Desystemize Turns One

A once-a-year meta post.

It’s Desystemize’s first birthday today! (Which also means it’s my birthday today. I decided I would send the first post out on my birthday for reasons I’ll get into below.) I generally try to avoid meta-posting out of respect for your inboxes; it seems much better to go silent (even for months on end) when I’m working on a post rather than constantly spam lower-effort proof of life posts. But it’s nice to reflect now and then, and hopefully we can all agree that once a year is a reasonable cadence for that.

In terms of raw output, there were only thirteen posts. But one was the gargantuan Representation and Uncertainty; and anyway, here of all places, we’ll distrust the impulse to simply tally up the first metric we get our hands on. The relatively small amount of posts belies the enormous development in my ideas that happened throughout the year. In Desystemize #1, my thoughts in this space were mostly limited to specific anecdotes with only a wordless urgency drawing them together. The best I could do to summarize was:

The thesis of Desystemize, in one sentence: it takes a lot of work for a number to mean anything and we largely aren’t doing it.

But through the work I’ve done to research and write these articles, and the discussions they’ve generated, I’ve gotten a much clearer grasp of the target we’re aiming for. I managed to truly grok In The Cells of the Eggplant, which I had bounced off before (I’m embarrassed to read my post about it trying to carve out the “desystemic lens” now that I have a more nuanced idea of what’s actually going on in breakdowns of representation), and I read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, which is an excellent way to change the “default way” you approach meaning. Rewriting my one-sentence mission statement today, it’d be more like:

The thesis of Desystemize, in one sentence: representing the world with static forms we can manipulate often destroys the details that make them meaningful, and we don’t understand the work we tacitly perform to make representations useful.

A more cumbersome sentence, maybe, but a lot more accurate.

Getting out there and posting got me connected with Suspended Reason, and through him the rest of the Inexact Sciences group. Being in constant conversation is a great way to help you realize the frontiers you should be looking at next: a lot of my output on tis.so is me starting to make a point and realizing I should just encapsulate it for posterity. (Sometimes the ways TIS improves my productivity are even more straightforward than that: a few nights ago Hazard literally came to me in a dream, I wrote up a dream-article based on our dream-conversation, and then when I woke up I got to just transcribe the dream article and publish it.)

So the first thing I want to stress is that you can literally just get out there and start moving on something you care about. I don’t want to be the kind of person who says stuff like “positive thinking solves all problems!”, because it clearly doesn’t. But I can say that if you feel like you’re stuck in a rut, it’s important to dispense with the false humility of “I’d better not think too highly of myself”, because past-you wasn’t working on the thing, and if you demand future-you is mostly continuous with past-you, future-you won’t be working on the thing either. Pick a birthday (what I did) or some other cute little milestone and just say “Okay, starting today, things will be different” - being deliberate about that conscious break with your past is an excellent way to get moving.

I can sure attest things are different for me! I’m comfortable using “the representational crisis” as a starting point for arguments, without needing to justify myself every time I post. Year One of Desystemize has handled that first urgent reason I felt compelled to write it: the point that static forms will always be insufficient, that purely one-way flows of information don’t break down for idiosyncratic reasons (even if those are what get covered in the stories about them), but fail as a class because of general and predictable forces.

Year Two: so what will we do about it? 

Chasing the Treasure Fox has already previewed the areas I’m going to start investigating. How exactly do we generate accounts of variation? What sort of rules about environments are being sent forward in time through our embodied cognition? How do we distribute our thinking to the space around us, and how do we index that distributed thought to call upon later?

If I had to guess, my writing over the next year will be in three distinct channels. I’ll start developing these ideas in bite-sized chunks over on tis.so. When I see an example of a representational/ontological issue that’s digestible and evocative, I’ll write a numbered, average length Desystemize post about it. When I have a more complete understanding about detail-preserving cognition, I’ll write a longer, more conceptual named post like R&U and Treasure Fox. But where I ended up now is nothing like I was thinking on June 18th, 2021, so all this is subject to change anyhow.

Since interaction is such a key component of discovering useful concepts, I’d like to be explicit about ways you could influence the writing of Desystemize, if you’re interested:

• Most obviously, and also most importantly - you can just share stories where you think there’s something more to be said than the article you’re linking, whether it’s a direct representational issue or just something that seems to rhyme with what I’m covering here. Worst that can happen is I disagree and don’t write about it, but my whole mission is to think of frameworks that apply generally, so there’s no such thing as too many links.

• I also love talking about these topics, even outside of an article context. Conversation is a good way to force you to articulate thoughts you had sloshing around subconsciously and thereby gain a better understanding yourself. My DMs are open! Also happy to discuss appearing on podcasts or speaking at conferences. (I’m located in Minneapolis, but willing to fly for a sufficiently interesting discussion group.)

• One of my signal joys this year has been discovering the writing of Vasily Grossman. He manages to blend the gnarled morality of how people actually act in the world with a razor-sharp personal understanding of good and evil, chronicling the world as it is without succumbing to bland nihilism porn. In this regard he’s right up there with Remarque, another one of my favorite authors. If you know of other authors with this quality - people who’ve captured the true nature of human beings in extreme situations, taking care for realism in motives and dialogue while maintain a profound moral clarity that gives the story a point - please let me know which book to start with. (For Grossman, it’s Stalingrad into Life and Fate; for Remarque, it’s Flotsam into Arch of Triumph.)

• From the non-fiction side, I need to get a much better understanding of embodied/environmental cognition, so recommendations for good reads of that nature are extremely welcome. Also anything good about ecology - while I have a decent working understanding of ecology, I suspect that I need to reindex my knowledge entirely with the new ways of seeing I’ve developed in the last year. Ecosystems are a kind of distributed cognition, and I have a lot more conceptual buckets to put them into nowadays.

• Speaking of distributed cognition…my U-Haul trailer was unhooked and stolen in Las Vegas in May when I was moving back to Minneapolis, and I lost nearly all of my stuff. If you happen to know any thieves in the Vegas area, please tell them to at least give me my books back. Every time my brain has a thought that’s indexed “go look it up in this book” I have to go buy the book before I can remember what I know. It’s exhausting and has been a real drag on the writing process.

• Finally, if you’re the kind of person who wants to send a present when you hear about a birthday, my charity of choice is Sea-Watch, who stop people from drowning in the Mediterranean as they try to navigate the world of international migration. Sea-Watch is just about the purest example of preserving detailed human life against the annihilating force of static systems that you could possibly come up with.

Whether you do any of these things or just passively read along, I hope that the cognitive tools we’re building here come in handy as often for you as they do for me. The best way to appreciate the world is to see it more clearly, and I’m honored to be working on the frontier. See you next when I have something to say.

-Collin