Facing Toward the Incoming Flow
Previously, we observed how our imaginative subflow is often interrupted by ‘dark periods’ of diminished consciousness (sleep, forgetfulness, distractions). These interruptions form the basis for our highly aliased perspective of the primary intuitive flow. When this perspective is cemented as the only viable one for observing the flow and pursuing knowledge of its dynamics, what inevitably ensues is the nihilistic stance that has permeated modern life. It is not only a perspective that lacks complete ‘information’ about reality, but it also lacks any orientation to how more complete information could be sought. It is not only missing hidden variables but also the proper inner toolkit for discovering them. This perspective thus feels forced, by the lack of an alternative possibility, to combine its familiar, fragmented mental images of already known variables in ways that increasingly imitate the restricted dynamics of its subflow. In other words, it feels satisfied when its subflow of mental images becomes like an increasingly perfect sculpture of the restricted dynamics it can observe. The intellectual ideal is that this sculpture should act as the perfect oracle of what to think and do next within the primary flow.
Returning to the Chess aperture metaphor from Part 1, let’s imagine that there is a delay between the 8x8 primary game flow and the 4x4 zoomed-in aperture. We could imagine that, when this aperture absorbs our attention, we end up beholding a restricted ‘cross-section’ of the moves played over the last few hours in the primary game, or even moves from previous games that finished a few days ago.
It is as if our backs are turned toward the incoming primary flow, and we can only focus on aspects of it that have long since receded from the present horizon of our intuitive state. The primary flow continues in real time, but once we zoom into the aperture, only those moves from previous ‘epochs' of that flow come into focus at our horizon of consciousness. The move patterns from these previous epochs are characterized by a completely different intuitive signature from what is presently unfolding. Because of this ‘phase gap’, the aperture only reflects moves that have been repeated often enough by the players to become habitual. Therefore, new moves and tactics are not reflected by the aperture until they have been executed hundreds or thousands of times. When we observe the dynamics of the aperture, we are beholding the templated habits of players that took shape from their past understanding of the game flow. All that we become intuitively familiar with while engaging with this aperture is the lingering reverberations of prior habitual gameplay.
We can easily verify that this past-oriented posture is our default stance within the intuitive flow. For example, if a loud, unexpected noise occurs and shocks us, certain intense impulses and feelings are ‘stirred up’ within our soul. Yet we usually aren’t able to contemplate those experiences as they happen. Rather, we can only look back on them as stripped-down memory images and work with those images through the formatting of our already acquired intuition (like the intuition of ‘cause and effect’), gaining some minimal conscious orientation to the experience. Likewise, when we observe the items in our living space or the buildings and other cultural objects that surround us, we know that we are contemplating inner experiences - impulses and ideas - that were active long ago. When we contemplate animal form and behavior, we also intuit that we are contemplating what we once were, even longer ago. We are contemplating the dispositions, passions, desires, and urges that previously dominated our intuitive navigation to such an extent that it sculpted our very physical structure into certain characteristic forms. Most of the light from the starry Cosmos that we use in scientific research only reaches our eyes after millions of years.
The modern theorizing intellect does something akin to developing an AI engine trained on millions of moves observed within this restricted, delayed, and templated aperture. This engine then optimizes a function that, when fed a series of moves, predicts the next moves with ever-greater accuracy. The intellectual algorithm works extremely well at predicting the flow within the sub-game, but that comes at the expense of its sensitivity to what is presently unfolding in the primary game. That should make it easier to see why, no matter how accurate our intellectual engine becomes in predicting the 4x4 moves, it won’t provide any deeper insight into the wider 8x8 game flow. The most important reason is that it can only model patterns based on a limited range of moves that have already occurred and have become habitual. Such extrapolated habits of movement, however, would never account for the full palette of real-time creative decisions available to players in the primary flow. These intuitively creative decisions will always end up ‘surprising’ the past-fixated algorithm.
Full essay - https://open.substack.com/pub/spiritana ... medium=web
