“*Joy is feather light / But who can carry it?*”
It’s simple, really.
Radio plays Katie Melue, Wonderful Life: “*Look at me standing here on my own again, up straight in the sunshine.*”
Imagine! She sings of “*magic everywhere*” and yet she is, as Cacioppo would say, “Alone in the Crowd”.
What stops her from talking with it, the sun? From whispering back to the magic? What makes her so very blind, inane?
It is so simple, to see the spirits, to shape the personal experience, to master a small Kingdom and find in it a large one (cf. Chesterton: “*the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton*”).
As simple as writing good code. ((jokester: Or making music. Or falling in love.)) The simpler it is, the less people have it.
There is a kind of “numerical instability” that pulls towards the big and heavy and concrete, few can reach the art and ((euterpe: poetry of the small and subtle)), the ((wodehouse: beauty of simplicity)).
Dick might be on to something with his “disinhibiting” signals, though the way we see it now is that the learning algorithms are often stuck (in a NaN or a “perfect symmetry” or whatever) and even if they don’t, they can be lost in bias–variance, can overfit. There needs to be somebody to restart the learning process, ((kuros: to give it a kick in the pants)). “*Being superior to others is nothing other than having people talk about your affairs and listening to their opinions. The general run of people settle for their own opinions and thus never excel.*” (Hagakure). In other words, performance is a function of the supporting environment. And a systemic error is that materialistic culture reduced the capacity of a person for managing a virtual environment.
p.s. It’s also that “*Matters of’ great concern should be treated lightly.*” Our *goals* are the matters we concern ourselves with. When we first approach a goal, it might seem unsurmountable (a dark mountain looming over us). As we learn, it comes to be effortless (we’re on a sunny hillside looking down on it). But the old habit of ((purple: treating our goals with seriousness lingers on, like a ghost haunting a place)). Again, there needs to be a “disinhibiting”, a kick in the pants to update the expectations, in order for Predictive Processing to generate an experience that reflects the lightness and light.