Neurophilosophy

Notes for a new field of study.

[neurophilosopher]

Technology is 'Obseqious'

My thoughts on the matter have reached the complexity where the new notion that occurred to me today about the Internet connotes something that can only be adequately expressed by a neologism. It's literally easier to communicate the sense in which I mean this if i invent a word to do it. In line with my last three posts, the relevant concepts have crystallized in my mind. Internet technologies and methodologies lack something meaningful to us.

If I just leave the word intuitively defined then it'll just end up meaning, "something hard to find," which is not my intent with the word. There's a ton of software engineering and user experience behind this notion that's become lucid in my mind, and I'll formally define 'obseqious' in a moment.

The internet lacks intrinsic meaning. This is often confused with having no true (spiritual) value, but that's just not the case. The internet has intrinsic value even if it doesn't have any intrinsic meaning. It has inherent meaning, of course, as a tool/technology, but the value we derive from using it is just that—ours. We give it meaning, so its value must be considered inherent—rather than intrinsic—since that value does not come from the thing within itself. If the same value could be had of the internet in a vacuum, then it would intrinsic to the internet.

My technical background is relevant here because it allows me to understand where the meaning comes from, and why it seems to be lacked from so much of the Internet. As a software and web engineer I understand gamification of our microbehaviors and as a user of every technology I help create, I understand the effects these systems have on our resulting habits and behaviors first hand. There's no corporate administrative layer isolating me from having to experience the effects of the things I create. I get the full impact, and intentionally so. I try to be mindful of the complete (holistic) experience of interacting with a software body, neither dismissing any use-case or failing to understand the algorithm complexity of pandering to each one.

I am in the minority with these design ideals. Everyone (else) treats popularity as success, and once a community forms, what formed it becomes sacred. This is fine, it works, but it's not the ideal. What's lacking from this process is too often the very human element itself. Web developers treat analytics like a first-class functionality, when in older software markets it has only ever been an afterthought that became a feature. The modern web is reliant on microtracking of a massive number of user behaviors, and then making decisions on behalf of all of them, to the exclusion of any minority of use-cases. This leads to a number of things, but I won't discuss them here as they do not relate to the subject.

The end result here is that our systems are no longer designed to serve any purpose. Every individual purpose only exists as juxtaposed against all the other purposes active on the social components of the internet, and any slight cultural shift changes the game forever. Nobody goes back to a simpler software, even when that software is literally proven to work better. People want it to be simpler, more intuitive, less flexible, and ultimately devoid of meaning.

Except we can't possibly want the ways we choose to spend out time to be meaningless, so what is going on?

What's happening is the words we thought we understood from analytics are feedback back into and corrupting the value AND meaning of UX terminology. What "the user" wants is subject to constant renegotiation and user feedback. When something breaks, when UX is violated, the analytics spike. A vocal minority is suddenly placed in a position of massive influence over the UX of every other user or group. This doesn't destroy meaning directly—it just makes the system incapable of generating any new meaning.

But again; the developers don't know what they're doing. They can't possibly read everyone's minds—because they don't actually know why people are using their site. Its purpose is void, its meaning nonexistent. There could be a million different reasons a user shows up, but they will go undocumented and ill-understood, if that. It's not that anyone is out there trying to create a meaningless world, it simply hasn't been a priority to preserve any meaning.

Therefore obseqious is any system that hasn't been engineered specifically to enable the creation of meaning.

[neurophilosopher]

Everything’s fine.

If it seems like it's not, then it means it's at least working well enough to let you identify it.

Contrarily, if it seems like everything's fine, then you have no evidence that anything's not fine.

What could produce no evidence? Hypothesis: Everyone operates on the above reasoning, leading to a paradox whereby nobody can ever learn that it's not fine until they have experienced not-fine-ness themselves already.

This adequately explains any scale of "fine" conspiracy.

[neurophilosopher]

IRC lectures

The internet is basically communication.

What advances or is good for communication, is good for the internet.

What degrades communication, threatens division, what is bad for communication, is bad for the internet.

All ideas become more refined when networking is possible.

The full span, the entire plethora.

All concept, all knowledge.

Every conspiracy.

Every cabal.

All deed.

The REASON communication is so critical to lasting peace, is BECAUSE our nature, as humans, is peaceful.

We create safety.

It bubbles out from every environment we create.

Civilization is "safe."

That IS its defining trait.

In any capacity; evolutionary, tactical, psychological.

So as [...], knowledge advancement is purely a function of population density.

Now, don't be confused; the internet has a VERY low population density.

Like its physical namesake, population "density" is measured as mass spread out over space.

But because the "mass" of a person is a constant 1 ("one person"), we just sum the population and divide it by the surface area (space) of a locality

But the internet is non-local.

If it were local, we wouldn't be speaking, because you're halfway around the planet from my reference frame.

So strictly speaking, non-local is the only thing, conceptually, that the internet can be, if we were to measure it by its "space."

I'm not sure how familiar you are with physics, but basically, non-locality means "no space," which, conceptually, means infinite potential space.

Again; /potential/ space.

While physical reality *appears* uniform and linear, the *potential* to exploit physics for pocket dimensions, and warp/spacial drives can't be denied.

Now, the internet is like that, but on steroids.

Online, you can create the infinite /sense/ of space.

This means that, even if you're sitting in a VR pod on an industrial sized shelf with 1000 other VR players in sensory immersion/deprivation pods, you'll *feel* like you're free.

In ways physical reality can't feedback on its own.

So when you divide anything by an infinite space, the number gets smaller and smaller, to the point it's almost zero.

Functionally, you have no idea if you're talking to a bot, a program, a person, an AI. Doesn't matter.

The internet is the internet, and that doesn't change no matter how we try to philosophize about it.

That's just how it is.

Its mere existence is as utterly intangible and unprovable as the astral plane.

So I've oft to call is the digital plane, or realm.

Of all the things you meet there, the odds that you'll ever get back to the real world with those people, is very, extremely low.

Just as the odds of running into someone you know on a crowded street in a foreign city.

So the networking effect runs in reverse, dictating that the more creative we are, the more sparsely populated the internet is.

It can as much drop our population density below that of an amoeba, or it can network us densely, into small, dense, populations where ideas can network and knowledge can expand itself.

[neurophilosopher]

I don't like likes.

Even when I consciously tell myself that people giving my posts a like means they really do like my posts, it does nothing to motive me to make more content. There almost seems to be a disconnect between how we design sites for consumers and how we design them for content creators. On the creator side, most platforms generate tons of analytics options, as if we're supposed to respond to our audience, while it has been my experience that any time an artist tries to write for their audience and not for themselves, their art sucks because their heart isn't in it. Creating platforms for true creative expression and other forms of content creation won't be possible until we better understand the concept of motivation.