harry a

Differences enhance attraction, but they don’t diminish ultimate compatibility. So, if you have dated a good many people but haven’t felt much of a spark with anybody, the answer might be to stop looking for your cultural twin: Being alike is not hot . Instead, try looking for someone who excites you because their background, upbringing, and... See more

Conscious faith is reason: Reason tells you you’re bounded. Reason tells you you’re embedded. Reason tells you you cannot compute the whole. And therefore reason implies faith: the calibrated openness to the whole. The question is never whether you will live by faith. The question is whether you will do it unconsciously (scattered, defensive,... See more

The larger system’s complexity exceeds your modeling capacity. Therefore, you cannot—in principle, not just in practice—represent the whole of which you are a part.

Gradients allow local navigation without global knowledge. A bacterium does not need a map of its environment to survive; it follows chemical gradients. A neuron does not need a theory of the brain; it entrains to local fields. Likewise, a human agent embedded in systems vastly more complex cannot compute the optimal life path.

Specifically, meaning... See more

When action increases alignment with higher-order constraints, meaning intensifies. When action decreases alignment, meaning flattens.

1. The meaning crisis is, at root, a breakdown in cross-scale coupling—i.e., being out of synchrony with higher scales of causality beyond the isolated individual.


2. Higher scales cannot be compressed into the local mind because the effective complexity of the larger system exceeds the modelling capacity of the smaller agent.


3. Therefore, the only

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Laukkonen calls this a “metacognitive gradient,” a felt slope that guides action when we can't possibly compute the optimal path ourselves. Which we can't, because the effective complexity of reality vastly exceeds our modeling capacity.

If you can't model the whole, you can't derive the right action from first principles. You're forced to rely on... See more

Everything in nature is embedded. Cells are embedded in organs, organs in organisms, organisms in ecosystems. At every level, the part depends on the whole for its existence and function, and receives signals from that whole about how to behave. A neuron doesn't know where to fire without the context of the brain around it. A cell doesn't know... See more