mbilokonsky

Either conscious life will evolve in the direction of more highly conscious self definition or which is the same, towards greater autonomy than has characterized it in the past or else conscious life will disappear from the face of the earth.

— Leslie Dewart, Evolution and Consciousness

Leslie Dewart: Consciousness as Self-Presence

Leslie Dewart proposed that consciousness is not an innate biological endowment but a historically emergent achievement, generated through the acquisition of speech, a learned activity transmitted socially and culturally across generations. His theory begins by distinguishing experience itself, which humans share with other animals, from conscious experience, in which the experiencer becomes present to their own act of experiencing. He argues that this self-presence arises through speech and subsequently develops through thought and culture. Because consciousness is acquired rather than simply inherited, it can also develop defectively. Dewart's philosophy thus offers b

mbilokonsky

{
  "version": 1,
  "hooks": {
    "stop": [
      {
        "type": "command",
        "command": "bash \"$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)/.claude/hooks/log-session.sh\"",
        "timeout": 15
      }
    ],

mbilokonsky

Additional Conventions Beyond the Built-in Functions

As this project's AI coding tool, you must follow the additional conventions below, in addition to the built-in functions.

Vivaa Monorepo

Prefer skills over documentation. Conventions live in the project's skills directory. This file captures cross-cutting rules only.

Skill Types

mbilokonsky

Vivaa Monorepo

Prefer skills over documentation. Conventions live in the project's skills directory. This file captures cross-cutting rules only.

Skill Types

Skills follow a naming convention that signals how they're used:

• codechange-* — Step-by-step guides for a specific type of code modification (e.g., adding a migration, creating an API endpoint). Invoked when performing that kind of change.
• workflow-* — Multi-step orchestration guides for work that spans apps or PRs (e.g., adding a new primitive end-to-end). Invoked when planning or executing that workflow.

mbilokonsky

What Is This?

This project is an attempt to explicate the text Evolution and Consciousness, by Leslie Dewart.

Glossary

We have a glossary of terms that may be helpful in understanding the concepts in play.

Chapter Summaries

We then follow with a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the arguments of the text, expressed in the most accessible terms possible.

Quizzes

mbilokonsky

Chapter 1: The Anomaly In the dark dystopian world of the Matrix, a mysterious anomaly begins to disrupt the simulated reality. Neo and Trinity notice strange glitches. Meanwhile, in the Watchmen universe, Dr. Manhattan senses a rift in the fabric of spacetime. The Animaniacs, in their zany world, discover a portal that leads to unknown dimensions.

Chapter 2: Convergence Dr. Manhattan, driven by curiosity, investigates the rift and discovers it's a connection to other realities. His investigation sparks a philosophical debate with Rorschach about the nature of existence and whether realities are interwoven patterns of information or discrete entities.

In the Matrix, Neo and Trinity consult the Oracle, who presents them with theories of information complexity. They discuss the nature of reality as a construct, where dimensions might be layers of complexity rather than physical spaces.

The Animaniacs, on the other hand, playfully explore the new worlds, making light of these profound existential questions.

mbilokonsky

Thinking About Thinking

Having grown up with undiagnosed autism, I've been thinking about how to think for as long as I can remember. My models of the world never seemed to match anyone else's: I'd be confused at things others easily understood, and I'd understand easily things that others found confusing. I had to learn to reverse engineer how thinking itself worked so that I could anticipate the connections other people would make, and then use those insights to construct a social identity. I needed to understand why things seemed mean different things to me than they did to others - what is meaning, anyway?

And so I learned.

Understanding Meaning

I learned that meaning is constructed - that when someone associates some things in some way that they create third thing, the meaning of which is relationally defined by things joined. For instance, maybe someone hears a piece of music while experiencing a pleasant emotion. That piece of music now 'means' that emotion for that person, and vice versa. So w

mbilokonsky

[
	{
		"name": "sound",
		"category": "sensory",
		"sense_seeking_question": "I have a stim that involves really loud sound, be that music or machinery or something else.",
		"sensitivity_values": [
			"A sound needs to be very loud for me to even notice it.",
			"I sometimes need to turn the volume up to hear something that others seem to hear just fine",
			"I've always felt pretty normal here - my experience seems to be in keeping with that of most people around me.",

mbilokonsky

Often, when building software or thinking about reality, we have this natural tendency to organize our reasoning in terms of top-down narratives. What I mean is, we see an ant carrying food back to its nest and we think "Yes, the ant colony survives by sending individual ants out to get food." There is this natural, to most humans, sense of teleology. We understand things by understanding what they're for, what purpose they serve.

We don't, as a rule, understand behaviors that seem to serve no purpose. We at best describe them as "not yet understood", and we assume that with more information we'll finally be able to tell a story that includes the fact under discussion.

But like, stories are only real in our heads, right? We tell stories because stories are how humans think. If some data can't fit into a story then we ignore it, because we literally have no way to think about it. But I think that this often leads to a specific kind of fallacy: the fallacy of assuming that a story exists that can reconcile al

mbilokonsky

Thinking Like a Function

Part 1: What's a function?

As a software engineer, you probably think of a function as a unit of code that takes some arguments and returns some value, eg:

 function square(x) { 
   return x * x;
 }