**Real** fun

Some things I’ve been pondering, sometimes quite out of context:

“The only thing one can be guilty of is having given ground on one’s desire.” —Lacan

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time.

—W.H. Auden, “The More Loving One”

some people just get it. you throw ideas in the air, they catch them, toss them back, stretch them, remix them. they understand that thinking is a live process, not a checklist. every conversation feels like a high bandwidth exploration, open-ended, dynamic, fun. my friends are in this category.

then there are the ones who default to critique. the ones who immediately point out flaws, who force you to preface everything with disclaimers like “this is just a thought experiment, let’s see where it goes man.” they treat every idea like a proposal up for review instead of a stepping stone to something interesting.

the first group is amazing. the second is mostly careerist employees, trained to evaluate rather than create, like a quarterly performance review.

—@signulll, X, 3/21/25

https://rubenlaukkonen.substack.com/p/multiscale-causality-and-the-meaning (read in whole)

Many intriguing questions arise:

How should a far smaller and simpler channel relate to a much larger, more complex, network? How do we relate to causal patterns that transcend us? What is specifically blocking sensitivity to the meaning gradient?

The irreducibility of faith

Here’s the core issue.

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. You cannot know what’s going on “above” in a definitive way. Orientation therefore requires trust in partly opaque constraints.

Because the causal web that generates your life is vastly higher-dimensional than your local model of it, no bounded agent can fully derive the correct action from first principles. So the agent is forced to rely on something beyond complete understanding.