Ability and Desire as Space and Time

theory
#1

I’ve been rereading a bunch of old articles recently and came across this one again.
http://storymind.com/mental_relativity/brain_1.htm
Toward the end, there’s a description of Ability and Desire. Seeing them as equivalent to Space and Time was difficult and strange, but I was eventually able to find a way to accept it. But after reading this article, I was like oh, yeah, that should actually be pretty easy to do.

Basically, it describes Ability at the thoton (internal equivalent to a photon) level as being the amount of an observation one has observed or considered before, as how familiar one is with an observation. Just as an example, lets call the entirety of The Shawshank Redemption a single observation. If you can quote the entire movie word for word, you are familiar with the entire space of that observation. The whole thing. But if you tried to watch it once and turned it off because the scene where the new fish gets beaten to death was just too much, then your ability regarding TSR would be the space of about 10-15 minutes of a 2 hour movie. So just as you might have the ability to run only one mile(space) of a marathon, you’d have the ability to be familiar with about 8% of the space that makes up TSR.

Desire, then, is described as something like the probability that a thoton will fire, or the likelihood that one will think about something. As a buildup of knowledge decays, a thoton can spontaneously fire. This is thought. As a thotons instability grows from repeated observations, it becomes more likely to fire and will even sometimes fire without stimulation. The probability of firing, the article says, is what is meant by desire. The probability of firing, like time, is an ever growing number…well, ever growing until the thoton fires, at which point I assume the number resets. Because probability is a growing number (except for that reset) it’s like the amount of time until one thinks of something.

Another way to put it would be that as time is the evolution of space, desire is the evolution (growing probability of thinking about something) of ability.

Had to type fast and no time for proofreading, but hopefully that makes sense more than it muddies the waters.

1 Like
#2

To make sense of Ability as Space and Desire as Time, I’ve always thought of them like this:

  • If you think of something like simple particles, or even planets, space is what gives them the ability to move – degrees of freedom. The more spatial dimensions there are to move in, the more Ability they have.
    • Or think about a fly stuck in a tiny space no bigger than it – no ability to move. Versus a narrow pipe – it can move in one dimension. Trapped between a screen and a window, it can fly around but still limited. In a 3-dimensional room or even better, outside, it has a lot more space and therefore Ability to move.
  • Desire makes no sense without Time; it sort of follows from Time. To have desire (the motivation toward something better), there must exist the concept of things being different in the future, and things being different than they were in the past.
3 Likes
#3

So I used to think of ones ability to run or do things, and it’s kind of like the fly. But how do knowledge and thought play out in the ability to run? I guess one can observe and think about running to get better form, and I can accept something like that, but it always seemed kind of weird. And how do knowledge and thought play out in the flies ability or inability to fly?

I think I read a dramaticapedia article one time about ability being like ones knowledge of the rules of a game when compared to the rules one doesn’t know or something. And that kind of worked, but was still a bit strange. But I like this idea of an observation being like a structure, like a box, and knowledge and thought give you some familiarity with a portion of that box. That’s a very spatial/linear image.

And desire ticking off the probability until a thought occurs and describing how one becomes more or less familiar with an observation rather than just wanting something is a much more timelike image. As a linear problem solver, it’s supposed to be much harder for me to see space as ability and time as Desire, so I really like how easy looking at it that way makes it to see those connections.

And I think that article maybe mentioned that Ability and Desire at higher levels do end up looking more like their traditional definitions anyway, like the flies ability to fly.

2 Likes