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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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I often enter a sort of listless vacant state when I drift off dumpster diving in my head, which my family members often find to be rather impolite. But of course it’s not quite the same as what you’re describing - I’m surfing, not drowning
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I like this picture that my wife took of me recently when we were waiting for our dinner. I can’t remember what I was thinking about. But I was thinking about something. I live in my head a lot, even if I’m not on my phone
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I think the surfing metaphor actually fits within the self-at-home metaphor -- the zen-like flow suggests continuity of a self even if you don't explicitly define the boundary, whereas a janky, entropic non-flow state is a sign you're inhabiting a homeless, not-there self
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Ooh also - this just occurred to me for the first time - this 👇🏾 is kind of what Campbell is talking about re quote-unquote schizophrenia, but Jason here is able to put himself back together again when he returns to civilisation. Some people don’t make it back
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When Jason was alone out at sea for months on end, his self unbundled into multiple personalities. "It seemed completely sane". This is consistent with other things I've read about people in ultra-solitude. The coherent self is constructed for interfacing with others
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