Ran Prieur

October 10.

2022-10-10T22:20:10Z

October 10. Thanks Matt for suggesting a good tangent to last week's post. I've been using the concepts of "first person" and "third person" in the most basic way: first = from the inside; third = from the outside. It's a lot more complicated, and some people have suggested adding a "fourth person". But I'd rather not be constrained by numbers. Here's how I break it down.

The deepest level of "me" is "I am this stream of experience." (Actually you can get even deeper: I am the void that this stream of experience fills.)

The next level is the embodied self: how to interpret raw sense data into stuff like, "This is my leg. That's a tree. That's the sound of rain."

The next level is the reflective self, or what western culture calls the self. It includes stuff like, "My favorite color is orange. I am an introvert. I have a strong imagination." Ego is the stickiness of the reflective self, its resistance to changing and expanding.

The next level is the social self, where I think about what other people think about me. It's complex, but I'll just point out that there's a difference between "I am sensitive to other people's expressions of what they think about me," and "I imagine myself inside another person looking at me."

The latter, we usually call the "second person", and for the first time, you're taking a perspective outside your own skin.

Another way to get outside your own skin, is to shift from I to we. This has usually been done with the local social unit, the family or tribe. When it becomes reflective (this is what my people are like), the multi-person self is more egocentric than the one-person self: more resistant to change, more resistant to expansion, and more sensitive to the expressions of others.

In theory, the multi-person self doesn't need an opponent to define it, and it can be expanded to include all humans, or all beings. In practice, these moves are done by educated people, on an intellectual level, and rarely on the level of feeling.

Now, it's a whole different way of thinking, to look at something and say, "That's not me." And there's a whole range of ways to do it, but they all come down to the habits and values of your constructed self. You can look at a tree like an artist, or like an ecologist, or like a lumberjack.

Also, "not me" raises a peculiar option, which I think is uniquely dominant in western culture: the "view from nowhere." It's an attempt to strip knowing from perspective, to say, "Never mind what you see, this is how things are." Supposedly this is the view of science, and yet the most advanced science refutes it.

On a practical level, the view from nowhere is probably necessary to make a large complex society work. But we don't have to take it so seriously. You can see it even at the level of the reflective self, where instead of saying "This is my favorite song," we're tempted to say, "This is the best song."

October 8.

2022-10-08T20:00:16Z

October 8. A few fun links for the weekend. The question is often asked on the Psychonaut subreddit, What do you prefer, LSD or Shrooms? But this thread has an unusually good set of answers. In my experience, LSD makes everything luminous and mushrooms make everything peculiar. Or, LSD is major key and mushrooms are minor key.

From Hacker News, a much smarter thread about psychedelics, on an article about LSD-like molecules that counter depression without the trip. Personally, I've never had either one -- hallucinations, or an obvious effect on my mental health. I could always just take a huge dose, but LSD is hard to find, and mushrooms make me nauseated, so I prefer to dink and dunk.

Two relaxing driving simulators, Drivey.js and Nightdrive. If you're interested, here's a page about the Making of Nightdrive, and some other projects by the Drivey.js creator.

October 5.

2022-10-05T17:30:53Z

October 5. In the Leafbox interview, I was asked "Do you have any religious practices?" I said no, but actually I do. Every year in June I take a long walk, with certain cognitive enhancements, in a good semi-wild area. This year I was too busy moving, but I've arranged to housesit for my stepmom, so I could come back to Pullman in October and take my favorite walk, up the south fork of the Palouse River out of town.

Every time I do this, I get reminded of the same insight, and try again to put it into words. This time I thought of a line from Mike Snider: "It is effulgent, visceral, radiant, and absolutely void of any objectivity or subjectivity whatsoever."

It's God and heaven rolled into one -- but those are loaded words. I'm talking about something genderless, nonhuman, and mostly beyond our perception and understanding. "Nature" is how it appears to us. The world of wild biological life is our primary interface to the one real thing.

Then I see, poking out of that, some ugly building, and I have to wonder: What's the point of humans? Why did we go off on this strange and painful path of disconnection?

There are a hundred stories we could tell. We are a meaningless accident. We're here to spread life to other planets. We're here to bring the carbon to the surface and go extinct. We're baby gods learning to be world builders. We're remedial souls qualifying to rejoin the whole.

The idea I got, this time, is a variation on a common saying, "We are the universe experiencing itself." Sure, but the universe is already experiencing itself all the time. It doesn't need humans for that. What we can do, is see the universe in the third person. A tree knows what it's like to be a tree, but it doesn't know what it's like to look at a tree with eyes tuned for aesthetics.

On my walk I borrowed a hat with the slogan "The Last Frontier". The last frontier is not space -- it's us. Just as we send astronauts into space to see the earth, the mind beneath the earth has sent us into a headspace so isolated that it can look back at itself.

I got the feeling that our job is almost done. Within a thousand years we'll be gone, not through failure but success. Our birthrates will taper to zero as our deeper selves are like, "Humans, been there, done that." But I'm probably wrong. Our brains are so adaptable, surely they're good for more than one thing.

October 2.

2022-10-02T14:00:55Z

October 2. Stray links, posted early because I'll be busy tomorrow.

Gabriel sends this cool article on Stone Skipping. The most interesting thing is the guy the article focuses on, Kurt Steiner. He's the rarest kind of person: highly eccentric, but competent enough to not be dead or in prison, and also highly motivated.

There's endless choice, but you're not listening. The article is a selection of people explaining why they quit streaming music. I find Spotify a convenient way to share playlists of well-known songs. But even when I listen to those playlists, I do it by getting the mp3s from Soulseek, putting them in a folder on my laptop, and playing them in VLC.

I wonder if AI will ever come up with a really good music recommendation engine. Right now they all work by correlation: what do people who listen to this song also listen to? That never gives me anything surprising. I want one that actually analyzes the sounds, so it could follow an obscure song to an equally obscure song from a different genre.

Interesting Hacker News thread on cheating in chess. A few hints from a computer can make such a big difference, and be so hard to detect, that the standard of "innocent until proven guilty" leaves way too much room for cheaters, and the chess world is still figuring out what to do. I expect they'll eventually make players change out of all their clothes to a tournament uniform, and play without an audience. In 30 years, they'll have to scan for brain implants.

Dense essay, The Pathologies of the Attention Economy, with some interesting stuff about the history of attention as a scarce commodity. The basic argument:

1. We inhabit a techno-social environment manufactured to fracture our attention.

2. The interests served by this environment in turn pathologize the resultant inattention.

3. These same interests devise and enforce new techniques to discipline the inattentive subject.