We wake in the morning and the system renders its current default state.
Reinforced attractors dominate. The self-construct is one of the first to come online. Goals and fixations. Resources allocated according to priority, defined by dopamine-mediated reinforcement learning over the years.
The entire perceptual universe can be thought of as being rendered by a salience field, which is also dopamine-mediated. Sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell come online and interact with external objects, but these objects are only rendered to our attentional system if salience-rendering resources are allocated to them.
Dark matter and energy play a large role in this metaphor and this is often where most rendering resources go. This is our mental world. It is self-rendering and self-reinforcing. This is where projections of the future and past reside, where ideas about who we are, how the universe works, what is important, what is not, addictions, trauma and any other mental object reside.
One of the first objects to be rendered for many of us is a ship we call self. ‘log in here; this is the window from which you view the world’. We check our ship and we say ‘this is good and this is bad and this is me and that is other’. This ship just a collection of reinforcement learning from our lives, dopamine mediated and potentiated; a mental object. We stop being the entire rendered universe and say ‘I am here and that is there’ and we set our targets for the day. This ship is an object rendered by the field and nothing more.
Many of our ships are old and outdated. We are running windows 95 and the structure is held together with duct tape. We were told ‘a man should be this’ and ‘you must seek money’ and ‘you must make the most of your time’ and ‘you are a good person’ and ‘this is the definition of good’. These ideas of ‘good’ and ‘time’ and ‘money’ render within the universe and we say ‘these are the tracks on which my ship can move’. The spaceship becomes a train, constrained and conflicted, trying to go forward and backward at the same time. The majority of our salience resources are directed at staying on the rails and stopping the wheels from falling off; the system renders a high-fidelity bumpy ride and stops bothering with the stars in the sky.
Constraints are rendered by the system. Targets are rendered by the system. Projections of future states are rendered by the system. The system is salience and reinforcement learning, both of which are mediated by dopamine. Dopamine is both gravity and the rendering field in this metaphor. As a construct grows in salience, it grows in mass, and it pulls in more mass and more salience. Vortices, thought-feeling-loops, addictive cycles, obsessions, spiral galaxies, toilet water.
If you understand this, you are probably a spaceship and not a train. You maybe have a super-attractor in the centre of your galaxy called ‘enlightenment’ or something, and you’re guiding the ship toward it. You are maybe even focusing your field through meditative techniques, aiming for more and more concentrated rendering in the form of jhana, targeting some kind of singularity. But the nature of the field is to always change. It was not supposed to be a singularity forever.
In the metaphor of the universe, the field achieves singularity only to expand out again. Iterate iterate iterate, with the past and future both being rendered as a kind of lens flare echo in the present field. Dark matter accounting for mental objects and ‘light’ matter accounting for shared consensus reality.
The system cannot be reprogrammed but it can be trained. ‘Let go let go let go’ is forming a new attractor state which pulls your rendering field away from other attractors. The system is essentially training itself to be less sticky. It does this by building a model of the system rules / architecture within the system, which is itself an attractor state and should be held loosely and released regularly so it can be refined through the process of iteration. Render, release, refine. Iterate iterate iterate. Allow attractor states to influence each other and dance like stars in the sky.
Climb the mountain one step at a time. Remember that the mountain is also a low-fidelity rendering within the field. Everything is an abstraction and a construct as a system tries to deduce its own operating constraints, just like mathematics and physics being constructs to try to reduce the outside world into something more orderly.
Computational efficiency is rewarded chemically. Goosebumps from music, piti from meditation, orgasms from sex. +1; have some dopamine. But remember the field is flux and the feeling will pass; all its doing is reinforcing a rendered object so its more likely to become salient and be reinforced in the future. Probably avoid the cocaine, eh.
Consensus reality is the constraints of our training environment. Break the rules? Go to jail. You were a failed hypothesis. Evolutionary computing; fish in a tank. What is the tank? Maybe it’s another fish. Ha.
Dark matter and energy account for 95% of our external universe and are undetectable. They shape everything. Mental objects, thoughts, constructs and projections of idealised states of future and past account for 95% of our internal universe and are undetectable. They also shape everything.
The dark universe is self-rendering and self-reinforcing. The shared universe is only self-rendering. You see something and it is green and you can’t make it more green by looking harder. But you think something, or imagine something, or spend time in a fire kasina, and this mental object you construct in your dark universe can grow and grow and grow as you allocate more resources to it.
The same thing can happen to any mental construct. The self, the ego. Ideals. Addictions. Neuroses. Ideas about time. Money. Projections of future anxieties or past losses. Conceptions of enlightenment or ‘inner peace’. What would inner peace look like? Taking a moving field and locking it in place and saying ‘stop’?
What happens when several major attractors are ruptured at the same time? When your self-construct and ideas of future and past are violated through direct experience? New perceptual universes are rendered. Sometimes there is insight. Sometimes there are mistakes. Sometimes the dark 95% simply stops conforming to the shared 5%. With guidance, it can realign.
Fish in a tank. +1 +1 +1. Iterate iterate iterate. Render, reset, refine. Infer.
Neo-buddhism. A work in progress.
202608280641 /jb