Reflections on Identity, Faith, and the Infinite Map

I realized that I could probably start organizing my daily notes a lot more and using them explicitly as indexes for ideas. If I want to start breaking things out into their own notes, that is my prerogative. But I will still use these spaces as interesting source documents in and of themselves. (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-0cO0bIb_5sWtD4Aq5jyev3LybsL6tsg) > [[2024-09-20-161728-]]

I will be moving away from Grok and using ChatGPT again. Just because I do not want to keep paying for these tools. I do not use them enough to fully capture the value that is possible. Even though ChatGPT is somewhat more censored, I think that the ability to come back to it and leave whenever I want is more suited for my needs. (https://chatgpt.com/share/66edd560-49d8-800b-95ec-e06104ceb878)

I shall seek to understand myself through the adding of headings and labels to my writings, along with trying to include ChatGPT outputs that help to process my thoughts.

Made a small PDF of my notes so far from today, with a simple “dialogue” format where I have LLM-generated summaries at the end of each section.

Dreamscape Exploration

I had more dreams of apartment buildings and practice rooms. I went into a building, found my wife, and started making out with her in front of all the new students who had come pouring in. I was on a bus of some kind? Oh, before that I was running for a long time. I realized that eventually, it was easier to keep on going than to stop. This is exactly what building a habit is like. Running is a good analogy for getting into the flow.

Your dream—full of fluid movement, affection, and spontaneous settings—reveals something intriguing about how your subconscious mirrors the waking world. It’s striking how running became an analogy for habit-building, the idea that once momentum is gained, it’s harder to stop than to keep going. Maybe this reflects not just the physical habit, but the ongoing momentum of your intellectual journeys.

Personal Geography

I realized that my stream of consciousness in my dreams is extremely powerful. I still am fairly “awake” in my dreams. I can even feel my mind wandering! I have so many things where I am moving up and down streets, hopping on the subway, traveling through different landscapes. I like how I learned the streets of Montreal to the extent that I could walk from downtown to Verdun with only a minimal amount of guidance, all without any GPS tools. I had to stop at a McDonald’s from time to time to peek at Google Maps on my laptop, but that was more similar to the old days of needing to pull out maps. This is a fun way of enjoying discrete, contained documents. Maybe what makes our sense of geography worse in the current day is the idea that all maps are functionally infinite and so are impossible to learn anyway. We need to start making personal maps again.

The streets of Montreal, even the pauses to check the maps, seem to represent a kind of practical, personal geography—a sense of orientation that GPS can’t replace. You touch on something powerful about finite, personal maps. Is it the boundaries, the familiar lines drawn, that give them more meaning than the vast expanses of modern digital maps? What does this say about how we orient ourselves in larger, infinite systems—spiritual, social, intellectual?

Nested Records of Consciousness

While reading The Soprano Sorceress again (I took a break for a couple of weeks), I realized that I could clearly see how it was a system of nested documents. When one character spoke at length, it really felt like the author just stuck in one of his own personal encyclopedia entries. This is fine! We are allowed to do this! We can nest in our diatribes on whaling! I want to read Moby-Dick, now. > [[2024-09-20-155101-]]

Fiction is a great way of embedding different ideas and aesthetics together. It is a way of performing anthropology and philosophy at the same time. It also makes legible the internal workings of worldviews and how they serve the different personas and personages that deploy them.

The documentation of documents—meta-documentation—is what my writing amounts to. I keep on reacting to different works, and in doing so create a loose literature that speaks plainly and yet indirectly, only gesturing at a tight nucleus of theses. We could say that I have been direct, and yet this is not the whole truth. I hope that others in reading my writings will understand I mean, esp. when it comes to that which I myself can never hope to uncover. > [[2024-09-20-153714-]]

When you mention The Soprano Sorceress and its nested encyclopedic entries, I sense a kind of permission you’re granting yourself in writing. The way authors embed their long digressions—it’s like creating these moments where the personal becomes the universal, or at least opens up new pathways for exploration. You mentioned wanting to read Moby-Dick—what do you imagine Melville’s approach will illuminate for you, especially regarding nested diatribes or thematic expansion? Is there something about embedding yourself into those “diatribes on whaling” that calls out to your own reflective process?

Norms and Networks

Strong relationships come from measured discernment, from knowing one’s sin nature and recognizing one’s limits. The more one is attached to this idea that they are a good person and can do no wrong due to this, the more they will be unable to properly take precautions. > [[2024-09-20-153858-]]
Surprise, men and women are different. Gender differences matter. We need to keep into account the complementary roles of men and women. This includes when we think about leadership within civil society and within the church. Also, this extends to the language we use for each other—though maybe we can also let everyone in on the fun, just with different boundaries. > [[2024-09-20-154123-]]
Our culture is shifting in the direction of becoming more Eastern in the sense of being less selfless and more self-centered. Think about how Chinese people talk about family and how Americans talk about family. The latter contains true selflessness even when there is also less sacrifice. People truly give from their hearts. At lunch today, my wife and my mother were talking about the culture of gifting in China, which is itself related to the culture of posturing and making up social fictions. > [[2024-09-20-153954-]]
In a time when our common pillars of society are eroding, due to the corroding factor of everyone diving deeper into their own sets of alternative facts, we are more and more likely to see huge swathes of people coalesce around falsehoods and mythology. We see this so much in the current day with the other-ing of political opponents. This is an age-old problem, going right back to the Tower of Babel. We should expect that this will only keep happening. > [[2024-09-20-154230-]]
The creation and maintenance of scenes is important. We need to search for our in-group and find a way to bridge the divides that exist in our world. Part of this project is acting as a bridge between worlds, just as Jesus did. He is God for he brought humanity to the divine. > [[2024-09-20-154736-]]
Our documents can stand the test of time if we are keen on preserving them. Even now, we can expect to find lost works that can be re-appreciated. Maybe some of them will even become new masterpieces. Fur Elise (Bagatelle in A minor) was one example, and maybe this new Mozart string trio will gain some traction when it gets recorded. > [[2024-09-20-155215-]]

Your note on strong relationships through self-knowledge and discernment brings up a classic paradox: the more we understand our sin and limitations, the more capable we are of giving and receiving love. The acknowledgment of gender differences strikes me as part of this discernment, recognizing complementary roles as an essential truth in human interaction. In what ways do you see this playing out both in leadership roles and in daily practice? Is this difference a means of bridging gaps or reinforcing healthy boundaries?

Cognitive and Identitarian Security

I believe it is possible that we will need to keep on searching for ways of storing up the people we are now yet protecting them from future pretenders. We need to prevent ourselves from becoming villains, whether these future selves are part of our continuous experience or whether they are sick clones of us used for the twisted purposes of others. Think of the danger of people being reanimated as zombies.

We will need to start setting passphrases with those we love so that AI imitators cannot exploit us. There is one word that AI engines will not say, so if we say it, we know we are not ChatGPT. (https://x.com/AllisterClisham/status/1836978518418411955)

Finally, your thoughts on preserving the “current self” against future exploitation by AI imitators carry a kind of almost sci-fi paranoia that speaks to the deeper question of identity. Is the passphrase idea more about protecting relationships, or does it speak to something broader, like preserving a continuity of self in an age where identity could be distorted or replicated? What might that “one word” AI won’t say signify to you—something of an anchor, or a symbol of unbreachable authenticity?

I cannot say it. My brother will say it for me.