the spiral

Been thinking about strange loops. The idea at first was to write a hidden entry - it seemed to fit in with existing thoughts in that realm. That entry is yet to be written. Instead the train of thought landed on the Journey series, which I hadn’t expected to touch again for a good while yet.

I’d assumed that if a strange loop showed up in the paintings it would be in the colour, or in the obvious circularity - the series following the hero’s journey, which is already a loop. After some thinking on the matter, it seems incorporating it into the serpents is the way to go. That way they’re more deeply symbolic than previously planned: the demons drawn not as something wrapped around the figure, effectively reading as ornamental, but as an extension of the figure - with the series traversing the coalescing of the two.

The hope now is that this enables some more precise planning on the compositions. Where previously I only had the disk and figure in mind, and their interaction, that left a lot of empty space I didn’t quite know how to fill in a meaningful way. Now the series is more illustrative than descriptive, which I think works much better as artwork.

Something I’ve noticed recently: the process of falling asleep is inherently stressful to me. Not dramatically, but more of a mild stress response, and I think it’s responsible for much of my troubles with insomnia.

The obvious and oft-recommended approaches have never worked. “Just relax” is not a strategy. It’s an instruction with no implementation. And trying anything involves some degree of effort by definition, which is precisely the wrong state to be inducing. There’s something almost paradoxical about it. You can’t strive your way to rest. The striving is the problem.

I’ve been thinking about this from a systems angle, as I tend to do with most things. When a computer is idle, it isn’t empty. The CPU drops to a low-power state, but the interrupt controller stays live. The system isn’t generating work — it’s in a listening posture, receptive to whatever arrives. The difference is directional. Normal operation is the processor reaching out. Idle is the processor waiting for something to reach it. It hasn’t shut down. It’s just stopped being the source.

It seems the mind has an equivalent of the opposite of this - the default mode network, which runs when you’re ostensibly doing nothing. It’s generative. It simulates futures, rehearses conversations, chews on unresolved problems. That’s not idle. That’s a background process running unsupervised at full utilisation. Trying to sleep on top of that is trying to context-switch out while the queue is still being actively populated.

So the approaches that are often recommended — emptying the mind, forcing quiet — are the wrong frame entirely. You can’t drain a queue that’s still being written to. And you can’t force idle; you can only stop generating. Which suggests a different approach to experiment with: instead of trying to clear or suppress, change orientation. Not “stop thinking” but “only listening”. Shift from generative to receptive — the interrupt-listening posture. Observe what arrives rather than producing what to process. The thought appears, it’s registered, no thread is spawned in response. Log and return to idle. This is adjacent to what meditation traditions call witness consciousness, and it’s what I think they might actually mean by it - not emptiness, but a change in directional relationship to mental content. The instruction isn’t “have no thoughts.” It’s “stop reaching.”

There are other angles worth exploring. The queue management problem - not emptying before sleep but triaging: some things can be killed outright (a conscious decision that something doesn’t need to run tonight), others swapped to disk (written down, state fully preserved, released from RAM).

For now the experiment is simple: at sleep onset, consciously adopt the listening posture rather than attempting to clear or suppress. Not trying to sleep. Not trying to think. Just receptive. See what happens when the system stops reaching. Admittedly, I have recently been implementing a write-to-disk type approach by noting down any threads that feel particularly urgent or interesting enough that they can’t be terminated otherwise, which has had notable success, so the idle emulation experiment will build on that rather than replace it.

Definitely more thinking to do on this topic, I suspect there may be other possible avenues to explore…

Started reading exhalation by ted chiang, which got me thinking about the correlations between human memory and computer memory. The thread turned into a few directions, ultimately relating back to the black box problem, so that’s a pretty interesting development.

Thought threads recently do seem to be turning into more of fringes than individual threads, so it’s a bit challenging to find the time and mental energy to flesh these all out and keep the hidden section up to date with everything. Settling for at least the main ons or at least the most interesting and fleshed out ideas. The hope is the others will come up again when the time is right and the spiral returns to that place once again.

Hoping to get more development work done on Valknir soon, it’s bugging me that it’s still so rudimentary. The problem is getting the time to focus on practical applications to the point of some degree of proficiency. Admittedly, it’s also taken some time to figure out the best workflow for that but current thinking is to look at CTF write ups and practice.

Unfortunately, time available to dedicate to practical things it’s extremely limited right now, so doing what I can with regards to reading, writing, and thinking. Admittedly, this is quite the bottlneck and not nearly as fun…

Looking at some potential reading material. Rationalistic pantheism came up and seems worth exploring further when there’s time — curious to see where it sits relative to my own ideas. The perennial philosophy also seems to approach familiar territory.

A longer list formed: The Character of Physical Law, The Tao of Physics, Laws of Form, Complexity by Mitchell, Exhalation by Ted Chiang. Too much to read at once, so it will resolve itself — follow whichever thread has the strongest pull when there’s actually time to sit with it. Feynman feels like the most natural starting point. Conversational rather than dense, likely to catalyse rather than just inform. The Tao of Physics is directly in my territory but may end up being more validating than revelatory — which could go either way. Laws of Form is genuinely unusual, Spencer-Brown deriving logic from the single act of distinction, directly relevant to the loop and circularity thinking — but demanding, probably not first. Mitchell’s Complexity fits well alongside the emergence thinking.

But it might be Exhalation first. Fiction sometimes lands deeper than the direct approach — not because it argues a position but because it creates conditions. I’d rather have thoughts that are my own but sparked by something not even trying to make a point.

Will see what has the strongest pull when there’s actually space to think.

There’s something unexpectedly satisfying about having 7thmagpie up and being added to. Hard to articulate exactly why — it’s just genuinely nice to have my own small piece of the internet that belongs to no one else. Not under the ownership of a platform, not subject to an algorithm, not contingent on engagement. Mine. There’s a particular kind of catharsis in getting thoughts down somewhere they might some day find the right person.

Motherhood is incredibly tiring.

Kairos has made unexpected progress and is approaching proof of concept — ahead of plan, which is what happens when you follow the interest thread rather than the schedule. I can’t test it myself; any free moment I have is either occupied by the baby or immediately claimed by something else. I don’t have the luxury of waiting for the right time. A friend has agreed to test for a week, and if it goes well, possibly longer. I might bring in a couple of course mates at a later phase.

Valknir is moving slowly. Deliberately so — I don’t want development to outpace understanding. It’s not enough to complete an exercise; I have to know I’ve truly got it before moving on, which means going over the same ground repeatedly until it’s mine rather than memorised. The knowledge will compound. Right now it’s just painfully slow. I’ve found some writeups that should help on the practical side.

It’s good to be back at work. Nerd time. Conversations that aren’t about motherhood. I love my son more than anything — he’s my favourite thing in the world — but mothers are people too, and it’s good to have time to be my own person. I’m grateful I get paid for at least some of that.

Thoughts have been thin lately. I’m not sure if that’s because the site now gives them somewhere to go rather than queuing up indefinitely, or whether it’s simply that there’s no time to sit, breathe, or take anything in. Possibly both.

There’s a way of moving through life that works better than fighting it. It’s a way I’ve tried (and continue trying) to follow and to actively learn from so I can follow it more truly. That way is what I call leaning in, and it has never yet led me astray.

Recently I ran a thought experiment on myself to see if I could lean in to the constant generative thoughts that is the ADHD experience. To fight it is to try to stop the thoughts, to long for silence and focus on whatever seems most practical. Instead I aimed only to slow it down — to promise to give the thoughts the attention they deserve for as long as they last. There were only two constraints: one thought at a time and no overlapping. The usual busy, chaotic, stressful mind instead slowed, allowed space for breath, and felt somewhat peaceful for once — so much so that I fell asleep. I was honestly quite shocked at how easy it was.

Not too long before that, I ran another experiment on leaning in — instead of trying to do housework under some established structure or in whatever way it seems is adopted by others, I instead allowed the ADHD to lead. Instead of trying to finish a room to completion before moving on, I allowed myself to follow a thread. I let that distracted little squirrel mind lead the way: starting from fixing something of annoyance around me, then noticing something else that needs done, and letting myself zip all around the house. I did, of course, have constraints here too — lest I run the risk of giving myself more work to do. I didn’t allow anything that would be destructive (so no pulling apart an entire room) so that, should I lose interest halfway, the room would still be in a better state than when I started. And I did try to commit to a task a little — I wouldn’t go downstairs just to take one piece of rubbish, but I’d hoard a small pile until it seemed like a good moment to switch. Again, I was shocked at how well this worked. Sure, no entire room got finished, but I achieved at least three times as much as if I’d tried a more conventional approach, and I didn’t feel so drained afterwards. It seemed like fighting myself drained more energy than I’d noticed — or perhaps leaning in was energising in itself.

It wasn’t always this way. For a long time the default was resistance — to circumstances, to self, to what wasn’t working. I was trying to play by rules set out by society, or whatever worked for other people, despite struggling greatly with those very same things. It was a recipe for disaster in every aspect. I was unemployed, depressed, and stuck in a relationship with someone I resented. It was, by every account, the polar opposite to the situation I find myself in today.

Three years ago I quit what, by all accounts, seemed to be a very good career prospect. I had devoted three years of my life to work and study towards a career I’d spent more than three times that longing for. At the final moment, however, everything seemed to push against me. I had to redo courses multiple times due to difficulty meeting attendance requirements for weather and medical reasons, then got bullied by one of the teachers. I struggled to motivate myself to study for oral exams. So I quit — with nothing else lined up and £10k of debt to my name. As soon as I quit, my interest in programming returned and I felt in my bones that that was what I wanted to pursue, despite very sparse experience and no qualifications. I figured I’d take any job in the meantime while I worked out how to break into that career. Less than three months later I started working in software development — gaining work experience and a degree at the same time. It’s the best outcome that could have happened, and three years on I’m still not burnt out, and more passionate about computer science than ever.

These ideas aren’t unique to my own personal philosophy. Taoism has the concept of wu wei — effortless action. Like water following the path of least resistance, slowly shaping the rock, we too can find a path best suited to us by leaning in rather than fighting resistance. Nietzsche and, to a lesser extent, Marcus Aurelius touched on similar ideas, while Jung coined the term individuation for working with the unconscious rather than against it. He even claimed that the act of pushing against resistance amplifies it — something I can’t help but feel is perfectly exemplified by my own experience.

Leaning in isn’t to be confused with passivity or giving up. It’s the active pursuit of ease and attention to the flow of things — very much easier said than done sometimes, particularly when it comes to identifying where the resistance actually is. We’ve been so conditioned to put up with unease that it fades to background noise, a constant hindrance we stop noticing. At times it takes a genuine leap of faith. But sometimes it’s worth asking what you truly have to lose, compared to what you will lose by continuing against the grain.