Philosophical Speculations

Federica wrote: ↑Sun Jan 18, 2026 12:28 pm So, the efforts we are invited to make cannot be resolutive as such - because we are still fully active within the realm of mental pictures. However, they hopefully evoke the existence of another, much vaster realm of experience, worth striving for by gathering all inner and outer means and aids we are fortunate to have access to, as we all are who are reading this series of essays.

Thanks for adding this inverted pyramid image to help us feel what we are doing when engaging with the essay concepts, Federica. I experienced it as very helpful in that respect. I would only add what may already be implicit in what you described - that there is a distinction between thinking about the levels of the pyramid, on one hand, and intuitively feeling how our thinking stream of mental pictures is placed within that pyramid, on the other. In the former case, we remain on the hamster wheel you described. In the latter case, our thinking process truly clothes itself in the characteristic stance and gestures of higher cognition, thereby momentarily transcending the hamster wheel of stacking mental pictures about 'what we are doing' and focusing exclusively within their internal combinations. It is as Cleric described with the light switch example:

For example, we flip a light switch. We can immediately try to feel how this act only makes sense because throughout our life we have seen others do that, and also we have done it countless times. The act is made meaningful through the intuition that relates two outputs – the flipping of the switch and illumination. But we can go even further. We can try to feel how the need for illumination fits in whatever we are presently doing. Maybe we are walking in the basement to get a tool that we need for our tactical garden work. The garden work fits in some way into our strategic life goals. There’s no need to philosophize about any of this. It takes only a split-second to become feelingly aware of these interleaved IO flows.


Perhaps this is what you describe as the 'evocation' of another vaster realm of experience. I agree there is an evocation and would only complement that with the observation that the evocation is itself a dipping into that vaster realm of experience, so to speak. In other words, when we strive to become feelingly aware of the interleaved I/O flows, with the help of anchoring concepts and illustrations, we are not merely staying within our hamster wheel of mental picturing and dreaming about a future stage where we will transcend it, but we have already begun the process of transcending it. Our inner process has truly discovered new degrees of freedom to navigate the lawful structure of its primal flow, which can be experienced as increasingly overlapping with the expanded degrees of freedom characteristic of higher cognition (depending on how much we can purify and intensify the intuitive feeling experience).

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Jan 18, 2026 1:50 pm Thanks for adding this inverted pyramid image to help us feel what we are doing when engaging with the essay concepts, Federica. I experienced it as very helpful in that respect. I would only add what may already be implicit in what you described - that there is a distinction between thinking about the levels of the pyramid, on one hand, and intuitively feeling how our thinking stream of mental pictures is placed within that pyramid, on the other. In the former case, we remain on the hamster wheel you described. In the latter case, our thinking process truly clothes itself in the characteristic stance and gestures of higher cognition, thereby momentarily transcending the hamster wheel of stacking mental pictures about 'what we are doing' and focusing exclusively within their internal combinations. It is as Cleric described with the light switch example:

For example, we flip a light switch. We can immediately try to feel how this act only makes sense because throughout our life we have seen others do that, and also we have done it countless times. The act is made meaningful through the intuition that relates two outputs – the flipping of the switch and illumination. But we can go even further. We can try to feel how the need for illumination fits in whatever we are presently doing. Maybe we are walking in the basement to get a tool that we need for our tactical garden work. The garden work fits in some way into our strategic life goals. There’s no need to philosophize about any of this. It takes only a split-second to become feelingly aware of these interleaved IO flows.


Perhaps this is what you describe as the 'evocation' of another vaster realm of experience. I agree there is an evocation and would only complement that with the observation that the evocation is itself a dipping into that vaster realm of experience, so to speak. In other words, when we strive to become feelingly aware of the interleaved I/O flows, with the help of anchoring concepts and illustrations, we are not merely staying within our hamster wheel of mental picturing and dreaming about a future stage where we will transcend it, but we have already begun the process of transcending it. Our inner process has truly discovered new degrees of freedom to navigate the lawful structure of its primal flow, which can be experienced as increasingly overlapping with the expanded degrees of freedom characteristic of higher cognition (depending on how much we can purify and intensify the intuitive feeling experience).

Thanks, Ashvin. Absolutely. As soon as we open to the simple experiences that take a split-second, but typically remain unnoticed, as soon as we follow the hints to the intuitive context, for example in feeling, we are already moving in the right direction. Even when we 'wrestle with tortoises', as I have tried to demonstrate, we may not be struggling in vain.

In my last post, I haven't spoken of any of the vast realms evoked in the essays. My purpose was rather to offer a super meticulously fleshed-out reflection on the recursive trap illustrated by the picture with the drawing hands. That picture encapsulates a cardinal intuition, but I guess it's easy to approximately get it in the moment, but later have it as a sort of floating scarecrow about the dangers of recursiveness in thought, yet without a clear sense of how the recursiveness plays out concretely. So I tried to provide that in case it helps.


PS: for some reason, I didn't even think about using Wisprflow to dictate the post. It's been all silent typing

Federica wrote: ↑Sun Jan 18, 2026 12:28 pm As we read the essay, we see the chess animation above and contextually form the corresponding flow of mental pictures. Following the thread, we understand that the animation is meant to evoke the existence of an unusual (for our conscious attention) experience, unfolding as we attempt to have the horse reach the carrots. Here we may be tempted to search in memory for a picture-flow similar to the animation, as if to check whether the sequence of stacking pictures actually happened, while we were playing the carrot game. To help us control this cognitive ‘instinct’ we are warned: “we do not see such stacking of mental images in our imagination”.
...

Thanks, Federica,

This is really a great example of decomposing the basic intuition. As a matter of fact, I do pretty much the same in Part 6 (only more briefly), with the intent of moving past that state. It is also what a 800+ page book like Gödel, Escher, Bach iterates over and over again in the most varied forms, except that it doesn't reach the important conclusion that you state. The author there fights to convince everyone that this recursive process is the source of consciousness. In other words, any potato pipeline that is able to feed back on itself and build such recursions is thought to 'feel like consciousness'. And don't expect that the countless examples in the book will make this one-sentence-message any more substantial (as if to really understand how the potato process becomes innerly experienced phenomena).

I apologize for delaying Part 6, but I constantly find better ways to frame things and I keep refining. This week it should be ready.