michael-dean-k/

Given I’m slightly sleep deprived these days—less so from a baby that wakes up too often (she often sleeps through the night); more so from waking up very early to get in a work shift before my wife leaves for work—I often fall asleep reading.

Mortimer Adler said if you fall asleep reading, you should stop. If you’re drowsy, you aren’t sharp enough to read analytically. He’s probably right. I notice a gradient in how active I am with my reading: sometimes I’m punching mini-essays into my Kindle for each highlight; other times I highlight and move on.

Nonetheless, I have noticed some interesting recurring phenomenon as I fall asleep reading, which I’ll call “reading malfunctions.”

The first malfunction is when, as I drift off, I notice the text on the page get slightly blurry, and find myself reading text that actually isn’t there. It’s like a hypnopompic literary hallucination. I’ll read a string of words, wake up, and then look for that string of words to continue, but it’s nowhere in the paragraph, nowhere on the page. It must be something like the subconscious filling in detail to the larger gestalt of the page.

The second malfunction is when my eyes actually close, yet there’s still the inertia of gliding across strings of prose, but at this point I’m seeing an image or idea instead of text, and I’ll notice that it’s often not even directly related to the text, just some association that I can’ quite connect.

The third malfunction, and maybe my favorite, is when I doze off and process only the geometry of the spaces between the text. I stop seeing letters or words, but the void between words, and the patterns that happen to occur from that particular combination of words. Sometimes they look like clouds, or mountains, or aztec symbols; it’s the similar pareidolia effect from cloud gazing. (I imagine AI might get to a point where it can simultaneously compose “void art” that matches the meaning of a paragraph).

Screens are unfairly tainted. I'd love to write a post about how screens are underrated, a glorious technology that would be marveled at by basically any other generation in history. Screens are the scapegoat because they are the point-of-contact, the portal through which bad or selfish actors bend your pixels to their whims. I know people lament over "blue light" and the physical strain from staring at something for many hours, and of course that is real at excessive doses, but might that then be an software or psychology issue?

The main reason I started writing this was to riff on screen-time with kids. There is a revealing nuance in the advice, "no screen time for kids below 2 years old, but FaceTime with relatives is fine." Why is that? It's not the screen, but the nature of what's on them. FaceTime is fine because there is a fixed and unchanging frame which features a fixed and unchanging person moving within. There is stability and coherence. We take this for granted, but infants haven't modeled this yet! They might not even have object permanence (ie: if they disappear from the frame, are they gone forever?). So by this logic, any piece of media with a stable frame is potentially infant safe; beyond FaceTime that includes single-shot lectures, text editors, etc. Obviously an infant will not be in gDocs, but the point is, if they see you using a static interface, there is little harm, it's simply another object in their environment.

By contrast, cartoons and commercials are the real issue. To explain this to my mother-in-law, I counted out loud the camera cuts in an ad, and it's less than once per second. There is a whole psychology on why they do this, which I can guess, but should probably look into. TLDR you are being addled. But when an infant sees this, I imagine the frame resets are alluring, but disorienting. If the frame changes every second, they're locked trying to make sense of this self-evolving landscape, an experience novel and atypical from every other thing they've seen. It has no continuity.

By this logic, it also explains why feeds are worse than personal websites. You just stream past 100 things per second and have no steady frame. Even though my site is feedish now, it's all from a single person, so at least that's a constant. I'd feel okay with my daughter at 5-years old reading personal websites and having her own, but I wouldn't want her to be using algorithmic social media feeds even at age 15.

Our last meal as pre-child adults was at Panera—something quick and light on the way to the hospital (plus she craved it)—and as we ordered our “pick twos” on a digital menu, I was struck by the beauty of a jazzy Christmas song that would have otherwise been extremely ordinary. It was “White Christmas” by Booker T and the M.G.s. My guess is that the stakes of an extraordinary moment—in this case, one of anticipation—can totally rewire musical taste (or preference in anything, really). Works that we attribute meaning to sometimes have nothing to do with objective qualities of the art, but in the circumstance in which you experience it. 

On the experience of looking into late-pregnancy sonograms: it’s a lot like looking into clouds. Apophenia is in full effect. That looks like a face! Oh wait, that looks like 3 faces. What is that? There are multiple shapes, some big, some small, some cute, some aliens. In trying to idenify the boundaries of my daughtr just now, I saw Elmo, several monsters, and worms. Sometimes it just devolves into B&W abstract collages, something you might see in MoMA (I’d be surprised if a sonagram art exhibit doesn’t exist). Throughout all this looking, a very technical nurse is performing a technical feat: using one hand to place the sound wave, and another hand to operate a cockpit-looking interface, leaving acronyms like RUQ and RLQ to measure blood flow. She hesitates when you ask her if you can take pictures, because this is not a gush-sesison, but an important test for amniotic fluid, but she let’s you anyway because she is fluent enough to be confidently undistracted as you film the whole process … And then suddenly, as soon as your baby appears in crystalline focus, with her tiny skull, and arms, and legs, she seems to explode, and it takes you a second to realize that it’s just the nurse shifting to a different angle.

10:12 AM: Wow. Through a visual meditation in the park, I experienced a full erasure of perspective, and my perception was only this massive flat 2D panel of color, patterns, and light (abstracted from the 3D perspective of the park). Will write more on this later.

11:18 AM: After I drop my wife off at the train, I take a half-mile walk in the nearby park. This was day 3, and also, my third attempt to try to naturally hallucinate (see older logs). Day 1 was something like a mystical experience; Day 2 was a dud—possibly because I tried a different spot; and so Day 3 I’ve returned to the original location. An open question: can you do some [ perceptual-hacks / visual-meditations / (not sure what to call this) ] in any location, or is it that certain vantage points have a perception that can mess with your consciousness if you look at it right?

To summarize in one sentence, two days ago I found myself in “flat land,” meaning that while staring into a park, for about five minutes, my entire perspective collapse into a flat, complex, oscillating 2D texture. 

Today, from the same spot, I only got halfway there, but far enough to form a better thesis: the location matters, and there’s a particular way of looking. First, I need to step off the path and into the grass, because otherwise the path will be in my peripherals and it will be harder to unlatch from my default frame (I really need to work on my vocabulary around this). Anyways, I’d describe what I was doing with my eyes as a kind of “parallel processing”: I’d fixate my gaze at a point in the background, while simultaneously trying to expand my peripherals, horizontally and vertically. 

It takes several attempts, with subtle approaches on how to focus, refocus, and break focus. In the process there are some neat effects, such as changes in color and brightness, as well as wave-like oscillations (that I imagine are normal on a mushroom trip). But the particular effect of interest has something to do with contrast.

Maybe my working theory is this: by adjusting the contrast to extreme degrees, it actually alters your depth perception. For example, from this vantage point, with a normal gaze, you’d see a bunch of trees cascading from foreground to background. But when I tap into some focusing drill that seems to adjust contrast, if I follow it down, it’s almost like the leaves and their patterns (with shadow & light), come into such focus, that the trees (the main “object” creating depth perception) seem to disappear.

And this is I think the “secret” of this location. The foreground, the field, is full of leaves, but also, the background has trees still in the canopy. So basically, by adjusting the contrast, and creating a new gestalt that’s optimizing for leaf patterns, it can become so strong and overpowering, that the trees diminish in their hierarchy, until they practically evaporate, overpowered by pattern. The fact that this pattern was both in my foreground and background, paired with the trees losing all hierarchy, might explain why it felt like I was suspended in a 2D plane.

A few months ago I sketched out a model of consciousness, and I think there are scales of free will that map to it. The model included:

• T1) an agent’s real-time perception of an arena (at ### frames per second);
• T2) their phenomenological degrees of freedom (their different options of cognition in any scenario, whether it be abstraction, projection, remembering, solving, ignoring, acting, etc.), and then;
• T3) a feedback loop, where their decision is logged to memory, affecting how they'll engage with the arena in the future.

"Degrees of freedom" (T2) is about your free will in any given moment. Can you control how you react to situations? This is the most basic level, the thing any human can prove to have. Then, the "feedback loop" (T3) is about understanding your feedback loop over longer time horizons, designing your psychological scripts so that you have more affordances in the future. This is much harder. This taps into transcendentalism, cybernetics, self-development, all revolving around being able to control your own evolution. Then the hardest level of free well is being able to manipulate your arena (T1) according to your preferences. This is less about using force to get what you want, but more so bending the world towards your intentions. This reminds me of Dune 2, or the Rick and Morty episode, where someone has mystical foresight to say and do the exact things to unlock the world around them. This last mode is ethically ambiguous, because the question arises of what manipulation is; does your gain have to be at the peril of others, or can there be win-win outcomes?

What's interesting is how every tier comes back to free will, and so maybe the simplest answer of the fuzziest phenomenological concept (consciousness) is the fuzzy philosophical concept (free will). Consciousness is freedom. I don't think this is an original claim, but it certainly isn't a common one.

As you move from T2>T3>T1, you upshift a dimension. T2 is about free will within a particular moment; T3 is about free will across time; T1 is about leveraging free will into a shared space.

Over Utah I look down from my plane window and see a frozen red sea, of a pink-purple hue, not blood, but still, the wow hues of death … a red sheet of ice? I pinched my lip; feels real.

I think back to my sequence of day’s events (to see if I am in a dream and could be become lucid; this is how odd a bright red sea is to me), yet it all connects: hiking through a bayside trash park with CansaFis > talking to Will in Vesuvio > seeing Dan Shipper on my plane … it is … distinct … but it all connects, despite the real-life dream logic. (Not implying I think I’m in a dream—recently an Alaska Airlines pilot had an LSD-hangover, and thought he was trapped in a dream he could only escape by crashing the plane—I'm just trying to convey the oddness of this one thought spurred from a red ice sheet — and when I look down now it’s all normal, just trees and hills.)

I can’t remember the last time I studied a plane wing, but I’m doing it now. It started because it’s turning dusk and everything is dull except the sun beaming on one triangular solid, now gold, protruding towards the back of the right wing (I have poor plane vocab). It felt unreal, which was a frame-burst that got me remembering oh yes, this is a wing, and a wing is not just an ignorable plane part that blocks the midwest scenery, it is a product of centuries of engineering, an invention so stable and durable that I can sit and log ten of thousands of feet in the sky without concern.

How to explain awe? How can I even know the emotional peaks and ebbs that anyone else experiences, other than relative to my own?

I first had and heard about Maslow’s peak experiences when I was in my freshman year of college. The first time is a shock, but an “actualized” person then rounds this out into their default mode of consciousness. This means they don’t even notice it. Is awe a deviation from the baseline, or an absolute state? Is an idiot's accidental fall into a minute of enlightenment more awe-some than the monk who always lives there?

Maybe there is wisdom in calmness. Or maybe that's boring. Maybe stability and indifference is a kind of aloofness, a blindness to the edges of experience.

This all ties into the question of being unable to know if I’m an emotional person or not. I could either be the least or most emotional person ever. I think being expressive (emotive) and being emotional are entirely different things. Maybe the thing that’s normal to me is extraordinary to another; if they saw the way I see they’d weep from the aeshetic/emotional engine I’ve crafted over the years of my life. And maybe the inverse. Maybe I have the shell that needs to be cracked. Or maybe any shift from one head to another—if head shifting were a literal thing—would produce awe just from the state change, with no real sense of hierarchy on "better" states of consciousness.

1. I might have green-coat syndrome: I get an anxiety around a low-dose placebo weed gummy (possibly stemming from weed prohibition?). This comes from old fear mongering (DARE/ “all drugs will kill you”), and also bad memories of weed overdoses (10-100x recommended dosage) that only occurred because weed was illegal and the only edible sources were from homemade unmeasured brownies. (Also, a remarkable argument for weed legalization is that a 100x overdose will not send you to the hospital, compared to alcohol, where 4x a reasonable dose could kill you).
2. 1 mg at 8:05. Nerves and excitement. Suddenly I feel a +1 day post-workout burn. Every little thing is being interpreted: my chest, neck, and stomach. 8:10, my tongue feels funny and I research terpenes using ChatGPT. Maybe I’m just over sensitive because I’ve had a cereal day and now I’m suddenly attuned to my body.
3. Did I finally fix my posture? I’m usually too focused to notice, but now I’m over-sensitive to slight discomfort.
4. Fear is an emergent design property that can become transparent when you embody the transience of space-time relativity. I realized this in Tudor Town (there are some walking distance tudors). It reminded me of my architecture school building, and somehow the realization that I’m the same being from 15 years ago reduced my somatic anxiety; it’s like I realized that I’m not immersed in fear, but fear is an abstract output from misaligned inputs. It’s all I/O. I have the agency to redesign my system, starting in this very moment.