Aleph

How should I feel small

Beneath the open sky

When at last I see all that I am?

This fragment of poetry has been spinning around in my head for something like two years. I can't remember where it came from. Perhaps I read it somewhere and forgot the source. Perhaps I saw a verse a bit like it in a poem I remember not at all, and the fragment has been twisted into what it is now. Perhaps I even made it myself in one of the great swathes of time of which I have no memories to speak of. Perhaps I found it in a dream (is that the same as having made it?), and of course I rarely remember my dreams at all.

Regardless of it's source, it's meant a whole polytopia of different things to me over the course of years of personal development. The an earlier state of the process I'm forced to refer to as 'I' and 'me' (for want of a better language, or better yet a good DNI) saw hazy connections between the shape of the clouds and synesthesiac representations of his/my emotional states, felt some strange pride in the perceived connection between his/my mind and such a beautiful thing.

More recently, it was something like my acknowledgement of the origins of the particles making up my body and the wider universe... seeing the majesty of the sky, I was seeing some similarity to the phenomena that birthed my synergetic components... and that's a meaning I still like, and it's a component of the larger understanding I came across this evening beneath that open sky.

Cut to an hour ago. The curve and spin of the planet is pulling me and the horizon away from the sun, my vantage point in relation to the air above that distant curve filters the light of the sun to a warm red-orange, like the embers of a fire. The gradient of the clouds sheeting the atmosphere and following that barely-distinguishable curve reflect different bands of light at me in a pleasing gradient. I'm lying on the highest hill in a few miles, arms spread and looking slightly cruciform on the stalks of what was recently tall grass and is now hay bales. Looking straight up, the sky from my vantage point resembles a lens, and I stare up at the perceived apex, trying to glimpse the infinity I know is out there but which is hidden by that beautiful blue layer of scattered light.

I'm running about three thought processes in parallel: one about leaves, one of thoughts about various people I know, and the other seeing the sky in front and feeling the grass behind and juggling concepts of scale, perception, context and perspective (I've been reading some of Moravec's stuff about interpretation spaces and it's stuck).

Compared to the vastness I know to be in front of me but cannot see, I am a collection of quantum blips adhered by gravity to a mote of dust floating in a sunbeam/Compared to the sessile life-forms I'm lying on top of and the micro-organisms in the soil beneath them, and in the air and in every part of my body and In my every breath, I am a vast pseudo-deity of coherence and consequence and beautiful interrelationships of focused biology.

Compared to the spherical world-ship I am a tiny integral function and product of, let alone the entity we call Galaxy in which it is a similar speck, I have lived a few microseconds and glimpsed and learned infinitesimally little/compared to the things that live in my mouth, the butterfly that flew past me as I walked up the hill, let alone the human children who die every day a few days or hours or minutes old, I have lived an eternity and am functionally omniscient. We are microbes and we are gods. It probably takes a tiny effort to switch between those two perspectives. For one who can hold simultaneous multiple worldveiws, being both of them is quite an enlightening experience.

Those three lines of untraceable poetry sprung to my mind, and, as if meeting an old acquaintance and wondering whether you still like them, I turned it over in light of this new insight/lens/filter, as well as some of the other insights, epiphanies and conceptual markers I've picked up from my travels. The sunclipse was over and the sky was getting less directly interesting, so I stood up, looked around a bit, stretched and set off on the run back across the fields to town. As I was vaulting over a fence when the lazy flows of self washing around and bouncing off each other, I suddenly came to one of the emergent-idea things that I like to call a Confluence.

Like a paradigmatic layer being ripped away and letting the thoroughly-metaphorical waters of thought and being flow into a new deep pool or shaft or maybe lazing cavity (though mixing metaphors never helps to explain), I could see a meaning to Those Three Lines more profound than all the others I'd tied to it over the years.

I've acknowledged for a while now the nature of sophonce as a homunculus experience nestled within an opaque cushioning layer of data. I tried to explain that epiphany before in a rambling that I never put up, because I couldn't make it make sense. I'll try short-form.

I'll leave the wonderful connected insights for another post or possibly even a recorded talk on one of the video sites, Alex Kaapa style, because I can explain it better by wandering around an empty room and talking to no-one than I can ever do in writing.

But, basically, the 'we' that we acknowledge with the word 'we', the 'I' that 'I' am not yet cognitively flexible enough to avoid thinking of, the 'you' that 'you' perceive to be reading this are abstractions, our original function something like a cognitive sorting engine, a circuit for all the beautiful efficient animal prediction-and-control processes to... to "bounce ideas off" and to find out what the other 'teams' have been doing and make connections. As Peter Watts put it, like the pointy-haired boss off of Dilbert, signing memos, passing them on, and taking all the credit for the company. We are the circuit with the power to acknowledge... but like the superficial manager and router in the metaphor, we can only see the surface 'buzz' from each team as they try to explain the process to one not educated in their field of work. The communication between sections of the brain to the 'mediator' (sophonce) is about as superficial as current language is for communicating true thought between two humans.

The patterns and relationships we see in the world are the explaining-to-a-numpty feedback of the deeply integrated pattern of prediction algorithms the unique 'team' lobes have developed from observation of their particular specialisation... food-detection, social analysis, memory storage (those memories we can call to mind are again as talk is to thought, our brain can remember a lot more of our previous iterations (lives) than 'we' can... I think people with eidetic memory are those who have a clearer connection between the memory and the 'sophonce' circuits, people with super-functioning mathematical abilities similarly so, same for 'empaths', etc.) and so on.

And our 'being-ness' is something like an iffy boss in the way it misunderstands certain team input, overvalues certain data over others, and makes biased decisions based on it's slightly skewed and under-specialised view of the situation, and the lobes knowing that while their director is by no means perfect, they have no capacity to object or even acknowledge how the other lobes are working, and so they all go along with their part of sophonce's decisions, and 'act to keep it happy' according to their specialisation. This 'keeping the boss happy' is what leads to the phenomenon of preconscious free will (this explains a lot better than I do, I'm just doing the basics. Yes, that's what me covering the basics looks like).

What we end up with, then, is the sophonce living purely as a not-really-decision-making conduit, being fed data by every'one' else, including the sensory cortices who have already parsed the sight for them. 'We' can already be said to be living in telepresence, VR, whatever. It's Eric hunting's 'actual transparency vs. virtual transparency' thing applied to brains. We are just a stream of experiences and data suspended between the nodes that are doing the actual work and causing them to misunderstand each other.

All this I acknowledged as something I'd learned previously, this I acknowledged whilst leaping the fence. Running through then next field, I pondered it's relevance to the poem, and whether it really applied anymore...

And to my surprise and elation it fits more than ever. If i take 'sky' as not the sheath of gas it really is and instead take it as my interpretation of the shape of the cloud, the colour I think I see, and the fact that I am my thoughts and perceptions, I realise that I'm more expansive than I thought, even in my musings on the nature of scale as I lay on the grass. I am the sky. I am the trees. I am but a pale reflection of true beauty and complexity but every part of my process is achingly beautiful, stunningly complex nevertheless.

For the rest of the run I sort of elatedly ran off a list that reminds me rather a lot of the longest and most beautiful sentance in the history of literature, from Jorge Luis Borges' story about the quest for the Aleph. Find it and read it, it will change you.

My list, as I ran home, ran something like this

Beneath the open sky, at last I see all that I am. I am every blade of grass I can see here, in their infinite varying rows that are but illusion. I am the clouds that spiral above this body. I am the feeling of my hips and the bones of my legs vibrating with the percussion of the ground, I am the muscles that move them, I am the elegant relationship between these feelings, I am the dirt beneath the balls of my feet, I am these leaves I duck beneath, I am the wind of my passing on my face, I am the feeling of the shape of my face and the knowledge of the variations of it's look in a million mirrors, I am the face and appearance of every person I know and many I do not, I am the knowledge that behind those faces lie other strange collections of beauty I will never know, unaware of their expansiveness. I am the knowledge that behind the sky is infinity, I am what I see of every other person, just as they are what they see of me. I am the guesswork as to what they feel and experience, the attempt to empathise and the knowledge that I allow my hand to be warmed by a sunbeam and clam to hold the sun in my palm, I am the unfolding patterns of a Mandelbrot set, I am the memory of mountains and I am the assumption that they are still there, for I cannot know. I am a thousand places vividly remembered in a little area of the world made of of little bits of Europe. I am motorways and oceans, I am the taste of an apple turnover from Belgium, I am the still images of places I have never physically been, (yes, been) seen in photograps. I am the sweep of stratocirrus and I am the strange way it reminds me of walking down the streets of Santillana del Mar, I am the spires of sandstone cathederals, I am the veins in a leaf, I am my own organs, I am the evidence of billions of people, people like snowflakes, utterly unique yet so similar from a distance and there's so damn many of them that we forget to pay attention to the uniqueness and beauty, I am the taste of eggs and grapes....

It went on like that for some time.... I just thought I'd share this insight while it's fresh in my mind and I'm enjoying it