rfinz

Anxiety is Effective Action Failing to Leave the Body

2020-06-11T00:00:00-05:00

Anxiety is Effective Action Failing to Leave the Body

At this point whether I'm Newton in quarantine or a self-care expert, the data is in: my body would rather buy prospective hobby gear or spend 12 hours failing to debug nebulous errors buried under n+1 layers of library code and operating system peculiarities than to practice any of the things that exert influence on or receive feedback from a meaningful outside world. What a devastating thing to learn about oneself.

And that observation was from before the uncertainty of social uprising, the tradeoffs between immediate security and long-term improvement, the financial precarity of my own life and the financial precarity of the people and communities I love made extremely more apparent.

Seeing ambitious projects spring to life and immediately crumble under a tragic commons is wrenching. The radical seems synonymous with the immediate, but the more of these projects that fail, the more it seems like immediacy only works within the most intimate organizations of humans.

Conversations with friends about hard topics feel equally likely to entrench, to frustrate, or to exhaust. A number of friends are now conspicuously absent from the internet after spending weeks boosting info and sharing links. The clarity of the moment has faded, exhaustion, confusion, and concern about the implementation details have emerged as our primary modes of online interaction.

At this point it really feels like my actual sphere of influence is the garden bed I could build, the plants I can tend to, the dog I can feed, the people I can love.

But that's the thing, right? Our points of leverage are often nebulous to begin with, and it takes a certain amount of storytelling to convince ourselves that we have any leverage in the first place. The things that it's easy to see ourselves influence are the things that we have always influenced, since the dawn of time. We're adapted to see those things.

We're not adapted to know how yelling at a crowd or volunteering for a large organization or working at a large company actually do anything.

Anxiety is the sensation of a threat to our goals or values; if it's in our values to be helpful, good, or useful, then simply being unable to locate our control (how we might help, do good, or be useful) in the world is enough to make us anxious.

Often in these circumstances we're left with few options:

BELIEVE earnestly that our individual contribution to the large-scale is working, and that the large-scale (read: individually incomprehensible) thing is pointed in the right direction
Panic
Identify the things we DO have control over (the things we can help, do good for, or be useful to immediately) and start there
Oscillate quickly between the three other options

So here I try: there's a corner of the world I can do mostly unambiguously good within. Plants, friends, direct acts of service, humor, analysis, a listening ear and verbal process in real time, a psychologically safe place to disagree, new frames or depth for conversations that have been flattened by media and social media exposure. If I don't do these things effective action will have failed to leave my body. Even when they do I'll find myself oscillating into panic or self-righteous certainty, but they are greatly diminished. When I have spare time I'll build. The levers and knobs I can interact with to do good in the world are limited in part because they're the levers and knobs I've thus far disclosed. Building capacity will disclose more options.

Humble action within the sphere; humble action on the sphere itself; keep growing; keep going.

Mess Made Real

2020-05-28T00:00:00-05:00

Mess Made Real

I am so beside myself that words feel empty. Forget the hypercomplexity of global objects, the concerns of a middle-sized metropolitan area are humbling enough. There is no epistemology adequate for this local, within-walking-distance set of events.

Really screws with yr epistemology when you see literally everyone - anarchists, liberals, local organizers, people in HK, cops, journalists trying to strip parts of a chaotic event out of context to support their version of good/bad and the rest become meaningless asides
— Eric w/ one wild life (@MutualArising) May 29, 2020

One person: people die every day, but not this way. It's not escaping justice: people escape justice everyday, it's that escaping justice seemed inevitable.

A grocery store: a piece of essential neighborhood infrastructure whose absence is a distinct source of inequality, a capital asset of a large corporation, an employer in an uncertain economy, full of "stuff" not people, stuff that feeds people that the neighborhood is now already fundraising to replace.

A housing development: neighbors for more neighbors, income for local businesses, just a bunch of lumber, a gentrifying force.

A big-box store: ugly, discriminatory, insured. A hole on the strip that will take years to rebuild in any form.

Small businesses: complicit, an acceptable casualty, just stuff, a person's passion, several peoples' livelihoods, the only liberatory capitalism. Signs in the window: "black owned business"—passover, reckoning.

Policing: tremendously overfunded, tremendously unprepared to handle any sort of significant resistance. Are people really just finding out now that a crowd as small as 20 people can loot a store without significant consequences? What was preventing them before this moment?

Protest: "stay home tonight" he said, like we were speaking to god. "do something" he said, assuming we were just walking to enjoy the evening

"just a few broken windows" → "looting essential items, mostly" → "a little light arson" at extraordinary speeds

Rioting: necessary convulsion, we trust it will stay contained to property, trust that the revelatory freedom will respect the right to life of the people around it, trust that the already activated can't be goaded into more extreme actions, trust that the worst of us won't take advantage of a bad situation to harm the worst off of us

Startling insensitivity from police on the streets (or the rooftops, as it were). "Less-lethal" munition fired without care for life or limb, actively "drawing aggro" like they were in a video game.

Startling silence from anyone that seems like they could be in charge. No leaders on the ground. Nobody at the top putting their bodies on the line. I can't blame them. I haven't either. But the symbolism of me yelling at a cop pales to the spiritual relief of a Mayor or police chief subjecting themself to the abuse of the crowd. Seems like the one thing disincentivized by modern politics is actual leadership.

Restrained by precedent, restrained by fear, confused by the speed at which the goalposts move.

Community leaders imagining that the whole city is their community, elected leaders imagining that consistent messaging works as crowd control.

Me, trying to water my tiny garden and keep the new transplants from dying.

Sensations of Mono no aware

2020-03-25T00:00:00-05:00

Sensations of Mono no aware

The in-between times are collapsing rapidly. Winter is turning to spring, and summer to fall.

Tendrils of green poking through the dull brown left behind by feet of snow. Green turning brown as the world battens its hatches for the coming winter.

Grieving the world we thought it would be. Seeing potential in new growth and strength.

The world out there opening up to let the light pour in, the people closing themselves off in preparation for the coming storm.

Long moments stretching longer with rapid changes, the stagnation of yesterday giving way, forcefully, to a today that is radically different from days previous.

This too, a new normal, itself a transition. No matter how used to isolation and self-distraction, this is not the world of tomorrow. Less pointlessness and make-work, maybe. But in all likelihood a more robust world is a harder working world in general. More redundancy. More self-sufficiency. More focus on the unforgiving push-pull with material reality.

Uncertainty rules the transition, and material security rules the uncertainty. The fate of many millions of human lives contingent on forgetting freedoms, on maintaining composure, on keeping infrastructure afloat as even the young and durable crumple under the load. As we find new patterns on the floor of our apartments, government interventions reshape the world outside our doors.

This is a world(big world) of limited permission, a world(our world) of limitless trust and forgiveness. New social contracts, deeper social connections.

Our friends, our family, the people on the block. Is it their spring or their fall? Is it ours? Time undone, time out of time impossible.

Not the same, but it never was, just faster.

Translation

2020-03-02T00:00:00-06:00

Translation

One of the things I’ve wondered aloud about on this list is “translation” between various operating levels - upward and downward the ladder of complexity, between different systems of thought that are working at different levels of abstraction, from ideas into praxis, etc. These sort of translations often seem to be implicit and unconscious, partially solved by emergent organizational structures. These structures then become the models for a codification and systematization of scope and responsibilities.

Part of what I find so exciting about metamodern thought is that it tends to explicitly recognize this process. Metamodernists, especially of the developmental ilk, of which there are many on this list, identify and name the many thought frameworks, developmental axes, power structures, and social worlds that need to be translated between. Identifying levels and recognizing the need for translation are the first and second steps, and I’m very curious about the next ones. Given the current niche status of metamodern orgs, it seems prudent to develop translations with broad appeal. I don’t know what that looks like, but here are some other places where levels have been identified and there is active translational work:

Medicine has the aptly named Translational Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translational_research , https://accelerate.ucsf.edu/about/clinical-and-translational that tries to bridge the gaps between lab work and community health.: Researcher/Theorist -> Researcher/Clinician -> Clinical Practice -> Public Health
Aeronautics programs sometimes use a TRL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level that facilitates communication about readiness and provides a common map of what progress looks like across orgs.: Researcher/Theorist -> Researcher/Developer -> Engineer -> Manufacturers -> Ready Technology
Patreon(lol) very recently published an “Engineering Levels” guide https://levels.patreon.com/, that describes the progression of scope and concerns of an engineer as they develop.: IC6 (Architecture / Vision / Multi-metasystem meta-pattern decisions) -> IC5 (meta-pattern decision making) -> IC4 (multi-system decision making) -> IC3 (single system decision making) -> IC2 (contributing) -> IC1 (learning)
Business/Management has a ton of stuff, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats is an example of trying to balance the needs of a few (very basic) analytical frameworks. Notably this translation is horizontal, not vertical, except that “blue hat” is in control. More like translating between languages or equal paradigms.
Reasoning about higher mathematical dimensions feels isomorphic to this sort of translation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwAD6dRSVyI: Multi-dimensional object -> 3D projection -> 2D projection of 3D object for viewing on a computer screen
Simple english wikipedia has done a ton of work translating between large and small vocabularies https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-postmodernism which honestly is a good place to start

So I dunno. That’s what I have. Thoughts? Is it self-evident that this process is necessary? Is there a there there? Are we actively developing a metamodern translational science? Are there examples of it? Does this mailing list count? Are there other examples like the ones I listed that are interesting attempts elsewhere? Alter Ego?

If this is worthwhile I may try to write up more.

Taken from a mailing list message dating 2018-04-19.

Five Minutes of Dangerous Writing

2019-08-28T00:00:00-05:00

Five Minutes of Dangerous Writing

Used The Most Dangerous Writing App to force some words out into the world. Written in one 5 minute session and left unedited.

here's a thing, perhaps I will be saved by my lack of typing skills, since backspace seems to keep the timer ticking. The flow of words from my brain seems a little forced, but for five minutes I can see how my brain would not yet go blank. It is not as if I am being witty, I am simply dumping words onto the page in hopes that they do not go away. A weird sensation. Normally I do not know whether I would care whether or not the words go away, since normally my thoughts go aways regardless. Maybe the energy of typing them into the web page is what gives them value, since my fingers and wrist are liable to twinge from the extended effort. That makes me think that I really should investigate alternate typing modalities, since 5 minutes doesn't seem like the longest time to be continuously typing words… maybe I will rekindle my interest in stenography… after I complete the three million other things I've signed myself up for this season. I really do have too many hobbies. Too many vocations, even. Called in all directions with no where, ultimately to go. C'est lal vie, I suppose.

Why Knots?

2019-08-22T00:00:00-05:00

Why Knots?

(lightly edited from direct messages to Jason Snyder 8/6/2019)

The perfect knot:

exists for a purpose
accounts for the materials in which it is tied
unties exactly when its usefulness expires
binds two ropes together as robustly as if they were one, or binds a rope to a fixed point without compromising the strength of the rope
either passes through a block without snagging or will not pass through a block, depending on the knot

The imperfect knot:

forms without intention
pays no heed to the particulars of its material
is difficult or impossible to undo
cannot be counted upon in its security
reduces the strength of the rope in which it is tied
will snarl in the block

The knot becomes an exacting metaphor for a way of holding emotions/concepts/attachments/reality in general:

firmly,

with an eye for the particular,

until the exact moment they are no longer useful,

in a way that slides when necessary and grips when it is not.

So, the transmutation of a clot or snarl into a thoughtful knot (knotted cord also having some previous sacred associations) is a total transformation into an impermanent but useful affordance in the thread of life, that can be gripped, clipped in to, undone in a moment, used to take up slack, used to produce slack, whatever else our life may need help in its arising.

Still, it implies some skill in the transformation, since the imperfect knot looks an awful lot like a clot or snarl…

Sensations for Wordsmiths

2019-08-01T00:00:00-05:00

Sensations for Wordsmiths

I've struggled to keep up any sort of blogging habit. Mostly this is just because I don't have anything to say. Partly though, it's because words suck. Or so I've heard.

Words are hard. Words are inadequate. Words are inaccurate. Words are fuzzy. Words don't fully capture an idea. Words are the worst. We just don't have the words for it. There is no english equivalent to this word. There are no words to express things. Words don't capture reality. Words barely mean things anyway.

It seems most peoples' model of the way words work is as some sort of transmission from one brain to another that's lossy or inaccurate due to some feature of the words that the person chose. That's pretty optimistic.

In some peoples' model words have local valence, and, while accurate within a bubble, are easily misinterpreted by those outside. Okay, but still.

People tend to think of words on the internet, or words in a book, but ignore folk uses of words. This lands them far from the truth. Words mean things because they're pointed at things besides other words.

When we're talking to the people physically around us these things are almost always the shared environment. Weather. Friends in common. Clothing. Words that appear entirely contentless without their social situation. We say observations until it looks like we share a single reality.

When we're working together to accomplish a task the words often refer to configurations and immediate context. You lift that side. Am I moving or are you? Look in the hole. I'll go high, you go low. Words that appear entirely contentless without their surroundings.

These "contentless" words (though maybe here I might actually call a word "lossy") mean real stuff. Words on the internet? Words in books? Concepts??

Words point through some conceptual domain at an actual reality. Words change sounds, concepts change content, and reality literally moves beneath your feet. A rose by any other name would still be a rose?

Words don't have meaning on their own - they trigger it in another person's brain. Also "your" meaning was known to you before it was words.

sense -> words -> received words -> triggered sense

3 translations, 3 moments where personal contexts/mood alter the "message", per word
— Raymond (@rfinz) September 3, 2018

To borrow from my own words:

Words are, at best, a temporally locked trace of a particular thought pattern. A single frame of a continuous animation.

Words are pattern poetry, chorded activations of concepts that bring us close to some framework of understanding. Just framework, though—bones.

form is just content bones
— Science Banana (@literalbanana) July 14, 2019

You don't need words to think, though the framework that words provide may help scaffold you into more complex domains. You don't need concepts to think, though concepts may help scaffold you into a domain that resembles words.

So words point through concepts that you possess, and are adequate to express those. Well, mostly adequate. Words don't smell. Words don't sing. Words don't rearrange matter with their bare hands. I just don't even know if inadequate is an adequate word to describe the not-even-wrongness of words not singing or smelling. They're not inadequate. They're nonsensical. Or maybe seussical.

Words also point through concepts that other people possess, and are adequate enough to express those — confusing as that may ultimately be.

So do words suck? Are words hard? Or what?

Sensations for Emotional Reasoning

2019-06-24T00:00:00-05:00

Sensations for Emotional Reasoning

You in Need of Release

You, tightly bound, in need of proper release, cords cut, returned to freedom. Assuming that the mind is of leather straps or metal catches, it follows that the straps must be released and the catches undone for free movement to occur. Assuming that the mind is a pressurized pipe, or maybe some other vessel, it follows that we must occasionally "vent" or "blow off steam". Assuming that the mind balances upon a single point, it follows that occasionally things fall "out of balance" or are "unbalanced". A mind of rope may be in "tension" or "relaxation". A mind of doors may become "unhinged". But where does the pressure go? What straps are released? What direction does the brain tip to become unbalanced?

You Who Might Not Know Your Emotion as Friend

Are you your emotions? Or do those emotions whisper to you? Do they whisper sweet secrets of your innermost desires and motivations? Are you your motivations? Or maybe, because your emotions must whisper motivation's secrets to you, your motivations are somewhat outside of you as well.

Here we are in today's metaphors: desire, like reality TV, dozens of suitors from across space and time. Emotion, your best friend, informant to your cause, purveyor of juicy gossip. What do you believe? Who do you choose? Ultimately that's up to "you". Maybe you believe that your best friend's opinion must be your own, though I find that unlikely. And maybe you believe that whatever suitor is strongest should just take you, by force. I find that even unlikelier.

You Who Might Be Blocked or Clotted

Let us forgive what I said about ropes. Your life is a rope that is slipping through your hands. The occasional clump, snarl, clot or blockage catches upon your palms and interrupts the gentle slither of fiber on flesh. Pain! Frustration! Suffering! This is not far from the truth. You slow your breath and widen your grasp and become an accommodating channel for the rope, where the clots might pass you by, noticed but evaded. This seems wise.

But maybe there's something else. Maybe with effort you can transmute the clots or blockages of your suffering into knots, sturdy affordances by which you can grasp the rope and let it pull where it may. By this you relinquish control and establish it. It is by your own grip that you hold this particular knot, having skillfully allowed less appealing forms to pass unmolested. If you are not accustomed to a firm grasp the knots may very well seem like a nuisance, a kink to be unwound. This seems unwise.

Let go of the rope, you say? The gentle float is worthwhile, but mind your lifeline to past, present, and future.

You Who Feels Nothing for the Moss and the Rocks

Are you filled with emotion at first glimpse of raw earth? Do you chuckle when you avoid a puddle? Or perhaps when you barrel through? Mostly not. But what of when you slip and fall, or the going is slow and harrowing, or the puddle means rain after a long drought? A tree might appear neutral on first appraisal, but how does it feel to have shade to sit in? One wonders if that emotion was there the whole time: not in the fibers of the tree or water of the puddle, but in how those fibers and that water interact with what we can or must do in the world.

You Who May Not Feel the Emotional as Physical

The moon is not as big as it may appear near the horizon. Our vision stops when our eyes remain still. Hills appear steeper when we're sad. Glasses of water appear larger when we're thirsty. The world is not our sight or our hearing, though that is a part of our world. Our world is not the "surreality" of emotion, though the surreality is part of it.

As much as any of our "physical" senses of the world belong to us, so does emotion - our sense of motivation, of goal, of value. Without emotion there is no world out there: our senses co-evolved to fill our niche. We can not see without seeing what something means to us— our motivations in the landscape.

…and what of these motivations? From whence do they come? Do they come from yourself? A genetic realm beyond your sight (and within your emotional gaze)? Do they come from without? A societal miasma beyond your sight (and within your emotional gaze)?

You Who Might Need a Conclusion

The path you might wind through the world of desire is infinite. You may well wear your walking shoes.

Try to imagine where your emotions come from. Are your emotions a "thing" on their own? Do they exist without the context in which they operate? Have you ever been angry about being angry? Who are you angry at, then?

Try to imagine how your emotions pull you. Think about catching a knot and holding tight. What does it feel like to be pulled along by anger? Or by sadness? Or by happiness? Are there memories you had to conjure in order to inhabit this metaphor? Is there anything tugging on you now?

Try to imagine three reasons why you're reading this. Did you make them up? Were they latent? How small were they? A pebble in your mind's eye? Or did you look up and into the face of a cliff?

Take this, a gift:

Emotion is an adaptive feature of our existence; even the "negative" ones have positive purpose
Emotion holds the meaning of our lives, or as close to it as we can get; even when this meaning is ill matched to our new reality
Emotion is not who we are in the world or what we do in the world; it is something that precedes those things.
Emotion is not something we choose; it is something that we choose to respond to, however we may

Notes on Matter and Zeitgeist

2018-10-25T00:00:00-05:00

Notes on Matter and Zeitgeist

Sitting here tonight and noticing, aimlessly, that I have some descriptive work to do that is not going to get done anytime soon. I've been focused on longform writing and the pressure to create complete attempts, rather than attempting slowly, over much time, is tiresome. Working slowly, over much time, is equally tiresome. I don't know.

In AI from a Different Computer Universe I labeled a large blank area the "substrate of patterned matter and zeitgeist" as if that alone were explanatory. I'd like to compile some other partial descriptions that may be benificial to my own thoughts about the thing (if they're in one place).

Substrate?

I'm talking about fundamental building blocks here. It feels weird to say that things are "literally made of goals", so I probably won't. I will say that we behave as if this were true, so when I say that the region is a "substrate of patterned matter and zeitgeist", I mean that for a mind (whatever mind it is I'm in the process of describing, universality not guaranteed) to work it must also behave as if everything were made of both matter and value (goals, zeitgeist).

Patterned Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist is patterned because it has some predictable forms. It is difficult (or too easy) to describe because it is nebulous. In Goal Plane I state explicitly that there are things that happen within Zeitgeist that not everyone can sense, or that appear to have different shapes from different angles.

One universal seeming pattern is that forms within Zeitgeist (the goal plane) can affect the material plane, and forms within the material plane can affect the goal plane.

Partial descriptions of the push and pull with material reality:

Goal/Zeitgeist
Actor-Network Theory
Popper's World 3
The Noosphere (kinda weak?)
Some of the fundamental meaning stuff I was thinking about recently
Temporary Autonomous Zones, Egregores, Tulpas

It also seems as though Zeitgeist has dimensionality to it (I often think of it topologically (though I'm much too dumb to get into the weeds about specific topological forms)) that can be navigated similarly to the material world, and has regions[we'll see about that] that feel distinct and that have their own traits.

Partial description of the Zeitgeist "landscape":

The "surreality" of meaning that we live in (Solomon)
Moods
Plans
Also the TAZ, Eg things, and Tulps as above

Noticing that the psychic groupings are in both listings, maybe that's the obsession with them? They affect the world and they're "big" enough that many people can agree that they exist. Sounds like a good start at least.

Patterned Matter

Content to say that it probably exists

This document will grow as I continue to galaxy brain

Common Humour Patterns of Mostly WEIRD Urban Minnesotans, Ages 22-30, Collected 2018-2019

2018-10-01T00:00:00-05:00

Common Humour Patterns of Mostly WEIRD Urban Minnesotans, Ages 22-35, Collected 2018-2019

Comedy patterns that play out in informal social settings, with a focus on patterns that invite active participation from the group beyond simple laughter.

Sounds Funny

Funny noise, funny noise repeated, funny noise escalated (syllables elongated, substituted, switched around)
Word sounds unnatural or weird, word gets repeated, funniest parts of the word escalated (syllables elongated, substituted, switched around)

"Bad"

(audience participation in the "badness" is invited)

Obvious pun
Clever pun
Hyperbole
Intentional Malaphor

Bits

Physical bit with "chorus" echo, with repeating and variations, as the "Sounds Funny" category, above
Everyone is doing the same accent
Someone says something hyberbolic or otherwise absurd, onlookers "play along" as if it were true or maybe say "is that so?"

Reminiscing

Recounting just the barest details of a funny scene from a television show or movie that most of the group has seen, someone else can chime in with a detail or free-associate to the next scene or another similar scene
Recounting just the barest details of a funny shared experience, participation through free association is also encouraged

Continuous work in progress until 2020