Stray thoughts on disambiguating "love" · 4:36am Jul 4th, 2022
I think this one stands on its own, so I'm just going to list it out bluntly.
- Broadly, love seems like the desire for someone or something to have a place (or a bigger place) in the world. I thought of this one some time ago while writing about cutie marks.
- Sometimes it's also a thing that inspires creative activity. This one came up during a panel recently.
- Sometimes it's the desire for one's relationship with a thing to be more than it is.
- Sometimes it's the desire to remove barriers between oneself and a thing.
I'm probably missing some things, but this seems like a decent enough start.
In other news, I've been spending some time thinking about how, practically, to get people intrinsically motivated to participate in complex projects in a self-directed way. As part of that, I'd like to better understand the stories people tell themselves about the world, plus the roles they attach to within those stories. I'm thinking that an ideal delivery should make people receptive, motivated, knowledgable, and collaborative. I suspect that inspiring love of a thing would be the ideal way to motivate people. I suspect that a better understanding of the stories people tell themselves about the world would be the ideal starting point for getting people to be more collaborative.
Anyway. That's all for now. Thanks for reading.
Love is a lot of different things. It's a great weasel-word to say one thing and mean another, or even worse, to think you mean one thing when you actually mean another.
5669775
Fair point. I think I'm most interested in the thing people often wish it meant. That one that's usually responsible for people doing profoundly stupid things. That one seems to be a strong motivator.
It's an overwhelming instinct.
I think of it as investing a part of yourself into something.
5670044
It's one of the weirder instincts, I guess along with the fear of death. Other instincts tend to get triggered by low-level sensory input. Instinctive reactions involving love and death seem to work even on very abstract or reasoned thoughts. So it's an instinctive reaction, but it responds to the way we think about things, including things that can't possibly be "programmed into" our genes. How does that work?
5670054
That's a good one. It's like a flip side of "desire". People can desire something without playing any part in it. With investment, people can play a part in something without having any desire for it.
5669775
I'm still thinking about this one. Somehow "love" is both ambiguous and valued. I would expect language to have evolved to clean up this mess, but it's apparently still happy with the situation.
5670111
Although I have to say being simply "invested" on something does not feel like enough. Clearly, someone can invest some aspect of themselves into something they don't "love" (although perhaps the reason for doing so is related to what they love).
Perhaps desire coupled with self-investment comes close to the way I think love is.
Love: The desire to self-invest in something. (I love it, Ha!)
5670123
I like it! It feels one step away from the instinctive parts of love and towards the calculating/anticipating parts. That puts Trick's comment in a context I can understand better.
5670257
5670123
5670044
5669775
After massive amounts of pondering and drugs and reading cadence of cloudsdale by skywriter which I need to catch up on and studying systems, and grappling with the inevitability of death and my agnostic terror of possible future non-existence, and trying to be less of a douchebag, and trying to adopt more hopeful productive political engagement, and so on, a succinct definition I've settled on that I'm pretty happy with is:
Anyway equestrian sin I can't remember if you were who I've talked to about systems and need to read an article you wrote or if that was someone else but if that was someone else, then I offer the following colon parts of which if you use control F since I ramble lot you might find interesting since I'm studying how systems work to figure out this sort of shit
Systems Studies by Bryan Chandler
If you are reading this, it means I think you will find my personal studies of systems if not insightful and informative, then at least interesting:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SvdkPwlmFp6FLGE9Mm1J26r897xQQPOSm3tuwFWJ3k0/edit?usp=drivesdk
Intro/summary/background (written 3/7/22):
Around November 2021, (surprisingly, for once NOT while on acid) I realized that systems are the perfect thing for me to study. Because I've long been interested in designs and how things work since I was a kid from roller coasters to K'nex to writing crappy My Little Pony fanfiction to composing and performing a variety of music on a variety of instruments in a variety of genres, and politics and economics, memes, and more. And one of my struggles when consuming large amounts of my ADHD meds has long been many hour, occasionally multi-day Wikipedia binges hopping between hundreds of articles.
And then one day, for the first time I just suddenly realized that these are all systems and that I could study ALL of these things, looking for commonalities and how they worked and what principles they followed, and how the fractal nature of the universe means that if you understand how one system works, you can apply those principles to other systems, and how perfect this is for me because I've always considered my creativity and ability to find parallels between disparate phenomena a strength, and long have recognized since middle school that I'm vastly better at understanding concepts than memorizing things, and in recent years recognized that I'm great at connecting people because friendship is magic and networking is just applied friendship.
So in recent months, armed with usually-legally-prescribed stimulants and a thirst for understanding, I've really dived in, and it's pretty overwhelming, because I'm literally trying to understand *Everything*. But it's raining rewards. The first system I chose to intensely study was myself, because I'm a very dysfunctional system. And while I continue to be very dysfunctional, I understand that this functionality a lot better and it has helped me be more cognizant of why I do things the way I do, and More in awe of how incredible and incomprehensible life, the universe, and existence are. And also why it's impossible for me to get addicted to drugs. From neurochemistry to statistics I have a lot of work to do, but literally everything in life is a system, and armed with knowledge of how it all works, I know I can help make this world a better place.
Anyway, here's over 8, 000 rambling thoughts about that organized by date. Still need to scan a few of the old school pencil and paper brainstorming sessions I did. Especially the one where I made this crazy flow chart between the brain the body the mind actions and the external environment, and how they all interact, which led to me for the first time understanding on a deeper level the concept of consciousness being an emergent property of quadrillions of chemical reactions between trillions of molecules in billions of cells in millions of unimaginably complex feedback networks every single second, and that like gender, my identity is a construct and that I, Bryan, do not actually exist. Or as I put it humorously upon this original enlightenment, "I'm literally just a shit posting differential equation."
That was a bit shocking of a paradigm shift, for sure.
Anyway, here's all the typed out stuff. I've been understanding and realizing how important connections are and how good I am at connecting people and how every single system is made up of the two component elements of stuff and the way that stuff is connected.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SvdkPwlmFp6FLGE9Mm1J26r897xQQPOSm3tuwFWJ3k0/edit?usp=drivesdk
Please feel free but not obligated to leave comments on the doc, and happy reading!
~~~~~~
Hi, I'm Bryan: pianist, singer, actor, driver, writer, meme lord, networker, systems theorist, and friend! Quickly reach me texting (714) 496-3119 . Less urgent matters: bchandleremail@gmail.com . Spread love, laughter, and kindness, and have a blessed day!
5672534
Yeah, that was me. I hit the same realization about systems several years ago, which led me through many, many rabbit holes. I went through basically the same process as you, writing down my thoughts and the things that felt worth investigating. I have hundreds of pages of bullet points on where my thought processes began when I started the process and how they've changed over the years, and I still add on to the list nearly every day. Also similar to you, I was the first system I started trying to understand more concretely. I realized within a few weeks that I was too dumb to finish the job, so I started studying more math since that seemed useful for making my thoughts on the relevant topics more coherent. I'm still too dumb to finish the job, but I think I'm a bit closer than when I started.
I'd highly recommend keeping a separate document where you only write one or two partial sentences per line of thought. It's very useful to have a document where you can scan through the last few days' worth of interesting thoughts in under a minute.
5672637
Yeah I desperately need to summarize my ramblings into more useful short shareable fragments.
Can you share the link you shared with me again please?
And is there anything I could trade you for perhaps help condensing mine a bit I want to keep the original Raw rambling intact but like have a second condensed document. Also if you're down for making more friends I have another friend isn't doing this exactly but we talk about this shit a ton and I love connecting people
5672739
I forgot which one(s) I suggested, but these are probably the most relevant.
For understanding oneself as a system:
- https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/971567/elements-of-persona
- https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/989962/bifurcation-of-self
- https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/974736/emotions-as-a-sense-for-stories
For the role & development of system specifications:
- https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/917056/cutie-marks
- https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/919326/cutie-marks-why-dont-we-have-them
It probably helps to understand computer science too. It's all about understanding & specifying system behavior, and it's a good mix of practical and mathematically-grounded. Most academic fields deal with some sort of system, but computer science tries to do it very directly and at all levels of abstraction.
All my time is currently allocated for the foreseeable future, so it's just sporadic moments when I'm feeling lazy that I have available. How about if we go back-and-forth through blogs? I currently want to understand characters very concretely as systems. I want to understand them concretely enough that it would be feasible to create accurate AI-assisted models for characters that are well-understood and for which a lot of data is available (e.g., mane 6). I wouldn't mind getting distracted occasionally to read or write blog posts about that.
5672814
Sounds good. I'm going to bookmark this page. Looks like it's time to also once again bug knighty about making it so that we can favorite or bookshelf blog posts