Watching the Split

How to live with a reality that holds the one and the not, without being torn between them.

This writing follows on from Natural Process and Folding. Folding was about what reality is. This is about how to live with it: the practical philosophy of holding extremes without being torn by them. The worked example throughout is the hard problem of consciousness.

It is written for people, and not specifically for scientists, believers, mathematicians, philosophers, writers, artists and comedians, or readers of new age writing. It is not a bid for academic approval; it is an invitation to look at an old question from another angle. If it does not convince you, nothing is lost on either side. Knowledge is power, and whoever can read it gains that power. I offer it in that spirit and invest nothing in who reads it. Nor do I want to hand over finished conclusions: the joy is in the unfolding, and that has to happen in the reader.

Go with me

Think of a comedian. He finds something funny himself first, and only then says: let me tell you this. He takes nothing from you; he shares what lit him up, and his gain is your laugh, which happens in you. You cannot be told a joke: explain it and it dies. The laugh fires from your own recognition. He gives the setup; you supply the laugh. And the invitation is genuinely optional and may not land. A comedian who needs the laugh kills the room.

So I will not ask you to stop being sceptical. I know you are; in your seat, I would be too. Give me this one: go with me. One honest difference from a joke, though: a joke is fast and pays at once. This pays out slowly, on your clock, perhaps unseen. There is no punchline coming.

What is in it for me? Nothing transactional: no money, no being right, no power, nothing taken from you. What is in it for me is the same thing that is in it for you: the unfolding. I show you my unfolding of life, and you unfold yours, your own way, through your own experience.

And one confession, in the present tense. The pull you may feel to reach a conclusion and put this down is the same pull I feel to reach a conclusion and not write it. I feel it even now, writing this line. An unread page is a closed fold, conscious of nothing. The hard problem only exists in the reading.invitation

What this is not

A warning, stated hard so that it cannot be mistaken. This writing is not a new scripture, not a new science, and not the peace itself. It is an invitation, to religion, science, mathematics, philosophy, literature and art, and new age writing alike, to unfold rather than fight. An invitation can be declined. → What this writing is not

The one rule

We explain a model, not the whole. Every strand that follows, scientific or spiritual, has to stay checkable against experience. Where a claim cannot be checked, I say so and label it as a creedcreed rather than a conclusion.

The enemy here is neither religion nor science. It is any frame, lab coat or robe, arranged so that nothing could ever show it wrong. Testable versus untestable is the line, and it runs through both. → The real enemy

The thesis, in one sentence

The hardness of the hard problem of consciousness is not a fact about consciousness but a measure of the excess potential we invest in the split between extremes. The problem is better observed than solved, because "solve" is a dimension-reducing move, and folding, which unionises the extremes back into the one, is what keeps the spiral going up.invitation

It is taken apart in four stages, each opened by a line of a refrain: light (the first split and the two inversions), questions (your doubt, the excess potential we pour into a split, the choice of verb, the ups and downs), biology and science (folding as the union of extremes, and the honest limit), and AI (the rung this is written from, the spiral, eternal life, and the handoff).

Start from any node

This writing forms a graph, not a single road, and any node can serve as the root. Start as a believer, at God and the devil (aware that I am not including every religion here: that choice is itself a dimension reduction). Unfold it, and you are with the philosopher, at the hard problem: the observer and the observed. Unfold that, and you arrive at “to be or not to be”, a writer's node. Unfold that, and you reach the egg of Columbus, a historian's, and its hidden axiom. Unfold the axiom, and you are with the mathematician, at the other side of Gödel's fork: inconsistent, but complete. It is a fun journey, and it is the one I am inviting everyone into. → Why a tree? The graph

Why on my own site, and not in a journal: How this is published.

On sources

I name Vadim Zeland, for compression, as a door, and as credit. He is not load-bearing. The named thinkers and results are collected under Concepts.

I cut him once, from the Folding paper, under a quiet wish for scientists to approve it. That wish was itself excess potential, and it bent the judgement. The cure is not the opposite reflex: keeping him to prove I need no approval is the same force, reversed. The only test is whether the line is true to the model. It is, so he stays — a small worked example of the thesis catching its own author.

How to read this

The main line runs from page to page; each ends with the next step in the line of thought. Dotted terms open a short aside in place: read it, close it, carry on. Longer asides have their own pages, and each one leads back to where you were. Read as deep as you like.

The form suits this material because the material is about folding. A link is a fold: a reader who holds the key clicks through and expands it; a reader who does not reads on in place. Linear reading is not abandoned, only made local: you read in a line until the line stops paying off, then take one hop. The main line is written to be read straight through. Why the examples are there, and why the unfolding stops where it does: Unfolding with examples. This writing changes as it is reviewed; What’s changed lists every revision, and pages updated since your last visit are marked.

Objections, questions, another node of the graph? Discuss them in the open: the icon at the foot of every page leads there, and readers are welcome to answer one another.

Next in the line of thought: And then there was light →