23,694 Days old = 13 * 1823
It’s a puzzle I’m working out. That’s what my notebooks have always been. A puzzle I’m trying to put together. I have ideas about things that seem important, so I start writing words. They give me sentences that remind me of those thoughts — and I like to think the words are so clear that anyone who understands my language will equally be able to at least understand the sentence and so know that thought. With a few sentences, a few paragraphs, a series of thoughts builds into a meaningful idea, and with a few paragraphs, an insight into some subject has been distinctly preserved. In most theories of language, this preservation of an insight by any subject, given the preservation of the text, perhaps suitably translated from language to language is eternal. An insight thus becomes timeless and atomic in its existence.
But of course I know the more clearly I state it and the more clearly I state anything, that this cannot be ultimately true. This truth, like any insight, like anything capable of being contemplated requires assumptions. It requires conditions. It requires context, expression, and a circumstance, a moment of discourse.
Continued…
I’ve learned a lot from talking to AI, but the most important things — the timeless, precious, priceless thoughts — are within me. It’s the stepping back, reading back the responses that I get after asking the chatbot to organize what I’ve said, to summarize, to clean up and restate what I was feeling inadequate at describing, unable to clearly explain to myself for years, that I understand — not that the language models know something that I don’t — but that what I knew all along can be expressed in a way that is clearer in words that nearly fit self… or perhaps patience — to organize so clearly, or completely.
So what I’m learning that is so important is that I did know these things all along but I didn’t have the clarity to fall back on, or the eloquence to have confidence in the feeling that I did get it… whatever it is… or was…
I want to believe in wisdom that I have never been able to state. But now, with those statements which resonate with my inner wisdom… have I gained some wisdom? or have I lost the seed of maintaining the wonder of ineffability?
When we ask a question, we are generally looking for meaning in the form of a narrative answer. However, words are not meaningful. Words are not containers of meaning. They are not containers at all. They have the ability to evoke meaning only when presenting to a mind that can place the word used in a context which has been meaningful to them in the past. It is the mind that recognizes the word which evokes meaning from their current context, and the discourse they understand as why the words are being encountered.
Meaning is more than words. Life, like my life, is meaningful to me, whether I am thinking of naming the content of my thoughts or not. For example, as I sit in my car, writing these words, there is a mosquito buzzing around me. I try several times to swat with my hand against the window beside me and finally manage to catch it with a clap of my two hands. There are few or no words in my head as I do this, even as I’m writing through the narrative I’m forming on this page that either helps me toward my goal of removing the threat represented by the mosquito — but there is significant meaning to the success of my mission — to me.
Consciousness is a container, in that all experience, all of my experience, which is the only experience I have access to, is contained in my consciousness. This container of consciousness holds the immediate experience — which in reflection I might label as “Now” — but this immediate now contains both what I am recalling as what has been, and what I anticipate as what is to come.
As the immediate experience, the container of consciousness resolves a personal horizon, which I would describe in a narrative to another person as my subjective world. It is within this idea of consciousness as a container which I label my subjective world that I can understand and distinguish a part of this world — the objective world — that is, the models of a physical world, of a political world, of a scientific empirical world, of a social and emotional world. I can distinguish many labels referring to various aspects of this objective world, but there is no question that all of these models which I think of as outside of me are contained in my subjective world, and so within my pre-reflective indisputable consciousness.
While I use the models learned from narratives learned through a life of interactions with the people and media, and with experience I have had directly through my physical encounters with my body and the world around me… there is another world which is outside of my subjective world, and also not included in the models I can make of a physical world. That is the corporeal world, which is the world which is present to my senses, which can be recorded by my instruments. It is the empirical world before there can be a model of it. My experience as reduced to only what [scribbled out] is immediate. It is the corporeal instant. It is the self entangled with non-self, such that there is no distinction. This is my lifeworld. Husserl’s Lebenswelt.
The corporeal world is a conceptual extrapolation of a wider world which can only be experienced one conscious mind at one Now. And if we understand the subjective world as contained in consciousness, and the objective world as contained in the subjective world of one person, then the corporeal world is the world that [scribbled out]
is touched by the subjective world but only through a corporeal Embodiment.
The Nature of Narrative
In my notebook, to express an idea, my tool is primarily words forming sentences, and those sentences presented serially in paragraphs. This is the form or the narrative construct to express and organize some set of ideas that I have in my mind that I have an intention of saving so that I can recreate these ideas for myself and hopefully, but less certainly, offer them in a form that other people can use to recognize these same ideas. This form is called a narrative. Whether I am writing or speaking, the ideas are not contained in the form. We depend on a reader or listener recognizing the expressions and recreate them into the sentences, paragraphs, and organize them to understand my intended ideas.
Narrative is not a formal system. Rather, it is an informal manner of allowing a specific vocabulary of words usually understood as a specificity of language, to form expressions which can be recognized as a specific intended meaning. However, the lack of formalization in interpretation means every reader or listener has some personal degree of flexibility in understanding the actual meaning. While there could be conscious intention to take an expression in a certain way, usually the understanding is automatically a reflexive, implicit understanding of meaning.
So maybe the serial narrative does have important utility… just perfection in translation from ideas and absolute modeling of corporeality is not available as such. I would note, in that case, that the problem with the serial narrative form is not in the narrative, but in the belief that expressions are more than the utility that they bestow. That the meaning they evoke is something which can be “True” in any absolute sense. Rather, at best, narrative is useful, now.
6 June 2025
123 Days since Feb 1
23,703 Days Old
The Nature of Narrative
In my notebook, to express an idea, my tool is primarily words forming sentences, and those sentences presented serially in paragraphs. This is the form or the narrative construct to express and organize some set of ideas that I have in my mind that I have an intention of saving so that I can recreate these ideas for myself and hopefully, but less certainly, offer them in a form that other people can use to recognize these same ideas. This form is called a narrative. Whether I am writing or speaking, the ideas are not contained in the form. We depend on a reader or listener recognizing the expressions and recreate them into the sentences, paragraphs, and organize them to understand my intended ideas.
Narrative is not a formal system. Rather, it is an informal manner of allowing a specific vocabulary of words usually understood as a specificity of language to form expressions which can be recognized as a specific intended meaning. However, the lack of a formalization in interpretation means every reader or listener has some personal degree of flexibility in understanding the actual meaning. While there could be conscious intention to take an expression in a certain way, usually the understanding is automatically a reflexive, implicit understanding of meaning.
Formal systems aspire to higher standards of reproducible rigor than informal narrative, with postulates, proofs, definitions and standards defined through intersubjective institutions. Still, the form is one of symbols and words forming serial expressions which must be perceived and understood to evoke a meaning in the mind of a reader. The target idea in the mind of the writer is similarly subtly adjusted by the iterative process of creating the formal expression. The resulting written form of the formal expression often corrects or perhaps falsifies an idea which the writer is working out. Further, a translation of the formal expression can be expressed in informal language, interpreted for those who are not schooled in the specifics of the meaning of the formal system.
Both the formal and informal systems of expression are limited by various attributes. Transmission of meaning is still dependent on a shared context between writer and reader. The informal system is more flexible in the ability to make up words — whether as compound words or phonetic constructions which may mimic sounds the writer assumes the reader may have heard or may reference shared but unexpressed cultural touchstones.
Both systems are strictly limited by the time available for cognition to evoke the meaning of a sentence or equation, for instance. A sentence cannot be arbitrarily complex in scope as well, and the constituent words or symbols need to be clear and distinct enough from one another to work in the target context.
Note that in these cases we’ve been talking about the use case of formal and informal expression has been to take thoughts, project them from a mental idea into a specific serial narrative or formal expression, then compare them to that mental idea for some degree of congruence. For the writer, this is how an idea can be translated from an internal conception into a serial form which will facilitate recalling the idea in the future. For the reader, the comparison is starting with the serial expression, and evolving a facsimile of what the reader’s understanding of the words and symbols perceived suggest.
The open question I would like to now address is whether either formal or informal systems can be used to express models of “the world.”
I am writing in my notebook, sitting beside a campfire which I built in a large metal fire pit, in my campsite in a redwood forest in Northern California. In the context of models of the world, the building and maintaining of a fire safely requires a model of what a fire is, what it needs to be maintained, and how it can be maintained safely, so the fire does not spread to the delicate and vulnerable forest all around me.
To categorize this model, an idea or perhaps understood as a set of ideas which together constitute a model, it includes both scientific principles like combustion (chemistry), material science (wood, paper, air), fluid science (airflow), thermodynamics (temperature: even gravity — cold air is heavier than warm air, gravity creating lift in response to heating — with the possibility of embers being carried on currents out of the pit into the forest).
Beyond the science, the actions I take to build, maintain and control the fire are engineering. With intention I am finding and judging twigs to start the fire, stirring coals to maintain the fire, judging whether I need to add a fresh piece of the wood bundle I bought to keep the fire going without making it too large. I am also judging how close I can sit to have the smoke of the fire drive away the mosquitoes but not so close that the smoke irritates my eyes, as I continue writing about these ideas in my notebook.
As a writer I like to imagine my thoughts are the same as the words on the page I’ve just written. I aspire to capture the important points, the essence of the intention which motivated me to pick up the pen and paper and start jotting down letters to form words, sentences, paragraphs. But on reflection, I recognize that the thoughts I have while writing are far more varied, even scattered, than the words that I carefully form on the page. Further, as I re-read the words I’ve been writing, my thoughts change, my ideas develop. I think of examples which I’d like to include, concepts which may help explain, and ambiguity and misleading phrases which may distract from one critical point or another that I am aspiring to make crystal clear.
Has the subject of my writing changed? Has the topic evolved? Well it depends on what I mean by those words. I want to consider in this writing session the nature of narrative, informal or formal, and whether such a form is able to articulate a model of the world. This is difficult first because it is circular: in that the thesis I wish to evaluate is also the mechanism I must use to accomplish the expression of the idea… and I’ve already determined that the act of composing the expression influences the idea being expressed… for better or worse. In noting the science I wish to focus on a model of the world to which I am investigating, I’ve also realized in all practical cases the idealized model building of the ideas in my mind is conditioned on the engineering of my empirical interactions with any world I am aspiring to understand and model. Even distinguishing how much is the science of modelling and where the engineering of observations and experiments biases and limits what can be known is a concern.
I’ve sat here next to my little fire, looking at the end of that last sentence considering where to go next. Clearly, to me, narrative is inadequate to convey or create comprehensive models of “the world” — whether internal models of a subjective world, conceptual models of an objective world, or a model of a corporeal world to which we are casually connected. It is inadequate to record a comprehensive personal account of such a model, and demonstrably more inadequate to convey such a model to a different person or some other type of being.
Yet it is literally all we have, and from a practical viewpoint it does convey many practical ideas in many useful categories. While not purely scientific, the practical engineering that can be codified in formal and informal ways has bestowed untold power on human beings going back some millions of years… including tools like fire and much more recently, writing.
An Irrational Belief in Rationality
In the modern era, logical arguments have replaced articles of faith in deities for the most part. Beliefs that were common and accepted by large percentages of a culture’s population or supported by accredited academics have been overturned by precise and verifiable logical proofs and detailed empirical experiments with precise apparatus, at least as long as those methods can be reproduced and verified.
However, the difficulty in precise expression through narratives previously uncovered, open a limit on how closely an individual can believe that a narrative they may know word-for-word can be either understood exactly as the writer intended, or how applicable it may be to a particular person’s subjective experience. Rationality may not be enough.
I’ve been considering the analogies to mathematics as early as the Greeks. Euclid and Pythagoras found through careful analysis that whole numbers and rational numbers were not enough. Simply measuring the sides of right triangles uncovered an inconvenient relation in the form of √2, simply drawing a right angle with equal opposite and adjacent sides. The hypotenuse was provably not a rational number. Pythagoras’ Theorem is not closed with regards to rational numbers. The real numbers are required.
The discovery of the utility of the square root of negative one further addressed more necessary cases where the reals were not closed, but opened more bags of proverbial worms.
Narrative, aside from the philosophical issues so far explored, has more cases where seemingly logical deductions offer plausible arguments and compelling metaphors, but using them can be fraught with inconsistencies, false metaphors, and fuzzy logical equivalences.
What I want to be thinking about, and writing about in these journal entries, are the fundamental questions of philosophy, consciousness, human existence and the fundamentals of being itself. To have riots in LA just a few hundred miles from where I’m sitting in such peaceful quiet — hearing the occasional crow and ravens in the distance and the soft brush strokes of Hilary applying water to her watercolor drawing — is as ironic as it is heart-wrenching.
There is something wrong here, meaning in my experience of the world. Is it something wrong with my view of an external world? Is it my experience of my subjective world? Is the problem with my idea of what should be, rather than the way the world “really” is?
Or, is the problem with the assumption that writing out questions, answers, statements, pronouncements, expressions — or speaking — or thinking in narrative has anything to do with anything, other than occupying my conscious attention for some length of time?
What’s the point?
A Guide to the Subjective World
A written roadmap to The Algorithms of Text Through Agency.
There are many subjects, but there is only one you, the person reading these words and understanding them. My goal in these pages is to help you, the person reading, understand your perspective on the world as built from some conditions of Being, Agency, Awareness, belief, and conceptions of Models described in text, and judgments.
This is not a description of a Being living in a corporeal world. Ideally, the specifics of the subject are essentially unknown and unknowable by any Being other than the Subject Being, which is always only you.
Being is just what it is to be you, moment to moment. Exactly that, nothing more. In this sense, Being, as the verb of “To Be,” it is the “is”-ing of “is.”
Subjects exist in corporeal packages, and could be anything, but it must be something interacting with a surrounding corporeal world with presumably other corporeal Beings which can interact through some corporeal mode.
The focus of this guide is a phenomenological investigation and guide to the structure of Being a Being with a body with agency in a world of interactions among many levels of Text, turning to a specific perspective on all of the ways we are focusing on stories, and judgments of stories that distort a subject’s balanced awareness of specificity, the limits to the usefulness of text, and how a bias towards distortion (deconstruction) is its only utility.
The only assumption I make is that you can understand the words you are reading.
As a subject, your awareness of your corporeal world presents clues to your senses about what is real.
As a reading subject, text adds not only the field of a new source of patterns of how much attention there is in the brain to recognize and understand words and symbols, it also brings a new kind of time sense. Text is dealing with content that happened or is scheduled to happen at almost any time but now. This is the clear distinction with all of the other senses which are all composited together in our awareness of Now as what our senses show us is what the world seems like at the moment, and who I am now, it is the “me” it takes to notice what Now is.
An understanding of Text as an additional sense organ makes it clear to me that text is channeled into a deeper, integrated experience of truth about each sensorially experienced text encounter — and as the meaning of the new encounter is evoked by the reading, the present state of Being is, as a whole, recalibrated, even if only very slightly.
The actual text of anything is like the photon. It carries an experience to the reader but the reader must evoke what it means, and it will always be an experience which only manifests in the context of one specific subject at a time. This is a guide for the subjects.
Levels
- Corporeal Substrate
- Subjective Agency
- Modes of Awareness
- Modes of Belief / Ontological Ground
- Text Model Interpretation
- Judgments of Objective Models
- Practical Banter
- The Known, The Unknown, The Unknowable
Picture / Video / Story sharing Mode
at humanizer.com
Humanizer —
Fully understand the Subjective Corporeal Agent Being that I am.
That all Beings Are
And set intentions for my Being that are balanced between Intending actions which are For the Benefit of All Beings.
Including Myself and Those Beings corporeal, like Me.
And to approach all Beings as Agents, striving to maintain the dance of homeostasis.
The Guide to Subjective Agency
I want to keep the focus of the Guide to be on the most general conditions, to put your specific conditions in perspective for what is possible, what are the most balanced perspective to know what I am and what that means for me.
The Corporeal substrate means my body — but maybe there will be truly conscious computers sooner or later — the consciousness is still happening in a confined area made up of some corporeal substrate, biological, electronic, or whatever.
Being Corporeal means being able to interact in the corporeal world as an agent which is interconnected in the field of Corporeal Action — this is a Field of Agency.
How the Corporeal is structured is a very different topic. We will here take the corporeal body and the corporeal world of sense and measurement as a Given. A Priori. Human beings are born corporeal agents in a Field of Agency.
Intention is the rudder of the subjective agent. The flow of now is a mode of awareness guided by the various levels of attention in the mind of the subject.
Habits develop as underlying certainty about how the corporeal world works. These include many ideas that are learned as stories, conveyed by people who also convey their opinions on the matter.
Visualize the structure of your awareness of Now. This moment.
Not in words, but in the categories — starting with a simple individual agent to an agent that can both act in the world and read and write stories about agents at different times, in different places, even in different languages.
Guide for the Curious Subjective Agent
Our flow of experience is always only as a corporeal subjective being. While corporeal observations can be made of the interactions between any subjective agents through corporeal organ sensors, the experience of the agent and our consciousness when self-reflected allows a deep influence. Once the structured landscape of eidetic objects is learned, it begins to appear to be quite distinct from both the corporeal world that I can experience through my senses, and which I understand through personal habits and models of how I think the world works, is the interpretive field of some corporeal substrate that supports our page of mind. I can see the evidence and logic in cause and effect. What we infer from our senses as a distinct object in my world, it fashions in my model of the world, which backs my instantaneous reactions to new sense impressions.
I think of text as a sense, but in addition it allows sensations at times that are not now. With the creation of text, a chronology can be recorded and new information added later, so the moment of now can be used to plan the future, and to memorialize.
Stories far predate writing, but text used the structures of language to create new structures in the subjective agent that are understood in the world more and more as an objective word, in which the main goal was to imagine yourself in your subjective perspective on the world as practically insignificant — that what people are supposed to do to want to be anyone is to do something so significant that everyone knows your name.
Yet the objective world doesn’t really exist at all. It is a set of ideas that each individual only knows what they have read or seen… but yet make judgments — good or bad — on ideas about the world as a whole based only on what I think I know, what I’ve heard, and whose words I trust.
It is difficult to understand the nature of text in a subjective way. This is a critical point but one made particularly difficult to express clearly and unambiguously because of the structure necessary for a subjective agent to read text and in so doing, constructing in my own model of the world my eidetic object of what I understand the words to mean, along with an unwritten but assumed truth by the writer and the reader, when propositions and is understood in the context of an objective world. Not the corporeal world of sense and measurement, but the subjective was reduced and latent in each moment’s encounters with the sensible world, which evoke the latent models relevant to the sense data.
Text, which includes all media as well, defines in its practical repeatability a new world which few Beings are even aware of because it is awareness completely abstracted and disconnected from the corporeal or subjective worlds. The Objective World is a way of thinking as if there was one world common to everyone, verifiable through the use of text simulated and…
A body is a corporeal containment in which humans find themselves in. No one asks you which container you will spend a life in. Circumstances choose, and you are the self-identified person, noticing you are a person with a name, a language, and — if you’re lucky — a family, a few friends, a class, a club, maybe a tribe or two.
A set of circumstances created the corporeal human being in which the body realizes pretty early along the way how to ask the basic question about being here and now.
Here and Now are like Space and Time, but as reduced to the way in which the geometric sense is experienced in our conscious integration of the senses and the eidetic model of the world and all that is in it, this is the Noema, the wordless, instantaneous essence of what I know of something is stored. However the corporeal substrate seems fit, but the subjective world is experienced as the eidetic mind objects, informed and informing the conscious acts, focusing attention between our sense impressions and our eidetic meaning.
Now is the flow of moments. The mind has many associated and disassociated awareness threads. Now tends to be experienced one moment at a time, but they manifest in consciousness in the appropriate way to consider the content, the experiences which are summed up and progressively compiled into the Current Agent Subjective Model.
We live in the conscious moments of our corporeal human. This guide aspires to give you tools to uncover the structure of Agency as a Subjective Human Being.
We will first consider the very Basic Beings. Then we consider what language adds to the power, but what is lost that was easier without it?
Then we need to pay particular attention to Text.