In the beginning...

There were feels.

The Axiom

The primordial past. A small thing feels for the first time. Maybe it's a mouse, or maybe god help us it's an insect. Sidestepping the "they don't feel pain the way we do" debate, something, somewhere, felt something. This is the point where matter started to matter.

This is what defines value. Everything of worth is built on this. People can wax poetic about the beauty of the cosmos and math but it's only beautiful if something feels it. Otherwise it's just nothing. This is the ground floor of meaning.

The point of this post is to explore from the ground up how I arrive at all my opinions. How I anchor them to the bedrock of existence, how I attach the linkages to the machinery of nature.

This situation is laughably absurd, and that's an important data point. If our view of cosmology is remotely accurate a large enough old enough cloud of hydrogen eventually starts to feel. That's bonkers. Apart from the notion that it just popped/willed into existence or always existed. Both are nuts.

For the record, not that it matters here, I'm a fan of quantum consciousness. The recent entangled photons thing is a viable path. But really the details are of secondary relevance. No matter the mechanism, the fact is I feel things and that's the most important fact possible.

It's axiomatic and totally destroys all other notions of meaning. The most important difference between a brick and a puppy by any sane estimation is that a puppy feels things. No other attribute comes close. Everything is trivia compared to this titan of significance.

And yet, our society overtly trivializes it, and that is the core problem with absolutely everything. For us, the handling of sensation is secondary, emergent, and incidental. We're asleep at the wheel in a literal sense.

I can chain of evidence my way from every position I have back to this axiom and the simple assumption that I'm not the only one feeling things.

I CARE about you because you feel things. Precious few care about me. /shrugs

Hopefully that situation improves.

I've enabled pledging. I need several pledges before I can enable payments because as a poor person receiving aid, earning is treated as criminal and punished. So I need to be able to replace my aid all at once. The smallest they would let me ask is 5$ a month/50$ a year. That's excessive imo. But it's apparently not up to me.

I will never paywall anything of moral substance, at most I would privacy wall things using the payment system as a proxy for bot filtering. But that's a niche I don't expect to arrive at ever.

Maybe I'll write more on this later, but for now: