Livewriting my thoughts (Jan 3, 2024)

The following was originally a very early draft of a blog post on the topic that you see at the beginning: narrativizing your life because that's potentially useful. Then I just ~~livetweeted~~ directly wrote my thoughts onto the page for about 45 minutes without regards for coherence or deliberate development. Genuinely, I sat on the couch and didn't stop writing for 45 minutes. I won't call this rambling because it's not meant to be coherent or unified; it's a primordial thought-soup that might be useful as fuel for future blog posts or discussions. In other words, much of this may feel like a fever dream or incoherent bouncing back and forth; this is not unintentional, there's a reason this is on the drafts website. In other words, read at your own discretion.

maybe this is interesting as like, a depiction of where my thoughts go when allowed freedom and a base stimulus to set of a chain of... stochastic theorizing?

What is it that we love about stories?

Why do we love to see the journey — see the knight slay the dragon?

I imagine we would feel different if we were in the hero's shoes, on the way to the beast's lair. It wouldn't quite have the same magic.

Magic, that's it — it's magic. (I don't know what it is, so I'll call it magic.)

[I need to actually try and write well in order to explain what I mean by magic precisely enough that I can be confident that the reader understands it, but I don't have that in me right now. A blog post for another time.]

But there is magic to the world in a story. Perhaps it's the infinite possibility, the certainty about a happy ending.

When I watch intellectually stimulating movies I get this kind of high after. It feels like that magic stays with me afterwords. What if we could live with that magic?

I've thought about this a lot. When I abstract away all the life details and tell my life as a story — even a kind of mundane one, like "high-achieving high school student finds himself at the end of high school, graduates and enters college" — it feels… magical. Suddenly it feels open again.

I've thought about ways to try and capture that magic and keep it as part of my life.

Planning in the third person, like you're telling a story?

Developing a life-gamification system — e.g. learning stuff is leveling up a skill, working out is improving your stats — in an attempt to turn my life into kind of an RPG is tempting. But when I get down to the mundane, I always struggle.

What story am I really trying to tell?

There's a broader thing that this idea reminds me of — that the story is in some sense fundamental. Maybe this is an incoherent overgeneralization, or maybe it is actually something meaningful and interesting.

I sort of feel like humans think, somehow fundamentally, in terms of stories.

Defined broadly, a story is a sequence of cause and effect. The world — at least, the empirical world as we collectively represent it in our mind — is fundamentally causal. We perceive the world as an infinitely complex story, which we can reduce to specific elements when it's useful: He did this. They went that way. That thing

Language reflects that fundamental structure — well, English does. Subject, verb, object — in whatever order it is, according to 'standard grammar conventions' a sentence isn't a sentence unless it has at least some of those things. A pure description without some sort of cause and/or effect — e.g. just saying "the great orange moon that hangs in the sky" — doesn't fit those criteria.

When I asked why that is, I sort of thought two things:

1. It's purely conventional, and the aforementioned sentence fragment only sounds weird to me because I don't hear things like it often
2. Sentences convey information

Just specifying the moon doesn't say anything, abstractly. (As with language, there are always contextual exceptions where meaning is added by context) You have to convey information about it — what is it doing? What is it like? And sentences are the standard for making this relationships more clear. Actually, "that hangs in the sky" conveys information — because it's got a verb inside of it

Jorge Luis Borges, in Tlon, Uqbar, and Orbus Tertius, imagined a world defined by the subjective, in which there is no objective reality. I can't really describe more than that and have it be meaningful to you, at least right now when I'm writing abstractly — if I wanted to write a short story review I could probably do that, but you'd best be served by reading the story yourself.

What would language look like in such a world? There are no verbs, just… adjectives. Sentence fragments, as we'd treat them. This sort of seems to validate the idea that in some sense causality is an organizing principle of 'objective' reality — without objectivity, there is no… causality? Well, not really — cause and effect happens, just not within the subjective world.

I'm kind of getting off track. This is connected to some other ideas. For example, Lyotard's idea of a meta-narrative — a meta, story, a story which organizes all other stories (think,e.g., marxism defining all of history as the story of class struggle)

Actually, way back in February (it feels like 2 years ago I swear) I started writing a whole manifesto. I called it "phenomenological narrativism" (I wanted to give it a fancy academic-sounding name to add gravitas):

Thesis/Basic idea: The mind organizes thoughts into stories, both explicit (i.e. consciously explicable) and implicit (i.e. not recognized by or explicable by the consciousness which uses it). Stories define our relationship to the world -- our beliefs, the way we regard meaning or its absence, and our understanding of objects, people and events.
"Stories" is a loose characterization. A simple, one-way cause-effect relationship is its most basic form: in a vacuum, say, a moving molecule bounces against one that is still, causing it to start moving. As our perception (though not our sensation -- simply put, our minds' interpretation of stimuli, not our basic processes of seeing and hearing, translating light waves and sound waves into neural impulses) of the world is fundamentally one observing cause and effect, on any level of the brain that has not yet been
Our cause-effect perceptions cause us to wonder about the causes infinitely: what is the cause of the cause? Thus, each story we hold within us is one that is interlinked with many others directly, and practically infinite others indirectly.

Ah, the mind-walk continues. The concept of infinite regress in causality — a cosmological question — which reminds me of infinite regress in epistemology: there is no fundamental postulate that we can know to be true. (Recursion?) But in theory, if beliefs rely on other beliefs, where does it start?

This is a question in epistemology, and there are three "major" responses: infinitism, foundationalism, and coherentism. (I wonder what it looks like when these ideas are re-applied to reality's causal structure. Could progress in cosmology or physics mean progress in epistemology based on that mapping?)

The dependent "causal" structure of belief is isomorphic to the dependent "causal" structure of reality because… the structure of our representations of reality is story? And so is belief?

Is this trivial? Sorta seems like it, but… maybe not? An obvious idea once you think of it, but non-obvious before? A mental model? Something?

You know, this stuff sort of falls apart when we remember that reality is actually not classical, and… things get weird when you get small enough or large enough. Blah blah "this is a fundamental limitation of human cognition and we actually can't make any more conceptual progress in physics" this seems like a dumb idea.

Maybe this was an attempt by younger me to unite all of human cognition with all of reality, sort of like how Wittgenstein tried to link all of language to all of reality in the Tractatus. Uh, except much worse? Or very different?

Speaking meta, this mind walk sort of feels like useless philosophizing. What am I even doing when I think these things? Maybe this is simply an attempt to make a meaningful unity out of the world's chaos, because that… triggers some sort of reward in my brain. (A lower energy brain state of world-models? Like maybe the impulse to search for knowledge is really just a search for a configuration of… mental models that are as simple, accurately predictive and explanatory as possible → use the least amount of energy to maintain and update? [Minimizing surprisal or something?] This would make biological sense for energy-use levels? Well, not really, cause I don't think the brain uses much energy when it thinks compared to when it doesn't think — I mean I know it uses much of the body's energy but iirc that amount of energy doesn't increase or decrease when you think harder. It wouldn't make sense to try and minimize energy. Also, it would be very surprising if… genuine, fully-formed rationality was a well-formed goal that evolution converged on. Politics suggests otherwise, unless there's something so much stronger about culture that it could override that goal.) The urge for a simple and coherent story about the world seems general; you always want someone to blame (loose brain connection: scapegoat mechanism?) and some explanation of why things are the way they are, if we could just fix this one thing then everything would be comprehensively better, let's kill all the people that are standing in our way, oops wait actually society has lots of issues (why? ineffective cognition writ large?) and our facile description of the world was incomplete?

Anyway, Do thoughts like these fall into philosophy, simply because they have no other place? Is it just because "philosophy is applying rationality to the world" (or deconstructing rationality itself or something? There's no systematic definition of philosophy just like there's no systematic definition of anything because concepts are actually flexible and fuzzy and non-logical. Uh oh? Does this conflict with the whole stories idea?) and these are just… thoughts. Thoughts. Stories! What is the purpose of all this? Am I refining my world-story? Creating useful internal representations of the world even if they're not systematic or true or something?

Often I wonder about what the humanities are for. I really find literary theory interesting, for example. What's literary theory for? Uh, like, analyzing texts? So just taking the philosophy out of a work of art? What's art for? An author's personal expression? Saying things you can't say explicitly? What's saying things for? Improving — uh oh, I slipped into teleology again. Classic beginner mistake!

Ok I am tired and I'm reaching the end of my mind-walk. Thanks for coming! This was fun. Time to put this on the internet.