MOVED TO GOOGLE DOCS 07.02.2020
The Existential Creator Model is an examination of my life using a software engineering method called a “system analysis”. This piece examines all elements of my life in a procedural fashion and will be most appreciated by those with a technical mindset.
I have always admired the taxonomies across various disciplines which allowed biologists, mathematicians, physicists and various other scientists to achieve integrated and useful outcomes in their respective fields. I was determined to contribute to the emerging framework of life, and started “Project Now”, a way of conceptualizing and enabling large-scale digital representation of the real world. After several years of work, I was devastated when I discovered the “Universal Modeling Language“, a tool that software engineers could use to rapidly design and implement software systems based on real-world scenarios.
Though I was unclear where my contributions would fit, when I had a spiritual experience at 22 I became convinced that there was an inner science that could be integrated with the science of the outer world. I could verify spiritual truths at the intuitive level; but somehow I couldn’t translate those into direct change within my life. I needed answers as technical and precise as my thinking, followed up with practical steps and observable changes.
Consequently, I spent the first half of my 20s looking for a “theory of everything” that would connect the dots between my internal and external experiences. I aspired for practical applications to achieve ideologically consistent outcomes in my life because I want to live my understanding, not just write books and talk about it at parties. I was so moved I bought a one-way ticket to Asia with my financial aid money and settled into a remote, isolated Himalayan cottage to discover the new science.
By 26, my search had yielded an interesting political philosophy and some important insights I’d come back to later in life, but ultimately I hit a theoretical dead-end. Though I didn’t find the answers I set out to find, I had achieved some important practical outcomes. Namely, I transformed my life in pursuit of a answers: I rejected the consumer lifestyle, learned how to live and thrive off the grid, made spiritual satisfaction a central character of my life, and written hundreds of pages of theory. Though my prose was complex and mechanical, I had made some vital theoretical breakthroughs. Each of these were essential aspects of what I’d come to term the “disengagement” later in life.
The next time I resumed my search for the inner-outer connection was in my late 30s. After nearly 12 years building enterprise software, I had refined my skills as an analyst and systems architect, and had crafted hundreds of practical, as well as ambitious software projects, many which opened entirely new corridors of thought in software development. Why not approach the inner-outer problem as a software engineer, I thought? For engineers, the first step in understanding a system is to model it.
As I crafted what would become the Existential Creator Model, I added three key criteria:
- It must define experience from my perspective
- I must be able to validate all of my propositions myself
- It must be practical, enabling me to actually live my understanding
The life system
To an engineer, a “system” is a collection of components with functions and properties that work together to serve or achieve some purpose. We produce a “system analysis” to describe how all of the components of a system interrelate and work together to accomplish their objectives.
Taking my life as the system, the complete system of my life is “my reality”, and it’s functioning is my experience. As a system, my experience of reality is divided into two distinct experiential components: those phenomena which I conceive, and those which I perceive. More precisely:
- The conceptual is that which I internally, non-physically experience as intangible thoughts, feelings, memories, and ideas. Concepts are the object of the conceptual, and others cannot directly perceive or verify what I conceive.
- The perceptual are those phenomena which I perceive externally, physically, and directly, such as objects in my environment, other people, and natural phenomena. Percepts are the object of the perceptual, and can be directly experienced and verified by others.
Additionally, I experience the perceptual and conceptual as emanating from some place I can describe as the center of my existence, which I call my original. This epicenter lies at the intersection of the two components and can be described as the “observer”.
In the diagram below I have labeled these three components and arranged them in a way that corresponds to my actual experience. Note that I have used the convention of dotted lines for my conceptual experience and solid lines for my perceptual experience. This supports the traditional idea of my conceptual experience being subjective while my perceptual experience is objective.
Taking it a step further, I can segment these components into distinct subsets based on my experience. One clear subset of my perceptual experience is my physical body, which has a distinct physical boundary within my perceptual environment.
Additionally, there are a less formal, but equally separate set of mental, emotional, spiritual, and conceptual constructs I’d refer to as my “conceptual body”, which is my sense of self. It would contain my identity, personality, characteristics, feelings, and general concept of who I am.
I’ve add these to the emerging diagram as body shapes, as shown below.
I am able to place all of my direct experiences into this model. Something I conceive may influence my actions until it manifests as a percept, and vice-versa. The interplay of these two halves form my reality. All of my experience can be further sub-divided into the following categories:
- My original. This is what I experience as the observer deepest within me at the very center of my being. It is the apparent source of everything I conceive and perceive. It feels like everything else is accumulated on top of the center.
- My perceptual. My outer life experience of the “natural” world.
- My perceptual self. This is the physical layer which I experieince most acutely. It is everything that I consider my physical body and responds to physical sensations. I use it to move and interact with the material world.
- My perceptual imminent. These are things outside of my physical body, that I can directly and physically perceive. My immediate environment, including people and objects.
- My conceptual. My inner life experience reacting to and participating in the creative process in my life.
- My conceptual self. This is the abstract counterpart to the perceptual body; it is the set of self-thoughts, feelings, and emotions that I consider “Marc”. It includes my habits, values, personality; everything I consider to be “me” that is non-physical. Utility-based knowledge such as language, mathematics, learned skills.
- My conceptual imminent. These are the immediate abstract concepts, active thoughts, memories, feelings, and percepts tied to immediate extra-self percepts. When I see a mountain, an extra-body percept, I reflect on it as an extra-body concept. This is knowledge that I have retained and can call on demand, such as the name of a tree, or the fantasy of scaling a mountaintop.
- My conceptual periphery. Containing, but beyond my conceptual imminent, is my conceptual periphery. This is every non-imminent mental conceptualization I have such as plans, thoughts, fantasies, desires, feelings, opinions, memories, knowledge, skills, beliefs, values, superstitions, ideas. This segment of my perspective continues to grow and consume new information and experiences throughout life. My tendencies are formed by my conceptual margin.
- My conceptual unknown. These are concepts that I know or believe in but don’t directly experience as perception (eg, my fantasies, worldly beliefs). It includes a number of different types.
- My unknown known concepts. These are concepts that I believe exist, but that I believe I do not know (eg, topics I believe in but I do not believe I fully understand). Mysteries, other people’s ideas, theory of evolution, etc. I believe these things exist, but I do not know what I need to know in order to fully understand them. I believe these things exist, but I do not believe I have the means to ascertain their truth. For example, I may believe the existence of a galaxy, but I do believe that I do not have the means to directly ascertain the truth of that. I believe others have, in my place.
- My unknown unknown concepts. These are all of the percepts and concepts that I believe exist but I do not have direct experience of. Admissions and belief that there are “things I don’t know”. This is the belief I have that I do not know everything. This state opens me to an expansion of my beliefs, and a subsequent diminishment of myself. When I believe that I know everything, this ceases to exist for me.
Taken together these form my entire life – everything I experience falls into one or more of these categories.
How the Conceptual and Perceptual Interact
My reality is the fluid experience of the Conceptual and Perceptual. The Conceptual and Perceptual are directly connected to one another along a continuous spectrum. I experience this connection through my Center, where Percepts are further experienced as concepts, and concepts as percepts.
In the diagram below, I see (i.e., perceive) a tree. Upon seeing that tree, I think about (i.e., conceive) the nature of the tree. In this way, a percept has manifested concepts.
Image source (url)
In the second diagram below, the opposite has happened. I have decided that I want to see a tree (i.e., a concept), and presumably divert my attention in some way to see a tree (i.e., a percept). In this way, the originating conception manifested as a perception as indicated below.
Image source (url)
Obviously at any given moment in time I’m experiencing more than one percept and one concept. But the key takeaway is that what I perceptually experience directly impacts what I conceptually experience, and vice-versa.
Like a prism dividing light into different colors, a percept can directly split into multiple types of concept: emotions, lustful desires, ambitious desires, ideas, memories, anticipations. The percept of a big tree might evoke: feelings of peace and tranquility; memories of a tree from my childhood; desire for a similar tree in my yard; ideas of where to plant a tree in my yard; fantasies of climbing the tree; and thoughts of the name and species of the tree. These can all happen more or less simultaneously. Within this model, all are conceptual because they occur internally.
The pattern: how concepts and percepts relate
The framework binding all of my concepts and percepts together into a contextual whole is called a “production”. A production is a collection of actors, playing roles, acting to accomplish some objective or set of objectives.
Everything I do, think, believe, want, perceive, and observe exists within the context of at least one production pattern. Every actor assumes one or more roles in countless formal and amorphous productions they participate in. As a role-playing actor, I’m constantly performing according to the expectations of my role. Productions can vary in every conceivable way, from size and scale, to participation requirements and purpose (see Appendix: Role Examples).
My first role was involuntary as a dependent neonate. The production aimed to sustain and nurture my life, with my mother as the primary caregiver, supported by her husband and family, friends, and even the various local, state, and federal governments which all played some role in facilitating my survival. Any person or system contributing toward that shared objective of ensuring my survival was a participant in that production. But beyond these active participants, passive contributors such as moral and ethical value systems also influenced my nurturing and survival.
I continued to be fully dependent throughout the early years of my life, but began to form my own preferences. This was the emergence of a new production, where I was the demander and my primary caretaker was the responder to those demands. Over time I was slowly introduced to new, mostly family-based productions in a process of production diversification. I learned how to behave as a child in different situations, and eventually how to contribute more concretely with my labor in doing chores under my mother’s supervision.
As I grew, the roles multiplied and expanded in variety and complexity. Child, brother, friend, member, student, caretaker, employee, customer, boyfriend, and thousands of other roles I occupied, some lasting only seconds, while others will be with me until the day I die. As I was exposed to life and the larger world, I began to conceptualize and understand my role in much larger productions such as my state and country. One important production, which everyone participated in, was the singular belief in the value and importance of wealth. Everyone agreed it was important, wanted more, and fixated on those with it. I certainly knew my role within this production; I had none. But I accepted those values and began to imagine myself playing the role of a wealthy person.
Productions can be actual relationships with other individuals, exclusive memberships within larger groups, or distributed social groups without defined leadership. They can vary in almost every way, but they are all relationships in which beliefs and values are imparted, consumed, and internalized. Those in turn influence me to think (conceptual) and behave (perceptual) in certain ways. These patterns and behaviors are my performances, and they largely define my life. It was in these roles that I established, derived, and manifested my reality, including all of the countless percepts and concepts which together have created my experience.
Production Summary
After 40 years of life I have performed in countless productions within my family, community, school, jobs, relationships and more. I am still enmeshed in many of them, and many more open every day. Productions are useful for understanding my beliefs, values, and behaviors, but they are also nebulous and difficult to qualify.
The foundational production, in which all others are nested, is the belief that I’m alive. Further, I value life, I want to live, and I fear death. As an actor within the production of life, I strive to survive, self-preserve, avoid pain, and be comfortable. Other actors include all people and all other life, to varying degrees.
The next production is the generic social production; it is the belief that there are other people, and how I want to relate to them and how I want them to relate to and treat me. The social production is powerful, and determines to what extent I will go to gain approval, and how I
One of the more important productions I participate in is the economic production. In it, I value wealth, materials, and consumerism. Though the feel-good message that we were all equal was everywhere, some were more deserving of better things because they had the talents, skills and resources to acquire more money.
There are productions for every aspect of my identity. As a white man, as a business-owner. Intersectional politics is a great study in the mechanics of productions. I integrated these productions and their values into my life. My behavior is directly tied to the roles I play, values and beliefs I hold.
Public schooling and the various media channels introduced me to the academic productions, notably the ritualized worshipping of social, intellectual and historical celebrities in all subjects. Each new field I was introduced to had its own larger-than-life heroes. My role in all of these productions was as believer, adherent, and admirer. For those who dared, an aspirant. I was to look to these heroes for guidance in my own life. They asked questions and found answers so that I didn’t have to.
All of these productions, and my performances within them, coalesced into a worldview where I’m only one of seven billion observers and participants, temporarily competing for resources and experiencing this massive universe. The universe exists outside of, all around, and fully without me. I’m not required for any of it; it will continue on with or without me.
This is the reality I have been creating my entire life. I feel small in this reality. The default perspective is all-pervasive. Embedded in every single message we consume are values. Every message is something we learn. These values are encoded in all forms of speech and reinforce the default perspective.
Long before I had even figured out what life was, I was committed to playing roles in vast and impactful productions. I accepted things that, to this day, dominate my day-to-day activities and expectations of myself. In essence, if my life is what I do and think, then my life has belonged to actors in productions I don’t even know, and certainly never had a chance to evaluate or think about.
It’s no wonder I left America. Imagine life as a series of overlapping productions. I’m exhausted even imagining all of the roles I play in this world and in my fantasy world. There is no room for asking the most important question of all: what am I doing here? Every part of my conceptual and perceptual experience were mapped out and colonized by productions I had no part in. One begins to understand that his life is not his; it belongs to everyone else.
Because every one of those roles give me a purpose; I’m here to play this role. I had to break all of those roles to be able to re-write the story with a new central role. I needed a purpose-driving perspective; not a perspective driven by circumstance.
A dedicated commitment to “find oneself” is essentially a demand to pause and re-evaluate. And at first, while you think you are finding the real you, if you keep going, you realize that the real you is all of those productions. All that remains after those is the observer. And all the observer wants, when you listen, is peace.
…