The Game Loop: Part 2 Interleaved IO flows I

[Cleric]

Hello, Cleric. Thank you for your reply. I see. I think I understand now what you mean, but there is still one thing left that leaves me confused although I do see that prayer and having faith is what I should be striving for in order to find the right alignment towards the Divine curvature.
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So, doesn't this mean that it is possible to anticipate and discover something that we can absolutely be sure and certain of?

It all becomes simpler when we realize that our human thoughts are like artistic dance moves that express certain intuition. This allows us to see things in two aspects.

What does it mean to be absolutely sure of something? Experientially, we produce an art form, a mental sculpture, and say, "This is the truth. What I have produced is an undeniable truth." Yet, put like this, we see the thought gesture can never be 'the truth'. This is very deeply embedded in the human psyche. Because of certain secret pride, human beings expect that the World operates or is created through forces that are essentially compatible with our intellectual gestures. This is why we seek the truth in a thought. For example, we imagine that God has created the World from within a consciousness similar to our human. There could be a thought in the Divine Mind that is responsible for, say, gravity. Then, when we find that though (since it is intellect-compatible), we may say "this is absolute truth". In that case we would be justified because this thought is the actual blueprint of creation. But higher consciousness reveals that our intellectual thoughts are not the forces through which the Cosmos is created and supported. They are specific intuitive movements within the constraints of our bodily organization, producing mental images. So, what I meant in the previous post is that these mental art forms can be produced in their opposites. Even something that seems like an absolute truth, for example, "There's existence", can still be negated as far as the art form is concerned. So every art form is deniable, that is, we can produce its opposite.

But where does our sense of truthfulness come from then? It does feel that "There's existence" is an absolute truth. Here, however, we should distinguish things. What is real is the actual intuitive experience of existence. Producing a thought that reflects this intuitive experience is already an art form. We scratch a sign in the tree bark and say, "This symbolizes that I experience existence."The symbol only has value as long as I continuously replenish it in my consciousness from within the living experience. Without this continuous replenishment, thoughts are like inert puzzle pieces. We can assemble them in ways that feel to make sense or not, but through such manipulations only, we can never arrive at the feeling that a certain mental art form is 'the truth'.

So, to your original question, it is clear that simply assembling thought forms can never give us the answer "Yes, this is my destiny, and this is an undeniable truth." What about the other approach? Can I access such a truth in a deeper intuitive experience and express that as a thought? Here, however, we should once again be very careful. Such a question once again secretly presupposes that there's somewhere in ideal space some universal pattern whose intuitive experience can be expressed as "X's destiny is this and that." This, however, is simply not the case. There's no such abstract rule placed in the invisible, to which our destiny is forced to conform. Everything is a dynamic process, much like in Ashvin's response above. Our destiny is like a seed falling into the soil. The qualities of the environment and the seed are the true constraints within which our destiny meanders. There's nowhere written as some abstract rule that "It is the oak seed's destiny to become an oak". It is its destiny insofar as this is what results when the archetypal and elemental forces work together.

So our task is not to guess "what is written" for our destiny but to continuously grow our orientation for the way we are placed within these archetypal, soul, and elemental forces. And we can only start growing from within our present state.

[Kaje977]

A good fitting example for this essay part's theme that immediately raised to my mind here are so-called speedruns that often come with certain challenges, such as refusing to press a certain button during the entire run of the game. One of my favorite childhood games such as Super Mario 64 has many of such videos and challenges:


A little background info: The "HOLP", short for Held Object's Last Position, represents a set of values comprising the coordinates at which to render a held object ticket. They are, under most circumstances, the last coordinates at which Mario has held a ticket has been held, and the variables remain constant between courses and files. When thrown or released, objects are retrieved from limbo to the real world at the HOLP, which is not necessarily directly in front of Mario. Using certain glitches, the HOLP can be abused to spawn objects away from Mario when released. In the description, the player describes it what he exactly does:

Here is a play by play of what I do. I first enter Bob-omb Battlefield in order to place the HOLP in a precise position. This position is above the mountain, and so it’s necessary to construct a goomba staircase to reach it. This is the debut of a more efficient goomba staircase I developed, which makes use of goomba clusters. A goomba cluster is a formation of goombas placed remotely using one HOLP, but thrown at different angles so they have slightly different hitboxes. This technique vastly improves the goomba staircase, resulting in a quadratic number of goombas rather than exponential. Once the goomba staircase is complete, I use it to place the HOLP in the correct position, and then exit out of BoB and go to WF. Once inside, I collect 99 coins and use object displacement to destroy one of the cork boxes next to the tower, allowing me to place the 100 coin star next to one of the tower’s platforms. I then bring up the second cork box, and remotely throw it into myself right after I store vertical speed on side of the elevator. Using the cork box, the vertical speed, a ground pound, and a star dance clip, I am able to get onto the tower!

tl;dr: The entire first half of the video is setting up a glitch, that would make the box pop up in a certain angle once he threw it with the hat in hand glitch, which would allow him to gain vertical speed, but that speed alone wasn't enough to get up to the platform, thus he collected 100 coins to spawn the star, because once Mario collects a start he can grab ledges before the star dance animation, but he just skips the climbing animation and just gets onto the platform instantly.

It's interesting to see how the players find new strategies and ways to successfully solve the level when confronted with such a simple restriction such as not being allowed to press the A button. It really changes "the game", the game flow in many ways. Some of the solutions are very creative and unusual and sometimes takes a lot of trial and error to come up with them, such as the one above. It is relatively speaking easy to replicate it (ofc, practically it's difficult to play it 1:1 like the player in the video above does, but you get the point), like remembering a chess opening or memorizing a proof of a mathematical theorem, but it's very different coming up with it on your own or a strategy that nobody has not put out in the world yet. This is also why I usually refuse to ever read or study proofs by memorizing, or reading manuals or watching tutorials or walkthroughs for games I just acquired. I simply just start to play, and "intuitively" find my way through it. I also seem to have much more fun with it when I am forced to discover the game mechanics on my own.

It's quite ironic, because compared to real life where I love certainty, safety, risk-free environments and planning everything ahead (yeah, indeed always looking for a "script" or "manual" for real life to walkthrough it without problems), in gaming I'm really approaching things more differently, more freely. Probably because I seem to have the awareness in the back of my mind that the consequences of my actions in a game aren't having that much of an impact to my life compared to the consequences of my actions in real life where every misstep or mistake could end my career or social/private ambitions. If I die (or don't correctly apply a strategy) in a game while doing an unusual, risky challenge (such as refusing to press the A button and doing the HOLP strategy) to discover the ways how the game flow changes, I can simply just respawn and start anew. However, in real life doing something unusual or risky, could cost me a lot. And there's no respawn, I couldn't go back and start again. I would have to live with the consequences for the rest of my life, and, who knows, for my future incarnations.

[AshvinP]

A good fitting example for this essay part's theme that immediately raised to my mind here are so-called speedruns that often come with certain challenges, such as refusing to press a certain button during the entire run of the game.

These speedruns are also a thing in chess. One YT commentator that I follow spins a wheel to come up with an artificial obstacle, like "blunder queen", and then must find creative ways of recovering a winning position. This only works at the lower rating levels, of course, because at the higher ratings, even the slightest disadvantage would be optimized by the opponent. It's quite interesting to watch and see how the intuitive game flow is morphed to navigate these self-imposed obstacles. Here is an example: