Search Here ….

Tags

AI AI and Education Artificial Intelligence Asia School of Business Behavioural Economics Bounded Rationality ChatGPT ChatGPT Malaysia ChatGPT Plus Cognitive Offloading Digital Economy Malaysia Education Entrepreneurs and Startups Malaysia Entrepreneurship Future of Work Gardens Google GPTZero Human Capital IGCSE Intelligence and Technology Large Language Models Malaysia Malaysia MyDIGITAL Malls Maps72 Microsoft Midjourney MIT MIT Study ChatGPT MrMoney TV OpenAI Pavilion Plagiarism Plagiarism checkers Productivity and AI Quora Sam Altman Singapore AI Governance Software development Southeast Asia AI Technology Turnitin Udemy Writing

Consciousness x Writing Experiment

NB: This was the result of a small experiment on writing and consciousness. It is the result of my pondering aimlessly on a page and then pretty much just letting instinct take me to the end of the page. If it sounds incoherent, that’s possibly unsurprising. If it does sound coherent, maybe that’s a direction for explanation – either way, I’ll proceed.

Wake up in the morning and don’t feel like your life is purposeless.

You are on the way towards something bigger than yourself – the opening of your consciousness.

That’s the subject of today’s experiment, where you will just write whatever immediately comes to mind and you will publish it, without really thinking about what words you’ll write down, merely responding to instinct as it fires out predictions of what you should say and thus will decide to pen down in no more than a lickety-split’s notice. 


Of course, the part of yourself that’s writing this could just be doing it to feel productive and it’s not related to any sort of random higher force that’s creating this just to mess with you – it just feels that way because you seem to have gotten to a certain level where now, your consciousness is melding with the world outside it and now it’s just casually playing games on you.

To be completely clear, when we say playing games, there’s an element of control involved here; you could stop if you want.

…And you did, for a few seconds, only to continue because it seemed more interesting that way.

Anyway, there’s an element of control here that you’re kind of liminally sitting on the edge of as you type, the words appearing in front of you both by an act of willpower (obviously) but seemingly not – perhaps you could call it disavowal or something else, but what’s pretty clear and observable is this:

  1. You don’t completely know what’s going to come out from the outset in terms of structure. Did you for example even know that there was going to be a list? You did not.
  2. You don’t know what specific words are going to come to mind – those are procedurally generated in your head as a prediction pattern that comes to mind because of the prior words that you’d learned and the patterns that now pop out of your head.
  3. You are just casually writing things out, watching the things that are inspired by them, and more words are being produced.

In a way, I’m sure that this feels somehow like the dictates of a higher power that’s watching over you and animating you in a particular way in order to deliver a message to yourself that you’re seeing appear in front of you – if you knew the difference or could distinguish it, perhaps you might be able to tell yourself that you’re really just delusional and there’s nothing really waiting for you.

But again, we are here to talk about facts and it’s good to note that there is only one life for you in practice, only one consciousness, one experience of the universe where all of these words are just popping out in front of you in a way that you may have seen before but you are unable to distinguish from all the other scenarios where your creative thinking really just flowed and the things you said just began to appear.

It’s funny how you’ve tried to understand so many different areas of thought before, some in a shallow way and others in a more deep way but in all cases you’ve always found yourself in a little bit of a brain fog while you wade through a morass of things that doesn’t completely add up to everything that you read or to the things that you put into your head – but now no longer completely remember.

It is interesting to think about why that happens.

Is it because you don’t have notes?

Could this actually be better?

Could it be that this little voice in your head manifesting on the page is something leading you to a higher or better path, a voice that you’re unable to really distinguish from what is coming from you in this liminal indistinct point between agency and giving up agency that you’re entertaining as a mental experiment, half-believing and half-scorning on the edge of that agency as you ponder a little bit here, there, and everywhere?

A small reset, if you will.

All of that was basically just me allowing my consciousness to drift, to wander, for the words to just come out without my really thinking about structure or anything else – the stream of consciousness, as it were, of a mind that maybe is a little inchoate, yet somehow conditioned in some way that it is natural as breathing for words to come out of it, expressing themselves in the sentence, perhaps the paragraph, across blocks of letters made into a strange coherence just because the possessor of the efficient cause of these letters had been exposed to literary patterns so much that it’s become a natural effect of his mind that they assemble.

Perhaps something like this piece is what comes out when I just let myself breathe and then let the words out, without thinking too much about them or what their consequence really will be.

If I were you, I wouldn’t take this as an indication of mental state or anything else – though of course I cannot really control how exactly you would receive this blog post; but if nothing else, I ask you, dear reader, to consider the context of what this post is – as yet another one of my little experiments in consciousness, this time explored in a slightly different way relative to the previous times. 

On Gaslighting Myself

You might notice that I’ve been writing a lot more recently. I don’t know if this is going to continue, but if it does, I think it is the consequence of an interesting new activity that I take part in: gaslighting myself. 

Let me give you an example.

If you had talked to me maybe three months ago, a year or two ago, I might have told you that exercise, or pretty much any repeated habit, was a challenge to upkeep because it’s a matter of discipline and willpower. 

Today, it is automatic, efficient, and it feels wrong if I don’t optimize every single second and minute of it.

To be fair, I don’t blame my past self. Such an idea, or a notion of a person working hard and struggling, appeals to the emotion. I don’t just mean mine. I mean those of the vast swath of people whom I know. 

Tell a person that you work hard, or show that you work hard, and it is natural that they would respect you – because succeeding at working hard over a long period of time is a very rare activity, people, statistically speaking, are unlikely to succeed in doing that themselves. It becomes the petit objet a: the thing that, because they are unable to achieve it, they look to it as something worth admiring, imputing any number of positive characteristics upon the person who, in their estimation, has managed to succeed in accomplishing this (the thing that they themselves cannot do).

On my part, I get where that comes from. At the same time, I don’t think the logical way of attaining that standard is to go with that intuition, which I’ve observed again and again and which I’ve evinced from the way that people speak about hard work across a thousand different compliments. (Thank you for them, but I’m not going to allow them to make me complacent.)

Instead, I think the better way of getting there is, as I suggested, to gaslight yourself, to play a mental trick on yourself, and, oddly enough, to get closer to appreciating the true temporality of this world – not by working hard, but by creating small habits that make it so NOT working effectively is inconceivable and fades out of the realm of possibility both in theory and in practice.

The animating insight for this thought comes from what might seem like a somewhat unexpected source on my part: the contemplation that the world is beset by a condition of impermanence. 

Time is finite. It dissolves away into the sands, which flow out one grain after another into the hourglass. 

Given that the world is in permanent flux, everything will pass. Therefore, it does not matter what you do. Everything will happen in due course. 

All these too shall pass. 

One way of thinking about this is that it doesn’t matter what you do at the end of the day, because only one thing is certain: we will all die. 

Another way of thinking about it, though, is that a lot of things may happen naturally to produce the conditions of life, and I can treat all effort as nothing but that, which is natural and would have happened anyway. 

In practice, that is how I live my life, and there are some forms of triggers to make it as such. 

Timers, as you know – or if you didn’t know, you discover now – populate my day with small triggers that automatically take place when I am exercising, for each step, for each progression. 

I have routines for reading and exercise at regular cadences designed to ensure that when I get out of a flight of fancy (which, unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your opinion, is quite common), the structure is manageable – it is not broken up into chaos – and these routines trigger now with an increasingly slight relation to what I consciously think.

The net effect is that it feels as if things naturally pass by, sets go by, reading proceeds, a video is made, an ad completed, and exercise is done – and even if it seems that a lot of things happen unceasingly at a pace that a lot of people would not be able to handle, it feels like nothing more than a relaxing jaunt in the park for me. 

Of course, if you think it seems strange or silly for you to say this, you’re entitled completely to feel that way. It would be best for me to try to differentiate myself without anticipating any objections.

What I will say is that what I record here is just a record of my experiences and my observations of people and how they behave, and it is interesting to watch – I wonder what’s going to happen with this routine getting repeated over and over again for the long term. 

Given how effective the gaslighting has been on myself, I don’t think it’s likely that I’m going to notice all that much. There was a time when I did not look forward to the future, or I faced it with fear, trepidation, and the unknowing sense of dread that comes along with every fearful and forward-looking contemplation. It seems that that era has passed. 

There are still many things that I do not know, but I look forward to seeing what the future holds, in line with that old Taoist injunction by Lao Tzu, which asserts that nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished – a little aphorism so captivating that I guess some of you know that it is my WhatsApp status message. 

Insufficient but Non-Redundant Unnecessary but Sufficient

One of the biggest boons that has ever come to me is the realization that, in all too many cases, laziness is not the problem for me. Clarity is.

I don’t want to generalize this to all of humanity on the drop of the hat but it feels to me that that is likely the case. 

It is hard not to think so when it is obvious that people have ambitions inside them and how obviously a part of them was pushing them to accomplish the things that their ambition dictated. The desire existed within them, a push of the soul, if you will, to say that they never really wanted to accomplish the things that they aspired for is, I suppose, to negate the driving force of that initial will.

Implementation is a much more difficult thing than mere wishing and most people never cross that boundary in a true or Sufficient way, and of course this can happen in the way that so many other failures happen for a million different possible reasons:

– Diversion because of life events

– Actual flagging in willpower

– Lack of a system

– Deviation from one’s word

– So many other things

Unfortunately, the world tends to collapse all these things into laziness. If only a person had tried harder, then they would succeed. To be fair, such a mentality is entirely psychologically coherent and understandable. You were unable to succeed. The method did not avail itself. You could have done a whole list of things in order to make sure that you would actually accomplish your goal.

The thing about these could-haves is that they lie in a future that was not realized, and that seems subject to a possibility only if. Also, if you weren’t able to accomplish your goal through a series of linear steps, one after another, I suppose it is normal to then blame yourself, even as you never reach the outer edge of what is really necessary. 

I suppose one of the problems here is that when we talk about success, we have a tendency to imagine causation in an incredibly linear way. You worked hard, therefore you succeeded. You did not succeed, therefore you did not work hard enough. It is a very clean story and perhaps that is part of why it is so attractive. Unfortunately, I don’t think that the world has any particular obligation to make itself quite so clean for us.

Consider hard work for a moment. Obviously, hard work matters. It would be absurd for me to suggest otherwise. But it is equally obvious that hard work by itself cannot be sufficient for success. You can work extraordinarily hard at something that does not work. You can spend years implementing a terrible plan. You can possess tremendous discipline while moving in completely the wrong direction. You can even do almost everything correctly and discover that some circumstance outside your control has decided that none of it is going to work anyway.

Planning seems to suffer from precisely the same problem. A perfect plan that is never implemented accomplishes nothing. Implementation without a plan can result in a great deal of movement without a great deal of progress. Clarity without action is useless. Action without clarity may simply allow you to become extremely efficient at accomplishing something that you never actually wanted to accomplish in the first place.

So perhaps the mistake is to imagine that any one of these things is the thing.

This was what led me back to something that the philosopher J. L. Mackie called an INUS condition, which is one of those philosophical terms that sounds considerably more complicated than the idea that it is trying to express. Mackie describes a cause as an Insufficient but Non-redundant part of an Unnecessary but Sufficient condition.

That is quite a mouthful, but the underlying idea is remarkably useful.

Suppose that success requires, in one particular case, hard work, planning, competence, feedback, persistence, and the right opportunity. Hard work by itself is not enough. Planning by itself is not enough. Persistence by itself is certainly not enough. Yet remove one of these things from this particular combination and perhaps the whole thing falls apart.

At the same time, this particular combination need not be the only possible route to success. Somebody else could arrive at exactly the same destination with more talent and less planning, more capital and less time, better connections and less effort, or through some combination of circumstances that was never available to you in the first place.

This, I think, is where the idea becomes extremely important.

Hard work can be genuinely causal without being sufficient. Planning can be genuinely causal without being sufficient. Clarity can matter enormously without being sufficient. All of them can be indispensable parts of one route while still not being indispensable to every possible route.

And once you see success in that way, the statement that you simply “didn’t try hard enough” begins to look rather strange.

Perhaps you didn’t. That certainly happens.

But perhaps effort was never the missing condition at all.

As I move forward with the entire constellation of different things that I’m learning at the moment and the goals that I’m trying to compress and distill my time for, I suppose I’m hit up for a few possible causal configurations. It is not always certain to me which new ones will take shape, but what is clear is that a lot of this is coming to me intuitively, even as the structure materializes with increasing clarity each day.