The Game Loop: Part 8 Continuous Cognition
Posted: Sat Mar 28, 2026 9:55 pm
The Game Loop
Part 8
Continuous Cognition
Continuous Cognition
Google Doc version (easier to follow footnotes)
Part 1 Mental Pipelines
Part 2 Interleaved IO Flows I
Part 3 Interleaved IO Flows II
Part 4 In Search of the Fundamental Inputs I
Part 5 In Search of the Fundamental Inputs II
Part 6 Concentration
Part 7 Meditation
Part 8 Continuous Cognition
On our journey to find a more intimate IO interface within the universal game, we were led to our inner life of thinking and imagination. We saw how through concentration and meditation we can stabilize our vantage point of existence as if within a deeper barycenter in the flow of becoming. From this deeper inner stance, we can be consciously active as if through intuitive steering that modulates how phenomena are compounded within the receding flow, and reciprocally, we discover how our steering is embedded and constrained within the complex interference of IO flows across different temporal scales.
While we are still under the influence of the homunculus metaphor, we secretly expect that our inner process should be graspable as a sub-pipeline embedded in the universal pipeline, that is fed potato crates on one side, performs certain operations, and pushes out corresponding crates on the other. This conception entails that the richer and more manifold our experiential flow is, the more complex the pipeline constituting the inner process must be. According to our contemporary scientific conceptions, it seems that intelligence can only be the result of a highly complicated computational pipeline. As long as we submit to this view, we’re locking ourselves to picture-in-picture modeling, where we instinctively try to stack increasingly complex sequences of abstract mental images that mimic the supposed computational process. We are bound to declare that whatever the reality of this process is, it must lie ‘behind’ the screen of conscious experience and can never be known in some direct experiential way. Thus, we feel fully justified in maintaining our free fall through intellectual choreographies, since we convince ourselves that this is the only way to know what the process of reality might be, at least indirectly, by dancing through a symbolic mental pipeline.
While the meditative experience might not be denied, it would be seen as only approaching a peculiar threshold where our intellectual hopping collapses. Our intellectual sense of being can only conceive that as bordering on a lapse into unconscious sleep or a trance state. Unfortunately, such a view is only reinforced by many spiritual trends in our age, advocating such inexplicable states, which our waking intellectual flow remains completely irreconcilable with. However, when we approach the deeper barycentric flow in the proper way, we are fully conscious within our intuitive movements. We’ll now attempt to gain intuition for how this subtler intuitive navigation not only doesn’t set us apart from our ordinary intellectual life, but allows us to understand in a fully experiential way how the latter takes form from within a deeper stratum of our intuitive activity.
The Dasher software is an accessibility method for inputting text without a keyboard.
The input method can be used by people with limited hand mobility, as it can be controlled by a headmouse, eyegaze tracking, etc. Instead of typing by tapping individual letters on the keyboard, we continually zoom into an ever-bifurcating space of letters. Based on the prediction algorithm, the more probable letters may stand out. Notice how we are once again dealing with tight IO flow. We smoothly vary our cursor inputs and continuously contemplate the feedback of the output. In the above clip, we can see how after zooming into ‘H’ and then ‘e’, certain continuations, like ‘re’, stand out. Such probable continuations depend entirely on the prediction algorithm. If prediction is disabled, then, after zooming in on a given letter, all letters of the alphabet would be offered with equal weight. When a prediction algorithm is used, for example, one based on a dictionary, it is as if we open the dictionary and browse for words beginning with ‘he’ and see what the next letter could be. There are almost no words that continue with ‘z’, so there’s no reason to make that letter stand out. Rather, the algorithm makes those letters stand out, which most often follow ‘he’ (yet, if we really want to zoom into ’z’, it is still present deeper between the letters that stand out). More advanced algorithms would take not only the dictionary into account but also how often the given word appears in the corpus of literature, the context of previous input, and so on.
There are a few things that we can illustrate through the Dasher metaphor. One is how the different weights of the incoming letters can be seen as analogous to the fact that when we think, certain thought continuations are more likely than others, based on the intuition so far integrated in our life. When we try to solve the chess puzzle, we instinctively zoom into the next ‘letters’ (board configurations with the knight at a certain position) and stack the output. What we zoom into depends on what moves stand out. Just like when using Dasher with a more advanced prediction algorithm that takes prior inputs into account, so the intuitive weights in our cognitive flow are distributed depending on the so far compounded IO experiences. Without this, we would have the anterograde amnesia analogy, where we zoom through the same distribution over and over again, and nothing changes – we have no way to feel for how long this has been going on. Conversely, we can imagine that with every Γ-move that we zoom in, the following weights are slightly redistributed such that a potential thought begins to stand out more and more. After stacking enough Γ-moves, the weight of this thought may become so significant that we zoom into it and stack the words: “This has been going on for a while, and it goes nowhere.”
The metaphor here is not intended to offer any mechanistic explanations (mental pipelines) about how this redistribution works. We are only using its vocabulary to point at facts that can be surveyed directly from experience. We all know, even without ever having heard of brains and neurons, that learning has something to do with repeated experiences of specific inputs and outputs stacking together or in sequences. For example, if we have stacked a specific sequence of thoughts many times, it becomes more likely that this sequence will stand out in the future palette. In this way, since we have moved the knight in its Γ-move many times in the past, corresponding next states are more likely to stand out, instead of board configurations where the knight is in a random position. If we had no prior experience with chess, then every knight position would seem to stand out with an equal weight. We wouldn’t feel that there’s anything special about the board configurations reachable through Γ-transitions compared to all the rest.
We do not propose that our intuitive orientation (the directions that stand out) within the present state is a function exclusively of prior personal conscious experiences. Even the simplest sensory perception that draws our attention by providing a zooming direction, standing out so prominently that we can hardly resist falling through it (like a sudden sound), shows that the redistribution of weights depends on the whole existential context and not only on our conscious intents. Thus, we should be completely open to the possibility that many other, as of yet unknown, factors may contribute to the shaping of our present intuitive orientation and the paths of becoming that stand out.
To extend the metaphor further, we can imagine the right edge of the screen as the event horizon from which all outputs precipitate toward the left. Like the video feedback example, these outputs do not exist along some time dimension of reality but are all compounded in our present state. To make the metaphor more lifelike, we can imagine what it would be like if we had to control the zooming with a cursor that is not visible. If we only see a still frame, there’s no way of telling the zooming direction. The direction can only be intuited while the output continuously transforms. We provide small inputs and gather from the continuous feedback whether we need to keep pushing the input in one direction or another. Thus, we need a higher strobing rate, the IO feedback needs to be tighter, and our attention unbroken. To make this even more compatible with our prior artistic illustrations of first-person experience, we can present it like the stacking chess puzzle boards. Looking at things in this way may help us be less prone to stare into phenomenological space and expect to see the event horizon and the weight distributions as perceptions contained there.
Thus, we move with our back toward the future, so to speak1 (or we are stationary, and the future approaches us from behind). If the Dasher analogy is taken literally, one would expect that, for example, we should perceive in our imaginative volume the palette of potential next thoughts, and then simply choose which one to manifest by zooming into it. This, however, would be in a sense the opposite of what we are trying to point out through the metaphor. We do not perceptually see what we are zooming into, nor do we see the palette distribution, but we bend the flow in a certain intuitive direction. When we type in Dasher, we try to stack the letters of something that we have in mind. For example, when we intend to write ‘Hello’, we do not immediately see that continuation on screen, but we keep zooming intuitively in the directions where the needed letters are expected to be found (this intuition is based on the fact that the letter elements are alphabetically sorted). In this case, we can still mentally rehearse the words that we want to type. Things become more interesting when we take the metaphor to our real-time thinking process, where we can no longer rehearse (think before we think). Now, mental phenomena become perceptible only as they cross the horizon and compound as memory images. However, this doesn’t mean that we can’t have intuitive orientation for the direction of metamorphosis. If that were the case, we wouldn’t be able to tell a single story. Thus, even though we do not see our potential next thoughts as an alphabetically sorted palette, we still somehow push into the direction where inner words compatible with the general intuition of the story are stacked.
It can be objected that in certain cases, we do see in the output what we’re zooming into. For example, when we stand in front of two doors and choose to go through one of them, it seems that we directly see the palette of possibilities, and we zoom into it. However, it is really important to understand that the field of phenomenal outputs still presents us only with the consequences of our intuitive zooming, while the latter is headed toward an anticipated future state. When we look at the doors, it feels like we see what we are zooming into, only because we are quite familiar with the geometric lawfulness that visual perceptions transform under. It almost seems that when we look at the door, we see what the potential future of approaching it might be, and thus we feel like we zoom into something we already see. However, if we imagine that there’s a secret trapdoor on the floor, just in front of our chosen door, we easily realize that our falling into the pit wouldn’t be something that we have seen ourselves zooming into.
The frames of existence that convey our approach toward one of the doors must still be grasped as stacking output images. Our state metamorphoses toward something unknown (as if behind our back), and the output perceptions of the doors only feed back the repercussions of our act of will. It is crucial to feel that when we look at the doors, we’re looking into the past2, into compounding memory images (like fading CRT pixels), while the future we can only know by willfully pushing the metamorphosis of the game state with the anticipation that every next frame would present the phenomenal pixels of one of the doors as occupying more and more of our perceptual volume3. Even when we imagine (rehearse) the approach toward the door, we’re still beholding receding mental images, and not ‘the future’. It is true that the already stacked images of the doors evoke corresponding standing-out paths of experience (because of prior life experiences with doors, when we see one, we also feel the possibility of walking through it); however, what these paths lead to is not contained in the images (as the trapdoor example shows). If the whole Dasher metaphor is not to be grasped in the opposite way, we need to firmly hold on to the fact that conscious phenomena always present us with the compounding effects of our zooming toward an unknown but intuitively sought future state. The greatest challenge is in resisting the urge to seek the future state as something we can see in the phenomenal volume and step into.
Another aspect of the metaphor is how the complexity of our inputs can be experienced as stemming from something simpler. Notice that even though the cursor input is simpler – we only use two axes (x and y) compared to the many keys of the keyboard – this doesn’t reduce the effective degrees of freedom; we can still type anything. Something analogous becomes a quite literal experience in our meditative concentration. We overcome the sense of being a thinking mind that throws out and arranges mental images on an imaginative tableau, which in itself raises a world of questions: What are these mental images? Are they independent ‘things’ in phenomenal space? How do we create them? Do we use some mental hands to place them? What are ‘we’ in respect to them? And so on. All such abstract mental pipelines dissolve as we converge toward the IO threshold. In Dasher, even though our inputs are simpler, the perceptual experience is richer and more colorful compared to keyboard typing. In an analogous way, in the meditative state, our phenomenal experience grows richer and more manifold, yet we find certain lawfulness and elegance within the complexity which we navigate in a simpler way. Our mental stream starts to feel like an intrinsic aspect of the primary flow. Mental images no longer set us apart from reality by intuiting in them only pipeline representations of whatever lies on the opaque side of our inner experience, but we behold the mental image flow as an inseparable texture of the only first-person phenomenal World flow that we have ever known. We can surely feel ourselves more intimately active in the modulations of the mental texture compared to the texture of visual perceptions (I can hardly modulate the red color I see into blue), but they nevertheless come to feel like aspects of the same unitary phenomenal flow.
When we deepen our meditative efforts, our inputs indeed begin to resemble continuous steering, as if we point our attention in a secret, unseen direction from within which we intuitively strive to accommodate the next frame of our first-person existential movie. As a crude example, when we think a word in our mind, say, ‘dog’ or ‘cat’, one option is to imagine that we provide a very specific control input; there is a unique ‘button’ for each word that our homunculus must intuitively press to mentally pronounce it. Instead, we may picture that, compatible with our present state, there are two potential flow continuations of the World process – in one we pronounce the mental word ‘dog’, in the other – ‘cat’. If we pronounce ‘cat’, it is as if we have steered into a flowline4 in which our life story continues with the experience of that mental sound. Of course, broken down like this, we may rightfully regard it as a completely speculative pseudo-scientific theory. Furthermore, if we tackle it in a completely intellectual manner, it leads to a regression. We’ll soon be philosophizing about what buttons we press for the steering to happen (i.e., homunculus within homunculus). We’ll then seek yet other buttons that control the deeper inputs that press the buttons that command the steering, and so on. With every such step, our intellectual self secretly protects its background vantage point. It seeks to secure a private pre-calculating space, where inputs can be rehearsed and only then allowed to actuate the outer homunculus. Yet this approach utterly fails if we try to pre-calculate the pre-calculating thoughts. We can’t grasp the real-time process of philosophizing by simply doing more philosophizing! The latter always remains in the blind spot, while we are immersed in the abstract mental and memory images of a potentially infinite input cascade.
When we strive to seize and concentrate our innermost intuitive activity (which otherwise pours through a pipeline of philosophical Γ-moves) and maintain it into a smooth, unbroken stream, then something like the Dasher metaphor becomes a much more fitting artistic expression of the way our inner metamorphosis feels. We do not aim to fight and eradicate our philosophizing activity as if it were some alien process, but try to enter more deeply into the real-time experience of shaping its thoughts. In other words, before we can resist our endless philosophizing activity, we need to fully enter it; we need to fully identify with it – not in the sense that we are the receding thought modulations, but as to experientially feel tightly and creatively responsible for them. Thus, we do not resist our thinking streams by stubbornly fighting them – in the best scenario, this would at most exchange one stream for another. Instead, to resist a usual thinking line, we need to awaken within a stratum of intuitive activity that secretly animates it in the first place. We need to feel how our innermost activity is clothed and sieved through the pipeline stages of philosophical Γ-moves.
As we begin to awaken within the intuitive stream beneath the clothing, our scientific process gradually relaxes its dependence on contemplating a pipeline replica of the supposed World process in the outputs of its own mental typing. Our inner process now resembles a tight feedback loop, where we strive to make our mental inputs ever more subtle and concentrated (by loosening them from the clothing of constraints that shape the usual freefall) while we closely experience the compounding effects. Now we seek reality not as contained in the compounding output phenomena, but we live it in the real-time process of becoming by intuiting the constraints and degrees of freedom of metamorphosis. The totality of the compounding phenomenal flow (including both the mental and sensory textures) is now grasped not as what the World process ‘is’ or what it ‘objectively looks like’ but as an ongoing symbolic feedback to our intuitive metamorphosis. We call the feedback ‘symbolic’ because it reflects the cumulative effects of intuitive becoming, just like the seismograph’s trace can be seen as a symbolic record of the interference of inertial forces. This doesn’t mean that the phenomenal outputs are unreal. They are an aspect of what the ever-metamorphosing state of existence feels like. Yet we realize that there’s no such thing as an objective or universal perception of the World process. The phenomenal pixels in themselves can be considered objective experience, yet in them we contemplate the compounding effects of continuous metamorphosis. Such a statement may feel disheartening because it implies that we can never see reality ‘as it is’. It feels that there’s a vast hidden world of ‘inertial forces’ and all we can ever know is the tiniest scribble of their seismographic trace. We feel isolated because it seems that every individual being beholds its own relative symbolic rendition of the World process, and thus we can never hope to agree on a common assembly of phenomenal pixels that we can call ‘the objective perception of the World process’. However, we’ll gradually see that what gives us the sense that we share in the same World process is not the equalization of our unique renditions of phenomenal pixels, but intuiting common overarching intuitive IO flows at different scales.
Seen in this way, the reality of a constraint is not something that we see and touch in the compounding outputs, but can be understood as the fact that certain flow continuations in the present distribution are deeply buried and hard to zoom into, or others stand out so prominently that we can barely avoid free-falling through them. The thus compounding phenomenal output trace is not the full reality of the constraint, but scribbles some of its consequences. On the other hand, liberating a new degree of freedom is like effortfully zooming through flow continuations where the weights are gradually redistributed in such a way that flow directions hitherto buried deeply between the prominent ones begin to stand out. Once again, this degree of freedom is not something we see in the trace, but the latter only presents the consequence of zooming through the novel weight distribution.
The challenge with metaphors like ‘clothing’ or ‘masking’ is in habitually imagining that what lies beneath the mask is of a more or less similar ‘shape’. In our case, when we try to conceive the undressing of our intuitive stream from the usual intellectual pipeline stages, we are prone to imagine that we should awaken within some kind of ‘finer’ intellect, which still philosophizes by assembling ‘subtler’ mental puzzle pieces down the picture-in-picture flow. The critical thing to realize, however, is that the transition we speak of leads to a significant shift in the experience of our cognitive flow. First, it indeed feels like a flow – it is continuous. Continuous should not be mistaken for homogenous or amorphous. Consider plant growth as an analogy. We can think of it as continuous, yet it metamorphoses through complicated rhythms and stages. It is similar when we begin to experience our inner life through a higher strobing rate and concentrated inner stance. Our ordinary intellectual pipeline stages now feel like milestones or road signs along this more intimate stream of becoming. Thus, when our deeper intuitive activity is sieved through the intellectual palette, it not only flows through more rigidly shaped channels, but it also attains its so characteristic discontinuous nature. We feel like stroboscopically hopping from stage to stage, with diminished awareness of the underlying flow. Second, our intuitive modulations feel inseparable from the primary flow, and not as something that stands in opposition to and philosophizes about it. When we experience our inner metamorphosis in that way, we have a clear wordless intuition: “This is what the World process feels like from a limited perspective. This process metamorphoses like continuous plant growth, and my inner life is an inseparable aspect of it. When I think, I don’t stand outside of this process, but I experience how I participate in its growth, how I contribute something to its modulations. My mental images are not ‘mine’. They are the vibrant texture of the phenomenal World stream that I behold as I steer into various flow continuations. This continuous real-time experience can never be mechanically constructed by patching together the stroboscopically flashed intellectual Γ-moves. It’s the other way around – the intellectual hopping is what the continuous intuitive flow feels like once it is shattered into discontinuous fragments.”
In Dasher, if we are careless or hasty, we can very easily zoom into the wrong continuation. And this is indeed how real life feels like – when we are in a hurry, and our intuitive intents rush forward, thus losing coherence with the feedback of our bodily IO flow, we make mistakes, knock objects over, stutter, and so on. Understanding this, in itself gives us a practical method for mastering our daily flow. Instead of our head (that is, thoughts and imagination) trying to move faster than our feet can run, we should seek a concentric or coaxial flow, where our strategic, tactical, and operational flows all nest within each other musically. Just as cacophony would result if one musician in an orchestra rushes forward through the score, so the IO flows need to find their common rhythmic intersection. We can always move in that direction by slowing down and bringing our imagination and willing inputs tightly and smoothly in phase. It is of great value if we regularly perform movements where we first try to feel the distinction between an imagined (remembered) movement and actual bodily perception resulting from willful input, then bring them in phase as closely as possible by performing smooth and continuous movement without ‘lifting the pen’ (without getting interrupted by commentaries in our inner voice or other images)5. Such discrepancies between intuitive inputs and receding outputs exist even in our thinking. Normally, we instinctively push forward, and our thoughts (for example, verbal) ‘fly past our head’ toward the receding output in templated bursts. We have almost no awareness of the way our inner speech is formed. The Dasher analogy can help us see how we can increase the strobing rate and feel very closely how we can be creatively active in the shaping of inner speech, not only at the word level but even in the morphing of the individual sounds. We can feel about our thinking speech in the same way as when the clay artist is fully focused and maintains a tight IO flow between the hand inputs and the perceptual output feedback. We need to split the now moment to such an extent that we feel tightly metamorphosing through the sounds of our inner words, instead of letting them fly by. The most natural way to experiment in that direction is through singing in our inner voice. We can try to be fully concentrated and feel as closely as possible how our pitch-varying inputs are reflected in the inner sound. In this way, even varying the pitch of a single vowel can be experienced as if we move through metamorphosing chambers of a gallery, especially if we allow ourselves to feel modulating a greater volume of the phenomenal flow (as if we let the inner sound ray out in all directions). It is also possible to experience this for non-singing words by thinking even ordinary thoughts, but slowly and eloquently. The goal is to avoid stamping whole templated patterns of inner phenomena, but sieve our entire mental flow through the pinhole of concentrated activity, such that more and more of the modulations within the output stream feel like a tight feedback to intuitive input steering.
Such fine-grained control can be conceived if we imagine that Dasher is not limited only to zooming through letter elements. In the same way that we need to zoom through several consecutive letters to produce a word, we can imagine that we enter a region that is more finely discretized, and we can zoom through a sequence of phonetic vibrations for their total stack to form the sound of a letter. Toward the other extreme, we can imagine that we zoom into elements that contain whole words, phrases, sentences, and so on. We can also include the streams of other kinds of mental stacking, such as mathematical, pictorial, chess-related, etc.
When we are zooming at a particular level of granularity, the elements of the same level stand out most prominently. Yet, the elements of the other levels are also there, even though buried deeper among the others. Zooming through phrase elements makes our flow more efficient, as we do not need to individually micromanage the stacking of high-resolution elements, but at the same time, our forms of expression become much more templated. If we are restricted to such a palette, we might be pushing in an intuitive direction, but feel that none of the incoming templated phrases resonates sufficiently with what we strive to express.
Clearly, in practical life, we do need to make use of the more templated palettes. Our hasty modern daily rhythm makes it necessary that we resort to them, but we also need the quiet meditative effort, where we find the high-resolution flow buried between the standing-out phrases. We absolutely need to give time to this concentrated, tight-feedback flow with a high strobing rate, in order to counteract the strong bias of modern life toward more and more templated flows, instinctively free-falling through the most prominently standing-out attractors. At this point, it might not yet be clear how this focus on the ever-finer input gestures can be helpful. It seems quite a one-sided fixation on micromanaging the flow, and thus becoming too tangled in reductionistic ‘bureaucracy’ for assembling the more overarching IO flows. We’ll gradually see how mastering the micro-flow can also help us gain clearer awareness and means of transformation of the more integrated flows. For the time being, we can at least try to feel how, in order to break a templated habit (of bodily movements, speech, or thinking), we need to decompose it and stack it anew bit by bit, by creatively and with fine-grained control, zooming in through the higher resolution elements in a new way. As a result, we progressively transform the intuitive conditioning by moving through flow continuations with weights redistributed in such a way that the elements of the corrected habit are more likely to stand out. As a whole, we can feel that we always need special effort if we are to explore directions of becoming that do not usually stand out. This also holds for our meditative life. When we want to meditate but can’t because we feel stuck, bored, sleepy, and so on, it means that we’re free-falling through continuations that feel in conflict with our general intent to meditate, but can’t find a way to steer away from them – we oscillate and fall right back through the most prominent gravity wells. In such cases, as a universal rule, we always need to sharpen our concentration and let go – become ‘smaller’ than the attractors of boredom, sleepiness, and so on, thus gaining a chance to flow through continuations that have been hitherto deeply buried between them. Looking at things in this way gives us another artistic stroke for what it means to split the now moment, as if to find flow continuations hidden between the usual, most prominent ones.
In Dasher, when we make a mistake (because we were in too much of a hurry and zoomed in on the wrong letter, or simply because we have midway changed our intentions), we can move the cursor to the left and zoom out to a previous junction, thus undoing the typing. In real life, we cannot do that. We should imagine that the cursor can move up and down, as well as left and right, to control the speed of zooming to some extent, but not so far to the left that the movement stops or reverses. In this case, if we want to correct a mistake, we can imagine that we need to zoom in on a special ‘backspace’ element of the incoming flow, inside of which we encounter suggestions similar to those before the mistaken letter. In other words, if we start typing ‘H’, ‘e’, and then mistakenly zoom into ‘m’ instead of ‘l’, we will be offered the plausible continuations of ‘Hem’. Instead of going back, we can zoom in on the special backspace element ‘←’, just like we would zoom in on any other letter, except that after it, we will once again see continuations suitable for ‘He’. The critical point, however, is that this correction remains part of the stacked letters. We’ll have ‘Hem←llo’. As we already mentioned when looking at the branching chess tunnels, this corresponds to our experience. When we correct a mistake or decide that our flow is moving into a dead end, and we need to start a new iteration, we do not move ‘back in time’, but we continue stacking new states. In this way, the suggestion distribution after the backspace element may not be completely identical to what it would be without the error – that is, the latter still has some compounding effect. We can think of any mistake or dead-end iteration as leading to a certain extract, the intuitive lesson learned, that acts like a seed for the new attempt with slightly different distribution. Zooming into this incoming seed element looks like backtracking because after it, we encounter intuitive directions that are similar to those we experienced in the past, but effectively, we are stacking fresh growth, and the effects of the previous iterations remain compounded in the present state (they cannot be truly undone).
If this whole metaphor is not to remain abstract, we should really try experimenting within our inner flow. For example, we can pick two or three topics. One could be about a particular event that happened recently, another could be about something that we plan to do, and so on. We should try focusing on one of these topics and spend some time thinking about it – stacking words and images that explicate it. Then we switch the topic and do the same. We can represent this process like this:
Here we have colored the different regions according to the different topics. We can see that there could be different word-stacks that begin with “I was at the…”, yet they would lead to different continuations. It is of great value to introspect and try to feel what changes when we switch such topics. Apparently, the initially compounded words are the same. Yet, somehow the whole intuitive context morphs – the ‘color’ is different, and everything that we continue to stack fits musically in the new intuitive atmosphere. These things are usually not given much attention, but in our research, gaining sensitivity about them is critical. By gaining such sensitivity, not only is our awareness enriched, but we also discover new ways in which we can steer the flow. Normally, we are in a free fall, experiencing the stacking of mental images in whatever way they come, fed by the most prominent attractors. Through meditative concentration, we gain fine-grained zooming control over the flow, not only over the elements of the short-term operational flow (like morphing vowels), but also over the tactical and strategic flows (the contextual ‘colors’).
The standing-out ‘topic colors’ of our intuitive and emotional context come to feel as attractors or gravity wells of our becoming, and gradually we gain orientation within them, just like we have intuitive orientation about how spatial outputs transform. The attractors of our flow are found to constitute a lawful flowscape. It is very important to get a clear intuition of this, since a word like ‘flowscape’ immediately evokes a spatial picture. To understand this, we first need to realize that even physical space is not seen (just like we do not see some actual metaphysical ‘space’ when looking through a VR headset). What we visually see is the continuous morphing of phenomenal pixels. What makes the color perceptions feel as if we are looking into space is the fact that we can anticipate the various ways in which these outputs can transform. We have intuitive orientation about the lawfulness through which the sensory texture modulates; we are aware of the degrees of freedom and the constraints through which our zooming can proceed (while still being susceptible to trapdoors, of course). We’re not implying that our sense of space is illusory, but only that it comes from our well-developed intuitive orientation within the flow of becoming, and not because we see space as some perceptible fact on its own. In a similar way, it is our increasing orientation within the lawfulness of psychological attractors (remember the magnetic pendulum) that gradually gives the sense of a flowscape. The greatest challenge is to resist picturing this flowscape as three-dimensional space, where we try to see every attractor as a spatial phenomenon to the left, to the right, etc. When speaking of attractors, we do not imply ‘objects’ that can be stared at in the output field, but tendencies that nudge the holistic metamorphosis of our existential state in certain directions. The deeper nature and origin of these tendencies can be revealed only gradually, thus, we should initially focus on what tendencies are related to what, how some are ‘closer’ (they more often act together or in sequence), while others are ’farther apart’, how we can ‘move’ from the influence of one to another, and so on. So, we do not see psychological space as some finished output, but we increasingly grasp the degrees of freedom and constraints within which our contextual zooming unfolds. It is very tempting to map out this flowscape and try to navigate it by looking at the map (by pre-calculating our every move), but as explained in the previous part, all our attention should be toward the pinhole of becoming where the real-time intuitive steering happens, and where the mapping process itself is the valuable continuous feedback.
The elements of the topics in the picture above have been suggestively contained in the yellow element. This signifies the fact that our flow through these topics occurs within the context of our intent to do the exercise. Thus, if we consider the flow through a single topic as a tactical flow, the overarching yellow context is the strategic intent of the whole exercise. On the ‘back of our mind’ we need to feel that we are exploring these flows as a part of a more encompassing exercise, and we need to switch between them and make observations. This context would be different if we were thinking about the topics in other circumstances. So, we reach again from another angle the value of the exercise suggested earlier in the essays. It is indispensable that we stop for a second throughout our daily free fall and assess the temporal contextuality of the flow. We can quickly feel, “At what scale am I zooming? Am I stacking fine-grained elements, or templated bursts? What contextualizes my present zooming? Am I following the ideal curvatures of a greater strategic intent? Or am I free-falling, dimly pushed and pulled by nebulous emotions, foggy ideas, and stacking perceptions?”
Let’s imagine that we see someone stacking letters with Dasher or simply hear them talking. For us, the letters or words precipitate in our output field as part of the texture of the primary flow that we hardly feel consciously responsible for, thus they often feel unexpected. If we try to tackle the problem through our traditional scientific approach, we may try to develop a model – a form of calculation that takes into account prior outputs, passes them through a potato processing mental pipeline, and we end up with a stack of letters that we call the prediction. If the letters that the person types coincide with our prediction stack, we say that we have a pretty good grasp on reality. We have found a model that explains what happens behind the scenes. We can step through the pipeline stages of that model, as if we simulate a mirror copy of reality, and we are satisfied when the stacking output of the model can be correlated with the wider primary output. However, when we experience our own typing, the situation is very different. We do not need to calculate the predictions of our next words. Even if we try, we wouldn’t be able to calculate a prediction for the calculating thoughts themselves, and so on. Instead, we somehow feel within the flow; we have some intuitive sense of how the so-far stacked images have been produced and where this stacking process is headed. At first glance, this kind of knowing seems applicable only to our first-person flow-modulating intuitive activity. For everything else that we behold as output-to-output relations, it looks like we have no choice but to calculate predictions and test how well they match any new outputs. This way of thinking only reinforces our sense of being a completely enclosed sphere of consciousness, which can intuitively know something of its own temporally extended flow of becoming, yet has no choice but to speculate about whatever lies on its opaque side by stacking mental pipelines within. Later, we’ll try to show that this boundary is not as absolute as our intellect pictures it to be.
Finally, we should mention that by introducing this input analogy, we do not attempt to replace our thinking, feeling, and willing inputs with some other kind of inner activity. Normal intellectual thinking is what zooming through a specific level of granularity and orchestration of the flowscape feels like. If we zoom through different conditions, this would feel like something likewise specific. Most importantly, we shouldn’t try to distance ourselves from the experience of our ordinary thoughts, on the pretext that we have outgrown them, and from now on we will produce them only by higher-level zooming. This would only lead us into more templated thinking, a kind of automation of thinking. The nature of our thinking should change not because we learn to fire whole sequences of thoughts through ‘hotkeys’ from a distance, but because, in a way, we begin to be intuitively active within the whole symphonic context. We not only steer at a certain level of granularity, but we also gain orientation and the ability to navigate the ‘color’ contextuality. We can experience mental words intimately and in full resolution even as we steer the deeper contextuality. And such words not only should not feel remote, but even more profound and in-phase, as they now resound like high-resolution inspired poetry, precipitating concentrated symbols of our deep intuitive orientation. In other words, our goal is not to focus on either one of the granularity extremes but to seek greater symphonic coherence of the total flow.
The main purpose of the Dasher metaphor is to hint at the way our fragmentary intellectual pipelining can be experienced as part of a continuous stream of becoming. We transition from discrete keystrokes to smooth continuous steering, while the former keystrokes now seem more like milestones or road signs along the stream. In our ordinary, stroboscopically aliased free fall, we are aware of the illuminated discrete road signs but only vaguely feel the dimmer underlying continuity. While we operate under the intellectual habits developed in the past few centuries, we strive to understand every clip of the primary flow by living through a storyboard sequence of mental keystrokes that constitute a cause-and-effect chain, just like a domino train. We are satisfied with the intuitive nature of this mental experience when we can overlay our picture-in-picture stacking process onto the primary flow and identify correlations. When we try to apply this approach to our innermost process of becoming, however, we encounter an impossibility. We never see the causes of our thoughts as falling domino pieces that ultimately cause our real-time intuitive modulations. The perceptible effects of these modulations are already compounding into the ‘video feedback’. We might be able to say in retrospect that a certain compounded past image had something to do with a consequent mental modulation (like a sudden sound can be followed by a corresponding thought), but the retrospecting inner activity itself remains something that cannot be seen as the result of pre-calculation.
In the face of this, the thinker of our age would say, “Well, this is simply an intrinsic limitation of our cognitive process. The underlying World process is fundamentally opaque to our subjective conscious experience. The latter tells us nothing about the real World process, just like the pixels on a computer screen tell us nothing about the underlying hardware. Thus, we have no other choice but to build pipeline models down the pixels of the receding picture-in-picture flow, and calmly accept that we can never consciously observe the actual real-time domino process, the tip of which is somehow experienced as precipitating conscious phenomena at the horizon of becoming.”
The approach that we describe here doesn’t aim to build metaphysical pipelines that pre-calculate whatever crosses the horizon. And we too acknowledge that we can never observe our real-time thought process as the tip of a consciously perceptible domino chain. However, the meditative deepening of our inner life toward the horizon soon reveals that we do have another choice. We no longer try to calculate a prediction about what our next thought would be (while the calculating thoughts themselves still cannot be pre-calculated), but we attain finer sensitivity for the curvature of the flow through the here and now. Just like we have some intuitive orientation for our inner process when we shape it consciously, like when we count to ten, so we begin to intuitively feel how aspects of the contextual flow also stream in ways that make intuitive sense. In other words, instead of stacking a prediction within the picture-in-picture sub-flow and then seeking correlations with the primary flow, we begin to gain an expanded intuitive sense about the rhythms and interferences of certain real-time tendencies of the contextual flow, about where they ‘come from’ and where they are ‘headed’. This is known not as an intellectual guessing or interpretation, but by directly feeling the in-phaseness of the intuitive curvature of the flow and the receding phenomena. In the same way, when we count to ten, and we are at five, we do not need an intellectual theory of the past to indirectly speculate about the counting events that might have led to our present state (like historians, biologists, and cosmologists patch up a mental domino storyboard that explains our present state), nor calculate anything in order to know that we are moving toward ten.
From within such an expanded intuitive flow, we can better appreciate what our intellectual life is really doing. Now, intelligence doesn’t feel like something resulting from more and more complex calculations, but rather like the ability to steer our inner flow in a direction that, so to speak, maximizes the sense of ‘makes sense’ – we secretly follow the gradient of meaningfulness. Our becoming makes sense when the metamorphoses of the total flow are experienced in-phase with the intuitive curvature of becoming through the here and now. When we are at five, our state of existence makes sense because we feel flowing along the intuitive curvature of ‘counting to ten’. If we simply hear in our mind ‘five’ without any context, we say that it doesn’t make sense. As an analogy, consider the difficulties that climbers meet when summiting Mount Everest.
Every crack in the glaciers is a logistical challenge. Special effort is needed to bridge the chasms. Yet, this all happens within the overarching intent that the altitude should be maximized. This is not always trivial. If we climb in dense fog, there’s no guarantee that just because we are gaining altitude, we are approaching the peak. It could be that we are only approaching a local hill. Our meditative flow can be seen as increasing the intuitive sense for the contextually nested flow-bending nudges in the here and now and the direction of the gradient. This rarely happens through a monotonic increase. It is an iterative process. Especially while we still cannot clearly differentiate what makes sense and expands our intuitive perimeter, from what merely feels good. Yes, one-sided seeking of a pleasurable output in response to our inputs might make sense from within our present existential context, but if this constitutes our only compass sense, it is very likely that we’re climbing a local hill from which we’ll tumble down again.
When we are myopically immersed in our intellectual stacking gestures, we are laying ladders through which we instinctively seek to maximize the sense of meaning – we are seeking a path to the peak: the intuitive perspective that will make sense of our present fragmentary situation (which in the first place compels us to seek a future state where the metamorphoses of the fragments are expected to be musically embedded within an overarching intuitive flow). Our contemporary scientific habits resemble an attempt to build a miniature model of the landscape out of small ladders. The gradient is expected to be seen in the model (map) as a result of calculation, and only then make a step in accordance with it. Such calculation, however, becomes impossible when we approach our real-time flow of becoming. We cannot calculate our next thought; we cannot think before we think. Yet, we can increase the strobing rate and find the concentrated flow-stance from within which we become increasingly aware of the momentary curvature of the flowscape. This is the crucial point – through meditation we do not move behind the horizon, as if to contemplate some pre-calculating domino process that yields our thoughts. We are always at the horizon in the here and now, between the states that have already been compounded in the present and those that are yet to be accommodated. However, we become more and more aware of the real-time curvature of the flow of becoming. The fact that we intuit the momentary curvature through the pinhole doesn’t mean that we grasp only the short-term lawfulness of metamorphosis. As explained previously, in the momentary curvature, we also differentiate persistent, long-term flowlines. In this way, our flow of existence makes increasingly greater sense on different scales.
All of this doesn’t mean that our intellectual ladder logistics become obsolete. At least not soon. For example, everything we’ve been doing so far in these essays has been tedious laying of ladders. Yet, the way we use these ladders is somewhat different compared to what we do in armchair philosophy. Instead of seeking satisfaction by building and contemplating a sculpture made of ladders, one intuitively explores the curvatures of the flowscape, while the concepts and words are an attempt to take limited symbolic snapshots of this expanded dynamic flow. Another person who traverses the conceptual ladders back and forth a few times, through their familiar intuitive locomotion gestures, begins to gain their own intuition for the curvatures of the flowscape (not that the flowscape is a fixed structure, but certain lawful patterns and rhythms of metamorphosis are recognized). Then it becomes clearer what the intellectual ladders have been trying to bridge in the first place.
Hopefully, now we are able to move further away from the homunculus conception that can only see the increasing richness of conscious experience and degrees of freedom, as a result of growing in complexity. Yes, the flowscape appears infinitely complex from our perspective, yet we find a way to concentrate within a deeper barycentric flow-stance. Then our inner flow-bending activity indeed becomes, in a way, simpler, yet, probably paradoxically to the modern ears, this leads to a richer and more comprehensive experience of existence. Our stabilized and higher strobing rate flow reveals unsuspected aspects of the phenomenal flow as they are brought into symphonic coherence with our central flowline (or the latter is brought into coherence with the former). Far more of the World flow begins to make sense, and we discover the possibility to steer into continuations that have hitherto not stood out, as we have been free-falling through the most prominent attractors. Even if this is understood, however, one may still insist that it all concerns only our psychological life. One still feels that the greater flow can be known only through picture-in-picture modeling. In the next two parts we’ll attempt to show that our modern scientific conceptions, when seen rightly, are far closer than one might expect to what existence feels like in our direct meditative flow-experience.
Keynotes:
Through the Dasher metaphor we attempt to resolve the seeming contradiction between simplicity and complexity. The increasing degrees of freedom of our inner activity evoke the image of a game controller with an exponentially growing number of buttons and sticks, operated by a likewise complex homunculus entity. Through the metaphor, it is attempted to develop the intuition that these degrees of freedom are utilized through inner activity that, in a sense, becomes simpler and can be compared to intuitive steering, leaning, or zooming into potential continuations of existence. A kind of reciprocity needs to be grasped – on one hand, as we concentrate, it seems that our inner activity becomes singular and limited. All the various directions in which our intellectual activity can instinctively hop are suppressed and led into a single focal point. Yet on the other hand, from within that stabilized flowline we discover an even richer and more manifold flow, which we navigate through gentle intuitive leaning into potential continuations of our first-person existential movie.We can only grasp the nature of this metaphoric zooming if we consider it first within our thinking process – how we zoom through sequences of mental images. If we do not start from here, we’ll always try to see the metaphor in an external way, as if we are ‘here’, perceiving flow continuations ‘there’ in front of us, and thinking and calculating which door to take (while the thinking humunculus remains in the background). It is precisely this calculating inner activity that we need to experience like continuous intuitive zooming.When we approach the meditative flow, we no longer feel like some ‘thing’ that occupies some conscious space, and produces mental images as kind of objects in that space. Instead, the existential flow now feels unitary, and our flow of mental images is an intrinsic aspect of its spectrum. We do not feel like producing these images as distinct objects in phenomenal space, but rather, through our intuitive leaning, we contribute something to the modulations of the flowscape. Or, equivalently stated, we lean into flow continuations where the output is beheld as modulated in a certain way.The flowscape is in continuous metamorphosis. We cannot stop or reverse its flow. We also cannot see the causes of our momentary modulations. Any philosophical mental images that try to picture a domino train leading to the pinhole of our own becoming are already compounding down the receding outputs. Our scientific goal is not to calculate the future (which we presently value as the highest understanding of reality), but to become increasingly conscious of the momentary curvature of the flow as a coherent intersection of IO flows at different scales. When we feel our flow musically composed in this way, our mental modulations feel like the notes of a greater symphony; they feel like flowing out of inspiration.This more coherent flow should not be seen as mere automation of the operational sequences of mental images, as if we now steer them from a distance, by zooming through templated mental recipes. Instead, our mental modulations feel even more intimate and musically coherent with the overall metamorphosis of the primary flow. Our concentrated steering does not replace the ordinary flow through thinking, feeling, and willing, but leads us to a more holistic and orchestrated consciousness of it. It is as if we awaken and navigate within a deeper carrier flow within which our ordinary inner activity otherwise manifests in more fragmentary ways.Resisting the usual attractors always requires special effort, where we need to concentrate, let go, and become ‘smaller’ than their pull, thus splitting the flow so that paths previously deeply buried become accessible. There’s no final stage to this process. Even our glowing meditative experiences can be seen in retrospect as flowing through specific curvatures. There are always flow-continuations still buried, which, once concentrated into, reveal imaginatively and intuitively what we have been hitherto flowing through with diminished awareness. Secretly, we seek a direction of becoming that increases the sense of meaningfulness. Here, ‘meaning’ doesn’t signify some abstract measure of information, but the sense of musical resonance of every moment of our existence within the complicated interference of intuitive IO flows. When I reach for a cup of water, even if I do it habitually, this is still meaningful in the sense that it nests within my overarching plan to quench my thirst. Thus, even the trivial inputs generally seek the gradient that makes them musically compatible with our present interleaved IO context.The increase of meaningfulness is not monotonic but an iterative process through which the perimeter of our intuitive orientation grows, and we begin to better distinguish the overall gradient from the steepness of local hills.-----
1 The image of us moving through time or the future arriving from a certain spatial direction will always be misleading if taken literally. Experientially, we are always centered in the here and now, and our existential state continuously metamorphoses ‘in-place’.
2 This is true even from a physics perspective. It can be claimed that no matter how small the distance, it takes some time for the light reflected from the door to travel to our eye, and as such, our perception already portrays the reverberations of past events.
3 This is easier to understand if we consider virtual reality. There, it is obvious that our intuitive zooming is toward specific input movements, while the VR headset only feeds back corresponding outputs.
4 Of course, by speaking of ‘flowlines’, we do not aim to postulate any metaphysical entities that exist ‘out there’, like some version of the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. All our attention is toward the threshold of becoming in the here and now. Any such terms are only symbols for our intuition about the way our ever-present state lawfully metamorphoses.
5 To make it easier, we may first break the movement into discrete steps. For example, we move our hand a little, then stop and concentrate on its sensations. Then we move again, but by a smaller distance. We continue to shorten the distance of the steps, as well as the time between them, until the movement becomes continuous, and imaginative input and bodily outputs follow each other tightly in phase.