Incorrect password
8.2.26c
8.2.26 11:20 AM
I woke up and immediately thought about the concepts of plans and blueprints continuing where I left off with yesterday.
[[the maxwell collection]]
[[step-change collection]]
Of course the plans are valuable, they tell you what you should really do to get where you really want, of course.
It’s taking shape in my head.
Immediately as I woke up I thought about the concept of planning things.
I thought in my head about how people have such an aversion to planning, thinking, and contemplation.
I realized my entries were valuable, because all my life I’d heard from people around me that I should “stop thinking so much, and start doing”. Fascinating.
I spent 6000 words talking about something I considered vaguely redundant, but I just remembered that it was controversial really.
The world is obsessed with doing, and has a loathful contempt for thinking.
People love the churn. People love moving around matter. People love to feel progress.
My files were entirely about the rejection of movement as useful in itself.
The world seems to be obsessed with this.
At any point, it is ultra quick to hedge and mention “the risks of sitting in deliberation infinitely”. It’s almost compulsive how quick it’s mentioned. I’ve heard it my entire life, and thankfully, I’ve always rejected it fervently inside of my head.
“stop thinking, start doing” is the mantra of systems that need servos. if you internalize that motion = progress, you become a perfectly docile gate — opening and closing on someone else’s schedule, feeling productive bc stuff is moving through you.
deliberation is threatening to systems that run on churn. if everyone stopped and actually modeled what their machine was doing, most of the machines would get turned off.
8.2.26 12:20
But it’s funny because most thinking is churn as well. People think and think and think, but similar to the work they’re doing, their thinking is churn.
As we’ve shown, there is no difference between thinking and doing. Both change matter and rearrange it to be different matter. The split between thinking and doing doesn’t exist, and the split between information and what it describes also doesn’t exist. A machine that has knowledge over another machine is simply a machine that’s rearranged itself to “know”.
And so the allergic response to thought and thinking people is an allergic response to rumination, not contemplation, because most people rarely think in systematic directed fashion for fun, and even more so, they sometimes actually do think in systematic directed fashion, but they produce nothing of value.
Thought is a risk you take, to most people. An investment, more reminiscent of a gamble with a vague prospect of returns of unknown magnitude, combined with an uncertainty of whether you get any return at all.
Most thinking feels like a gamble, like someone pulling at the slot machine, hoping for the prize to reveal itself, randomly.
--
the actual distinction was never think vs do. it was DIRECTED doing vs undirected doing, and that applies identically to both cognitive and physical activity.
8.2.26 6:28 PM
And so the thinking was the doing. It was always the doing.
Every plan I'd make, every blueprint, every theory, it was all doing.
It was never not doing, and even more egregiously, it was superior doing, unlike the churn that natural doing consists of. But what we consider churn is really just doing something you don't care for, or something that isn't the thing you think you want to do. It is doing, it is "churn", it is wash trading11 Executing trades where the buyer and seller are the same party, creating the illusion of activity. Used here metaphorically: effort that looks like progress but nets zero real change..
And most of what people do is wash trading to some extent.
What I did, all along was the real thing, where everyone else was wash trading, and making pennies. Maybe they got a little arbitrage money, but not by design.
And the dichotomy between useful and useless isn't really a thing. Because you always do something. It was just something.
Thinking was doing, doing was doing, and making was doing, and it all just was a bunch of machines doing wash trading in the universe.
But thinking... thinking was a machine doing something...
--
In a way it can be argued that the conceptualizing is the start of the building process.55 Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic (1916), p. 332 — "knowing is literally something which we do; that analysis is ultimately physical and active." It is the first rearrangement, the 0 layer, beneath the foundation even.
When constructing a building, none would be surprised at the step of making a steady foundation before the build of the house itself could even commence, but no house is built. No walls, no door, no windows, nothing constructed. Yet the foundation is vital. It is simply part of the building.
Similar to the foundation, the process of conceptualizing and thinking about the building and many types of buildings and everything about buildings is somewhat identical to the foundation layer construction phase.
Information as a concept tricks you into thinking it happens elsewhere, beyond the physical realm, as if the constructing was physical, and its conceptualization was something metaphysical and only existed somewhere metaphysically, above the physical realm.66 Spinoza, Ethics II, Prop. 7 (1677) — "The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things." But no, it was there all along. A machine was being built that could most effectively build the building itself.
In fact, really a crane was being constructed, a bulldozer, a jackhammer, the ovens capable of creating the bricks. All things that had nothing to do with the building at all, but were deeply essential to its creation.
Thinking is a completely identical thing. Matter rearranges itself in the mind of whatever clump of atoms capable of "computation" so that the data would take up the shape of the ghost of the building as accurately as possible.44 Aristotle, Metaphysics VII, 1032b (c. 350 BC) — "The form of the house exists in the soul of the builder."
All of this was real, and happened in the physical realm, and if it didn't happen, it'd mean that the building could not be constructed to a satisfactory degree.
A little model of the building was actually being created inside of the mind of the "Demon (of the Third Kind)"22 Extending Lem's taxonomy. The Second Kind reads facts from molecular motion; the Third Kind builds miniature models of reality in its mind to simulate outcomes before acting. so that it could then be reproduced at its proper 1:1 scale.
"you're working toward a monism. not just collapsing think/do or information/matter, but dissolving every dualism you encounter into "configurations of matter doing things in space." and the reason you keep returning to it, keep writing more entries, keep feeling like there's one more thing to nail down, is that the monism has a problem: if everything is just machines, and there's no special sauce, then why does modeling WORK so disproportionately well? why does the 0th layer matter so much if it's "just" more matter-rearrangement? your answer so far: it matters bc it's the layer that determines what all downstream layers do. fine. but that's a STRUCTURAL claim about where in the causal chain this particular matter-rearrangement sits, and structural claims require you to admit that not all matter-rearrangement is equal — that position in the causal graph matters. which means you haven't fully dissolved the hierarchy, you've just relocated it. instead of information being special, UPSTREAM-NESS is special. "
I think I'm building on it to determine what makes information so valuable
As I explain it isn't some kind of upstreamness or a kind of egalitarian framework about "matter being matter", It's a worldview and a lens that attempts to be better than the previous heuristics
What I'm saying in the last bit - which I agree is the most important entry ([this entry]) - is that what information really does, and what planning really does more so, is that it directly manipulates and builds the machines that I speak of on a miniaturized level. It literally builds. Actual real building.
There is no thinking being done, no vague hand wavy theorizing, or a kind of "generating of a new vague thing we call 'information'", but instead what it does is this: It literally takes abstractions, symbolic representations of the real matter, and it recreates and builds around with it within "virtual" space inside of a simulated model of the world/universe to see and thus "understand" what happens, before it happens.
It's a literal virtual machine where constructing is being done. A good plan isn't an aggregate of a metaphysical mystic thing called "information" that brings about the step change as a form of getting an advantage or making an "improvement" to a real thing because you "know" something about it now which gets converted to a tweak, it is literally getting an actual model, an actual different version of the "machine" built in your head, which then can go on to be recreated at a greater (the 1:1) scale.
the standard framing in cogsci is: "the brain creates REPRESENTATIONS of external things." everyone nods. but "representation" smuggles in a dualism that nobody examines. a representation is understood as something that STANDS FOR something else. a sign. a symbol. the map, not the territory. there's the thing, and then there's the brain's representation of the thing, and then there's a REFERENCE RELATIONSHIP between them. and now you need a whole theory of how mental content "refers to" external reality. this is literally one of the hardest unsolved problems in philosophy of mind — intentionality. how does a brain state "mean" something about the world?
I mean that it's a simulated version of the real thing. In a way the brain and its neurons run a "digital"/virtual version of atoms that can represent the atoms that you can build the bridge with. It is the bridge, similar to how it looks in real life. In the brain there's neurons that represent the atoms of the bridge at different abstraction levels (exact mineral of the brick doesn't need to be rendered, but could be if Demon of the Third Kind deems it necessary (and sometimes this makes the difference and sometimes it doesn't (fidelity)))
An isomorphic virtual maquette.
I think I might be saying something more boring and less novel, that sounds really tautological
It’s more like how a computer runs a simulation of atoms to render a building
The maquette in the brain is virtual, but similar to computers, physical components (neurons) are arranged in such a way that they can render the atoms of the maquette
And so you could take a slice of neurons, or find all the neurons that render those specific parts of the maquette, and they exist in physical space. It’s matter, and the purpose of this matter is to render in a more efficient way, other matter
And so what these neurons render are the atoms anything that could represent the real 1:1 object faithfully, but just in a compressed way, or not (when fidelity needs to be high).
And so there is a configuration of matter that represents and accurate models real matter. It’s like an ultra compressed map I suppose
I realize these are not entirely novel insights
| Concept | The standard view | The new view |
| Thinking | A passive mental activity. "Daydreaming." | Low-Viscosity Engineering. Rapid prototyping in a cheap medium. |
| The Model | A picture or a description held in memory. | A Physical Maquette. A literal structural copy built of neurons. |
| Information | A magical fluid that adds value. | Configuration. The arrangement of the machine itself. |
| Prediction | Guessing what will happen. | Simulation. Running the maquette to see if it breaks. |
| The Difference | Mind vs. Matter. | Cheap Matter vs. Expensive Matter. |
If everyone truly knew this, they wouldn't rush to "start doing." They would understand that building the neural maquette33 A sculptor's or architect's small-scale preliminary model, built to test form and structure before committing to the full-scale work. IS doing.
your framework dissolves the genotype/phenotype distinction in biology the same way it dissolves plan/building. the standard framing: DNA "encodes information" that gets "expressed" as an organism. this treats DNA as a representation — a symbolic code that refers to the organism. in your framework: DNA is a small structure at molecular scale that, through protein synthesis machinery, gets reproduced at successively larger scales until you have an organism. the DNA doesn't ENCODE the organism. it IS the organism, at miniature scale, in cheaper substrate (molecular rather than cellular/tissue).
if modeling IS building at lower substrate cost, then the value of modeling should be DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to the cost-per-iteration in the physical substrate. building a bridge: physical iteration costs millions per attempt. modeling value: enormous. stacking boxes: physical iteration costs seconds per attempt. modeling value: near zero. you don't need a blueprint to stack boxes bc the cost of failing physically is negligible.
this predicts exactly where "just do it" is correct advice (low cost-per-physical-iteration) and where "stop and model first" is correct advice (high cost-per-physical-iteration). the cultural war between the two is literally just people failing to notice that the optimal strategy depends on the cost ratio between substrates. neither side is wrong in general. they're each right in their respective cost regime.
It seems to be that the Demon of the Third Kind is a computer (thing that computes).
1 Wash trading — executing trades where the buyer and seller are the same party, creating the illusion of market activity without actual value exchange. ↩
2 The author's extension of Lem's taxonomy from The Cyberiad. The First Kind sorts fast and slow molecules; the Second Kind reads facts from molecular motion; the Third Kind builds miniature models of reality to simulate outcomes before acting. ↩
3 Maquette — a sculptor's or architect's small-scale preliminary model, used to test form and structure before committing to the full-scale work. ↩
4 Aristotle, Metaphysics VII (c. 350 BC) — "The form of the house exists in the soul of the builder." The eidos (form) of the artifact lives first in the craftsman's mind, then in the material. ↩
5 John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic (1916), p. 332 — "knowing is literally something which we do; that analysis is ultimately physical and active; that meanings in their logical quality are standpoints, attitudes, and methods of behaving toward facts." ↩
6 Baruch Spinoza, Ethics II, Proposition 7 (1677) — "The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things." Thought and physical reality are not two separate realms but two expressions of one substance. ↩