it's thrilling to find threads like this!
@visakanv is circling a mystery that I believe is the ᴜɴʟᴏᴄᴋ to humanity's future.
twitter.com/visakanv/status/1652548739876409344?s=20
I wonder if or to what extent @slatestarcodex puzzled over this riddle, this phrase... "indescribable mental motion."
i'm assuming the phrase was lifted directly from the patient who experienced the transformative healing from Intractable psychological trauma.
but we can tell that the phrase is a revelation for @visakanv, who goes on to connect the phenomenon ("indescribable mental motion") w/ human creativity.
what happens when we feel "blocked", stagnant? and what accounts for breakthroughs?
why do we frequently "know more than we can say"?
what do geniuses have access to that others do not?
What does Minsky's "mental management" look and feel like as a concrete 𝙚𝙭𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚?
twitter.com/visakanv/status/1601997144743108608?s=20
strange as it may sound: the "indescribable mental motion" can illuminate the central challenge of our future, commonly indicated in these terms -
𝘤𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦
𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦
𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘹𝘪𝘵𝘺
for those in web3/crypto circles, these are common refrains!
still, we have yet to see meaningful discussions in the space around where the real leverage lies: developing higher spiritual-mental (cognitive) capacities.
here are perhaps subtle signs of a shift...?
On the @MakerDAO forum, @RuneKek's recent amendments to the Atlas Immutable Alignment Artifact (prev. "Constitution") have quite evocative language.
twitter.com/MakerDAO/status/1646172897990565888?s=20
See explicit contrast btwn -
technical incentives vs 𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘢𝘭 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯;
letter of the rule vs 𝘴𝘱𝘪𝘳𝘪𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘶𝘭𝘦;
intelligent vs 𝘴𝘱𝘪𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴.
The Maker Atlas aims to "build as much resilience as possible" into governance. But this resilience doesn't derive, primarily, from a material construct - whether the Atlas, or underlying blockchain tech, or the tokenomics.
Resilience emerges from an ecology of distributed epistemic agents whose internal mental motions are coherent with that of the DAO's "big picture" purpose.
Q1: but what the heck are these "mental motions"?
Q2: and how can the "big picture" purpose be grokked in all its nuance & complexity, when just the most recent amendments to the Atlas are ~ 40k words long?
both questions lead us to hints by thinkers like @worrydream & @michael_nielsen.
Bret Victor argues the form of current knowledge work, computer interfaces, media, etc, is an accident of history that "inhumanely" shackles us to one narrow dimension of our cognitive capacity ...
Victor advocates for new, "humane representations of thought" that will allow us to develop latent cognitive capacities currently atrophying from disuse.
twitter.com/SpaceXponential/status/1352468375776190465?s=20
Despite the reams & reams of words composing its governance documentation, Maker's Atlas has to acknowledge the limits of dialectical rule-making.
Similarly, the next evolutionary breakthrough will come from liberating our thinking from language.
For the most part, our thinking today is bound to words, operating at the level of abstract, fixed notions.
twitter.com/SpaceXponential/status/1350208724107980806?s=20
(p.s. This is a major reason why we typically recall / absorb such a shockingly meager amount of actionable knowledge from reading. We believe we're actively 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 when we read, but in fact, we are 'sleep-walking' through words-as-remembered-notions.)
twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/1140684228444610561?s=20
To become equal to the task of epistemic agency in all its complexity today, thinking must shift 𝙪𝙥𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢 of words, so that we experience the vitality of direct, unmediated, intuitive understanding...
These are the "mental motions".
Because they are the primal 𝘨𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘵 that precede the crystallization of words, they have profound potential and implications for healing, creativity and collaboration.
(if you've been exploring or working along these lines, i'd love to connect. DMs are open.)