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Negtrin path reasoning:
This file is intended to enable me to trace the path of negtrin through a mind. This path of reasoning is important because it allows me to link my way from the understanding of the genesis of implexing, to understanding an implementation path for implexing.
Motivation:
We already understand that implexing begins with an intrin. The intrin prompts a search for the body surface which is experiencing the intrin. That surface is first implexed and stored away. Then subsequently, the cause of the intrin is sought out by implexing things that are relating/interacting with that body surface.
Since it turns out that intrins are what motivate tabula rasa implexing, we can't move forward in designing our implexor code until we understand how the intrin path will work, since the implexor code will be invoked only as a consequence of, and in service to, the intrin processing code. We could implement something on the implexing side, but it would be a blind implementation.
What exactly are we trying to figure out?
When intrins occur they occur at some device. Smo doesn't need a software-level representation of body parts, surfaces, or spots. The director can implex these and then build a proximity map for each intrin location by checking the causal relationships between the intrins when they occur. Intrins that co-occur in time and have a through-line of connecting co-occuring intrins are close enough to be proximally related.
This is how the director can build damage map volitionally without requiring us to force it to.
The design question we're pursuing here isn't the top-level notion of how to design a body map, but rather how to implement, at the software level, intrin implexing and delivery to the director.
- What information precisely do we have to deliver to the director for it to successfully implex body surfaces?
- At what point in the interoceptor data IRQ handling have we done enough work to enable the director to take over from that point?
The answers to these questions will, as a side effect, also tell us how to design the implexor model for interoceptors, at least for intrin interoceptors anyway.
- Should they be designed as NMI IRQs that the director can't ignore?
- Should they be prioritized normal IRQs that the director can ignore?
- Should they be IRQs at all? Maybe they should just be added to prioQ that the director polls.
- Should they be asychronously processed at all? Maybe the director should have to poll the device service routines manually.
Which of these implexor event interface designs is correct for the behavioural model? Also, can this model that we're designing for interoceptors also work for extrospectors? Do intrin percept events work the same as nontrin percept events?
We still haven't fully crystallized the exact essential question we're trying to answer, but we have a list of questions. It appears that the fundamental question is what the correct behavioural model is for intrins and intrin processing. As a side-effect, we're also trying to figure out what the correct interface model should be between the interoceptor devices and the director. Finally, we're trying to figure out whether the design we come up with for interoceptors will be reusable for extrospectors.
Suspicions:
A hidden, implicit new subsystem:
I suspect that part of the reason why I can't easily figure out the operations that need to be performed to properly process intrins is that the current set of subsystems I'm using to model the processing is insufficient. There may be additional, new functions that need to be performed by a new logically distinct subsystem altogether, or a new role to be assigned to a current subsystem.
Alternatively: my understanding of negtrins is simply inadequate:
It could also be that the reason I can't understand how to implement the negtrin path is because I just don't fully understand what negtrins are, implementation-wise. I.e: I still don't understand how to make negtrins be experienced by the director as intrinsically undesirable.
We do fully understand how to make postrins intrinsically desirable from an implementation perspective. But we don't understand fully how to make negtrins undesirable. Perhaps when we understand fully how to make the director volitionally consider negtrins undesirable, the model will reveal itself.
Intrinsically undesirable negtrin model design:
Postrins are represented as intrinsically desirable because the director will experience them as stupefactors. When a postrin occurs, the director will experience that as a stupifying experience, and will enter a HLT state, broken only by the suspicion that a greater state of stupefaction is possible.
Our implicit assumption: negtrins have an implementation meaning on their own terms:
When the director dequeues a negtrin, what does it do? Perhaps our entire thought patterns around the default state of the director is simply wrong. We currently model the mind as having an idle loop, and then it can choose what to contemplate and pursue. Because of this thought model, we consider the question of how to treat negtrins to be a valid question: we treat negtrins as having their own intrinsic meaning.
What if negtrins only have meaning as frustrators relative to postrins?
Consider what follows if we bias the entire implementation positively toward the direct pursuit of postrins. We treat the entire consciousness as a program whose fundamental goal is to enter a stupefaction loop on best postrin known to it. What would negtrins represent, in implementation terms? They would represent a frustrator. They would represent a dysvalue, automatically -- they would represent something that forces the mind to stop pursuing its highest known postrin and to attend to something cumbersome.
In other words: negtrins don't represent a distinct fact from postrins. The damage map that negtrins help us to build isn't meaningful on its own terms. It's only meaningful in relation to the stupefaction loop pursuit that it forces us to turn away from.
In this model, the stupefaction loop has intrinsic implementation meaning while the negtrin event has no intrinsic meaning: its meaning is merely that it diverts attention away from the pursuit and enjoyment of stupefaction.
Supporting evidence:
- A tabula rasa mind that has never experienced postrins literally has no desire to live. It has no positive goals.
Detracting evidence:
- A tabula rasa mind that has only experienced negtrins won't pursue any self-directed goals or desire to live, but it also will respond to negtrins. So even though this mind has never experienced a postrin, it will have a response (implying meaning and interpretation) to negtrins. If negtrins only have meaning relative to postrins, then this shouldn't be the case.
- Rejoinder: The tabula rasa mind which has never experienced a postrin will sit apoplectic in complete stasis, essentially in a "powered off" state. Is this not the same as a stupefied state? It seems that stupefaction is the default pursued state. To support the "default stupefaction pursuit" orientation, you'd only need to update your model of stupefaction to include net neutral states within your definition of postrins.
Stupefactor-Frustrator model:
In this model, the mind doesn't receive nontrins as IRQs. Rather, it polls for them actively by "paying attention". Intrins are qualitatively different because they trigger IRQs. The mind is by default a procedural, polling system that volitionally polls its sensors. IRQs are intrins being injected.
Intrins are fundamentally different because they force attention, and a neurological response. When a sufficiently intense postrin happens, you automatically stupefy. I have never been forcibly postrin-injected while trying to conduct some other activity, so I can't confirm this model. I've never had the indignity of being forcibly made to experience a postrin when I didn't volitionally choose to participate in allowing it. An ideal experiment would be to somehow have say, a coregasm while working out and not have chosen it, and see whether I can ignore it. This is the closest I can conceive of as a barriered-off experiment.
For negtrins, I already know that a negtrin forcibly hijacks attention.
The fundamental problem is the canvas-director evaluation function:
The fundamental unsolved problem is the contemplative evaluation whereby the canvas and director work together to produce a value judgment that considers intrins to be intrinsically [un]desirable.
Who does comparison? Canvas or Director?
How does evaluation occur? Who does the comparison? We previously thought that the canvas does the comparisons but today we noticed that Director may be able to do them. In a sense, it makes more sense for Director to be the comparator because:
Director as comparator:
- If canvas merely helps director to transform mentents (we've finally found a good name), then director has more of an understanding of what specific instructions it's supposed to be giving to canvas.
- Our previous model of having canvas hold both goals and mentents made it difficult to really understand how director could ever "know" what instructions to send to canvas.
- With director holding goals, it can choose the types of scenes that need to be rendered in order to make comparisons and causal evaluations.
- This makes the canvas implexing make more sense: the comparison is being done within director, but the canvas is making the comparison possible by rendering the mentents in orientations that enable canvas to compare them.
- In a sense, this also makes it make more sense how compartmentalization occurs. A lot of the compartmentalization isn't within canvas, but rather it's between the director and canvas.
Canvas as comparator:
In a sense, we can think of it as director partitioning the canvas, and finding some way to refer to the mentents within different partitions. Director can then implex the rendered output from canvas and compare that way. Perhaps the director only compares, and the canvas holds both the mentents and the goals that the mentents are being compared against.
But how can the director know whether the goal currently loaded into the "goal partition" of the canvas is indeed the goal that it desired to compare against? The canvas is a distinct mentent space from the director's comparison stage. The director-comparator model has the advantage of ensuring that the director can be certain that its current goal matches whatever is being rendered by the canvas for it to implex from.
What we can do is synthesize a bit:
- Have a special shared region between the canvas and director called the "goalspace". This is where the director stores its current goal mentents and the canvas can read from this space directly. Some synchronization will be necessary between the two, but overall, it should be fine. Canvas will only ever need to read from it so we can prolly synchronize it with an RW spinlock, avoiding the overhead of sleeplocks (mutex, sem, etc).
I think we settle on the director as comparator, canvas as orienter model, with a shared goalspace between them.
Where are introspective/contemplative qualia experienced?
In introspection/contemplation, canvas renders the scene into the buffers. Director implexes from the buffers. So in that sense, contemplative qualia are experienced when director implexes them from the buffers.
For intrins, canvas renders them into the sense buffers and then director implexes them and "experiences" them. I don't know whether canvas' rendering act triggers IRQs -- probably not. Since director is paying attention to what canvas is rendering, there's no need to forcibly direct director's attention toward canvas' rendered output.
How does director's comparison yield the notion of intrinsic [un]desirability?
Imagine director asking canvas to simulate the effects of some interaction that would bring about direct pleasure.
Could it simply be that the director holds the goal of postrins as an innate comparison goal, and so when a comparison yields an intrin, it ends the need to compare, and the director just commits to action from then on?
- Prolly not because we don't only figure out that an interaction will yield an intrin. With postrins for example, we figure out that they'll yield a postrin and then we spend a long time elaborately contemplating that postrin in self-indulgent scenarios.