Daily pages - August 26, 2021

Good morning. I think it’s very interesting that when I come to my desk, I often find myself unsure of what I should start with. This morning, I cleared a bunch of windows in my browser, but still didn’t have a goal, and finding this window open, ready to receive my thoughts was a nice relief. This is my time to figure out what I’m doing today after the chaos of the morning getting the kids and dog taken care of.

Yesterday, I found myself wondering about the three-pronged model of sovereignty that Daniel Schmachtenberger outlines on his blog: sentience, reason, and agency. If you compare this with at least a couple of cyclical models of what humans do, those models have four parts: observe (sentience), orient (reason), design or decide (internal creation or simulation), and act (agency). I think it can probably be argued that sensemaking and design are both internal processes or modes of reasoning and therefore are just separated out for convenience of clarifying a cyclical process. I wonder, though, whether I should go ahead and make that distinction in the book. Instead of just World Creators, Artist-Poet-Scientists, and Comprehensive Sensemakers, I could add Designers.

Interestingly, in listing these, I mentioned the idea of running a simulation, which comes from Buster Benson’s idea of the Soloverse as an internal simulation of Universe. Does that mean that Personal Universe is my missing fourth aspect of being human? Maybe the pattern should be this idea that we are all designers and we use our personal universe as the main tool for that process in conjunction with our imagination.

I’m not sure yet, it doesn’t quite feel like it’s clicking for me, so it may not be quite right. I have always had a problem with Personal Universe as the name of the pattern. It seems odd to talk about something that we all already have, by just naming it. The real pattern is that we should be aware of it and we should be actively trying to strengthen it.

And it’s interesting that I never really thought about when we use it. We don’t really use it at the sensory level, though it helps us interpret sensory information. We can use if for making sense of things; I think we probably loop internally between sensemaking and simulation, testing ideas against the simulation to see what the result would be. In designing, we definitely use it to figure out what ideas (imagination) might work, and in agency, we pretty much try to carry out what we determined was the best course of action, though we go though the loop over and over to adjust.

Is sensemaking a form of design? I think it’s more a process of backtracking what we’re seeing according to our personal universe. Abductive reasoning is the main process of sensemaking, looking for possible reasons for some event of someone’s conclusions and looking for inconsistencies. It’s largely analytical. Design is different, I think. It involves ideation and imagination, it combines things in new ways and then tests those in simulation to see how they might work. The simulation helps us decide which option might be the best—which might have the best bet of working in the real world—so we can then test it in the real world.

So, are ideation and imagination part of personal universe, or are they outside of that universe? We have some cognitive abilities that live outside of the personal universe, I think, like our ability to even think about how we think. I feel like Vervanke makes a distinction here, between cognition and metacognition maybe. Yet metacognition can use psychotechnologies like literacy to be more effective.

I’ve had he thought that we may actually have multiple personal universes, one for each universe that we experience. And I’m talking about fictional universes built by authors or movie-makers. I assess things a little differently when I’m thinking about The Hobbit or Star Wars, though they both integrate aspects of the “real” universe such as gravity, seasons, etc. You could even say that by imagining a different future, you’re building a new personal universe that houses those new ideas. Even imagining the furniture in a room in a different arrangement creates a different universe, I suppose. In that sense, design is really about creating new universes in your mind, then trying to construct them in reality. We already know that it’s possible to construct a personal universe that has little to do with reality. Does that mean our personal universe is really a multiverse?

If we think of it as Marvel’s multiverse in recent shows and movies, it’s a reality from which other realties branch off. I guess most of it is the same, but some little bit diverges and creates a new reality. I feel like in our personal universe, these kinds of diversions are relatively small and disappear quickly if we choose not to act on them. It’s like they’re stored in computer memory that gets overwritten by other ideas if they’re not written down or otherwise realized. Or maybe our observation of reality is what resets things. Each time we sense, or pay attention to the universe around us, it shifts the simulation back to baseline. That might account for how people can get so far off track in their personal universe, simply by being selective in what they sense, they can ignore reality so their imagined reality isn’t overwritten. Maybe that’s why we describe mindfulness as having the effect of centering or grounding us. It’s bringing us back into touch with reality.