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The Global Wayfinding Model

This section discusses the most important parts of the global wayfinding model in more detail.

See previous section for initial context.

Losslessness​

Losslessness is a concept from information theory, it describes a representation from which an original input can be reconstructed perfectly, that is, without any loss of information.1 In the context of global wayfinding, Mark often claims that the mind, (barring traumatic brain injury etc.) is basically lossless, variously with respect to memory, at least of formative events, but more importantly with respect to its volitions, affective conditioning, and values.

First off I have to note explicitly that I expect the strongest version of this claim must be false. I haven't discussed this with Mark, but etc. etc., the maximal version2 would flatly contradict most of what I'm vaguely aware of about the literature on human memory. Even with claims like recovering traumatic memories, I expect these are a mixed bag, some of these are definitely fabricated under suggestion from therapists, some I expect are straightforwardly real, some mixed, etc.

To some extent I'm less interested in the claim about memory per se, and more interested in the claim about values and emotions. The latter I see as a fundamental crux between wayfinding and certainly all traditional contemplative lineages I'm aware of,3 as well as almost all modern therapy systems.

The basic claim here is that, as a general property of human minds, let's say "volitional-affective structures" basically cannot be squashed, erased, or ripped out, and that those structures persist after even apparently effective attempts to do so, but now something like "swept under the rug."

(By volitional-affective structures I mean something very general, so inclusive of eg. triggers, attachment bonds, felt status and social posture, tribal/religious loyalty or devotion, "trauma" very broadly, also basic social/emotional "needs," sex drive, etc.)

This is not to claim that these structures never "naturally" decay or change, my understanding of Mark's claim here in general is that minds have organic, "integrated" conditions for relinquishing values and intentions, as well as conditions under which they will be suppressed and collect as conflicted, unintegrated cruft in the body-mind, which is a very common pattern of technical debt.

Technical debt​

Technical debt (often just tech debt) is a concept from software engineering, where it refers to (among other things) common patterns of cruft and fairy-dust-and-duct-tape style complexity which tend to accrue in software systems over time. In actual software, tech debt is most often incurred when features are quickly tacked on, without respect to the "structural integrity" of the program—metaphorically one could imagine a house with an extension built on stilts jutting through the roof of the original structure, and with holes in the floor covered up with carpet. Tech debt is basically pervasive in real world software, and Mark's claim is that the same is true in human minds.

In global wayfinding, tech debt refers to structural contortion, dislocation, and suppression, whether local or global, used to achieve a specific configuration of psychology and behavior, generally at the expense of integration.

These kinds of "contortions" can be spatial, and very often specifically somatic, with common patterns in their presentation and in their resolution. However, tech debt is not just somatic, and Mark is often insistent that meaning, being, and perception are all interwoven, with debt sometimes worked all the way down to the visual quality of space, the boundary of the body, object permanence, etc. In any case, tech debt also often shows up in terms of apparent structures of "belief," thought, etc., and the spatial connotation of the definition I gave would often be better understood as an abstract metaphor4 for some presenting pattern psychologically.

The actual patterns included under tech debt are largely not unique to wayfinding. Many common ones are included in the sections on trauma and the section on healing. However, it's important to note that tech debt is not equivalent to trauma. In this analysis, many of the features commonly described as trauma are more like accretions around a trauma, or a cluster of coping strategies around one, rather than the underlying wound itself.5

Some smattering of reports; note in this case most of these are taken directly from the wayfinding book, to try to more accurately represent Mark's models, rather than my own sense/understanding:

  • Complex, tangled, somatic/sensational/muscular clusters
    • Eg.
    • (Note this sort of thing is reported in many schools, though interestingly not all. In eg. Zen this is more likely to be described as kind of working itself out on its own, and largely peripheral to the main practice.)

Layering​

Refactoring​

Wacky phenomenology​

Wayfinding and awakening​

Footnotes​

  1. Er, rather, that the encoding doesn't lose any information, if the encoding is lossless then indeed there is an inverse function blah blah blah. ↩

  2. And Mark does seem to be making really extreme claims, so eg. here "the mind is practically lossless (in that any distinguishable sensory memory can be ultimately recovered)" ↩

  3. So the exception here is plausibly some theories of karma kind of end up equivalent to this claim. Mark actually uses the term 'karma' a lot to mean something like "tech debt + conditioning," this feels like an annoying misuse of the term and I don't think is close enough to the traditional models for it to be appropriate. Anyway, the crux here with traditional systems is really more about tech debt + losslessness rather than losslessness alone, but this flowed better. ↩

  4. I often think about tech debt as trying to move the position vector of the mind-configuration on some subspace, at the expense of some more general loss function over the whole space, or at least over the orthogonal complement of that subspace. This metaphor leaves out the whole "spatially localized" aspect, I also often think about an image of unfolding a crumpled piece of paper, where many folds have been mashed and polished smooth, and eg. thinking about nonomonotonicies over the progression of practice, in some loss function representing "smoothness" or "creasedness" etc. etc. Mark has a nice metaphor with steel cables here. ↩

  5. Not that the distinction matters most of the time, and in practice in doing wayfinding one isn't tracking almost any of this, but I've seen this confused a fair bit and it's somewhat important at least "for the sake of the theory" etc. ↩