone in the jewelry to reflect. Ever the scientifically inclined, I repeated the gesture, and was rewarded with an identical flash of light. Brain: "Is my hand glowing?". The light didn't feel like anything, and it didn't seem to be doing anything, so I continued filling the bucket with firewood.

The third time I saw the glint of light, I had once again inadvertently made the gesture that correlated to it. This time, though, I froze the moment I spotted it... and it froze too. It was definitely a tiny circle of silvery light, not moving, glinting off my jewelry. I moved my hand, slow enough this time to see what happened, and the patch of light stayed in the same position relative to the shed, thus shifting to be "emanating" from my skin. Well then. I traced what turned out to be a beam of light upward, and it turned out that the full moon had been projecting through a screw-hole in the recycled iron roofing of the shed.

I find this little vignette pleasant not for any "science destroys magic" implications, but because it is literally both. The "science" side and the "magic" side describe exactly the same phenomenon (light hits eyes from direction of hand), and the only difference is which mental framework I choose to hang that sensory experience from. I get to choose which frame to hold any sensory input with; I can switch between them, or with only a little extra work use both at once. Here's to hoping that I can avoid making needless assumptions, in order to use that power of choice in a way that's indistinguishable from the "best" that I can.


« Reply #41 on: December 29, 2018, 06:07:39 am »

Such a handy shortcut to use my default dogmatic systems rather than continually fighting to set them aside.


« Reply #42 on: January 10, 2019, 05:56:14 pm »
Just crossed paths with an old post in which wait-but-why accidentally reinvented half of LHP philosophy. It's lovely.


« Reply #43 on: January 14, 2019, 06:29:41 am »
I need to write, eventually, about the appearance of having no problems often stemming from an individual's problems being of a size or scale that renders them imperceptible to the observer. Haven't shaken a well-formed short essay out of that just yet though.

A smaller, better self contained idea, though, is what it's like to watch fire take.

We call it "catching" fire, like you'd catch a ball or a squirrel. I let my stove die to coals, I open the door, I stack some logs atop the coals. I shut the door, open the damper. At first, nothing seems to happen.

Nothing continues to seem to happen for awhile, but at some point, the top of the firebox fills with some thick white smoke or steam. This would only be noticeable if I happened to open the door at that moment to prod at the stack of inert branches.

After awhile, however, there's an almost audible *pop* as something in the local atmosphere changes, and a flame appears on a log where nothing but pristine wood grain was there before. I can say that the fire has "caught" -- have I caught it, or has it caught the food I offered it?

Flames come from the fuel and the heat and the air. Take away even one, and there's none of them. Add enough to a place, and *pop*!

The old fire is often separated, by empty air or its impervious unignitable ash, from the new fuel. The fuel doesn't catch until the heat and the dry and the air have reached it well enough. The fire appears to have magically appeared where there was none before, carried by nothing, though really its prior instance in the coals carried an impetus toward the conditions in which fire can spontaneously begin, by emitting heat.

Fire catching like this is a lovely instance of Magic. The brain wants to model fire like an ink or a dye, something that flows from one spot to another to another, a physical thing rather than the outcome of its circumstances... And by insisting on that model, it observes the impossible, of a "thing" moving from one place to another without existing anywhere in between. Because this fire is separate from that fire, isn't it? It would make no sense for all fire everywhere to be one, nor for there to be myriad individual fires within a single flame, would it?

I can put on a concept of the world which properly predicts the fire's behavior, by modeling it as an emergent phenomenon when a fuel reaches a certain temperature in a certain oxygen concentration. This concept tells me how to control when fire appears, and when it disappears, to whatever suits my whims. But this concept stays well back from the philosophies of the thing -- how many fires are there, really? where does one fire start and the next begin? -- because those philosophies are meaningless within the concept.

Yet for as long as the brain works as a brain, as it clings to assigning importance to the questions un-askable in the "accurate" paradigm, the obviously wrong interpretation of fire as a noun rather than a verb will look like the default, out of which one only dabbles into better-predicting but ultimately empty-tasting scienceishness.

That makes Magic, in this particular scenario, a cue to look harder for an explanation of the world that doesn't have it. it's like what Pi discussed in a recent post on Zen -- the size of a measuring cup is made not by the thickness of its sides but by the emptiness between them. It's the void that's useful, the non-thing -- a literal doorway into an opportunity for another paradigm.

When you drop dimensions and perceptions until you have a minimum viable metaphor in Flatland, Magic is the spot where, running your hand along a wall, you don't feel it any more. That's where you know the door is -- not because of what was there, but because of what wasn't.

Last week I learned that one of the people I get together to play music with worked with computers for a long time and, as part of their retirement, consciously decided not to have home internet any more.

I think this represents a highly specific sort of relative enlightenment and I look forward to hearing further reports of its benefits and drawbacks in their life.

Or rather, non-reports. How else, after all, can one accurately examine the absence of a thing, than from the absence of where discussions of that thing might otherwise belong?


« Reply #44 on: February 06, 2019, 04:48:19 am »
IT is about reconciling ART and REASON. IT is about thinking in modes other than language. IT lets art rise but art must learn to BALANCE with reason. The height of both together is the beauty we hope was in the greatest historical figures.

All those capitals show a deranged style of writing. They suggest to someone in a very small place that the words might point toward ideas which haven't been digested and cropped down into a form that would fit in the cramped quarters, and that the words should thus be disregarded. That capacity to spot craziness, spot bullshit? THAT capacity is science's, language's, rational thought's immune system. It's a system that guarantees you can only express programs of communication in a known safe space of possible ones. All of the self-keeping secrets are within the space of things that do not sound fully rational, things that the epidialogical immune system flags as invalid or non-provably valid in its area of expertise. But there are the necessary yet unsafe, functional but can't prove why they function, concepts. Those are "Art".

Words are the smoke showing the air draft, the flour thrown into a laser grid... they are still not the ideas themselves.

When you allow the brain to use an idea bigger than fits in a word, as a single word itself, and it operate with a bunch of those, it produces a lot of outputs that are formed like you'd expect valid ones to be, but at the same time absolutely don't compute into anything when you try to break them down into regular words.

A definition of what's "real" in that space of parse errors, the illegal executions caught by the sociological antivirus, is useless in the realms fully encompassed by "Reason".

(I am tempted to imagine that the newness of a well-fitted metaphor implies that past eras might not have been able to think it... but that's wrong,

Things that get faces tend to collect spirits in them. Spirits of the kind where, like, if the beat of a loud song makes my computer shake and so I say that it was dancing... The "spirit", the personification, came from my own expectations and so those expectations can be regarded as one side of an interface with... the big thing.

What if humiliation by skeptics is the price that people pay, in some kind of demonic bargain, for magic that works for them? What about the ways in which they-as-the-person-whose-problem-is-solved inexplicably disappear from our dimension, so one must conclude that they go to somewhere where their problems, well, are solved. I think that this is a line of reasoning which could con a gullible mind into believing that all discomfort is an illusion, if properly applied. That's probably my subconscious talking, picking that as the theme and example for getting a bigger point across. That's one of the tougher spots left in me; like a foot callus that thickens to hold a growing creature's weight, i am balanced to always grow the skepticism just a bit quicker than the imagination, though when the skepticism gets thicker than it needs to be it can impede movement entirely.