Witness-Oriented Programming: Consciousness As Reducer; Same Events, Different Universes

How can two children, each abused by their father under similar circumstances, emerge from atrocity with two disparate views of reality, one of total despair and the other of hopeful agony?

Those children share an overwhelming amount of the same childhood events. What creates PTSD in one child and post-traumatic growth in the other is that each lives in a disparate universe, not different perspectives.

Their consciousness constitutes their reality.

Witness-Oriented Programming

I built Witness-Oriented Programming to formalize this phenomenon: https://github.com/mv2kprf1/necessity

The Dual Axis

There exists two axes:

  1. Necessity (Horizontal)

    1. Immutable event log: what happened has happened
    2. It cannot be changed: append only

  2. Grace (Vertical)

    1. How each witness interprets the event log
    2. A mutable reducer
    3. Can be changed
;; A child experiences cruelty
(define events
  (list (event 'e1 '() "beaten by parent" 'suffering)
        (event 'e2 '(e1) "pleaded for mercy" 'despair)
        (event 'e3 '(e2) "beaten again" 'suffering)))

;; Two witnesses: two universes
(fold-events ordinary-reducer '() events)
;; → '(despair more-despair despair)

(fold-events grace-reducer '() events)
;; → '(calls-for-justice transformed calls-for-justice)

Same events, different universes. The difference is measurable given two reducers, not symbolic.

Implications

  1. Consciousness is the reducer

    1. "You" are the reducer
    2. Death is the dissolution of the reducer from the material body

  2. Healing from trauma is computationally cheap, existentially costly

    1. Transforming from one reducer to another requires re-folding the entire event log
    2. 11 years of childhood trauma = approximately 4,015 daily events, or 4015 re-reductions
    3. Healing is slow because phenomenology is O(N): little cost for computers but immense cost for humans

  3. Each person lives in their own universe

    1. If our reducers differ, your fold result and mine are incompatible
    2. The necessary world (material reality) simply is: the fold result is the encoding of personal reality
    3. When two people disagree, the social struggle is the collision of two universes

  4. Grace is orthogonal to necessity

    1. You can't change what happened
    2. But you can change how it reconstitutes your reality
    3. The derivative reconstitutes the constitutive
  5. Empathy is the running of another's reducer: computing what they compute

Constitution and Derivation

In the beginning was nothing, and so in the beginning was something. In the beginning was the logos, and so in the beginning was possibility. Constitution and derivation.

That possibility necessarily manifested into life, or “let there be light.” Instantiations under Necessity: derivative.

All derivations are linked to some constitution.

A chain of links: logos, Necessity, being, consciousness, individual action. Each part dependent on the previous. The mystery of existence: why something rather than nothing?

We operate in gravity’s realm of derivation. Who we become renders self-aligned actions onto the world we inhabit, or the perspective of coherence.

In this sense, derivative things can also be constitutive. Like all chains: interiorly bidirectional. Grace is the miracle of a derivative link constituting the previous link.

Upwards movement.

And it was good.