Essay series · Beta
Transpositions
One question, moved through several voices, to see what survives the move
One night I asked an AI what I think is the hardest question anyone could ask: what is this? I told it to take its time and not to tell me it didn't know. “You know something,” I said. Then I forgot I had asked.
An idea can feel finished in one form and fall apart in another. Some only work as a memo. Put them in a story and they go thin. Ask someone who disagrees to say them in their own words and there's nothing left.
So this series takes one question at a time and moves it. A memo first, as clear as I can get it. Then the same ideas as something you can try on an ordinary afternoon. Then the strongest case against them, in the voice of someone who thinks they're wrong. Later I might try a conversation, or a short story. Whatever the question needs.
If an idea survives the move, I understand it a little better. If it doesn't, I've found where it was hollow. (Usually both.)
Any effect can go both ways. Working with AI can break down set paths in meaning, and it can also round the edges until everything merges. Moving an idea between forms is one way to see which of the two is happening.
The first question is the biggest one I know. What is this? It takes in reality, experience and being. My afterword to the essays, “What This Is”, made one bet about it. This set moves that bet into the positions of its rivals. The memo argues against my own working paper, Space Immanence, and the third piece argues against both. I wrote the memo with a team of AI models. Read it first. After that, any order. It's that kind of question.
You gotta have faith.
The first set
1 of 3 · 21 minSomething Is Showing UpWhat is this? A memo on reality, experience and being2 of 3 · 7 minTry This at HomeOn mugs, headaches, and who wrote this paragraph3 of 3 · 13 minWhat Seems to Be Showing UpA transposition: the case against the memo, in the voice of an illusionist, written with the same AI models.One idea, through the set
The self as one more thing that shows up, in each of the three pieces.
René Descartes, the seventeenth-century French philosopher, started here and went a step too far. He concluded there must be an “I” doing the thinking, when all he was given was the thinking. In the 1790s Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, a German professor of physics, wrote in a notebook that we should say “it thinks”, the way we say “it's lightning”. He added that we still need to assume an “I” for practical purposes. I'd go a step further than he did. The self that seems to own what appears is itself something happening, one more thing that appears.
Try this. Sit somewhere quiet and close your eyes. Then wait for the next thought. When it comes, see if you can catch it being made. Look for the place it came from, and whoever made it.
Pain is the clearest place to watch a brain build how something seems. Researchers separate two sides of a pain, how strong it is and how bad it feels, and the two can come apart. Focusing on a pain tends to make it stronger, and a low mood tends to make it feel worse, through partly different circuits in the brain (a review).