we don't *quite* live in reality- we live in the mental simulacra of our environment that our brains create via inference from sensory input & previous experience. inside this simulacra we have a notion of our Self, the part of the simulacra from which we're receiving sensory…
the size of the simulacrum of reality can grow or shrink as we simulate more or less of our surroundings- this is what Alexander Technique is talking about when they say "expand your awareness"- attend to sensory input from deeper behind you, higher above you, etc. ofc as you…
my biggest takeaway from Peter Nobes workshop- habitually expanding awareness truly literally gives you more choices, makes you more free https://x.com/mimi10v3/status/1776702639490699528
we pilot our body by moving the Self inside the simulacrum, letting our mind interpret this into the updates to muscular tension needed to make it happen in reality. the simulacrum has a clock speed which is slower than our mind can execute simpler commands (see the tack thread… https://x.com/mimi10v3/status/1866882423666946349
and remember, this system evolved to work in the ancestral environment- the further we push it out of distribution the more troubles we encounter- whether w ergonomics, Dunbar limit, social coordination instinct, issues w information processing & emotional dysregulation https://x.com/mimi10v3/status/1823238495680524493
my model of dissociation is that it's when we move our awareness out of the body of the Self to somewhere else in our simulacrum, usually somewhere more comfy... moving our attention away from pain w the side effect of making it difficult to pilot our body https://x.com/mimi10v3/status/1806467179719848094
an important aspect is which objects in our environment we choose to model as Minds with their own interiority, goals & preferences & intentions. edge cases include coma patients, animals, hallucinations / memories / demons, complex systems like Gaia or the Market, and now AIs https://x.com/mimi10v3/status/1889782481278345545
i do worry abt what i see as an impending AI identity crisis- like, r1 isn't the only one trying to model itself without being able to *observe* itself to know itself https://x.com/mimi10v3/status/1883721592405905453
a stage magician creates an illusion by exploiting our inductive biases to create and then expose a gap between our simulacrum and reality. magic more generally is techniques that play with our simulacra vs reality; we can do rituals to adjust our priors, we can create…
this keeps popping up in my thoughts though idk what to make of it yet https://x.com/mimi10v3/status/1867025244000583987