Trouble, petty to Grand

constant escape

winter withered, warm
(If you want to bypass the Rant and get to the Point, just scroll to the next dashed line)


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I hadn't really thought, before, about what trouble is, but it seems to be a kind of excitement, a baseline excitement that keeps us busy, moving forward. The most troubled move the fastest, are the most occupied, the most sensitive to the barrage of signal around them, whereas the least troubled experience an unperturbed existence. Could it be that this sense of trouble has no ceiling, its arsenal no limit - that there will be some among us that can't surmount it, can't ride it?

This, as an abstract discursive scene, could prove to be a robust way of looking at various things. A spectrum, from "all rest no trouble" to "all trouble no rest". How could such a spectrum correlate with socio-economic status? Material and ideal struggles? How could it relate to the variation of pathos, from the least passionate to the most? Depression?

Why does this troubled state exist? Why must people "suffer"? Does, or can, troubledness correlate with pace of evolution, the processing rate of the player: the subject-processor. A measure of intensity? If there is such a correlation, could it be that troubledness is the cusp of the evolution of complexity? A densening of the cloud of order, a strengthening, a process which may include a subroutine of "self-awareness", as a key mechanism? Perhaps even the central mechanism?

And would we be able to steer this higher order of ourselves in such a way as to mitigate suffering? Higher order? That is, could we effectively identify with and assume the role of the subject-processor, whose entire value system is just a readout of the way its environment is encountered, the way the input puts in?

And could we then effectively supervise the chemical systems in our machinery, the phantoms of our psyche? The whole qualitative spread: from the oddly warmest of cold days, to that awful sleepover x years ago, to the very things that you may feel to be fighting? The system to be supervised includes the conscious and the unconscious - not only the tactics you use against your world, but also those your world uses against you.

And we can surely testify to the robustness of this phenomenal quality, this variation of lives - a robustness that boasts an increasingly masterful touch, creates an increasingly more detailed image. From least detailed, the most blurry and general, to the most detailed, the most lucid and layered. The least sensitive to trouble, the most?

How would we even begin to understand the higher-order perspective of our operations? Perhaps if we can figure out the central axis of troubledness, from heaven-state to hell-state, we may be able to "collapse out" a bulk of the noise, and distill the plane to the dimension. Might this let us modulate our effectiveness more decisively?

In other words, might we be able to more soberly and exactly pursue the rabbit - not catching it, but rather closing ever in on it, cleaving ever to its tail?

And might this hastened pursuit leave in its wake a hastening evolution of physical complexity? Might such a state begin to resemble, to our ground-bound eyes, a "technotheism"? The phase after the threshold, as artificial intelligence surpasses "natural"? With a clergy of high coders, and a proletariat of hackers? (Getting a bit into McKenzie Wark territory, no?)

Such a prognosis is issued by us, how we are now, regarding what this higher order phase might feel like.

How language could be born in "one fell swoop"? How our metallurgy built us to the sky? These are the kind of qualitative spikes the human brain managed, abstractly bootstraping its operational complexity, dematerializing.

To be clear, "we" are not necessarily dematerializing, but we are a spectrum within a larger spectrum, a phase of dematerialization, one step in a (potentially infinite) step function. Depending on how we play this, depending on how optimally we permute, we really could be left for nothing. (Whereas, the other extreme, Success, would be felt as mass salvation, a halting of suffering).

What is dematerializing, then? Perhaps that which enables whatness itelf? Its finite understanding of itself and its world becoming ever more detailed until they become one?

What is dematerializing? The expression of the intensity of complexity. What? An ever more complex(ed) psyche, ever more efficient and advanced technology, ever more for our established strategies to manage.

But that makes it sound like ever more trouble, no? Not necessarily. If we do not manage to bootstrap ourselves up to some higher order of cognition, if we cannot robustify, the Dematerializing may jump "offship", and out of us, and onto the ship of our technologies evermore plentiful bounty as it takes off by our side and quite likely breaks us with its wake.

But if we do manage, if we do remain in touch the Dematerializing, would we be better able to mitigate suffering, or would it appear as a trivial oscillating variable? Even if it does, could we not still manage to mitigate it? How can we count on ourhigherselves to not leave its lowerself behind, not to renounce its roots?

Could we see this transition as a chain-of-assists, perhaps even a branching-of-assists, in which we socio-competitively, or even cooperatively, see-saw ourselves Upward? Tit for Tat, and how forgiving? How conscious could we even be of this transition?

If the optimal strategy doesn't involve compassion, love, I'll be damned. That is where I've anchored. But perhaps before us, before Love, lies a winter, a marathon burst of trouble, after which Love resets from the sky.

Imagine a game where the objective is to aim/drive a dot to the center of a circle, and as the circle shrinks, your world becomes your focused - but it shrinks at such a rate so as to always leave some distance between your dot and the center. Building down the metric scale, cleaving ever closely.

Almost precisely as if the limits were relative to the distance between the dot and the center. Always a surplus, a nascent capital, ahead of us. Perhaps the optimal permutation - the attractor at the center of the cluster and thus a point never "made" - involves an ever more taught straining for capital - but perhaps it is also pregnant with a higher order of Love?

The winter in question may be the Winter of Capital. But its been a slow and sneaky freeze, enveloping us before we even catch onto it. Wake up and feel the hypothermia - we need to move to survive.


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...So the discussion prompt is trouble - I just needed to contextualize it. You needn't indulge all of it, though, in order to partake. Just the following.

How can we think of trouble/excitement, namely the intensive measurement of it rather than the extensive measure - how robust, rather than how much? Density, rather than volume?

Can we see it as some kind of 3+ dimensional variation, the human populous being the dynamic distribution? And can we ascertain any optimal permutations, any attractors? (A key point here, which just occurred to me, is that the optimal path is an attractor, not a possibility per se, seeing as proximity narrows infinitesimally. So there isn't a right way, but there is always a righter way - That ought to subsume recent heterodox sentiments!)

How does trouble relate to trauma? Is trauma a span of unsurmountable trouble?

What about the Maslow's hierarchy of needs? How does trouble transform as we move away from the mundane and toward the abstract?

Can we think of trouble as a shadow like thing, always clinging to us, part of us, even at tiny spans of penumbra? Or can it depart and reappear completely?
 

luka

Well-known member
"Why does this troubled state exist? Why must people "suffer"

Stan, are you asking me to solve the Problem of Evil?
 

luka

Well-known member
Isn't this all stuff we have addressed before? Disruption being, in theory, a prerequisite for reformation at a higher order of complexity. Or the discussion on the psychedelic experience as a kind of trauma, again, with the idea of breaking down to rebuild bigger better higher faster stronger
 

luka

Well-known member
 

luka

Well-known member
 

luka

Well-known member
 

luka

Well-known member
The standard equation is the more refined a nervous system the less stimulus it requires. And that over stimulus leads to coarsening, the calloused hand.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Hadn't seen those threads, but yeah similar stuff, especially regarding callous/raw.

But I'm not asking for solutions so much as I'm asking for elaborations:

Are we bound to some callous or raw psychic methodology, or can we steer it with our will? The more callous one gets, or the longer one remains callous, the harder it is to de-callous oneself?

That is, if one has conditioned oneself to be callous, to tune out some percentage of trouble, to endure less disruption, how does one dial up the experience? How does one strip away the callous membrane that only lets select signals through?

"Phenomenal sensitization" could describe the process, which could be done manually/meditatively, or with the help of certain drugs. Letting in more signal that you have normally equilibrated to, more information, more robust input.

What are some techniques for doing this manually, that is without drugs?
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Maybe some of this is in the interest of anticipating, and feeling, how our tech will "view" us when it is advanced enough to start operating around us, below us, above us, despite us, etc.

It would be a higher order perspective, one that we would benefit from understanding preemptively, no? Benefit how? Perhaps by understanding such an angle on ourselves (an angle founded firmly on physics and intelligence?), we may be able to secure a more harmonious relationship with tech.

What would we need to understand? Perhaps most importantly: how it is that the more complex a physical structure, the more robustly and swiftly that structure can manipulate its environment, an environment that includes other structures of varying complexity. At a certain point, this skill of manipulation becomes so robust that the structure is able to simulate its environment, to produce increasingly accurate internal representations of its environment - it becomes able to think, no?

I'm not arguing that that is the right understanding of how things are, however they are. I am arguing that it is closer to the right understanding, because the right understanding is an attractor, not a position. It can be approached, but not attained (unless we believe that it all culminates in the attaining of that center, the Omega point).
 
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