If I’m going to every bring this into being, the first thing it needs is a Nucleation point. Ideas nucleate around words and are transmitted through people like waves through a medium. We are the medium upon which “idea stuff” exists.
You know what, I’m going to tuck that one away. That’s a metaphysical topic that is certainly related, but not what I want to focus on here. But this foreward is an example of how ideas nucleate. If this idea thrives, it will reach some critical threshold beyond which it will live on in the medium indefinitely.
But before any of that happens, This nucleation site needs to crystallize. So let’s draw in a few more ideas.
I like Global Workspace Theory a lot. It doesn’t quite take us all the way though. Decision diffusion or whatever that Diffusion Models or Diffusion Processes thing is helps. And we need to account for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Self-Determination Theory and higher order thoughts theory . Functionalism, Society of Mind. Working Memory. ADHD as “intention deficit disorder”.
Statistical dynamics is useful for modeling a lot of things. I’m going to attempt to use it to model the mind. This is going to be especially challenging because I don’t have any experience with statistical mechanics or really physics even. But bare with me, i think I can make this work.
To start, we’re going to abandon Unity of Self. If we accept this as an illusion, which it demonstrably is, everything else falls into place. So let’s just start there with Multiplicitous Self.
I can model myself (“my self”?) as a collection of policies, beliefs, drives, memories, and what have yous. let’s take all of those things and put them in a bucket. Beside me here I have a bunch of particles. Let’s go through the bucket and assign each item to its own unique particle. This makes the diffusion model of decision making a lot more directly interpretable.
The processes that comprise “me” are a collection of independent interacting components. My adrenal glands. My thalamus. My skin. My identity as a former firefighter. My atheism. My craving for chocolate when it’s in my presence. My memory of the place where I proposed to my wife Isabel. My memory of the intense pain I experienced during a cluster headache. The clean dry smell inside this airplane. My intimate understanding of spectral analysis. My drives. My drive to help others. My drive to avoid suffering. My drive to feel autonomous. My drive to feel safe (e.g. Antonio Damasio’s homeostasis thing probably).
Let’s model each one of those things as an independent agent.
I need a word for whatever this type of thing is. Cognitive Component?
anyway, there exist infinite factorizations here. represent me as a pie, and there are infinite ways you can slice me up. But generally, this slicing process will be hierarchical. you don’t just jump straight into infinitesimally small, we get there procedurally, and the steps naturally correlate to an order parameter. When “I” am represented as the whole pie, undivided, we’re at order parameter = 0. The “origin” so to speak along some order dimension of “my” frame of reference.
I’m reasonably confident that we can call Union(my mind, my body). I’m not being a dualist here, I’m just saying that “my mind” is a thing we can talk about.
Let’s try a different route, a more physicalist route. Let denote my body. at we’ve got organs, so my brain is at level of organization. you’ve got my hemispheres, and so forth. I’m not a neuroscientist, this is just how sets and interacting subcomponents work. I’m not saying that there aren’t ways we can make things overlap, but for us to identify something as a “thing” it needs to be possible to subdivide it into subcomponents of some kind, otherwise that “thing” is just a singularity, which is literally nothing.
So back to me. Let’s talk about me. I like talking about me.
I’ve started to elucidate a bit what I mean by order parameter, so let’s flip back to the first subdivision thought experiment where was union(body, mind). In this system, I’m not sure what is specifically, and I kind of don’t care. let’s say my beliefs live at , my drives at , and so forth. is for any given x or y? I have no idea. I’m not a psychologist or even a cognitive scientist (I hope that isn’t disappointing to hear).
We’ll explore what happens when we take that order parameter in the opposite direction (systems of which I’m a subcomponent) later.
Given some order level there exists some complete partition of “me” into sub-units that are properly/appropriately/best described within the context of level . Let’s call the collection of these subcomponents (me) . We’ll call the cardinality of the partition N, so .
Let’s call each a “policy” at level of organization .
Under this parameterization, “I” am literally a bag of policies. I assert that it has to be possible to model me that way, just as a function of logical construction. At least to the extent that it is possible to characterize “me” as a “policy”, it is has to be possible to characterize me as a bag of policies. I don’t think it is unreasonable to put a box around “me” — however we want to define that, be it my mind, my consciousness, my soul, my brain, my inner monologue… put a box around whatever you want, this always has to be true by construction — we can parameterize “me” as something we’ll call a “policy”, and by extension that policy is parameterizable as a collection of subpolicies which fully cover and partition the “David Marx” policy.
It’s pretty easy to connect this to the diffusion theory of decision making from here. Diffusion percolation? something like that.
in so far as we are able to draw boundaries around these different policies, they are independent of each other. they exist independently of each other. This doesn’t mean that they don’t interact, they are just divisionally different things that exist separate from one another.
mathematical metaphysics interlude
Something something spectral theory, group theory, category theory, I dunno. Things that overlap or exist in superposition can still be spectrally decomposed into some dual space where they can be separated in so far as they are “things” that are of a kind that are relevant to this discussion. And there’s math rules about this we can learn from.
see also: