A Compression Ecology Between the Organizing Systems of Motivation and Inspiration

Overview

"When the rational ego is persistently opposed to the spontaneity of the instincts, consciousness becomes cut off from the larger psyche and the person might then be subject to a crippling state of anxiety."

Keiron Le Grice

The focus of this sensemaking is the faculty of predictive attention, and the motivation that provides internal incentive. Assuming a mechanistic view of consciousness will allow for these ideas to be organized.

"Motivation" is a complex phenomena related to the interface of the metaphysical and the physical in human beings. It tends to have root in something external—traditionally an out-of-sight "higher power", while being a self-reflecting memetic feedback loop in practice. If people build out internal motivation structures that are reconcilable between their instinctual and rational self, the trigger for this popular variety of low grade anxiety may resolve.

The aim of this sensemaking process is to represent the resources at hand, and compress the governing functions of their interactions into parsable communication. By doing this, we can develop more complete value systems and derivable heuristics. With enough accuracy and consistent granularity, these functions can remix and combine to create accurate, nuanced models reflective of human nature.

Background

These days, average-based thinking is being absolutely leveled. The predictions and decisions formed by it are always one step behind the future. Ignoring one's instincts and vitality can disempower or lead in a negative trajectory. However, making decisions from sensuality and emotional determinations can also be a regressive crutch. Each axis of consciousness forms a poor basis for judgement on its own. Instead, I want to make sense of how someone's mind can be in alignment with their body. Low grade latent anxiety is a pressing issue in the world. Everybody wants to feel pride in something; everybody wants to feel a permeation of satisfaction—and I think this is an alignment of projected meaning and sensation into productive harmony.

"Critical thinking, knowledge, beliefs—everything needed to be probabilized. Until I came to realize, twelve years ago, that I was wrong in this notion that the calculus of probability could be a guide to life and help society. Indeed, it is only in very rare circumstances that probability (by itself) is a guide to decision making. It is a clumsy academic construction, extremely artificial, and nonobservable. Probability is backed out of decisions; it is not a construct to be handled in a stand-alone way in real-life decision making. It has caused harm in many fields."

Nassim Taleb

"Stories replace probability judgements."

Robert Glushko

The development of natural philosophy is closely tied to the philosophical affordances available to the physicist's intuition. When the unknown unknowns are too significant, the use of induction is not safe or effective. There is instead a necessitation of narrative for the construction of one's predictive intuition or creativity in that space. Narratives work through the activities and value systems of consciousness, and can resolve into an aesthetic when isolated outside of context into abstract form.

If success is derived from some feeling of satisfaction, with satisfaction itself being derived from some harmonic progression to euphoria, then different morality codes offer varying rates of success, with differing definitions on what that success is and is surrounded by. If a feeling of what is satisfying is inherently harmonic, then different relations between notes must express different feelings—the spectra of which being connected by a spirit of value and desire. This sort of 'spirit' is empowered by story. Story could be surmised as a progression of narrative: motivated by conflict, aimed at resolution. A progression from dissonance into harmony. Such a story reverberates with the progression of humanity.

"Everything we do, including grasping a moment of music, commences with a sort of fleeting hypothesis that is confirmed or disconfirmed; every subtle mismatch is countered by adjustments to the next anticipation."

Robert Jourdain

Survey of Other Philosophical Metaphysical Traditions

Consciousness Health/Wellness Practices: Limited, egocentric metaphysical scope, allowing it to be clean and effective at local aim. When scope is stretched to an aesthetic absolute, reasoning becomes circular or self-immolating. (Stoicism, appropriated Buddhism, etc.)

Spirituality: Somewhere between self help / security, and a landscape of spirits. Spirits can facilitate the divination of particular motivation vectors. (New Age (naive empowerment orientation), Folk Superstition (naive fear orientation), etc.)

Religion: Spiritual power and justification through an external rather than egocentric model—that is, through "other gods". Scalable, indirect / curated / suppressed / hierarchical spirituality. Like an intentional gift of ignorance.

What is Being Organized

Ultimately, what is being organized are recursive, time-scale functions of resource combinations. We're focusing on the resources and interactions involving motivation and inspiration. Within the consciousness of 'self' and 'other', self-systems and images of other systems can mimic each other in a feedback loop. Memetics is then about the pattern creation of pattern-recognizing processes. 'Emergence' is the term for when such a complex system develops compressible descriptions or forms of behavior. We're after the correct emergences in our organizing system—a compression ecology of adaptive, sustainable properties. The ability to imagine idea, expound on idea, and perform idea are each covered. The organized representation of these emergences (of self, motivation, and inspiration) will be enabled by visual artifacts of form. Rather than just listing groups of resource connections, this visualization takes into account dynamics and state changes. Much more useful than lines and bubbles. Form here is an architectural object created by sweeps of dimensional links and limitations. The specifics of implementation are contextually generated.

Organization Artifact: Inspiration Vector for Predictive Attention

First, let's take a look at one of these projected arrows (fig 2). When seen through relative scope, it can be graphed along coordinate vectors of the motivation's relevant values.

Within our known self and reign of vision and competency, straightforward induction and probabilistic rational reasoning suffices for coordinating actions and making predictions. However, outside of this known space, we often still need to move or perceive. I would argue that the way this attention is enabled and distributed is through these scaffolding motivation vectors. The coordinates of the aim are contextually derivable. For some high order motivation, it may be implemented as having an X axis of how much the aim manifests pragmatic/earthly success, and a Y axis of how much the aim represents ideal/heavenly success.¹ Transformation or exertion of the self is what's spent to actually realize these projections.

Something like stoicism will try to help develop these scaffoldings without care for the context or absolute orientation of the vector—which when seen from the contextual frame (fig 1) may generally improve fitness, or lead to investment of resources into a locally positive but absolutely negative place. Of course, much inherent structuralism in practices of healthy consciousness borrow from aesthetics of particular moral systems, but tries to separate itself from ultimately religious narrative.

Competency and sanity itself doesn't cover the bases for aesthetic perfection in present satisfaction, because the requirement for meaning has to transcend localized time frames.

This is where Buddhism seems to step in. The ultimate denying of self, satisfaction, and narrative resolution becomes a religion and aesthetic unto itself. It substitutes local framing into an absolute reference frame by taking its limitations as absolutes—which by zeroing out some variables definitely can make one's system less chaotic.

Back to the vector image. Its architecture can be implemented to graph energies/motivations against length of temperament. One coordinate delineating time: temporal to eternal. Another coordinate delineating framing: from hedonistic to idealistic.

In regards to the structure of the motivation form itself (the arrow found at that chosen coordinate): The particulars of its form and force may be determined by the limitations and compatibility of its scope, and how much efficacy the self will ultimately be able to maintain within the model.

Having less of a model or less ability to reliably lean on one's external understanding (via an inspiration vector) potentially creates a vacuum fillable by tribalistic memes and other externally/arbitrarily-sourced mimetic effects. Suggestibility is only as good as what holds its attention.

Organization Artifact: Self & Interaction with Inspiration Vectors

(predictive attention) × (time & space) = mimetic evolution. (visualized as a spiral). Promise, truth, ability, and time influence this personal evolution trajectory.

Self as a nonlinear system means that germinating ideas can produce huge changes. We don't always know ourselves, and we aren't always well-rounded, so our center of self and center of mass don't necessarily line up. This effects the dynamics of our metaphysical movement: the path we take is influenced by the vibrations of our internal dynamics. Those internal vectors are basically the attributes of one's expression. The activity within that area could be seen as one's energy. It may not be totally organized in there, but that doesn't mean the chaos is bad—those jostling internal momentums may combine to emit strong vectors of creative expression. There is almost a necessity of disorganization in the creative process. However, the output of one's expression must be parsable in order to develop something. The distribution of one's spiritual expression may need to pixelate in order to choose words.

Promise is comprised of an angle oriented up to inspiration, and a magnitude. Its self-observation is perceptually gated by compatibility of communication, and learning curve. Its coherence is formed by the compatibility of its language with the self (its ability to be a cognizably realizable inspiration vector), and its vividness is formed by its connection with instinct and sensuality (its ability to be a simulated experience).

Ability to achieve that promise is perhaps informed by (generational consistency) × (investment towards long term) × (investment towards short term) × (emotional valence). Because self perception is part of its function, it has properties of a feedback loop (feedback means the function uses its own old return values).

Vision is another resource necessary for having the self interact with projections. Having an "open mind" or "humility" or whatever affords the dexterity to find new perspectives from which to look. The ability to actually see the stuff you're looking at could be a property of enlightenment.

The formation of this self perception, when referencing more properties than just projection-blind instinctive emotion, often communicates itself using narrative as an agent. Narrative influences these different dimensions and time scales all in one model.

The main point of our contextual diagram is how to zone for understanding and rationality. Within the area the self already has a handle on, we work with logic. Outside of that space, we work with belief.

"Logic creates lossless compressions along an absolute high entropy maxima. Belief creates lossy compressions along absolute low energy substrate tolerance."

Patrick Ryan

In regards to ultimate aim, it could be considered pursuit of the divine. As you move closer to the perception of 'perfect', your definition of the perfect changes. It's the adaptive process of pinpointing and progressing we've already talked about, but aimed towards the divine. Direct observation is out of reach—a 'god-shaped hole'. In the gradient between reaction and proaction, coordinating relative to the divine supersedes all other rationalistic framing. It is the superordinate goal oriented activity.