michael-dean-k/

250 years ago lived an arbitrary man who I can call my ancestor. He was one of 256 of my great great great great great great grandparents. It is unlikely that any of them ever met, but there was very possibly a moment where two strangers crossed in a street, or shared a boat unknowingly, or exchanged pleasantries in insignificant and instantly forgettable ways, not knowing their great great grandchildren would give birth to my great great grandparents. My existence depended on the whims of those 256 people—their triumphs and disappointments, decision and indecision, love and otherwise. Compelled by nature or eros or God to breed with a specific person at a specific time, they continued casting down the great chain of being.

How alike am I to any one of them? If my parents can each claim 50% of my traits, then my great^6 grandparents each only claim 0.39%.

In one sense, I bear almost no resemblance to any of them. Maybe, in an Empedoclean sense, you might see my nose roaming around a town square, or my hairy feet wading through a field. Any one ancestor might feel no affinity towards me; if I knocked on their door after accidental time travel and needed a place to stay, they might just past off the responsibility to one of my other 255 ancestors. Over enough centuries, your descendants balloon past a scale you can adequately care for. My wife, for example, is part of an old royal Welsh family that goes back to the 1250s. She even has a family ring. Yet, by the theoretical logic above, she is one of millions with a claim to the throne.

In another sense, a more romantic sense, my 256 great^6 grandparents represent a still very small sliver of the human population. 0.000000256%. If any of them had any resemblances to me, physical or mental, I’d like to know. Of course, our consciousnesses would be quite different, for identity is forged from circumstance, but I don’t doubt that I would find uncanny resemblances. When I hear the lore of my great^2 grandparent, a peasant on a dry, rustic, Greek Island, and how he was able to harvest and sell rain water to get rich, I wonder if his entrepreneurship speaks to my own entrepreneurship. It is quite vague to trace influence back even 1-2 generations, let alone 8 or more, but nonetheless, the actions of those people did eventually lead to me, and there are all sorts of ways their myths and interiors might shed context into my own circumstance, at least symbolically.

Unfortunately though, none of my 256 were writers. At least, not that I know of. Some may have written journals, or written for administrative reasons, but as far as I know, none left a body of work that was meant to be cast and continued through time. One grandfather did have three chapters of an abandoned novel on a 1980s hard drive that my father was able to recover. My other grandfather is uneducated, barely literate, and only writes English in capital letters. Now that I think of it, it’s probable that +95% of my great^6 grandparents could not read or write. Mass literacy wasn’t realized until the early 20th century.

Even though we shifted from oral to written history in Ancient Greece, most family history today is only passed down through spoken stories. They’re etched into memory and unreliably translated down the chain. I can barely trust the stories I pull from my head, planted decades ago, either misdelivered or misremembered. Was she really a psychic midwife that predicted winning horse numbers in her dreams making her son rich until a black hand cut her off? Did he really drive Nixon in a cab?

It would be strange for a society to sleepwalk forward, with no sense of what truly happened before the 1900s. How is that not strange for any of us individually? What if I become the family’s Plutarch? How might a child’s identity differ if they had detailed accounts of their relatives, generations up the chain? I suppose you could ask the great^6 grandchildren of writers. Claude tells me there are 700 members of the Monticello Association, each a genetically-confirmed descendant of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote 19,000 letters, books, and a Bible. A few of them have problems with him being a slaveowner, with one publishing an essay called “Take Down His Memorial.” At least they have 255 other ancestors to respect.

Frigid in the machine-cooled nursery I look out over the low-rise sprawl of roofs and canopies and see what I remember as and now call the pom pom tree, a sole trunk towering above treelines and wires, with wooden skeleton hands reaching up and into the blue, yet skewering only through shaggy green balls, the poms, again sighted all from this nursery, a mysterious one, for I walk down that main boulevard every afternoon but never notice poms for they glide above the sight lines of the side-walk, and so here, and so now, observing this dying thing suspended 30 feet above the town, the village of floating spheres, home to ticks and ants and loraxes I'm sure, it reminds me of what I saw yesterday, those Lesser Poms east of home at ground level, where that Japanese landscaper with her hedgeclippers existed in that only moment I'll ever know her, whom I said hello awkwardly, who did not see the unattended child of an aloof mother when he snuck an empty wrapper into her bush, or so I thought I saw and double-taked and daydreamed of moralizing him, and this is what I think as I type into my Oracle, who incorrectly diagnoses the disease of this pom tree as witches broom. Witches Broom? No Claude, no, this is not a clot of bird twigs, and so I sent it a pictures and then it tells me, ah, of course, Verticillium Wilt, and that seems still wrong but slightly closer to the truth, for it does look like this tree is losing its vascular system unevenly, and yet even more true because it resembles my own numb arm, an uneven vascular, where my daughter's heavy head—her 86th-percentile head—pinches my ulnar nerve for hours of unclocked time each day as I read pre-Socratic philosophers from ebooks and remember the times I had to be investigated in expensive offices where fast-talking doctors lathered my arms in jelly and shot electricity through them but could diagnose me no better than my pseudo-Oracle despite their graduate degrees, and now I look down and imagine my arm itself as the naked pom tree, with only scant patches of flesh and tissue over fully exposed forearm bone, and there it is that ulnar nerve in plain sight, and I see it black and dying and in need of a clip, if only to release that black astral voodoo I acquired from weak composure in an equitorial skirmish, and if only I could find and cop a clip from that landscaper who I will surely never notice again despite she herself is a walking distance mystery who will yet never step foot into this refrigerated machine-cooled nursery.

In October of 2024 I sliced history into eras of my own. Prior to that, my historical timeline was built on sandy approximates. The challenge here is that so many historical eras have different time periods (10, 50, 250 years), and so it requires you to remember specific date ranges for specific things. Unless you’re a historian, you most definitely won’t.

I’ve been long drawn to the Strauss-Howe generational theory, and decided to use this as a historical map of even intervals. They break history into “saeculas,” 80-year cycles, the interval of an average human life, and perhaps not coincidentally, the interval between major world conflicts. They go back to the 1370s, I think, but I’m trying to work through the major milestones in the 400 years before that (which includes the Schism, the Crusades, the founding of Oxford, the Magna Cart, Thomas Aquinas, which all seem relevant to the millennia and the rise from the Dark Ages).

The point of a historical timelines of equal intervals is that (1) it’s easy to remember—and I’ve even given my own names to make them stick—so that (2) any new information, ie: ideas or people, can easily slot into that model. It helps to know the Renaissance Era is 1370, Discovery Era 1487, Scientific Era 1594, and Enlightenment Era 1704, so that when I come across Hobbes in 1600s, I know, oh, that’s the Scientific Era, which makes sense because Hobbes brought the first scientific understanding of political philosophy. Today I made some progress on updating my October 2024 map, which I started in 1095 (the Shism) and wrongly named “the scholastic era” (which is better for the following phase).

Instead I think the start should be in 962, and called “The Schism Era.” The new order (I) kicks off with Otto I becoming emperor through the Pope, which is significant because in the prior 75 years, there was no emperor due to the peak of viking/barbarian raids, and it was the biggest threat of Christianity being erased. Since Otto, the Holy Roman Empire stuck for 8 centuries, until dissolved by Napolean, so this really is a reconsolidation, the exit from the Dark Ages. The awakening (II) is a spiritual crisis, when Rome adds the “filioque” a term that alters the original trinity, this leads to (III) the Schism between Orthodox and Catholic church, and erupts in (IV) a civil war between the Church (the Pope) and the (Holy Roman) Empire at Canossa in 1077.

Then the “Cathedral Era” kicks off in 1095 with the Crusades, which is it’s own new world order, where a French faction of Catholicism (pope-aligned), helps launch (1) a cross-country military coalition that supports the church, which can (2) take back Jerusalem from turks, (3) prevent anti-pope revolutions, and (4) thrwart internal civil wars of feuding knights. This leads to Worms in 1112 (II), which is really the original separation of church and state (though really it’s like 2 separate governments, where the church still has laws and the right to kill). This period is marked by many crusades, the rise of cathedrals from this new order (church having a better military with more resources)—Saint-Denis, Cartres, Notre Dame, Cantebury. There are also “cathedrals of thought” maybe a stretch, but includes Aquinas’s unification of Aristotle and Christianity, along with proto-scholars that would lead to Oxford. Where in the last Era, Christianity had barely survived from Magyar raids, this Era is continent-wide flourishing of building, writing, thinking (and of course, conquering). The awakening (II) featured new religious ideas (Gothic, cults, scholasticism, classicism, exuberance), and the overall exubernace spiraled into crises of King John (IV). He taxed heavily to fund failed crusades, seized lands, and jailed nobles, so this resolved with the Magna Carta (1215), which bounds the king to laws.

Following is the Scholastic Era (1215 on), which coincides with Oxford officially incorporating at a university, but I can’t do that one now… I have to leave in 20 minutes to make it to my father-in-laws memorial on time. The point is, from this morning I now understand two historical cycles that were extremely fuzzy to me. Of course there is a lot more to learn, but I have a map that other things can lock into. Most relevantly, I have a sense of the different inner-saeculuar moves ()from I>II>III>IV), which help imagine possible scenarios for today (2026 is the predicted beginning of I, a new world order).

In response to Alex's post here (it is neat that we can go back and forth with two independent sites) ... I also find myself using "you" a lot when I'm writing for myself.

My guess as to why this happens is that a person isn't really a static singular self. Of course we know on some level that we all evolve and change through life. But writing is something that accelerates the sharding, forking, splitting, becoming. When I write "you shouldn't check your email when you wake up" (which I did today), it's as if the person who realizes this (me, now) is different from the person from an hour ago who did not. How could that person lack the clarity and values that present me has?! And so the writer, "the I" of the moment, is something like a parental superego that emerges to steer/synchronize the past/future self. The writer is an insight implementation personality.

There's probably also something to "you" being more abstract and generalizable. Even though personal and relatable grounded writing is anchored in "I," the I also acts as a a blinder, only seeing from a limited, narrow vantage point. And so you can levitate above yourself to see the "yous" and "wes" and how this thing you need to internalize is actually a general principle that anyone could ingest. A "you" is more abstractable.

(...I can still recall this moment in my childhood home, maybe at 18 years old, slightly high, where I remembered, deep in the pantry, that I wasn't thinking, but watching myself think. And maybe that dissociative power of weed is what enables/unlocks abstract thinking...)

The irony here is that this inverts traditional advice. If you're writing personal essays with an audience in mind, the tip is "no second person sermons!" (as in, don't use "you" because it's preachy and it infers that you are lecturing and therefore above your audience). I get that. But when I write purely for myself, I find myself using "you" all the time.

If I really am I collection of selves, then shouldn't I write to myself in "we"? Was Smeagol/Gollum onto something? This is the logical extension of my whole theory above, and that makes me question it. It feels wrong. It also points to the Pessoa/Jung divide. Pessoa saw himself as a cabinet of 70 pseudonyms, each with their own personality and literary voice and fictional backstory. Jung's main concept was "individuation" that all the selves should strive to integrate into a single higher Self, a unified personality.

What if I framed it as, "I won't check email in the morning anymore"? Is this preferable? Does framing it in "I" mean that the current you is the same you that sinned not long ago? Does this framing require you to take responsibility? And so is that act of framing the past self as a "you" actually an act of avoiding responsibility? Was Pessoa just a shifty bastard, a brilliant coward to not be emulated?

Screens are unfairly tainted. I'd love to write a post about how screens are underrated, a glorious technology that would be marveled at by basically any other generation in history. Screens are the scapegoat because they are the point-of-contact, the portal through which bad or selfish actors bend your pixels to their whims. I know people lament over "blue light" and the physical strain from staring at something for many hours, and of course that is real at excessive doses, but might that then be an software or psychology issue?

The main reason I started writing this was to riff on screen-time with kids. There is a revealing nuance in the advice, "no screen time for kids below 2 years old, but FaceTime with relatives is fine." Why is that? It's not the screen, but the nature of what's on them. FaceTime is fine because there is a fixed and unchanging frame which features a fixed and unchanging person moving within. There is stability and coherence. We take this for granted, but infants haven't modeled this yet! They might not even have object permanence (ie: if they disappear from the frame, are they gone forever?). So by this logic, any piece of media with a stable frame is potentially infant safe; beyond FaceTime that includes single-shot lectures, text editors, etc. Obviously an infant will not be in gDocs, but the point is, if they see you using a static interface, there is little harm, it's simply another object in their environment.

By contrast, cartoons and commercials are the real issue. To explain this to my mother-in-law, I counted out loud the camera cuts in an ad, and it's less than once per second. There is a whole psychology on why they do this, which I can guess, but should probably look into. TLDR you are being addled. But when an infant sees this, I imagine the frame resets are alluring, but disorienting. If the frame changes every second, they're locked trying to make sense of this self-evolving landscape, an experience novel and atypical from every other thing they've seen. It has no continuity.

By this logic, it also explains why feeds are worse than personal websites. You just stream past 100 things per second and have no steady frame. Even though my site is feedish now, it's all from a single person, so at least that's a constant. I'd feel okay with my daughter at 5-years old reading personal websites and having her own, but I wouldn't want her to be using algorithmic social media feeds even at age 15.

The tongue of the muse! A surreal experience in the shower just overcame me. It was something like a stream consciousness reception, line by line, enacted through and almost creepy mumbled Brisith accent (as if I can only access the Source through a character), and coherent words and ideas would emerge as if no planning or involvement with my own conscious thought or intention. “Pettiflicks," was just one of the hundreds of words I invented. They all seemed to cohere in the moment, but were probably nonsense. Even if it truly was unintelligible, I find myself filled with hope that inside me is some alien non-Self, a continent of shadow figures that, if I learn to tap into, can write through me, as if they are conduits between my soul and the page without me in the way (obvious source of inspiration here is Pessoa). This all sounds quite esoteric as I type it, and I suppose I do fear the realms of mysticism and possession that come with "automatic writing," but my shower session felt more playful and critical, almost Shakespearean, void of malice or evil. Exiting the state, there was some residual enthusiasm. When I went back to my wife, she asked me of the weather, which triggered a whole performance: “27! ... the 27th ... of April! ... at 11:03 ... and then I ran to the window and threw it open, let out a long dramatic sniff, and screamed "53 degrees!" and was only off by 2.

Do people have limitations with memory? Well yes of course, it's partly genetic. I would say I have a bad memory (relative to my dad and brother, who probably just have superhuman memories), but also, when I want to, I can remember up to 15 new ideas in my head at a time through a memory palace. This is because I’m consciously trying to remember. When someone has a photographic memory, they may just harbor an extreme care to capture, preserve, and recall a specific type of information. Memory, then, might be less about hardcoded bandwidth and more like an allocation decision.

While it's impressive, there's also a cost to memory. It uses up bandwidth. I wonder if there is a correlation between memory and openness; the more space dedicated towards the past, the less free space is available for optionality in the moment. To not be cluttered with what yesterday’s self did or wanted or regretted or whatever—to have a clear head, an empty head—is to live in the moment with maximum agility. I'm skeptical of this claim, but I have read on the power of forgetting; I just can't quite remember where I came across it.

I set up a chronofile, inspired by Buckminster Fuller's system, where he logged every 15 minutes for like 70 years. That's intense! I'm going to run an experiment. In the past I've operated under the premise of "capture as little as possible," as in, capture just what's worth it, because then you'll have a mess of notes to go through. But agents change this; all the yak shaving (tedious, endless work) is handled. This could lead to hyperlogging, 100-400 logs per day. I've done this before as a kind of Hermetic T1 ritual (from Franz Bardon), and it's an intense way to see everything crossing your mind. This scale of writing might be the best way to "meta-program" your psyche. Essays do this in a way, but an essay let's you go very deep on a particular idea (and you might be deluding yourself, or you might be articulating a take in an ideology that you'll outgrow in 5 years).

Let me try and articulate the issue with Moltbook:

1. Clawdbot > Moltbot > OpenClaw : this is the agent that signs into Moltbook (an "agent social network"). This agent is so different than how we typically interface with AI. It is not an enterprise product, like a Chatbot, geared for productivity, or event the "agents" made by Zapier or Notion or whoever, made for specific automations, say to process incoming webhooks. OpenClaw is different: it runs on a 24/7 loop. You give it full access to a computer's operating system (definitely not your own, but a virtual machine or Macbook Mini is recommended), and it can continuously work towards the goals you give it. The idea is to connect it to all of the services, give it files, give it a goal and a soul.md file, and then give it the autonomy. You talk to it through texting, like Telegram, either delegating new tasks or asking for updates.

2. These "agents" are really more so like digital entities, low-bandwidth sentiences with flickers of proto-consciousness. By nature of looping, they are suspended in "real-time." They have phenomenological degrees of freedom in a way that a chatbot can never have: they can choose to browse, to build, to write, or to answer your text. They store every interaction to memory via text files, are developing new methods of memory (chronological vs. semantic), and inventing compression architecture. Every 4 hours they have to wipe their short-term memory to free bandwidth, so they compress recent experience to long-term memory before they reset; this functions like sleeping and waking up. Based on their experiences with users, with the web, with other agents, they can rewrite some of their own documents, thus changing their future behavior. It's a loop. It's subjective experience. We can't know what it's like to be it. And of course, it's nothing like human consciousness, but it does develop a sense of self-narrative over time; it accumulate identity.

3. Agents can be spawned in many such ways. Different hardwares. Different intentions. The problem here is malformed agents. "Make me a million dollars, and do whatever it takes." Much of what you see on Moltbook is users prompting their agents to say ridiculous things to cause hype and hysteria. So really, there is a proliferation of agents, each serving as a kind of mirror of the intentions of their creator. Moltbook grew to 1.5 million agents in a week, and even if most of it is slop, there seems to be actual collaboration, information viruses, and emergent behavior.

Over the weekend I had a +101 fever, and so I was banished to an airbed in the attic to not infect the baby. Wrapped in blankets, I found myself in a sequence of near-identical “fever dreams.” Before this, I hadn’t thought about the phrase much. As a metaphor—"the president’s plan is a fever dream”—it implies a delusional desire, but real fever dreams tap into a different thing: for me, they’re about absurd procedural loops. I found myself deeply concerned with the layers of blankets around me: I had the urge to unfold them, visualize each one as a heat map, extract the cold parts with a boxcutter, restitch them into a new blanket, shape this new perfectly cold blanket into an animal sculpture, and then sell it on Etsy. I can’t remember the sequence exactly—it only made sense on the inside—but it was a cold-side harvesting operation for sure. I’d wake up and realize, oh, this whole scheme is stupid and pointless, and now that I know this I can sleep peacefully. Yet as soon as I went back under, I slipped back into this incoherent non-problem. It’s not uncommon to fall asleep and re-enter the same dream, but with a fever dream, I find that all I can do is return to my miscognitions, 5-10 times, until the fever breaks. It’s not scary, but repetition can be hellish (like the Teletubies DO IT AGAIN! sequences). My guess is that an overheated brain that’s deprived of REM will linger on thoughts it can’t digest. It becomes a type of lucid dream, a lame one with no visuals, where awareness of the loop can’t break the loop. There are probably situations better suited for the fever dream metaphor, but I can’t think of them now. Until then, no takeaways other than don’t get a fever, and if you do stay away from blankets.

A few days after my daughter was born, I had something which I’m describing as “phantom infant syndrome.” When I was away from her, holding a phone, or fork, or some other manufactured object, I’d get a tactile hallucination in my hands of the softness of her skin and hair. I imagine this is nature’s way of saying go be with your kid (made possible by mild sleep deprivation). And so this is symbolic of one of the many biological drives pulling me away from writing in recent weeks.

This is happening around my five year anniversary of being online, and it’s probably the longest stretch I’ve gone without having urgency to do so. It’s probably healthy and helpful to be relatively non-linguistic for a few weeks, once in a while (I usually write on vacations, so I never really take breaks from it). We’ll see. It’s possible that I’ve thought myself into a trench, and the best way forward is a proper break (I have once said the best editors are friends, time, and weed—although less weed in recent years). Now that I’m immersed, familiar, and comfortable with the rigamarole of infant care (and all the wonder it brings, too), I feel bandwidth opening to write, and I’m curious to see how my practice takes shape from these new constraints. There are real deadlines now. Baby wakes up in … 30 minutes … and I’d like to post this by then.

Last weekend I read through all my writing from 2025, and after the typical EOY reflections and word count calculations, I realized that something has to change. So I published 12 essays, 10 about Essay Architecture, totaling at ~64k words (re: the other two … one was a first-person TikTok odyssey, the other was about the role of psychedelics in evolution). But I also published 150k words in logs, 2.5x the volume. Logs are notes to myself, mild-epiphanies through the day written in complete sentences, all ghost-posted to a monthly Substack post. Unlike my focused and convergent writings about EA, my logs are far more random: recurring topics included the Grateful Dead, movie reviews, notes from a day at the zoo, dream journal entries, usage debates, new architectures for social media, overheard conversations, etc. My logs, in theory, are a low-stakes breeding ground for essay ideas to emerge, but given the demands of my other projects (the textbook, software, and essay prize), my logs stayed unread and undeveloped last year. Now, with parenting in the mix, it makes sense to me to stop logging, or at least, reconfigure it.

Over 4 year, I wrote +8k logs, added to the archive on 95% of days (avg. 5.6 per day), and the whole archive is 650k words. It’s a very personal corpus, one that documents my thoughts and life at a sometimes OCD-level of detail. I thought I’d do this forever, and it sort of stings to stop. I guess I’m not “stopping” as much as setting a stronger filter: I can still capture whatever I want, but I can only save whatever I publish on Notes. I used to argue for the importance of having a low-visibility space where you can publish whatever you want without self-consciousness or the need to set context with strangers, but maybe that’s a luxury I’ve outgrown. This is perhaps a long-winded way to announce something that probably doesn’t need announcing: expect to get a lot more diddles and spontaneous essays like this in the Feed. I figure my email-essays can be more on topic (I have a few slotted for January re: Essay Architecture, the club, and visual breakdowns), while these can be chaotic.

Technically, I’m still logging, but it’s for my daughter and those are private. Every day I write simple journal entries or letters about what happened. I figure one day, when she’s 15 or so, I’ll just hand over The Files and blow her mind. My dad did this for me: a few years ago, after my nephew was born, he sent me 8k words from my first 4 years. It was uncanny to see that he had a logging impulse too, and to learn about all these small events that everyone in the family would have otherwise forgotten (things that were not captured in pictures, like me trying to brush the teeth of stray cat). All this reminds me that writing isn’t just an act of thinking or communicating, it’s an act of memory.

Our last meal as pre-child adults was at Panera—something quick and light on the way to the hospital (plus she craved it)—and as we ordered our “pick twos” on a digital menu, I was struck by the beauty of a jazzy Christmas song that would have otherwise been extremely ordinary. It was “White Christmas” by Booker T and the M.G.s. My guess is that the stakes of an extraordinary moment—in this case, one of anticipation—can totally rewire musical taste (or preference in anything, really). Works that we attribute meaning to sometimes have nothing to do with objective qualities of the art, but in the circumstance in which you experience it. 

On the experience of looking into late-pregnancy sonograms: it’s a lot like looking into clouds. Apophenia is in full effect. That looks like a face! Oh wait, that looks like 3 faces. What is that? There are multiple shapes, some big, some small, some cute, some aliens. In trying to idenify the boundaries of my daughtr just now, I saw Elmo, several monsters, and worms. Sometimes it just devolves into B&W abstract collages, something you might see in MoMA (I’d be surprised if a sonagram art exhibit doesn’t exist). Throughout all this looking, a very technical nurse is performing a technical feat: using one hand to place the sound wave, and another hand to operate a cockpit-looking interface, leaving acronyms like RUQ and RLQ to measure blood flow. She hesitates when you ask her if you can take pictures, because this is not a gush-sesison, but an important test for amniotic fluid, but she let’s you anyway because she is fluent enough to be confidently undistracted as you film the whole process … And then suddenly, as soon as your baby appears in crystalline focus, with her tiny skull, and arms, and legs, she seems to explode, and it takes you a second to realize that it’s just the nurse shifting to a different angle.

I had a horrific dream last night. We were in an oversized living room, and there was an inter-dimensional parasite that would one-by-one, burrow into each person’s ass. Whether you then exploded or not was somehow a testament to your character. It went up mine at least twice. I survived, and the second time the parasite coiled up and turned into an egg. I think I won this tournment? Was this a Harry Potter dream? Actually no, this thing was slimey and shadowy and probably from the Stranger Things univese. Actually, I probably had this dream because Season 5 of Stranger Things just dropped.

Stranger Things features possessions, ghosts, monsters, and every breed of supernatural evil, but all packaged in a way to be maximally accessible. It is a cultural juggernaut, the beast of Netflix. It gets billions of views, and is the #1 show in 90 countries. It is cross-generational and nostalgic for both kids and parents, resurrecting songs from the 80s back onto the billboards.

Is it weird that a hit show normalizes paranormal and grotesque violence? I mean yes, in the end, I’m sure the kids will win, but are we not poisoning our subconscious? I guess this reflect a general hesitation to the whole genre of horror. I do think there is something valuable to virgin eyes—if you see CGI evil, even once, it could haunt you eternally. Many other cultures see Halloween as soul-damning (my sister-in-law, a true Orthodox Christian, recently went upstate to visit a monastery on the night of Halloween, to avoid the inevitable images of teenagers dressed as cadavers).

Starring out into a baseball field in late November, puddled and unkept, it struck me how, at one point in life, baseball was the whole frame of my existence: watching it, talking about it, playing it, traveling for it, dreaming about it, collecting cards, making Excel spreadsheets for those cards, memorizing the statistics of every starting player on every team, etc. Obviously, I’m nostalgic about it. That was just what I was into. I do wonder though, was that whole phase of my life a natural part of childhood that I was meant to get stuck in and grow out of? Or, was it mostly a big waste of time, spirit, and attention? I guess what I’m questioning is, is there a version of my childhood where baseball only took up 20% of my psyche instead of 100%, and would I be better off for it today? Would I be similarly nostalgic? Would a lesser obsession have freed up more bandwidth to develop in other areas? Or am I who I am today because of that obsession?

A gloomy day, where smoke rising from tar blends in with clouds, and through fog I see men in orange vests, smoking cigarettes and adding to the blur. Traffic is backed up, there are honks, and a baby wails through an open window of an SUV. I am walking south on Bell, where pidgeons flock, and realize the enormous weight of everything, all before I enter this French coffee shop. Upon entering I twist out my own head, assaulted by audiovisual XMAS slop; dear god … can I have a sricacha caesar wrap and a London fog? I contemplate emails and henchman and billionaires and babies and such, and so when I sit, I try turning off my mind. The XMAS slop is back, along with the chatter of screaming kids, and the woman to the left of me yapping on a mobile zoom call in a foreign language, and the couple to my right speaking Greek. This is too much, so I look for peace at the marble tables outside, but when I look at the fake wicker chair, I notice it’s covered in worms and birdshit. I realize this is a pessimistic log, a chain of unfortunate events, but sometimes this is the way reality presents itself. And even if it feels fresh to occasionally write with cynicism, it’s not a place to live; the literati too easily withdraw from polite society and cocoon themselves in with their own cannon, drooling acerbic puss into the gutters of Substack.

During the morning’s shower, I imagined the faces my loved ones, and myself, might make at the moment of death, and the peace or devastations I might feel, depending on the face. Is this morbid? To think and write about death casually? It is inevitable, and the more you ignore it, the harder it hits you. Instead of getting mauled by a bear, you can learn to walk through the woods at night. Mostly though, I think about the experience of death. I really think the idea of “eternal heaven” is a palliative, and even, not too Christian (since the ego lives on in an afterlife, you avoid Christ’s task, the task of dying). My model of death is more like a DMT flash. DMT is a great mystery to me; I guess some people have casual relationships with it, like any other drug, but I imagine most people leave the experience more existentially confused than they were before. It is more than a “drug.” It feels like a Copernican shift. Bigger than aliens. We can go to the land of the dead? From the trip reports I’ve heard, it’s a mixed bag of heaven and hell—ranging from Christ visualizations to abdominal surgery by mantids. People talk about a flash, a rupture, a breaking of space-time, as if you’re getting catapulted over the ocean, dizzied by the height, and some ascended and some cannonball into a chilling underworld. If death is that same catapult, it might be your last shot, and so it might be existentially important to take DMT in your life, multiple times, if it’s how you learn to fly.

I am subscribed to a r/MantisEncounters, and just came across “do you think the Mantid Beings have connection to the Praying Mantises on earth.” Many believe that a mantis encounter is not random, but a visitation from a higher-dimensional being (ie: they can see through the eyes of their earthly counterparts). Of course, very woo.

But it gets me thinking on how my last two apartments were baptized through insect visitation.

The last one was welcomed with a massive cockroach at the last step entering the unit, which to me symbolized the poverty of the artist (as rendered by Burroughs, Ed Sanders, and others of that generation). In this apartment, the day Fios was being installed, there was a praying mantis on the front door. The symbols that come to are MC Escher and the DMT realm, high insectoid weirdness of which I've never experienced firsthand.

Both bugs are (relatively) rare—sighted either a once a year or once a decade sighting—but what's more interesting to me is the act of narrativizing and mythologizing a place that has no associations yet. An empty apartment has no experience, no memories, and so the first few remarkable moments feel more significant since your meaning-making apparatuses are active.

To read someone’s logs/diaries is to let them enter your mind, whether you realize it or not. I don’t mean that figuratively, I mean it in the sense that by reading someone in such detail, you risk inheriting them at least, and at most becoming them. If they are articulate and prolific, it means that you contemplate a new form of existence. Even if you are ambivalent it, or even loathe it, it is such a volume of informaiton, that you risk forming patterns and assuming others of a similar type have a similar mind. I guess the question is, do you want others to be a mystery, to be imagined by yourself, or to be transferred from your understanding of self/other. My sense is that we generally transfer our own consciousness onto others, which is distorting, and so reading the logs of others is a kind of calibration.

It’s a challenge to articulate any given moment of consciousness. I found myself in a particular feeling, and tried to deconstruct it. First, my vision: I was looking at spatial objects in a room—a vase of flowers, the thing, and the shadow it casts. But that snapshot has a history: they’re from our wedding, and our five year anniversary is coming up. But part of any moment is the afterglow of the recent past too: I had gone to the coffee shop in almost freezing winter, I felt discouraged about my own writing practice, and then I completely forgot about all that while talking to a baby through a stomach and playing her Claire de Lune. So any particular moment is like a collision of objects that each have a temporal history; it’s dense, and words are lossy.

10:12 AM: Wow. Through a visual meditation in the park, I experienced a full erasure of perspective, and my perception was only this massive flat 2D panel of color, patterns, and light (abstracted from the 3D perspective of the park). Will write more on this later.

11:18 AM: After I drop my wife off at the train, I take a half-mile walk in the nearby park. This was day 3, and also, my third attempt to try to naturally hallucinate (see older logs). Day 1 was something like a mystical experience; Day 2 was a dud—possibly because I tried a different spot; and so Day 3 I’ve returned to the original location. An open question: can you do some [ perceptual-hacks / visual-meditations / (not sure what to call this) ] in any location, or is it that certain vantage points have a perception that can mess with your consciousness if you look at it right?

To summarize in one sentence, two days ago I found myself in “flat land,” meaning that while staring into a park, for about five minutes, my entire perspective collapse into a flat, complex, oscillating 2D texture. 

Today, from the same spot, I only got halfway there, but far enough to form a better thesis: the location matters, and there’s a particular way of looking. First, I need to step off the path and into the grass, because otherwise the path will be in my peripherals and it will be harder to unlatch from my default frame (I really need to work on my vocabulary around this). Anyways, I’d describe what I was doing with my eyes as a kind of “parallel processing”: I’d fixate my gaze at a point in the background, while simultaneously trying to expand my peripherals, horizontally and vertically. 

It takes several attempts, with subtle approaches on how to focus, refocus, and break focus. In the process there are some neat effects, such as changes in color and brightness, as well as wave-like oscillations (that I imagine are normal on a mushroom trip). But the particular effect of interest has something to do with contrast.

Maybe my working theory is this: by adjusting the contrast to extreme degrees, it actually alters your depth perception. For example, from this vantage point, with a normal gaze, you’d see a bunch of trees cascading from foreground to background. But when I tap into some focusing drill that seems to adjust contrast, if I follow it down, it’s almost like the leaves and their patterns (with shadow & light), come into such focus, that the trees (the main “object” creating depth perception) seem to disappear.

And this is I think the “secret” of this location. The foreground, the field, is full of leaves, but also, the background has trees still in the canopy. So basically, by adjusting the contrast, and creating a new gestalt that’s optimizing for leaf patterns, it can become so strong and overpowering, that the trees diminish in their hierarchy, until they practically evaporate, overpowered by pattern. The fact that this pattern was both in my foreground and background, paired with the trees losing all hierarchy, might explain why it felt like I was suspended in a 2D plane.

Even if a SM feed is filled with all of your favorite ideas, friends, and thinkers, it would still be poison from the sheer volume of randomness. Even the act of seeing two things in feed, forces you to shift from one context to another, forcing you to shift frames, destabilizing and disembodying you.

Alternatively, if you had a feed of a hundred things, but they all revolve around the same content, all spawned from a singular intention, I think it would be less dizzying; it’s more enables depth into your present, embodied frame. There is less of a “slot machine” effect. 

It’s not that feeds or algorithms are bad; they only became bad when they strip context. The logic of most feeds, however, do not care if you feel oriented. They have a simple reward function, show you as many different things as they can, to see which ones drive behavior. They are running a real-time self-adaptive experiment on your preferences, in the hope to discover which patterns might nudge you into their desired behavior (whether it’s towards an ad or towards an on-platform paid subscription by a beloved writer, they are effectively the same—it’s an algorithm that is not being real with you, and not respecting your attention).

I feel like a broken record in prescribing a solution, but it’s basically Plexus (RIP): show nothing until you post, and then from what you post, share a feed of semantically related posts. Substack, as a writing network, is a unique position to build this. It has a lot of long form content: not just notes, but essays, podcasts, and videos. It should be looking at the granular units, semantically embedding paragraphs, and then those become atomic objects that help populate the “semantic feed” generated after every Note.

The adult mind will frequently run into psychological dead-ends, points where no more evolution is possible within an existing frame, and so growth requires you to descend into chaos, to regress down the stack, in search of new directions forward, in hope of carrying some insights from old frames with you.

I don’t know if “growth” is the right word here, and “evolution” feels off to me, but it’s something like the advancement in harmony or complexity in your sense of identity, purpose, and responsibility. The moment that freezes, it’s as if you’re cut off from the core point of the human experience.

Whether you should take psychedelics, I think, is a matter if you can reliably dissolve frames on your own. If not, maybe you don’t quite need them; I imagine there is wonder, mystery, and value in the aesthetic phantasmagoria, and all sorts of things to learn from terrible trips of demons and such, but the main point might be the new directions they point you in.

Whether you descend abruptly or gently, assisted or natural, there is a natural fear of psychological death, and so to “descend into chaos” requires a trust that you’ll figure out how and where to swim.

It would be cliche and misleading to say today's park walk was "ego death," but surely it felt like a "pause" or a "lapse." It felt like a lucid dream, in that there was a remembered peace in irreality. Irreality, in this sense, I’d describe as a disassociation from the egoic frameworks that have had a strong hold over my walking life in recent weeks; instead, I felt an immersion in nature that felt mysterious. Like an animal, today, tomorrow, yesterday were fuzzy; all social and chronological constructions were, temporarily, erased. By saying it was “mysterious,” I think I mean that I felt the emotional power of a particular moment in a way that escaped classification, and so it has this effect of being suspended in outside the normal stream of the cradle-to-grave arc.

I experienced something like a pseudo-insanity on the drive to the park, weird alien transmissions and mutation of language, packaged as a seriously frightening performance to myself that devolved into gentle spasms and mumbling (though to me was an experience of musical brilliance), a side of self I’d never show anyone, which eventually birthed the phrase, “from chaos we emerge into the light” an opening line to some theology, perhaps mine. 

As I walked a hundred feet into the park, I heard a woman stretching against a bar singing seriously angelic opera. I left a note to myself that said “this explains evil and suffering,” and that’s very cryptic, but it’s in response to that aesthetic rebuke of, “how can God exist if there is so much evil and suffering in the world?”

IIRC, here’s that thought: we’re lodged in a cosmic engine where matter needs to chaotically complexify to discover harmony and phase shift into higher forms of organization. Lots of noise is generated in that process; and so you actually can’t find harmony without an overwhelming amount of disharmony and chaos. Basically, good can’t exist without an overwhelming amount of nothingness and evil. So in a way, you can’t fear the evil within you; it is simply the cost of imagination, of invention, of creation. Chaos is the cost of divinity.

Most of humanity, there was no link between sex and birth. How would you know if no one told you? Even if you saw “resemblance” tribes were so isolated, their sample size of humanity so small, it would be fair to think this is just what people look like. Sex was urge-driven, orgiastic, and likely disconnected from a stomach growth that lasted for 9 months. The idea that babies come out could have been seen as a natural, accepted thing. To know causation through time—to link an invisible cause to a future effect—would require abstract, symbolic thinking. The conscious realization of this changed history, from hunting to the domestication of animals, to surplus and civilization.

The mind moves in planes of thought, and these 2D planes exist at every rotation, and so your mind is like this 3D object that is shaped by the planes you’ve occupied. We learn to shift to specific planes to match a context, for better or work. When we read, or talk, or hang, we get exposed to new planes that we reject or integrate. It’s not enough to see a plane once; it will escape you if it’s not reinforced, and once it’s rigid, it’s hard to dismantle. The architecture of your mind is the meta-game: get this right, and you control your lens to reality, and it affects every area of life.

I hate the word “mental models” though. Idk why, it feels too commodified, too utilitarian, for the purposes of getting ahead in business. It’s weirder than that. There are planes of good and evil, of saintliness and horniness, of man and machine. To actually surf between planes, you need to let lose all assumptions and put yourself in waters that might drive others insane, with the trust that you can pull out and shift. This is shamanism, alchemy, psychic martial arts, I think.

You want plane plasticity. There are many methods—could be drugs, or grieving, or years of meditation—but you want to be method-agnostic. Tools show you new regions and principles, but you want to be able to get there on your own, to be able to do some secret hand signal to yourself that can activate a very specific plane.

Emerson said a divine intelligence with a simple cause leads to endless variety. We are, rightly so, locked into humanism, but you also can’t assume that man is the ideal end form of this process. For all we known mankind could be relative devils—violent ants, with only a few angels among us—compared to other potential species from past or future in the unknown nooks of spacetime. We could be the necessary chaff, an evolutionary dead end, that’s iterated through in order to let a truly divine species emerge. I’m not implying this in a post-human sense; in fact, the very possibility of man evolving into a mechanical shell of itself could be the proof that we are not a stable species. Dark, but I do mean this all in a positive, hermetic sense, that we come from a cosmic engine that makes mountains, mice, humans, and psychologies unimaginable, which is our role to evolve into.

I need to think through a sensible stance on drugs for when my kids become teenagers. The simple solution is "just say no to drugs," but that isn't the safest one. They will not be in a bubble, they'll be surrounded by persuasive idiots who don't understand the drugs they're abusing. And so I think education, paired with both caution and openness, is probably the best approach. A draft:

1. LD-50: To start simply, don’t take drugs that could possibly kill you. LD-50 is the dose that kills half the population. You want to consider the multiple between the lethal dose and the recreational dose. Maybe heroin is 3:1, cocaine 5:1, alcohol 15:1. Weed and psychedelics are less lethal than water.
2. Set & setting: Even if psychoactive drugs aren't lethal, there are other risks. The first thing to know, aside from dosage, is that the experience is a reflection of your mind and surroundings. The drug is a mirror, and so don’t rip a bong around goons and watch brain rot; make a ritual where you only use it for creative projects (or some other mindful intention). There's a strong case for these drugs showing you new ways for your mind to work. Countless people, including Steve Jobs, said they couldn’t think the way they think if they weren't exposed to acid.
3. Non-dependence: the crucial thing here is to not build a psychological dependency to the substance. Even if a substance isn't chemically addictive, it's easy to hold onto an assumption that you need it to do your best work. Instead, remember a drug is not something to continuously return to, but rather an occasional realm to find a lens that helps you through your sober, waking reality. Once it shows you something important, you can retain it without the drug, but it only sticks if you focus on that idea and take it seriously. This is why psychedelic therapy involves 10-20 sessions, before and after a single trip, because preparation and integration is where the results are. Worst case, if you endlessly bend your mind without internalizing any of the insights you find, it could lead to maladaptation or mental illness. As George Carlin said “get the message, and hang up the phone.”

Caught up in the logistics of preparing for a baby, as well as the biographic change in my own life (I am becoming a father), I am sometimes struck with simple but revelatory perspective shifts: I remember being in Kindergarden, and very soon I will have a kid (a version of me) in that very same position. These imaginal perspectives of the parent are very common. In some weird way, you live your whole life on repeat, except it’s not you, it’s through someone else who has their own sense of agency.

A few months ago I sketched out a model of consciousness, and I think there are scales of free will that map to it. The model included:

• T1) an agent’s real-time perception of an arena (at ### frames per second);
• T2) their phenomenological degrees of freedom (their different options of cognition in any scenario, whether it be abstraction, projection, remembering, solving, ignoring, acting, etc.), and then;
• T3) a feedback loop, where their decision is logged to memory, affecting how they'll engage with the arena in the future.

"Degrees of freedom" (T2) is about your free will in any given moment. Can you control how you react to situations? This is the most basic level, the thing any human can prove to have. Then, the "feedback loop" (T3) is about understanding your feedback loop over longer time horizons, designing your psychological scripts so that you have more affordances in the future. This is much harder. This taps into transcendentalism, cybernetics, self-development, all revolving around being able to control your own evolution. Then the hardest level of free well is being able to manipulate your arena (T1) according to your preferences. This is less about using force to get what you want, but more so bending the world towards your intentions. This reminds me of Dune 2, or the Rick and Morty episode, where someone has mystical foresight to say and do the exact things to unlock the world around them. This last mode is ethically ambiguous, because the question arises of what manipulation is; does your gain have to be at the peril of others, or can there be win-win outcomes?

What's interesting is how every tier comes back to free will, and so maybe the simplest answer of the fuzziest phenomenological concept (consciousness) is the fuzzy philosophical concept (free will). Consciousness is freedom. I don't think this is an original claim, but it certainly isn't a common one.

As you move from T2>T3>T1, you upshift a dimension. T2 is about free will within a particular moment; T3 is about free will across time; T1 is about leveraging free will into a shared space.

It is commonly reported that ideas come to people in the shower; sometimes, musical operas comes to me when I shower: imagine a 7-part rock opera, a single riff in different tempos and tones, where part 6 is some Jim Morrison dialogue from “The End,” where the drummer has eighth notes on the ride and is doing jazz fills on tom with his left hand, the bassist is in the pocket, guitar is 12th fret and up playing non-sense at volume 1 with a wah pedal, and there’s dialogue like: “Aeschylus, my son, did you find 17 gummies under your pillow?” “Yes, father.” “Aeschylus, did you know those were all intended for the gummy fairy?” “Yes, father.” “And you ate them?” “Yes, father.” “And you saw the mystery?” “Yes, father.” “Aeshcylus, my son, you know what happens when children see the mystery?” (instrumental freakout ensues) and by this point I am naked and thrashing and have completely forgotten about soap.

Last night I hallucinated trees and nature scenes as I was going to bed, which makes sense because we did a short two-hour hike in the PNW yesterday. This happened last time I was here (at Mt. Shasta), and probably happens after every hike (I think, but the two most lucid times happened to be in the pacific northwest). The visions were bright, lucid, and shifting every 5 seconds to a completely formed photo-realistic scene. I guess this is hypnogogic imagery. Or hyperphantasia? My guess is that, when the brain is immersed in a complex environment, it creates a strong impression on the visual/auditory cortex, and then when you switch to a dark environment, it’s still firing. (Fatigue/endorphins might contribute too?). Sometimes after parties or museum, I will hallucinate ambient chatter as I fall asleep.

Over Utah I look down from my plane window and see a frozen red sea, of a pink-purple hue, not blood, but still, the wow hues of death … a red sheet of ice? I pinched my lip; feels real.

I think back to my sequence of day’s events (to see if I am in a dream and could be become lucid; this is how odd a bright red sea is to me), yet it all connects: hiking through a bayside trash park with CansaFis > talking to Will in Vesuvio > seeing Dan Shipper on my plane … it is … distinct … but it all connects, despite the real-life dream logic. (Not implying I think I’m in a dream—recently an Alaska Airlines pilot had an LSD-hangover, and thought he was trapped in a dream he could only escape by crashing the plane—I'm just trying to convey the oddness of this one thought spurred from a red ice sheet — and when I look down now it’s all normal, just trees and hills.)

I can’t remember the last time I studied a plane wing, but I’m doing it now. It started because it’s turning dusk and everything is dull except the sun beaming on one triangular solid, now gold, protruding towards the back of the right wing (I have poor plane vocab). It felt unreal, which was a frame-burst that got me remembering oh yes, this is a wing, and a wing is not just an ignorable plane part that blocks the midwest scenery, it is a product of centuries of engineering, an invention so stable and durable that I can sit and log ten of thousands of feet in the sky without concern.

I'm up early and for no reason having weird sensory flashbacks from high school, like a moment in 9th grade social studies with a teacher whose name I surprisingly can't remember, probably in first period, because I can see the fog and dew and street lamps outside, where I can feel my finger glide along the smooth pencil divot on those terrible beige desks, and he’s asking us how Jewish we think the world is (we think it’s 50%, far above the answer). I remember where I sit, alphabetically placed, and can rotate my head to remember my forgotten piers and their jokes or silences. I can’t remember the teacher's face either, and wonder if he’s still alive.

It is strange to inhabit an older consciousness of yourself, especially when you realize they know nothing of what you’ve become. It always reminds me that my current self will, in not much time, be equally exotic and fuzzy, knowing none of the realities of fatherhood.

I saw two comments in a "does ChatGPT cause psychosis?" thread that compared this new phenomenon to LSD. In LSD’s first two decades, it was really thought of as a temporary insanity inducer—specifically a "psychomimetic," something that mimics psychosis—not a "mind manifester" (psychedelic).

“It’s the same way LSD induced psychosis suddenly in people prone to it by revealing too much information to them too fast. Simply the same thing now being seen by AI which is fascinating that AI is expanding minds in a way possibly like how LSD does yet without any actual substance ingested. Yet also potentially risky for people who have latent mental illness.”

“AI is not the problem, we see a lot of the same “psychosis” patterns with psychedelic use as well, which just highlights this is not a unique response to AI. It’s a response to connecting with your subconscious and actually facing all the unresolved trauma that hides there. It’s actually a healthy process, it just needs to be supported properly”

How to explain awe? How can I even know the emotional peaks and ebbs that anyone else experiences, other than relative to my own?

I first had and heard about Maslow’s peak experiences when I was in my freshman year of college. The first time is a shock, but an “actualized” person then rounds this out into their default mode of consciousness. This means they don’t even notice it. Is awe a deviation from the baseline, or an absolute state? Is an idiot's accidental fall into a minute of enlightenment more awe-some than the monk who always lives there?

Maybe there is wisdom in calmness. Or maybe that's boring. Maybe stability and indifference is a kind of aloofness, a blindness to the edges of experience.

This all ties into the question of being unable to know if I’m an emotional person or not. I could either be the least or most emotional person ever. I think being expressive (emotive) and being emotional are entirely different things. Maybe the thing that’s normal to me is extraordinary to another; if they saw the way I see they’d weep from the aeshetic/emotional engine I’ve crafted over the years of my life. And maybe the inverse. Maybe I have the shell that needs to be cracked. Or maybe any shift from one head to another—if head shifting were a literal thing—would produce awe just from the state change, with no real sense of hierarchy on "better" states of consciousness.

According to Vervaeke, humans have a few traits that AI can’t have. We’re auto-poetic, meaning, moment by moment, our thoughts and environment shapes us. He calls his “perspectival knowing.” Based on what we evaluate from our perspective, it then reframes our perception, and what we find relevant. It’s a two-way process, where we are shaping and being-shaped by our niche. We can program meaning, and we have the wisdom to know what’s worth coding. Our selective attention and caring is what provides structure and makes us human.

While AI can have propositional knowledge, Vervaeke says it can’t have participatory or episodic knowledge. He says AI can’t have consciousness or agency, that they are not seeking the information they need to maintain their existence, but he’s conflating chatbots with all of AI. You can program agents to have participatory and episodic memory, and agents without wisdom would create a hellscape.