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Okay, I nerdsniped myself with this random side thought in my thread earlier about bearing witness to homelessness of the extreme, unraveled variety.
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I sometimes wonder... to advanced hyperdimensional aliens, looking down at me, would I appear to be homeless-and-not-at-home, sitting around in a pile of trash-and-not-trash on an 11-dimensional sidewalk? 🤔
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The aha! idea is that this Maslow-based idea of somebody being "there" at a given level of integrity of self to be helped actually generalizes quite a bit, and is not dependent on a Maslow-ish hierarchical view of self.
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You can't help with physiological needs if they're not "there" at safety. You can't help with safety if they're not there at "belonging". You can't help at "belonging" if they're not "there" at esteem. You cannot help with esteem if they're not "there" at self-actualization.
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There is a sense in which there is no such thing as a Twitter persona. It's not just a more atomized version of a blogger or book-author persona. There is generally nothing it is *like* to be a tweeter, unless you put in conscious effort to weave a self through the fragments.
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Example #2: notes Your notes constitute your extended back-end textual self. If your notes are a disorganized mess across multiple incoherent, incompatible systems, you're homeless. I live in a slum notes-wise, lives in a mansion, and is mind-palace tech
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Example #3: Physical environment (desk/office). This one is tricky -- many really messy looking spaces are actually deeply organized and the owner can often find something instantly even though it looks like a mess, while really tidy places have no inhabitable integrity
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To be homeless in a *physical* cognitive environment is to be unable to inhabit it. Like a chess board with a meaningful game position is trivial for an expert to memorize and recreate, but a chessboard with randomly placed pieces is not possible for a chess mind to inhabit
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Example #4: Digital device environment (laptop screen/folder organization, email, phone screens): this is a skeumorphic blend of #2 and #3 -- it's sensory-conceptual home. This is probably my most homeless state. It's a mess of dropbox, email, laptop desktop, phone screen...
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Mme working on my laptop is a bit like a homeless person rooting through a garbage can, pulling out and tossing stuff randomly on the pavement in search of the one pizza box with some cheese stuck to it (this is what half the public garbage cans look like in my neighborhood)
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Example #5: Your home entryway/portico during Covid. Ours turned into a bit of a disaster area with masks hanging on hooks, boxes waiting to be unboxed, sanitizer etc. This is a severely disrupted boundary of the self (in this case a family-level self).
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The general principle is that "home" is really "inhabitable self" whether it is a subset of your mind that maps to a Maslow level, or an extended digital or physical phenotype. You are a set of intertwingled selves that can all be graded on degree of homelessness.
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If your self can expand/contract appropriately and establish a boundary whose integrity is maintainable, and has non-trivial contents, that counts as a "self" in inventory. If the boundary is in a state of collapse, and your consciousness has no integrity within it, you don't.
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The idea of body-envelope integrity (which is disrupted when you have a cut/wound/fracture etc.) can be extended as a metaphor to all these selves, with the disruptions having analogues. For eg. a broken set of capture conditioning cues in your "notes self" is like a wound.
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So that's my theory of generalized psychological homelessness via a theory of "home" as an assemblage of inhabitable selves with integrity intact. Think of it as a crazy venn diagram of a dozen circles, with different kinds of boundaries -- some porous, some torn, some solid...
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