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540 points drankl | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.224s | source
1. positron26 ◴[] No.44485834[source]
Reminds me of the "How did you take that picture?" Reddit meme. Who is the observer when we conceptualize of ourselves as deconstructed beings? Occasional self-awareness and reflection can be insightful, but when will you get back into the cockpit and fly the plane?

90's culture had so much more emphasis on being legitimate (and its many self-defeating imitations). Being legitimate is something that cannot be attempted. Only self-evidence can ever be cool. Only existing as the actualized output and never its abstracted model inputs can be genuine. Through that lens, one's own dignity demands not deconstructing. You should observe and react to what you learn, but whatever fractures are incurred must come back together and be owned. Otherwise you are pretending not to be the person in the cockpit, not the person flying the plane. It's a lack of responsibility. You will not do or do not. You will "try" because you are not in control. You will never be cool.

The engineer wants to isolate pieces of the system. Play the game again to study the situation, learn the pattern, and overcome the error. This is where it applies that no man crosses the same river twice. When people say, "life has no reset button" it does not simply mean that there are consequences but also that that every moment always remains, flowing incessantly, regardless of how it is scrutinized and analyzed to fit into a maze of dots and figures. We cannot own things by going backward in time to try again. Winning the game after many iterations is never cool. The losses must be owned or the pilot is merely creating a lie that they themselves understand while holding a result out to others as evidence of their coolness. It is trying too hard. It is illegitimacy, and its self-knowledge will seek to pull back the curtains on itself so that the pilot will not betray the plane.

Living intentionally constructed is a thought that must itself be forgotten. The idea is a map. Supposed externalized awareness of the being who rides in the skull cannot exist. It is a construction, and once the construction is used, it must be discarded as a map that was used to achieve some perspective. We can remember things far away. We can catalog and connect patterns over time, but the ALU cannot look at itself as lines in memory. The ALU lacks any self-description from which to feign deconstructed awareness beyond control bits that are necessarily less information than the registers, program, and data under computation. It all must vanish to a fixed-point un-calculation.

It's an aesthetic with some jagged edges. You'll always move forward based on what you believe because there can be nothing else, and if you are wrong, you will be wrong. You must own it. There are no outs besides simply admitting mistakes. But what is the opposite of dissociated? Is it worth it to live in your skin? Is it worth it to forget the distances that do not exist between yourself and the controls?