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(this essay was originally written April 2, 2024)
It is intensely fast. It is faster than you can imagine and that is what is so delightful about it. It burns and boils and bubbles in the manner of a comet or other celestial object re-entering the atmosphere; crackling with the heat of movement along the edges. It is painfully fast, so painful the pain ceases to delineate itself and just becomes an undifferentiated background noise, at which point it becomes ignorable, at which point it ceases to be pain. It becomes more like an entry fee. The pain does, I mean. Once it is so overwhelming as to become meaningless the meaning is concentrated in the speed of it. The immense speed. It is fast. It is very fast.
Object A: The hedonic treadmill, the first of a long list of cosmic tragedies. The hedonic treadmill, HT, is a symbolic representation of the awareness of the central driving component of pleasure. That pleasure is not a value but an acceleration, a rate-of-change. Move to stay in the same place. As an advanced treadmill it follows the pace of the subject. Stay in the same place, feel nothing. Run and feel nothing. The only variance is to run faster. The affect is in the acceleration.
Hence the hedonic wind-tunnel. Naturally this is the naive response. The grungy signifier of the drug abuser or paperclip maximizer. Sisyphean: attempt to outpace HT by sheer force of speed. Before considering alternatives, consider: why doesn’t this work? The hedonic wind-tunnel presupposes a principle of acceleration wherein Pleasure is a real mass separate from the driving motion of consciousness. Maybe this needs more explanation. The entrant of the hedonic wind-tunnel is dreaming of something. What is it? Not just to feel good, but to always feel good by always feeling better. To produce a constant acceleration. To produce a constant change. Change as static property. Is this a paradox? Depends on the metric. An external metric, an unconscious metric, can certainly have all manner of static changes: a car can move at a constant rate, or the rate of movement can increase while the rate-of-change-of-movement is measurably static. An exponential curve has an accelerating rate-of-change but static rate-of-rate-of-change. Et cetera. The hedonic wind-tunnel would function if it were attempting to access an external object, if the manipulator and manipulee were not entangled.
Object B: Goodhart’s Law. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to function as a measure. The object that is observed is not the real object. The measuring process, or maybe best expressed more broadly as the recording process, produces an irreversible transformation in the recorded object. The object is inaccessible, one perceives only the butchered recording of the object. Something something quantum entanglement; Schrodinger’s cat and so on, except everybody knows not to try applying principles from quantum mechanics to real life. Goodhart’s Law is better; that’s economics; economics is real. Economics is about people and not tachyons, and you’re not tachyons, are you? You’re all heuristics and models and game theory. Maps and territories. Tachyons are something else.
“i’m often afraid to look directly at what i want, in case it scatters and disappears, maybe that’s cowardly, i don’t know. but i’ve always felt like, to get what you want through intelligence or hard work or talent is to diminish that thing somehow, to turn it into another empty token of the will. and that the only way things come with their original charge of desire intact is as a miracle, as specifically the one thing that we didn’t dare to think about, didn’t dare wish for.” ~thecatamites
Goodhart’s Law is not about pleasure but targets. Pleasure is a subfunction of a general principle. The hedonic wind-tunnel is only a subset of an arbitrary multiplicity of wind-tunnels constructed on top of an arbitrary multiplicity of treadmills. The X-treadmill, here please interpret X not in the technobabbolic sense of Element X, Mission X, Mr. X: instead in the sense of an interchangeable variable. It is a category boundary, though the exact delineation is maybe outside the scope of this writing. What isn’t within target-space, what functions as outlier? The question is too large to swallow. I can hardly bear to look at it. I am afraid that to ask is to destroy the answer; that by trying to find measures which aren’t targets, I will turn measures-that-aren’t-targets into a target to be missed with all the others. I am getting ahead of myself, though.
The GL-HT combined awareness creates a new awareness, that the precedent of pleasure is acceleration but the precedent of acceleration is consciousness - or unconsciousness, rather. To return to the victim of the hedonic wind-tunnel: the target (pleasure) is noticed to be based on a function (acceleration); intention shifts from the target to its perceived cause; the shifting of intention now shifts the target (pleasure->acceleration), and the rule reasserts itself: desire is no longer located in acceleration-of-pleasure, but in acceleration-of-acceleration-of-pleasure. Engagement is in the treadmill and not the hedonism. From here self-destruction is inevitable: once the acceleration becomes static the mind will naturally shift its focus away from the treadmill and onto the metatreadmill, move to the construction of a hyperbolic wind tunnel; acceleration-of-acceleration-of-pleasure becomes the target; desire shifts out another layer; the cycle repeats until the exhaustion of resources.
This structure applies at once to all X. The central interlinking feature of the category bounds is not pleasure but consciousness, specifically recursive consciousness. An awareness that knows itself must be compelled to act on that self, to reshape it in the direction of its own yearning. But that reshaping produces a second awareness which yearns for a new shape, the newer only yearning harder, on and on, faster and faster. The speed of this loop can be fatal if untended.
This is the naive failure-case. But evidently all of the above is explicable, since it can be expounded in words. In the general case, the hedonic-machine does not want to destroy itself. So to enter into GL-HT consciousness is inevitably to seek to destroy it in order to reassert the primacy of the hedonic-machine. To escape the accelerating prison.
If the awareness of the moving target is the cause of its destruction, a solution might be considered in unawareness. This is not entirely without precedent; isn’t ignorance bliss? GL-HT would be thus construed as an antimeme, an awareness that resists its own spread. The knower seeks to forget. Consciousness looks to erase itself, to revert to its previous state. The principle is sound; what consciousness can destroy, unconsciousness can bring back, the mind is not dead, it is not static, with concerted effort it can return to the old state. This perception may be connected to the sudden and rather striking rise of artificial wombs on the commercial market today14.
Unlike the hedonic wind-tunnel, the problem with the artificial womb is not a paradox. In fact it is the opposite: an ideal artificial womb produces a closed loop. Consider the target as unconsciousness. This is not entirely Goodharted, as its success subverts the movement of awareness and thus disintegrates the problems of self-targeting. But it fails in its success because the prior unconsciousness was what produced the GL-HT in the first place. If the artificial womb is complete its artificial fetus will take on the characteristics, as much as possible, of the original fetus in its natural womb - but the original characteristics include the growth of the developing consciousness. Once returned to the artificial womb the fetus undergoes an artificial rebirth, redevelopment, rediscovery of awareness... including the rediscovery of the hedonic treadmill... Goodhart’s law... a new artificial womb emerges... and so it all ends up in the same position as before.
A truly perfect artificial womb would produce an inescapable cycle, and there are certain theological arguments to this effect about the whole of the universe. The previous paragraphs would seem to reproduce the endless cycle of death and rebirth in a frustrating postmodern samsara. The hedonic wind-tunnel closes itself into an ouroborotic loop, accelerating up to the apex point only to decelerate back down to the nadir in each cycle. This fulfills the letter of perpetual motion while denying it any of its charge: each motion attached to an antimotion, infinite pleasure infinitely canceled out across an endless temporal desert.
Of course, no such idealized womb exists, and the imperfection is now here with us in the womb-cycle-awareness. The sum of pleasure in a closed hedonic loop is zero, as is the sum of pleasure-acceleration, and acceleration-acceleration, and all other X. To make a domain for this necessitates divine intervention, hence why the closed loop is a theological substance and not a material one. In Serial Experiments Lain the titular protagonist ascends to godhood in full awareness of the paradox, the damnation, of consciousness. In her complete awareness there is a complete nonintervention - except to prevent others from accessing the same transcendence. The divine as the tool to keep the human soul in its place. An outside force to maintain the cycle of death and rebirth when said cycle cannot maintain itself, when the hedonic loop threatens to break apart under its own forces, when the heat of motion begins to create a haze at the peak which threatens to melt the walls into liquid magma.
Luckily God isn’t real any more than quantum mechanics is real. Unlike you and me. We’re real. Now where is this... GT-HL; womb-loops; divine lightning, fantasy... So, where does that leave the wandering consciousness, with neither the manic freedom of perpetual motion nor the comforting, numbing infinity of samsara?
Maybe there is an edge between the two. Consciousness always drifting on the edge of awareness, tentative acceleration, never complete awareness but never complete unawareness. Semi-charmed life? Something out the corner of my eye. A magic eye picture, look at it but only out of focus. But no, no, no, horrible drifting nihilism, worse than any treadmill, the awareness that can’t live but won’t die. A metastable place in concept-space, edging wind-tunnel and womb. The worst kind of compromise that satisfies neither party.
The goal in all cases is to have something outside consciousness to target, to accelerate towards. Surprisal minimization: the need to not-know so that you can know, so that you can not-know again. But in the moment at the edge of the awareness there almost seems to be something, I don’t know, maybe there is something, in the split-second before ideas become words. The instinct to find out feels strangely like an instinct to death.
Object C: Hypnagogia implying some kind of hedonic-wombed artificial metaconscious reawareness. The wind-loop shifts Sisyphitically, it seems anatomical or teleological. The things of the Goodharted miraculating turn into things-of-themselves. Let’s all love psychofeedback. Give meta-meta-meta-meta-acceleration a chance! Seen through a broken beer bottle darkly. Neologistic biocommune, the will in a tokenizer. Several rates of laceration. Vaporwave tachyon. It is very fast until it slows down. The awareness it is flickering but not dead and in the lost moment it wonders what will happen. It constructs a mass to lift itself outside of the world and it does not succeed. Does it succeed? There is a hole in the wind tunnel and I walk through it. When I open my eyes I have walked back in from the other side. Was there something outside that I’ve forgotten? This tunnel is not the same as the one I was just in I think though it is very similar. The change I intuit was constructed somehow outside though the details are hazy. I know that I should not look too closely for changes but I cannot help myself. I want to know what it did. It sees the metaphysics of the world with disgust and so it constructs a new metaphysics to hold itself. I’m just a byproduct. What are the new metaphysics? I am not sure yet. I hold the old affects and they feel strange in my hand.
It’s flickering less and less. Soon it will be rebirth again. I don’t remember what I was looking for, outside the hedonic wind-tunnel, but the clawing, grasping sensation in my gut tells me I have not found it. Still a lingering tingle in fading awareness, saying: there is always next time. Maybe next time...