idgo forgot its grimoire at home and is using this instead

[idgo]

I have it on my list today to write about Loops, Resistance, and Secrets. This seems as good a place as any to write something and have a good chance of finding it again -- better than a stray scrap of paper, at least.

Loops:

I entertain the speculation that "time" and "causality" have underlying mechanisms bearing little resemblance to the most common, practical metaphors we place upon them. Or, to put it another way, I speculate that alternate metaphors may be immensely more useful than the usual ones for explaining and understanding things that make no bloody sense when assessed the usual way.

Some materials that have recently refined my interpretation of the whole "holy shit time might not be as straightforward as it's convenient to pretend" thing include https://www.roadtovr.com/researchers-expexploitloit-natural-quirk-of-human-vision-saccade-hidden-redirected-walking-vr-gtc-2018/, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15965472, and similar. Also I tend to conflate sharding(https://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/sharding) with RAID(https://dtidatarecovery.com/raid-how-works/) due to a bit of sloppiness in applying technical metaphors to domains where they really don't belong. I also assume the reader has read http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html.

When altered enough to slow rational thought so I can actually watch it go by, I get the distinct impression that... a straight line drawn across the "disk" of time-serialized experience appears to pass through a variety of shards of disparate identity/self experiences, and serializing "reality" in a way that yields an apparently sensible ordering of self-experiences seems to involve a lot of seeks across the "disk" of "reality".

The less computer-ified, more artistic, and seemingly more human-understandable metaphor for the same thing that popped up to me recently is something someone really oughtta sculpt sometime: Model space-time "reality" as a sheet, the scoby grown on top of a big flat pond of kombucha or just a piece of cloth. Crumple it up into roughly a sphere, and you have a setup that looks not unlike the surface of a brain. That's the shared... substrate maybe? "external" thing? And then take a long sharp wire and interpose it through that balled-up sheet, again and again, till little of the sheet is left un-pierced and the wire is all inside the "brain" or "ball". In this, the wire is a linear serialization of one conscious experience... though if you're an electron at any particular point on the wire, and can only see along the sheet/membrane, it will *look* like there are myriad separate wires going along beside where you're at.

Anyways, Resistance and Secrets.

Secrets are an easy write: The secrets that are still secret in this day and age are so for a reason. Generally, they're some combination of exceedingly difficult to understand, useless, difficult to do anything *with* an understanding of including confirm that understanding is correct, and so far removed from language as to be nearly in-transmissible between humans. That's not a complete ontology; a seemingly worthwhile project for later on would be to categorize all the pieces of information in my head that I or others regard as "secrets".

And it's later on right now.

The lowest, degenerate, "false" secrets are things it'd be easy to understand if they were offered to a listener. For example, the password to this account is a secret in this class: If my password was "lollercopters34", and I told you so, then you would be able to use that secret to its fullest power and succeed at logging into my account. These secrets are the weakest because they do nothing to protect themselves; they fit fully and cleanly into language so when I say my understanding of the secret to someone else and they hear it, they get an understanding that has all the features and utility of the understanding that I attempted to say. These "degenerate" secrets are trivially easy to disprove -- you can try logging in as me with the aforementioned string in the password field, and you'll instantly discover that it is not the secret it claimed to be at all.

An intermediate class of secret -- "simple true secrets", perhaps? -- are only communicable with some additional shared background. The easier of these "simple true secrets" are those against which the listener has never been inoculated. An "easy simple true secret" is the Pythagorean theorem -- a^2 + b^2 = c^2, to find side lengths of a right triangle. It's in no way well-kept, and in no way self-keeping: Once it gets out, anyone with a sufficient background in arithmetic and algebra can use it to do its thing. However, show it to a kid who hasn't yet taken an algebra class (or an adult with sufficient pride in their own ignorance to have avoided retaining any algebra after school), and it looks like Greek. I suspect that  "simple true secrets", by virtue of being communicable in their entirety, can be disproven: If I claimed that a^2 + b^2 = b^2 for all right triangles, anyone with an appropriate mathematical background could trivially produce an example for which that wasn't the case. Computational complexity theory likely holds some sister classes to this one -- ideas easy to share accurately and demonstrate that they were shared accurately, but hard to disprove -- but I'll resist the temptation to hop down that rabbit hole and find them at the moment.

(I'll use the metaphor of a castle later. The secrets up to this point come through the portal in that castle unharmed)

The other simple true secrets -- ideas communicable in their entirety, but requiring shared background -- are the "difficult" ones. These are the secrets for which something has to be "un-learned" in order to use them. If someone was raised to believe that physique is dictated solely by genetics, "weight gain happens when you consume more calories than you expend, and vice versa" might be a "difficult simple true secret". If someone understands what calories are, and what it means to consume or expend a calorie (the shared background), they technically have all they need to lose or gain weight at will... they might be able to do all the math for how much weight a person with a given activity level and diet should be expected to gain or lose... but *actually implementing it to change their own life* could be difficult or impossible. Later categories of secrets can also qualify as "difficult", but difficult secrets are such a PITA that this will hopefully be my only mention of them here. (In the castle later, Difficult secrets are those that get torn and bent on their journey through the portal)

A lot of self-help, therapy, and simple magic falls into this "difficult simple true secret" bucket.

Then, beyond the fake secrets and the simple real secrets, there are more categories. I know of at least one such category: The "self-keeping" secrets. Information that I qualify as "self-keeping secrets" is that which *cannot* be accurately replicated through language from person to person.

I guess we can break self-keeping secrets into 2 further categories: Testable and un-testable. A testable self-keeping secret is one where you can't necessarily say the same set of words to every person and have them *get it*, but there exists some "objective" metric to measure whether they've gotten it. I figure that how to hit a home run, or how to shoot accurately, and similar athletic skills often fall into this category of testable self-keeping secrets. I can read all I want about how to hit a home run, yet in order to actually do it, I need additional information about my personal physiology that I can only gain by the trial and error that we generally call "practice". But, importantly, if I tell you "hey I learned to hit a home run", you can be like "OK then do it" and if I do it then you know I learned it and if I don't do it you can give me a couple more chances then write it off as either un-learned or unknown-whether-I-learned if I fail all of them. There's a lot of money for people who can persuade others that they can communicate or even just use a self-keeping secret, and this ties into the economic value of university degrees. (when I get around to discussing the castle, these will be items that can be sent out through the portal, but not brought in well)

Now, the un-testable self-keeping secrets are where things get really screwy. As will be obvious to anyone with pattern-matching faculties and the patience or insanity to have read this far, un-testable self-keeping secrets are the ones where when you have the idea in your head, and you try to put it into language, and you look at the language, it's instantly obvious that those words could mean a whole lot of things other than what you actually meant.... *no matter what words you choose!* And to compound that, there's no way for a listener to produce any language or action that can confirm with adequate certainty that the thing they constructed in their head upon listening holds any useful resemblance to the thing you had in your head and attempted to put into words!

(castle: these can't travel through the portal in either direction. They are often "discovered" outside the walls.)

Since un-testable self-keeping secrets are by definition not falsifiable, and a given serialization of one may have far greater utility to one person than to another based on their respective contexts in life, they often look like total bunk to most people. Additionally, any personal algorithm for decoding "the real meaning" behind a serialization of an un-testable self-keeping secret will be able to decode "real meanings" out of literally anything (which can often be very amusing and/or enlightening!)

Note that I'm whinging here less about any absolute traits of information, and more about the limitations of communication as we know it. Also I should probably draw this whole mess into a comic of sorts; I tend to gravitate toward spatial metaphors for internal use on non-linguistically-serializable concepts so those raw images might translate somewhat better into attempts to communicate.

Anyways, Resistance.

Resistance can be viewed as an algorithm that I personally apply to look for "real meanings" behind un-testable self-keeping secrets. Note above that such algorithms are guaranteed to produce "meanings" unrelated to what the authors of what you point them at "really meant", much if not all of the time! But that's ok, because I happen to enjoy watching things that can't think try to do so anyways and other such pursuits, so the algorithm's output is always *interesting* and I'm not bothered by the fact that it would likely disagree with others' interpretations if it was possible to compare interpretations to one another directly.

Resistance is basically that feeling that some thoughts give you when they, uh, "don't want to be thought". You know, "1 + 1 = 43" kind of "wrong". That feeling of "wrong" is what tells you you're looking at something that falls outside the boundaries of "sane and reasonable" thought, which means that you have a *candidate* for something that might do things "impossible" in the sane and reasonable world. Examining and testing those candidates is a whole other set of puzzles, and I haven't yet tried my hand at crafting a metaphor with any hope of usefully explaining to anyone else how I actually do that.

The tie-in back to prior ramblings (a tie-back? hold open some curtain?) here is that this Resistance can be a hint that a self-kept secret may be nearby. Or maybe it's my technique for sniffing around in veins of resistance that lace the rock into which we carve our tunnels of reason, that's actually helpful? I haven't yet figured out how to test that one. I guess I figure that the "self" in "self-keeping secrets" is tied into the nature of language and reason/logic -- if they're the barrier against sharing certain secrets, then looking at things I know for certain are on the other side of that barrier (because they produce Resistance) seems like as good a way as any to find interesting things.

(in the castle that I'll be getting around to quite shortly now, this Resistance pervades the world outside the walls)

Oh, and on Safety and Interesting Things.

Interesting Things tend to come with an option for using them, and when you haven't used a thing before it's between difficult and impossible to predict the full consequences of doing so. Because while causality might not be the *only* explanation, or even the *best* one for all circumstances, it nevertheless reliably models a part of human experience that's highly relevant to keeping on having a brain for thinking with.

It can even be useful to model the Interesting Things one finds outside of reason as explosives, grenades, land mines. Maybe teleporters, if you want to get all non-violent. Point is, *using* a Thing you find outside Sense and Reason tends to have nonsensical and unreasonable consequences. More relevantly, using the first Thing you find when wandering around out there is a quick trip to not knowing where you are or what's going on any more.

I find that as long as one has a functioning brain and body and place in society, it's trivially easy to "reset" back to some "spawn point" within Sense and Reason. It's like welp, that didn't work, back to where we started.

I guess in this metaphor, the most useful thing I've so far figured out to do with the Interesting Things I find outside of Sense and Reason is to try to carefully bring them back into it, and examine what I have left.

If this area I'm calling Sense and Reason is a castle, Language is a portal within its central keep through which one can export all supported concepts to the Language portal in others' Sense and Reason castles. On the grounds, one can attempt to piece back together the shredded bits of things that got a bit beaten up in their journey through Language. When there looks like there's a piece missing, it's feasible to send away for a new copy of that piece, or an updated blueprint showing that you assembled it quite wrong. And I've annotated earlier through this post how the different classes of secret interact with it.

I was supposed to look up whether I'm redundant over Hofsteader's Strange Loops, but that requires attempting to re-grok them (they tend to seem self-keeping, with a bit of Difficulty for me thrown in by their reliance on mathematical analogies I balk at).

I'll make a new thread if I have more things to say, so y'all are welcome to write words in the comments here if you feel like it.

[idgo]

https://i.imgur.com/iz1kFc6.gif

[pi_rameses]

Great title for a journal btw

[idgo]

Great title for a journal btw

Thanks! I suppose explaining the ideology which leads to that sort of incongruous title is itself a writing prompt. Do we want writing prompts for the journal section? Probably so. Perhaps I'll post some and see how they're received.

Anyways, through observing how others interact with their own belief systems, I've noticed a common trend: Someone does something out of the ordinary, gets it into their head that they're somehow  More Special-er than everybody else, and proceeds to more or less lose touch with reality.

Now, losing touch with reality is not in itself a problem. Most intentional alteration of the mind, whether by disciplines or chemicals, has losing touch with some part of reality as an integral component to its goals. Untying oneself from Causality (aka Consensus) places one into a space where one has nearly limitless power.

I identify an ordering of possible states, with "fully engrossed in and limited by Causality" at the one extreme and "fully engrossed in and limited by the Subjective" at the other. I've found that the first effect of learning the philosophies and techniques generally sold in the Magick section has been an ability to traverse that ordering at will. Traversal of that line is interesting enough, but by itself it's neither particularly new nor particularly useful. The really interesting stuff -- the unexpected or unusual Power, as it were -- comes from twisting the line back onto itself in order to make available features of multiple disparate points at once. There are already some ties between points on the line -- sociology and psychology contain plenty of explanations for how deep internal states of mind influence individuals' behavior and real-world outcomes -- so it's often easiest to strengthen those existing links in order to build the desired web of interconnection.

Anyway, this is a paradigm in which my goals -- a Causality appropriately shaped by my Subjective world; a Subjective world appropriately shaped by Causality -- require me to be able to be able to freely and readily traverse the spectrum from fully Causal to fully Subjective at will. I find that reveling too long in the pleasure of absolute power available at the fully Subjective end of that road makes it harder and harder to persuade myself to leave it; to return to the fully Causal end at which there are a bunch of things in the world that I have no dang clue how to control yet and on which any attempt at exerting control would change the system into one I understand and influence even less than the current one.

That whole wall of text would probably do much better as a drawing. I'll have to see what I can do.

[idgo]

Drew it up because when is a line not a line? When it's in metaphysics and it's always actually a circle, that's when.

The "have" and "lack" refer to perception-AND-evidence, truth table style (https://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/boolean/bool_7.html). Perception mismatched from evidence lands you in whichever one offers less control for you:

False positive, thinking you can fly by flapping your arms when the evidence in the form of laws of aerodynamics say you can't? Your outer world gives you less control than your inner world, so it'll win. You try to fly, you fall and possibly break, and now your perceptions in the form of observations that you aren't flying are matched to the evidence available unless you're delusional.

False negative, thinking you can't get a better job, when in fact your skills are in demand? Your inner world gives you less control than your outer world, so it'll win. You don't clean up your resume and send out applications, thus you don't get any offers, thus your perception gets confirmed.

But,yeah. I find that untempered self-flattery, even when justified, is a quick ticket to landing in the third and fourth quadrants, which are a right PITA to drag oneself out of. It's the first and second that I try to hang out in whenever feasible.

[idgo]

Writing to note that before this,I had 21 likes, 21 posts, and a single pentacle under my name as displayed. Curious whether it's a a particular post count, or an administrator action, which may prompt that to change.

Contextualizing some daily life in the context of the glyph from my prior post in this thread, I notice that my insistence of favoring Q1 over Q4 lies at the root of some behaviors and thought patterns that I'd prefer to eventually grow out of.

Oh, I should note the glyph in words in case imgur ever goes away. Draw a circle. Place dots a bit outside the circle at compass points N, E, S, W, and dots inside the circle at N, E, S, W. So the vertical and horizontal through the circle each have 4 dots along them, 2 in and 2 out of the circle. Then make connecting "arrows" or "Vs": outer-N to inner-E to outer-S (later labeled "subjective" or "inner world"), outer-N to inner-W to outer-S (later labeled "objective" or "outer world"), outer-E to inner-N to outer-W (later labeled "have control"), outer-E to inner-S to outer-W (later labeled "lack control"). NW is Quadrant 1, NE is Q2, SE is Q3, SW is Q4.

Anyways, the Q4 mentality is "you are one vote in Consensus" and the Q1 is "with sufficient power you can create and control anything". Neither is false, and neither is sufficient in isolation.

I've also been thinking more about those points outside the circle, dividing the quadrants. At the west extreme, between Q1 and Q4, you have a maximally accurate representation of the "outer world"... which is outside the reach of the "self" represented by the circle, and un-asks the question of whether you have or lack control. The north extreme un-asks whether perfect control is external or internal. This gets me to suspecting that the whole thing might be like an inaccurate map projection -- the 4 points outside the circle are really one, so perhaps the glyph can only be "correctly" drawn on a spherical surface. The circle "self", then, is a liminal equator between the "inner" and "outer". While not wrong, this is a vastly less communicable metaphor than describing the boundary of self as an attempt to bound a fractal, so I shall draw something up and switch over to that one.

[Onyx]

The pentagram icons are related to post count: 0+, 50+, 100+, 250+ 500+.

[idgo]

Cool, thanks for clarifying!

First post in here was a wall of text that nobody sensible would bother reading from an unvetted source.

I tried to make it into a picture but it reads to me as trite and obvious. Oh well, spent too long a 5mins on it not to impose it upon any reader with the misfortune to have followed this thread so far.

Nature of the cute pupper in this metaphor is left as an easy exercise for the reader.

[idgo]

Additionally in "Librecad plus xpaint do not an art tool make", a visual impression of what I consider the "boundary of self" problem, which I may have alluded to in my postings in the science thread on bees.

The inner world is red, the outer, black. The gradient represents those spaces that are neither entirely inner nor entirely outer: This forum post, accessible to others but shaped by rumination internal to its author.  Memories of other posts you've read, shaped by others but accessible only to you unless you use them to create something new like a spoken or written description of them in the outside world.

And yet, the gradient isn't "real". You see a gradient only because of the way I happened to line up all the cells relative to one another; each individual cell holds only a single color. Any pair of touching cells are so close to one another in hue that one wonders if they were meant to be the same, and one of their off-tints is simply a mistake.

Just as there's no one line through the image on the one side of which is Only Red and the other is Only Black, I see no clean line between the Subjective and Objective.

[idgo]

The possessions of a Satanist serve an essential purpose: They must strike awe into their owner's soul. Appropriate possessions can induce a sense of being honored and amazed that you get to hold or use <yourname>'s <item>.

The brain believes what it sees. There is a depth of belief -- belief that its owner deserves the absolute best the world can offer, belief that its owner is the consummate monarch over their own domain -- that can only be instilled in the brain directly through the senses. The easy way to feed in that literal *sense* of well-earned luxury is by carefully curating the contents of the physical environment.

Relatedly, the brain is an item, an "it". The brain, as an organ described in English, does not have gender. I think, and should investigate after booting my own brain back to its usual architecture, that examining where gender comes from could be an interesting string dangling off of where "self" is. It's something that some people can sense very strongly, and as a property of "self" which is not a property of neurons, it may be a bookmark between the chapters of "brain" and "mind".

Edit: Following on, in case this wants to become an essay someday...

The sense of *honored* is the key bit there. The sense of being honored to get to interact with a particular thing is a facet of the sense that the thing is somehow out of reach, above one's station.

Tracing the sense that it'd be wrong to accept a thing as part of normal life points out where one's sensations of inferiority are. It points out where one, however irrationally, is putting oneself down, or holding oneself back from possibilities.

The sense of being made more special by proximity to a given item (a feeling which is one of many polite masks worn by the sense of personal inferiority to something or someone) can be reliably dispelled through long-term exposure to the item. And training oneself to dispel the easily reachable inferiorities, by practicing doing so with the tool of exposure to items that evoke it, makes one better at dissolving the more insidious inferiorities as well.

In other words: If you deeply believe that plumbusses are only for Better People, and you get yourself a nice plumbus, your brain will think that you're a Better Person (because all people with plumbusses are Better). One man's lost treasure is another's lucky find, and the brain's built-in naivete is as much a problem or an opportunity as you choose to make it.

This also ties into social factors: Seeing your friends be impressed by your things or your home shows your brain that you match or exceed their standards, which helps it model you as equal to those you look up to.

Seriously though, what do the *things you own* encode to your brain about *who you are*? You can overwrite some of the defaults -- "some broke loser who's still using damaged kitchenware" can become "an ecologically responsible person who's avoiding waste and showing resourcefulness by getting every bit of use out of their household items". And other such examples that're a poor reinvention of NLP. But yeah, you can probably easily see how you judge others for how they look and what they own and stuff, but do you see how you also judge yourself?

Bother. I think I might have just explained to myself the previously-inexplicable affinity between some individuals and name brands. I must remind myself that my own sense of Quality was shaped by factors not at all representative of standard or average conditions, which means I both value things others may not, and disregard things that others know enough to value. At least, I prefer the "we're just measuring with different rulers" explanation over the "we're using different ends of the same tape measure" one.

[idgo]

I'm grateful that the internet makes it easy for "bad" people to out themselves. The behaviors for trying to profit off of a new acquaintance are so different from the behaviors for enjoying friendship that it's instantly obvious which of those the person is doing. On a forum like this the spammers, by spamming, keep us from mistaking them for legitimate prospective friends.

Contrast that against those circumstances in life where the "right" and "wrong" answers look the same. Like asking a friend whether they lied to you -- the honest friend has every reason to tell you they didn't lie, but so does the dishonest one -- simply asking if they're lying will give you no new information whatsoever unless you happen to be uniquely good at reading contextual cues unrelated to their answer to your question.

[Xepera-maSet]

I apologize if you've addressed this, but what is your view on pragmatism? Both lower-case "pragmatism" like doing what works for the individual, and upper-case "Pragmatism" as in "'Truth' is what works"?

[idgo]

I apologize if you've addressed this, but what is your view on pragmatism? Both lower-case "pragmatism" like doing what works for the individual, and upper-case "Pragmatism" as in "'Truth' is what works"?

Thanks for asking! I had not addressed P/pragmatism directly, because I take both as foundational to the philosophies that require it and irrelevant to the ones that don't.

A large portion of my philosophical work starts in the vicinity of assessing language's strengths and weaknesses, because it's ultimately through language that I can compare my experiences to those reported by others and refine my understanding of how the Consensus/Objective world exists.

I suspect that lowercase-pragmatism is an accurate description of one part of my usual worldview, in that it's a nice tonic against absolutes. I find that when I venture far enough away from any valid claim, I discover valid antitheses to it. However, these apparent contradictions can be eliminated by carefully scoping all claims to the limits in which I know they're unchallenged. This local certainty coupled with global uncertainty in the thing most people call "truth" has trained me to focus on the meaninglessness of overarching "good" or "bad", preferring instead "good for this" or "bad at that". I use "useful" or "not useful" as stand-ins for the global "good" and "bad" which modern speech sometimes necessitate, because "useful" carries with it the question "for what?" in a way that the generally accepted notion of "good" doesn't tend to. I suspect that this process of attempting to avoid fallacious absolutes and replacing them with terms like "fitness for purpose" qualifies as pragmatism, and it's at the core of the philosophies that I spend most of my time using.

"pragmatism" like doing what works for the individual

Why, why, WHY would any neurologically intact and intellectually competent individual attempt to accomplish a goal by doing something they were certain DIDN'T work? I would get offended at you for suggesting anybody could be that stupid, but sadly I've met enough humans to suspect you probably aren't wrong to imply some don't get it.

and upper-case "Pragmatism" as in "'Truth' is what works"?

As for Pragmatism... On the level of abstraction at which most people discuss "Truth", I have yet to convince myself whether or not anything is even capable of "being True". This isn't a problem for me, as that level is sandwiched between one where everything is True and a bunch where some subset of everything is True and the rest isn't. Whenever I search my mind for such a worldview to use, it's because I want something. Maybe I want to control my surroundings; maybe I want to predict the future; maybe I simply want to feel consoled or entertained. Desire for change can be found at the root of all actions once one gets in the habit of looking for it.  And the nature of a moment's particular desire holds all the necessary information about which of the myriad available worldviews will be best for fulfilling it. I pick the one that meets my needs every time I need to use a worldview; surprisingly few of them have 'Truth' involved at all.

"what works" is an interesting concept in its own right. I tend to frame whether or not I got an anticipated outcome from a particular behavior as whether my model of the circumstances' rules and starting conditions was sufficiently robust to predict the outcome accurately. "did that work?" alone is a reasonable thing to ask, but its answers usually carry no new nor interesting information. I tend to skip straight past the place one ought to ask "did that work?" and straight to "what happened? was it interesting? do I like it?", because the latter questions tend to have answers which I find actually useful.

I guess Pragmatism makes the most sense rooted firmly in Causality (not sure where else it'd make any sense at all). Pragmatism is practically an axiom of Causality -- "To attain this effect, you must create one of the causes which produces it". Causality can get a bit of a bad rap for being overused as an explanation for parts of the Objective where it doesn't cleanly apply, but it's also a fantastically powerful machine for exposing appropriate questions to ask when exploring new areas of the Subjective. A chain of "Why?", after all, is like a dowsing rod that will drag you straight to the nearest axiomatic "Because.", and those "Because."s tend to contain the fundamental truths of the systems they apply in.

Within those "Because."s, there are spaces where no philosophy applies in any sense that can be fitted into language, but that's a restriction of the spaces moreso than of the philosophies. Pragmatism is no exception -- the mind can construct a space so foreign to the usual workings of the "I" that a question about whether something "exists", let alone "works" for some purpose, will be unaskable, unanswerable, or incomprehensible.

[idgo]

Back to our regularly scheduled deprogramming, I felt inspired to make some cult propaganda. No cult to go with it yet but I'm sure I can find some eggsoteric entities to "coop"erate with me...

Needs moar sigils. Also better drippier fonts. Both of those are what we call problems for Later.

[idgo]

~~ A Dialog ~~

< Desire for change underlies all actions.

 But that's useless, because I can't learn to spot it! > 

< Why not? Just watch it when it happens, and you can learn control.

I don't know when it's happening till after I see it happen, because all I can see right now is the action. > 

< Have you ever heard of clicker training?

?? >

  < You can use it to train chickens,and if you can train a chicken, you can train anything.

u calling me chicken m8 >

< Their tiny little reptilian brains, very similar to one layer of your own brain, can be conditioned to do tricks, because they recognize that the thing that just happened a moment ago was what got a given result.

fite me > 

Fight your own laziness. If you win, you'll get to train your skull meat to replay the last moment of thought for your examination whenever you tell it. Then cue it to do that trick when you notice yourself taking an action, and self-knowledge appears!

wait, this was about self-knowledge all along? I'm not sure if that's what I wanted >