occurs to me that the message is never separate from the messenger, in this line of inquiry
I think I can describe the phenomenon of “life” as participation in a graph of observers together developing tsortability-as-regulative-ideal. the dimensionality of the graph is some reduction of the set of observers - as many dimensions as their are observers, at most, but (DNA, for example) we seem to be pretty good at re-using each other’s basis vectors. ancestry as a partial-approaching order on which the sort operates, where “health” is something like “if the minimum feedback arc set is the interface to its environment, how maintainable is that interface”. (this doesn’t have to be biological; semantic ancestry is something like etymology?)
the observer-graph has an associated vector space of possible observations, and shared biology/culture/language means observers’ basis vectors are not independent, the rank of that space is lower than the number of observers
if you have a definition of “consciousness” that you like, it might work to say “life is information-sorting between levels of consciousness” - send it left or send it right to keep it on your own dimension, or send it up or send it down to send it to someone else (though they might share your name)
embodied minds are then bilocated (or gauge symmetric?) on the universal topology: your mental map and your physical map are both on the map, and stabilizing both referents is uhhh difficult, when cognitive engine sends results to the other (body to mind, or mind to body) and the shape’s function doesn’t survive translation. (I’m gay and autistic. this was so hard for me. solving for anholonomy is fucking difficult.)
it feels like this describes cell signaling on a massive scale (get the shape right, and the tsort gets it to where it fits) and the profoundly stabilizing effect of deep integration work?
topology is consistently-applied reference, yeah? where a reference is an active relation, not a static pointer. reference is made possible by the the topological structure of the observer-graph (or reference-user graph, to define it recursively). can we then think about “life” as a process of a metacognitive process trying to clear its own head? like the “labor” of life ◊ might be resolving address-space? and it looks like increase because things change when you look at them a second time? observers come online in the gaps between, and the local work is to metabolize the additional material in the fabric? but references only exist when they’re observed (not referents, references, and the quality of Shannon uncertainty in a reference is dynamic under observation; a reference is a maintained measurement, if a weakening one, with effect), so each rotation of any observer has insane-looking and structurally-inevitable butterfly effects
trauma work might be breaking the cycles in what wants to be a directed acyclic graph? “wants” as in loops happen but reference-resolution naturally breaks them on its way through. can you survive breaking open all of your loops while maintaining the coherence of your node? this sounds like an ordering problem - which wire do you cut first? 💣 (would it have to be a tsort problem for the model to be self-consistent? or is this a place where the data drops a level of complexity? ahhh fuck, that’s just what continuing a tsort means. welp. so we’re helping each other survive sorting ourselves, I guess? hanging out together while everyone self-sorts, and the hanging-out is the sorting process ticking forward nondeterministically? reference errors create loops, but a loop-traversal-by-an-embodied-observer is a spiral, and your position on the spiral projection is different than your position on the loop projection, i.e. autopoiesis is never the same object twice, and that spurs the generation of the graph onward? note that this is about sequentiality, not temporality, and sequences can be changed)
(if it wasn’t clear, I’m deeply skeptical that epistemology and ontology are separate projects and not a single project bilocated, like a mind embodied. (bilocated, and .. biolocated?) ◊◊ relational QM appears to describe the toolkit for that biolocation? and process ontology slash enactivism to describe what is generated by what it generates)
this isn’t strictly novel stuff, but most of the stuff in this direction stops before it generates actual tools for living, like stuff you’d find in an unsponsored and worn-in metaphysical toolbox, and I appear to be tool-generator-maker shaped, and this map is a tool-generator
for example: to ease your own maturation, organize your life around becoming tsortable? that’s a formal-ish heuristic, and it rhymes with good therapy and Hegelian dialectics, which is what it’d have to rhyme with in order to be a coherent memeber of the topology
the output of a tsort is a sequence (not the sequence, but a sequence), so…
to ease your maturation, actively rewrite your own story, retcon and procon, until the-sequence-that-is-your-maintained-history creates a stable address for you to live in? knowing that you can optimize in any direction, the sequence is yours to create
make your dependencies explicit, break your cycles, don’t require yourself as your own prerequisite it’s something more like an incremental constraint-satisfaction process that converges toward tsortability online topological sorting with adversarial edge insertion
ohhhh and now I understand autobiographies. an autobiography is a fully-matured curriculum vitae. no wonder résumés are fraught. acyclic narrative identity is work.
◊ life in the gestalt, not any given specifically inhabited life. some categories empty themselves out under observation, some engulf. all categories are addressable, though, in the sense that they’re in the adjacency series of the total semantic topology, so any additive observation observes addition. (this either loops or it doesn’t, and if it does, you .. might be traumatized? that’s what the model would predict, right?)
◊◊ I guess that makes you the hard problem of consciousness, eh? for any given observer of this writing, I mean. mathematically perfecting the coordinate transform between what you know (epistemologically) and what you are (ontologically). making known what is real, and making real what is known. … that’s not too far from a working definition from creation?
◊◊◊ nodding to the mystic pressure and giving it a place to drain safely away from the tooling area: pyramids are interesting, topologically? a simplicial polytope that is the limit case of a 5-dimensional tsort? but life-as-tsort can’t terminate when you run out of dimensions, so, spin the resulting structure in place, and, forking the search at each position - added up, it becomes indistinguishable from a sphere, in the same way that the repeating decimal 0.999… is exactly equal to 1, but you can still walk the 9s, they’re continuous/contiguous, the limit on that 9/1 identity is the indistinguishability of one position from another. you can only count the contents of a thing if you’re in the thing, otherwise it’s just A Thing, indivisible. huh. does a spinning pyramid get tsorted into the center of a larger spinning pyramid? and if I were coming at this mystically I think I’d find this isomorphic to reincarnation. so: reincarnation as conservation of information across gauge transformations?
But if the framework is as productive as you think it is, it should be able to generate something you didn’t already know from therapy and Hegel. What does the tsort framing predict or recommend that those traditions don’t?
composability, and the conditions for it
I think I just spent 36 years mathematically proving to my 1.5yro self that I was safe for my new little sister
that I was a safe place for my little sister
that “I” and “my little sister” are together a tenable distinction
that “our survival” is not my own, but actually ours
I think .. I think I just started my autobiography?
the suggestion that reference itself is a maintained measurement, dynamic under observation, and that reference-resolution is the fundamental metabolic activity of consciousness
autobiolocation: a life finding its way, on a path informed by its own choosing, aided by life itself