The Game Loop
Part 4
In Search of the Fundamental Inputs I
Part 4
In Search of the Fundamental Inputs I
Google Doc version (easier to follow footnotes)
Part 1 Mental Pipelines
Part 2 Interleaved IO Flows I
Part 3 Interleaved IO Flows II
Part 4 In Search of the Fundamental Inputs I
Part 5 In Search of the Fundamental Inputs II
We now have some general sense of what our existential flow feels like, how our inner life is enmeshed in the interleaved IO flows at different scales of overarching intuitive coherence. Now we face two burning questions. First, what are our most fundamental, our innermost inputs to the game loop? And second, how can we trace the way in which inputs affect the outputs? At this time, the second question seems pretty hopeless. We already saw that if we try to tackle it with our familiar intellectual habits, we quickly end up holding mental images of two metaphysical blobs in our mind – one for the inputs and one for the outputs – and then start recursively bridging them with more mental images of crawling tortoises (in the way we try to bridge the hitting billiard balls with atoms, photons, etc.). The first question seems more approachable, so let’s start with it, and maybe as we go deeper, some light will also be thrown on the second.
What do we mean by ‘innermost inputs’? If we interview a random person on the street and ask, “How do you interact with the game of life?”, we’ll most probably receive an answer like: “Well, I use my hands, feet, and speech.” This is the easy part. It is trivial to follow how the perceived outputs of body movements are related to other outputs and form apparent cause-and-effect chains. However, tracing what we do within ourselves, what kind of inputs we issue for these body movements to be perceived, is more elusive. We have already seen that the impulses of bodily will are not reflected in the output in a completely direct and unconditional way. We saw that there’s a kind of leeway. This is obvious in the case of a paralyzed limb, but it is also apparent any time we try to acquire a new motor skill. We only need to remember the time when we were learning to write. At the time, we hold some idea and corresponding anticipation about what should happen, but when we try to let it flow through our hands, we are frustrated to see how clumsy we are, how our bodily movements are quite out of phase with our intuitive intents. Of course, through repeated effort, our intents become much more in-phase with the perceived movements, but the distinction can still be found if we try. Most of our daily actions form a kind of palette that has been developed and refined throughout our life. It is a more or less rigid vocabulary that formats our inputs. So the first hint is that we should pay closer attention to the not-yet fully formatted kinds of inner activity, before they have become conditioned to take the shape of rigid slots.
Take something as trivial as moving a finger. We can place our hand palm down on a surface and lift the index finger several times while trying to be very attentive to the way it feels. Then we stop moving the finger physically and only imagine its movement, basically trying to remember what we just did. It’s not so important that the imagined finger movement is visually seen in our imagination – it’s the inner input act that we try to repeat, but without allowing it to manifest as actual movement. Then we try this imaginative movement, but by transforming the intent – we try to feel the movement as a rehearsal for a future physical lifting of the finger. We can repeat these rehearsals a few times, and at some point decide to lift the finger physically. The most important thing to observe here is what changes. What do we do differently in order to allow the input act to reach deeper in the body instead of remaining only an imaginative rehearsal? We’re not looking for some clear-cut intellectual answer to this question, but only trying to feel the difference. It is indispensable for our further investigations that we learn to feel this difference as clearly as we feel the difference between pointing our attention up or down, in or out. Another very valuable observation is to feel what changes when we rehearse the future lifting of the finger in comparison to when we remember the one we just did. In one case, we can imagine the movement as if accompanied by the thought “Now I’m remembering my past movement.” Then we repeat the imaginative act, but accompanied with the thought, “Now, I’m rehearsing the move I’ll perform in a few seconds from now.” Is the nature of the imaginative experience fundamentally different? Or is it the intuitive context, the implicit meaning of the intent, which makes the difference?
Hopefully, through such experiments, we can gain more lucid awareness that in our thinking and imaginative flow, we are dealing with a more intimate stratum of our inner life. By ‘intimate’, it is meant that our intuitive inputs are much more tightly coupled with the resulting imaginative outputs. For example, we may have a sore throat and be unable to speak, but our inner voice can’t be sore in the same way. Even if we try to think, “I can’t produce a word with my inner voice” – there, we’ve just contradicted ourselves! What about feelings? These feel pretty intimate, don’t they? Yet, for most people, we can rarely experience feelings and emotions as following our inputs. Most of the time they compel our thinking and imagination in ways that we find difficult to resist, as it can be easily seen if we have ever tried through our effortful input to replace the feeling of sorrow with that of joy. Thus, we can conceive of being paralyzed and in a sensory deprivation chamber – that is, being mostly devoid of bodily sensations – we may feel nothing, be emptied of emotions and desires, yet our intuitive IO flow reflected in mental images is the last to remain.
Now, when we say that our thinking and imagination belong to the innermost spectrum of intuitive inputs, this is not to suggest that our feeling and willing inputs can be reduced to the mental flow. This should be obvious from our experiments – there’s something elusive but factual that needs to be added if our imagined finger movements should be reflected all the way in bodily outputs. Similarly, there’s something more needed to get out of bed in the morning compared to only imagining the act. Yet, at the same time, this difference doesn’t necessitate that the inputs are categorically and irreconcilably distinct, but only that there’s some experiential justification to differentiate them, just like we can differentiate the output experience of blue from red. Like the fundamental forces conceived by physicists, we may be open to the possibility that at some point they might be experienced (not theorized) as differentiations of a common, more fundamental kind of input activity. It can also be noted that even though our thinking and imagination feel to be the most intimate reflection of our intuitive inputs, this doesn’t mean that we are in unconditional control of the IO flow at this level. Producing a single word in our voice is easy, but when we need to solve a problem or find a creative solution, we can easily see that we may once again feel clumsy and out of phase.
Through the simple experiments above, we can clearly recognize how most of our thinking and imaginative life consists of such rehearsals of acts that we intend to pour deeper and allow to become guidelines for the transformations within the bodily spectrum. In this way we can premeditate our bodily acts. This premeditation takes place amid the interleaving IO flows, such as the strategic and tactical flows. Even though we rarely think explicitly, “Alright, so I need to move these units over there, so I’ll now click here and drag…”, but instead we are mostly absorbed at the higher-order intuitive flows, it’s nevertheless often the case that within these flows we premeditate, we rehearse our strategic and tactical decisions in our imagination, and by extension, our mouse moves and clicks may also be premeditated. Things are a little different, however, when we try to focus on the thinking IO flow in itself. If we are about to speak in front of important people, we may try to first rehearse our speech in our mind, we may try to hear our own words spoken in our inner voice1 and make sure we won’t say anything stupid. It is the common saying, “Think before you speak!” When it comes to the thinking, however, it no longer makes sense to say “Think before you think!” We cannot rehearse our thinking words. We may try to cheat by speaking in a soft whispering inner voice, and only when we approve, we repeat the words but in a more confident inner voice, yet this only shifts the problem – now it is our soft whispering inner voice that we hear without any rehearsal. In other words, it seems impossible to decide in advance what inner words to use for the expression of a certain intuition. Such a pre-decision would already be a verbal thought that we hear for the first time in our mind.
Notice that just because we hear our words for the first time without any rehearsal, this doesn’t mean that they feel like coming out of the blue, at least most of the time. For example, if we think “I’ll just move these units over there…”, these words certainly resound in our inner voice as something that we hear for the first time, without rehearsing them. Nevertheless, the verbal thought doesn’t surprise us. If someone asks us, “Stop! Why did you think that verbal thought?” we’ll be able to unfold something of our intuitive context, how we were trying to intuitively picture our next move in accordance with our overarching tactical and strategic intents, and the words just came out as a kind of verbal explication of the wordless intuitive striving. Of course, there are also cases where the thought can indeed surprise us. Such is the case in what we call insight or a surge of inspiration. In these cases, we cannot say that we consistently reached the thought, but rather, it’s more like we stumbled upon it or it was bestowed on us.
If we are capable of sensing this threshold or ‘event horizon2’ at which our intuitive inputs for the first time become conscious outputs (verbal thought, images, etc.), we’ll realize that our inner flow always has two superimposed aspects. In one, we are always ‘pushing’ toward the future. We dimly and instinctively strive to bring to the light of consciousness something new that fits constructively within our overall intuitive and feeling context. Even though our pushing inputs are largely instinctive, we cannot say that they are completely blind. We may not see in the output field what we are pushing toward, but we still have some intuitive orientation; we have some intuitive sense about what we are striving to bring to light. For example, when we try to solve a mathematical problem or a puzzle, we’re engaged precisely in such inner pushing toward the future. We do not see the solution in the output, but we have some sense about the direction we are pushing toward. At the least, we sense that whatever state we are pushing toward, when eventually reached, should feel like the solution to the problem at hand. The other aspect is precisely that of the outputs brought to light – these are the sounds of our inner voice, the images in our imagination, and so on. These are the outputs that seem to correlate very closely with our dim, intuitive pushing inputs. Seen in this way, all outputs in our inner life of thinking and imagination are already of the nature of fading memory images. At the moment we hear our inner voice, the words are already sinking into the past – that which has already passed and has left its imprint in the presently experienced game state. Now one may say, “Wait a minute, we’re now entering speculative philosophical domains. No one knows what time is, what past and future are.” However, we are not even trying to provide such metaphysical answers. Every word that we use here is only a pointer to something from our first-person experience. These dim pushing inputs that aim to bring something of the unknown future into the now, and the precipitating mental images that immediately feel as memory images, are simple facts of experience. One may say that their real-time thoughts do not feel like memory images but as something in the present. What they share with the memory images of more remote experiences, however, is the fact that as soon as we hear the thought in our mind, we can no longer change it – it’s already past. Even if we try to undo it, to say that we are taking it back, we are simply producing a new thought, while the first has already produced its rippling effects in the game state. Furthermore, even our memory images cannot be said to exist ‘in the past’. We have some holistic intuitive sense for the transformations the game state has gone through in order to reach its present state, but to remember a concrete past mental or sensory output, we need to relight it anew, just like the pixels of a cathode-ray tube (CRT) need to be continuously relit. In that sense, every sensory or mental output is experienced at its maximum intensity as it, so to speak, condenses across the event horizon and immediately fades away, leaving only its intuitive imprint in the game context, which allows us to relight similar mental outputs in the future (that we call memory images).
All further progress in our investigations depends on getting a sense for this peculiar event horizon. As far as we can focus on the experience of our inner process, and not on our philosophical thoughts about it, this event horizon is the closest we can get that feels like an interface between inputs and outputs. Notice that we are not saying that our intuitive inputs ‘create’ the mental outputs. We are safe to only say that we’re moving toward inner experience where the two feel more and more tightly correlated. They still have differences. Our intuitive inputs are of the nature of will; it is inner activity; we’re pushing toward something. The mental outputs are very much in phase with this pushing, but if we are precise in our observations, we cannot say that we experience our input-will transforming into mental outputs. If we expect to see such a transformation, it would mean that we expect to see our willing activity just like any other output, on the same inner phenomenal screen, and calmly observe the images of will metamorphosing into mental images. Yet, we speak of a horizon precisely because we do not see the will-in-itself as yet another output, but only experience it as inner impetus. The mental images feel like the consequences of this unseen but inwardly and intuitively known and directed act of will. We can symbolize this in the following way.
Even though we draw time arrows, we’re not speaking of a metaphysical temporal dimension of reality. Everything pertains to the ever-present continuous metamorphosis of our experiential game state. The image only points attention to the fact that, in a certain sense, we do feel our intuitive intents as dimly pushing toward the next state (symbolized by the right side), and we immediately become conscious of the effects of this pushing in the output field (the left side). Yet, we cannot say how exactly one transforms into the other (symbolized by the dark band in the middle). Just like we are not aware of what exactly happens for our will impulses to become reflected as bodily sensations, so it is also for our intuitive willing impulses that reflect only in mental images. These are normally so tightly in phase that we feel that our inner activity ‘creates’ the mental images, but if we are truly conscientious in our observations, we’ll recognize that we do not have the phenomenological justification to claim that. It would be the same as if an artist working with clay on a pottery wheel were to imagine that their hand-willing activity ‘creates’ the clay. Instead, the safe thing to say is that their willing activity somehow leaves its impressions on the flow of output perceptions. It’s quite the same in our mental flow, except that we do not have the luxury of perceiving a ‘mental hand’ in the output that we can conveniently relate to the outputs of the ‘produced’ mental images, like we relate the outputs of hitting billiard balls. So in a sense, within our most intimate ‘leading edge’ of becoming, we are in a position of an artist with invisible hands, who instinctively, yet with certain intuitive intent, pushes toward the strived-for result, yet only being able to perceive in the output how the shape of the clay transforms as a kind of feedback reflecting how well the goal is approached. As said previously, we can easily recognize that there’s something more that plays out in between our intuitive intents and the precipitating mental images, especially if we try to find a non-trivial shape of the flow (that is, solve a more complicated problem).
It can be objected that above we are guilty of precisely what we warned about – we make an image of the willing aspect of our intuitive inputs, of which we said there can be no image (but we perceive in images only the consequences). The solution to this contradiction is in the recognition that we can express our intuition not only about what has already precipitated across the horizon but also about the intuitive experience of the willful pushing. In other words, images like the above should not be seen as an attempt to lay down a supposed metaphysical pipeline, where will and image are contemplated from some hypothetical vantage point outside of reality, but they are only artistic expressions. They only serve their purpose if they can be used as pointers toward the corresponding inner experiences. Surely, the psychological inertia of the sensory-bound consciousness of the last few centuries is so massive that even though we intellectually understand the above, we may still find ourselves snapping back as a broken record into abstract metaphysical modeling, where we forget about our real-time intuitive pushing, and instead try to understand will and images as parts of a potato processing pipeline. In the next part we’ll try to enter even more deeply into this elusive region of our experience.
Keynotes:
In everyday life, we apply our inputs more or less instinctively. We are used to performing certain dim inner gestures and perceive corresponding outputs.If we try to intercept this activity, we realize that we can differentiate even between the intuitive pushing of our thinking and the precipitating mental images.It feels as if with our willful inputs we continuously push forward (into the future) toward a desired or intuitively sought-after state, while mental images manifesting in our phenomenal volume are, in a sense, consequences or testimonies of our pushing activity.-----
1 Here we can once again make valuable observations by investigating the difference between remembering our bodily experiences of speaking, rehearsing future speech, or rehearsing but without having the intent to let it sound out. The latter can be found to constitute a great part of our unceasing inner chatter.
2 In astrophysics, the event horizon is the spatial boundary of a massive object, whose gravity is so strong that below this threshold even light cannot escape. Yet, it is theorized that because of quantum effects, there’s a probability that part of the energy flux can actually escape as a kind of tearing precipitating from the threshold (known as Hawking radiation), which may eventually evaporate the whole massive object.
