And I think one thing I learned is sometimes a very few set of qualities can be a complete instruction set; if you can stay supple enough that you don’t get sort of closed down, and then lose that evolvability. And by instruction set, what I mean is like, your Intel or ARM processor, it has, I’m just gonna make up a number, 64 instructions that it then is able to act on with the actual transistors of the chip. It can add, it can multiply, it can jump, it can concatenate, it can flip, whatever, whatever. And basically every program you write gets turned into a series of these instructions. And when it says 3.6 gigahertz, it’s like, it can do this many instructions per that. And I think the problem with most of us is reality is tough to us; we start to shut down. And it pushes us to be effective in narrow ways. It’s the lizard that can escape the snakes, but your instruction set might become 42. And guess what? For the most part, you can get away with having an instruction set of 42. It looks there’s no sort of discernible difference, except at a soul level. You sort of, like, know there’s a part of you you’ve cut off, a part of you have abandoned, a part of the world you’ve now lost wonder in. I think the problem with that is when you don’t have a complete instruction set, you can’t compute over all of computing.

It’s a Turing-complete machine. If you have a f- complete instruction set, you can do all of computing. And over time, the ability to do all of computing is actually what allows you to have great capacity - evolve and pioneer things. Even if in the short term it doesn’t look much. And I think the combination of sort of having faith, staying supple, feeling the pain, feeling the heartbreak, feeling the fear, always being curious and humble, always assuming, trying to falsify myself, searching for the best teachers, you know, doing the work, listening to the whispers, whatever it may be. I feel even if I lacked in a lot of ways, I somehow had the set of qualities or I chose such that I had a complete instruction set. And with that, even if it may be inefficient and painful at times, you can sort of bootstrap yourself into all the other things.

FROM:

Dialectic with Jackson Dahl

Anjan Katta: A Sunrise Over Computing - Daylight Computer, Light, Agency, Humanity - Dialectic

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Staying open is the key to being a full person, being fully present, in the future. Avoid limiting beliefs that reduce your instruction set and reduce your abilities in the future.