The Functionality of the Black Iron Prison

[Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard]

Does anyone really believe in the Black Iron Prison? What's the point of getting out of jail if escaping it was never your own choice to begin with?

I think the recognition of the prison & the decision to escape is a solid example of free will

I think you and I understand free will in different terms, but I more or less agree with your OP - that the universe discourages free will

If organic life is a collective organism, it's an organism that is confused, trapped in habit, and struggling (& often unwilling) to wake up.
This can be felt in our own lives.

This is more of what I'm interested in - but less of the BIP as a metaphor, and more as a potentially genuinely real thing that actually exists around either myself or all of us. I sometimes wonder if perhaps PKD was right and really onto something, and not just barreling down a methamphetamine-fueled journey into madness. Then again, perhaps madness is what it takes to recognize the real BIP, and a willingness to break away from the collective hypersanity; the wool we pull over our own eyes and believe is what sane people think and how sane people behave, only because it's what we've been told.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

I'm trying to figure out where the boundary is supposed to be between the person and their zone of activity. What does it mean to say "if I behave in a way that the construct isn't designed for" ? Where does "I" end and the "Construct" begin? Given that my physical being is governed inside by all the same phenomena that exist outside it, why should the construct even allow me to imagine an action that goes against it? Or, if I am an independent instance of awareness and action that is somehow fundamentally divided from the construct in a way that allows that, where is that division?

[Cramulus]

How many more times must we have the "god is in the gaps" argument?

we must imagine sisyphus happy

[LMNO]

How many more times must we have the "god is in the gaps" argument?

we must imagine sisyphus happy

[Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard]

But bluntly, your apparent lack of curiosity here baffles me.  You only ran the test once?  If someone showed me evidence of astral projection, I would be as curious as fuck.  I'd want to test that repeatedly, under many different conditions.  The consequences would be world-shattering.  It would transform our understanding of reality.

I think I was a little too awestruck at the time to pursue it any further. I think also I didn't want to wind up hitting it too hard and breaking it in the process. In the same way that a watched pot never boils, I figured that if I had stumbled upon something truly unique and world-shattering, it was something that would prove to be elusive if I actually attempted to catch it. It was almost like the universe was allowing me a glimpse of something, and if I ran after it, it would vanish forever, and I'd be left with nothing but the question of whether or not I ever saw it in the first place.

A bit like my description of the BIP acting as a deterrent. Which would also explain why hard proof of supernatural things continues to be accepted as nonexistent.

But this could all be described as mental gynmastics, and my personal experience is completely anecdotal.

I like to consider myself a logical person who sticks to the rules of critical thinking, and I believe that I performed a test that would serve my satisfaction if passed, enough to expand my horizons to the point where I could at least consider that the world is not entirely mundane. I also, again, did not wish to become so rigorous in my pursuit of an answer that I would put any strain on the relationship I had with the subject. She was coming out of a relationship with a very controlling boyfriend at the time, and I didn't want to put her under any real pressure.

She never struck me as someone who would gain anything from fooling anyone. Conversations we'd had about supernatural subjects always happened naturally, and she spoke about her experiences of things like being able to "tell if a house was haunted" with the casualness of someone who has a subdued but genuine faith in their religion, without the desperation of needing to convert or convince anyone else. I've known a lot of bullshitters, and nothing about her character ever smelled of it. She was just a chill goth girl from the scene who liked riding horses and had no professional interest in the occult.

Most people who make extraordinary claims will come up with some reason they can't undergo a test, and if they don't, they'll try to do as you originally expected, which is design the test themselves. One day, during one of our conversations, I asked her if she'd mind me putting her to the test, and her response wasn't one of hesitation. She basically just said sure, let's hang out, and I'll try to do whatever you want.

She'd never been to my house before, and I was with her the entire time. I already knew that I was going to have her try to go into a room into which she'd never been, so I made sure that there was no way for her to visit that space ahead of the test. The room was the kitchen, not visible from the entrance of the house. We hung out in my room for a bit (the kitchen not being on the way), and I told her what I was going to do: go into it, write something down, and stick it onto the fridge. And that's what I did, leaving her in the room.

The position of my room meant that there was absolutely no possible way for her to follow me without my knowing it. She could not have left the house without my being aware, and, say, made her way around to peer in through a window or something. I took a piece of paper, held it against the fridge, and wrote my name in large, capital letters. I figured my name was simple and obvious enough that it could be seen and recognized in what I imagined astral space to be like, since she had described it as being somewhat fuzzy, not exactly easy to make out details in. I thought making it personal would have a more human and emotional connection, rather than some arbitrary word like "bat", and I assumed that would have more draw in a spiritual realm.

Of course, she could have pegged me as self-absorbed or something, and guessed that I'd choose to write down my own name, of all things, but that seems like a bit of a stretch, and, anyway, it's not the answer she gave.

I went back into my room, sat on my bed, and she went into her trance for a while. She warned me that she couldn't make any promises, especially with a room she'd never visited before, but I wanted her to try. She came out of it after a little bit, and asked me if I had drawn something. I said, no. So she does it again, and comes back and says she keeps seeing little drawings, did I really not draw anything? I said, no, I wrote something down. So she tries again, and eventually gives up. She says she keeps seeing drawings. I asked her if she saw anything else at all. She stops for a moment and says she did see something like the letter "E", but it looked scribbled, like it had been written twice.

This is the point where I was so taken aback by the amount of detail that I had no explanation for what had happened. I already knew what she was referring to by the "drawings", but that wasn't good enough. Could she have guessed the exact circumstances of just how I'd written down my name, and with what? The chances are 50/50 each, or 25% combined:

1. pen/pencil
2. vertical/flat surface

Not to mention also correctly guessing the first letter; a 1/26 chance. And being savvy enough to skirt around it long enough to "seem" like she was having a hard time getting it? And then making it subtle by not revealing the whole word but only the first letter? These kinds of elaborate ways of thinking didn't match up with her personality-type, and, honestly, I'd say would put her on the same level of deduction as a fictional detective.

I took her into the kitchen and showed her the fridge. She started to freak out and got super excited; the door was covered with stick-figure drawings my roommates had done over the months. She pointed to them and shouted "That's what I kept seeing! These!" She didn't even care about what I'd written until I pointed it out to her: I'd used a pen to write my name, beginning with the letter E; having held it vertically, the ink didn't start flowing properly until the second letter, so I had to write the E over again.

This ultimately gives me several nearly equally inexplicable options:

1. She was a fucking ghost ninja.
2. She was a female Sherlock Holmes and a con-artist with nothing to gain but the satisfaction of fooling a random person this one time.
3. She was an extremely lucky guesser, so good, in fact, that she should be playing roulette in Vegas.
4. She astrally projected.

In all the times I've been over this, the simplest answer has always been that she astrally projected. The other explanations actually make less sense, in my opinion.

There are a fifth and sixth options, I suppose, and that's:

5. This never happened, the universe is an illusion that began this morning, and my memories are fake.
6. I'm absolutely insane and at some point created this person and my experience out of thin air and manifested clear memories of it in the process.

Who knows? I don't. It's the only genuinely mystical experience I've ever had, and being someone who is decidedly not sensitive to spiritual things, I decided it was better to just let it be what it was and not try too hard to figure it out.

From what I remember, she had a dad who was CIA or something. I've never given much credence to the MKULTRA conspiracy theories (despite it being an actual program), but I've sometimes wondered if maybe she was some kind of result of it, if indeed it ever had any amount of success.

I kept in touch with her a little over the years, and even mentioned the experience again once to her. I think she said something to the effect of it having been a long time since she messed around with any of it. If I still had her contact info, I'd consider doing another run, maybe a few tests in a row.

She actually suggested that I try it myself that night we did it. I did, but I just don't have any knack for meditation. I keep wanting to fix that, take a yoga class or something. Doing it on my own, my brain just gets in the way.

I don't have any idea what the hell this thing is that we find ourselves in, or why it's here or what it's for, and I assume that anyone who says they do is lying. I don't tend to have beliefs in anything, but my mind remains open.

Providing, of course, that I don't smell bullshit. And I usually do.

[Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard]

I'm trying to figure out where the boundary is supposed to be between the person and their zone of activity. What does it mean to say "if I behave in a way that the construct isn't designed for" ? Where does "I" end and the "Construct" begin? Given that my physical being is governed inside by all the same phenomena that exist outside it, why should the construct even allow me to imagine an action that goes against it? Or, if I am an independent instance of awareness and action that is somehow fundamentally divided from the construct in a way that allows that, where is that division?

Where does a game end and a player begin?

If you haven't played The Stanley Parable, I highly recommend it. Or just sit through a Let's Play of the whole thing. But playing it is better.

https://www.stanleyparable.com/

I'm planning on giving the author's subsequent work a go. I think it's called The Beginner's Guide.

[altered]

...You got cold-read.

"Drawings" could be any kind of symbols or mascots on papers on the fridge. Actual drawings? Serendipitous but not necessary to be "right".

"E but doubled" is easy. An E isn't a 1/26 chance, it's THE MOST COMMON LETTER IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. By a pretty far margin, actually. 12% of all letters in English are Es. 12% is a way higher amount than 1/26th.

"Doubled"/"scribbled" is an escape hatch. It makes it work whether there are Es or not: E, F, T, H can all be described as "kind of like an E". In lower case letters, you get a, c, o, s. You'll notice these are pretty goddamn common backups.

The usual words used for this escape hatch are more like twisted/distorted/warped to cover all of those clearly. But this is good enough for some wiggle room.

You were conned. I have used these exact methods to con people in this exact way more than once.

[Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard]

...You got cold-read.

"Drawings" could be any kind of symbols or mascots on papers on the fridge. Actual drawings? Serendipitous but not necessary to be "right".

"E but doubled" is easy. An E isn't a 1/26 chance, it's THE MOST COMMON LETTER IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. By a pretty far margin, actually. 12% of all letters in English are Es. 12% is a way higher amount than 1/26th.

"Doubled"/"scribbled" is an escape hatch. It makes it work whether there are Es or not: E, F, T, H can all be described as "kind of like an E". In lower case letters, you get a, c, o, s. You'll notice these are pretty goddamn common backups.

The usual words used for this escape hatch are more like twisted/distorted/warped to cover all of those clearly. But this is good enough for some wiggle room.

You were conned. I have used these exact methods to con people in this exact way more than once.

The best part about this is that your response reads more like a con than an actual con.

The perfect results came out of all possible potentials in one fell swoop? Try me another. Nobody is that good, certainly not without getting paid for it.

[Doktor Howl]

This is all entirely too complicated.  It's what happens when you let primates move off of the savannah and allow them to play with fire.  They get all confused.  "Who am I?  What am I?  Do I have free will or agency, or do the angry thunder gods control my fate?"

Well, the Doktor is here to explain it to you: 

You are a weaponized ape.  You are nothing BUT free will and a bag of destructive tendencies.  Denying your free will is a category mistake.  The fact that you have fooled yourself into thinking there is a greater plan than "OOG SMASH" is EXACTLY why we're in the mess we're today.  Everyone's overthinking things, and worried that they are pissing off the gods, and trying to think of magical ways to appease those gods, though they may not think of it that way.

1.  You can't not piss off the gods.
2.  You cannot appease the gods once they are pissed off.
3.  Fuck the gods.  Right in their ear holes.  They are nothing but trouble.  Who ASKED them in the first fucking place?  Send the bastards home with a black eye and a fat lip.  Come around here telling us how to act?  The fuck you will.

It's a sad, sad day when I have to point at Anton LeVay as the only person with the right fucking idea.  That shit makes me feel dirty.

And here's the thing about category mistakes:  They blind you to reality one piece at a time, until you run into what we doktors call an "outside context event".  Usually this only happens once to an individual, a business, a society, or a species.  Because you almost never survive them.  What it IS, is a problem that you could not see coming and therefore could do nothing about.  And it doesn't matter if you couldn't see it because you just couldn't see it, or if you couldn't see it because you had your head up your ass worrying about free will or "being in the moment" or whatever the hell the kids are calling it these days.

[Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard]

This is all entirely too complicated.  It's what happens when you let primates move off of the savannah and allow them to play with fire.  They get all confused.  "Who am I?  What am I?  Do I have free will or agency, or do the angry thunder gods control my fate?"

Well, the Doktor is here to explain it to you: 

You are a weaponized ape.  You are nothing BUT free will and a bag of destructive tendencies.  Denying your free will is a category mistake.  The fact that you have fooled yourself into thinking there is a greater plan than "OOG SMASH" is EXACTLY why we're in the mess we're today.  Everyone's overthinking things, and worried that they are pissing off the gods, and trying to think of magical ways to appease those gods, though they may not think of it that way.

1.  You can't not piss off the gods.
2.  You cannot appease the gods once they are pissed off.
3.  Fuck the gods.  Right in their ear holes.  They are nothing but trouble.  Who ASKED them in the first fucking place?  Send the bastards home with a black eye and a fat lip.  Come around here telling us how to act?  The fuck you will.

It's a sad, sad day when I have to point at Anton LeVay as the only person with the right fucking idea.  That shit makes me feel dirty.

And here's the thing about category mistakes:  They blind you to reality one piece at a time, until you run into what we doktors call an "outside context event".  Usually this only happens once to an individual, a business, a society, or a species.  Because you almost never survive them.  What it IS, is a problem that you could not see coming and therefore could do nothing about.  And it doesn't matter if you couldn't see it because you just couldn't see it, or if you couldn't see it because you had your head up your ass worrying about free will or "being in the moment" or whatever the hell the kids are calling it these days.

You know, Roger, the more you say things, the less I dislike you.

[altered]

...You got cold-read.

"Drawings" could be any kind of symbols or mascots on papers on the fridge. Actual drawings? Serendipitous but not necessary to be "right".

"E but doubled" is easy. An E isn't a 1/26 chance, it's THE MOST COMMON LETTER IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. By a pretty far margin, actually. 12% of all letters in English are Es. 12% is a way higher amount than 1/26th.

"Doubled"/"scribbled" is an escape hatch. It makes it work whether there are Es or not: E, F, T, H can all be described as "kind of like an E". In lower case letters, you get a, c, o, s. You'll notice these are pretty goddamn common backups.

The usual words used for this escape hatch are more like twisted/distorted/warped to cover all of those clearly. But this is good enough for some wiggle room.

You were conned. I have used these exact methods to con people in this exact way more than once.

The best part about this is that your response reads more like a con than an actual con.

The perfect results came out of all possible potentials in one fell swoop? Try me another. Nobody is that good, certainly not without getting paid for it.

I would have been your guru when I was 15.

No one here knew me then, mind you, but they knew me when I was 19 and they're probably snort laughing at the idea.

It is EASY to do this stuff. It's so easy you don't even need to TRY. You absolutely can do it by accident.

Go on, give it a shot sometime. Meet someone and try to trick them into believing you have psychic abilities.

If you fail on the first attempt, you were failing on purpose. Try twice.

I could say "try it whenever you have the chance", of course. "Getting it perfect" even once should be enough of a shock that a hundred trials with one success should be surprising. That said, you really only need two: first one will see if you are prone to self-sabotage or not, second will work without fail.

I'm not joking, either. Any passingly intelligent person can convince people they're psychic.

[Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard]

...You got cold-read.

"Drawings" could be any kind of symbols or mascots on papers on the fridge. Actual drawings? Serendipitous but not necessary to be "right".

"E but doubled" is easy. An E isn't a 1/26 chance, it's THE MOST COMMON LETTER IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. By a pretty far margin, actually. 12% of all letters in English are Es. 12% is a way higher amount than 1/26th.

"Doubled"/"scribbled" is an escape hatch. It makes it work whether there are Es or not: E, F, T, H can all be described as "kind of like an E". In lower case letters, you get a, c, o, s. You'll notice these are pretty goddamn common backups.

The usual words used for this escape hatch are more like twisted/distorted/warped to cover all of those clearly. But this is good enough for some wiggle room.

You were conned. I have used these exact methods to con people in this exact way more than once.

The best part about this is that your response reads more like a con than an actual con.

The perfect results came out of all possible potentials in one fell swoop? Try me another. Nobody is that good, certainly not without getting paid for it.

I would have been your guru when I was 15.

No one here knew me then, mind you, but they knew me when I was 19 and they're probably snort laughing at the idea.

It is EASY to do this stuff. It's so easy you don't even need to TRY. You absolutely can do it by accident.

Go on, give it a shot sometime. Meet someone and try to trick them into believing you have psychic abilities.

If you fail on the first attempt, you were failing on purpose. Try twice.

I could say "try it whenever you have the chance", of course. "Getting it perfect" even once should be enough of a shock that a hundred trials with one success should be surprising. That said, you really only need two: first one will see if you are prone to self-sabotage or not, second will work without fail.

I'm not joking, either. Any passingly intelligent person can convince people they're psychic.

Everything her personality lacked, you're radiating. I find it completely unconvincing.

Let me put you to her test. Let's see if you pass it.

[Doktor Howl]

This is all entirely too complicated.  It's what happens when you let primates move off of the savannah and allow them to play with fire.  They get all confused.  "Who am I?  What am I?  Do I have free will or agency, or do the angry thunder gods control my fate?"

Well, the Doktor is here to explain it to you: 

You are a weaponized ape.  You are nothing BUT free will and a bag of destructive tendencies.  Denying your free will is a category mistake.  The fact that you have fooled yourself into thinking there is a greater plan than "OOG SMASH" is EXACTLY why we're in the mess we're today.  Everyone's overthinking things, and worried that they are pissing off the gods, and trying to think of magical ways to appease those gods, though they may not think of it that way.

1.  You can't not piss off the gods.
2.  You cannot appease the gods once they are pissed off.
3.  Fuck the gods.  Right in their ear holes.  They are nothing but trouble.  Who ASKED them in the first fucking place?  Send the bastards home with a black eye and a fat lip.  Come around here telling us how to act?  The fuck you will.

It's a sad, sad day when I have to point at Anton LeVay as the only person with the right fucking idea.  That shit makes me feel dirty.

And here's the thing about category mistakes:  They blind you to reality one piece at a time, until you run into what we doktors call an "outside context event".  Usually this only happens once to an individual, a business, a society, or a species.  Because you almost never survive them.  What it IS, is a problem that you could not see coming and therefore could do nothing about.  And it doesn't matter if you couldn't see it because you just couldn't see it, or if you couldn't see it because you had your head up your ass worrying about free will or "being in the moment" or whatever the hell the kids are calling it these days.

You know, Roger, the more you say things, the less I dislike you.

Wisest man I ever knew was Orton Nenslo.  Also the biggest asshole.  The two qualities are unrelated.

Not that I am sitting here claiming wisdom or anything.

[altered]

Sure: think of a random number. One digit. You may change your mind from the very first number to come to mind — once.

I'll come back to this.



With one bit of information that your friend definitely had, I can do a pretty convincing job just playing the odds. This is one of those things that gives you an absurd amount of information because it ties into the social fabric you grew up in.

Rough age. Call it the five year span in which your birthday falls. That's all it takes for me to dig up your childhood memories (mostly fake — focus on stuff most kids have happen and lean on the fuzziness of childhood memories to do the dirty work) and tell you a nightmare you had as a kid you didn't know you remembered vividly. (You probably didn't have that nightmare, but one a lot like it, and the imagery is probably pretty strong for you.)

It also gives me enough information to figure out what you consider a random word, because it will be similar phonologically to unusual words you heard growing up.

If you also give me your favorite movie and favorite book, I can spin a frankly creepy account of who you are as a person out of nothing. This part is the same exact approach taken for horoscopes, but hits harder because it uses narrative touchstones that you identify with personally in some way.

With the city you grew up in and your career, I can speak in broad strokes about your life story and hit them dead on. All it takes is extrapolating from the culture you grew up in and the life path you followed and making them meet in the middle.

Seriously. This is easy stuff. You can decode  anyone in this sort of way, not because they are predictable but because humans are bundles of heuristics and stupidity. They necessarily follow certain patterns. Social pressure narrows things even further. You will never pick out the meal they had three days after their 13th birthday, but you can figure out what their ideas of "random" are and get a good idea of what their life path was like.

Fun fact: this works really well in crowds because you can play statistics against them. Eyeball the average age group, describe a very common story for someone in that age group, and pick someone out of the crowd and say "You!" They'll say no, then you say a childhood friend of theirs perhaps, and OH GOODNESS YOU'RE RIGHT.



Right. So, that number. It was 7. But you probably changed your mind immediately after you picked that, and decided on 3 or 9 instead.

This is not hard to do. This will usually be the case for any human you talk to. I encourage you to try it.

[Doktor Howl]

Sure: think of a random number. One digit. You may change your mind from the very first number to come to mind — once.

I'll come back to this.



With one bit of information that your friend definitely had, I can do a pretty convincing job just playing the odds. This is one of those things that gives you an absurd amount of information because it ties into the social fabric you grew up in.

Rough age. Call it the five year span in which your birthday falls. That's all it takes for me to dig up your childhood memories (mostly fake — focus on stuff most kids have happen and lean on the fuzziness of childhood memories to do the dirty work) and tell you a nightmare you had as a kid you didn't know you remembered vividly. (You probably didn't have that nightmare, but one a lot like it, and the imagery is probably pretty strong for you.)

It also gives me enough information to figure out what you consider a random word, because it will be similar phonologically to unusual words you heard growing up.

If you also give me your favorite movie and favorite book, I can spin a frankly creepy account of who you are as a person out of nothing. This part is the same exact approach taken for horoscopes, but hits harder because it uses narrative touchstones that you identify with personally in some way.

With the city you grew up in and your career, I can speak in broad strokes about your life story and hit them dead on. All it takes is extrapolating from the culture you grew up in and the life path you followed and making them meet in the middle.

Seriously. This is easy stuff. You can decode  anyone in this sort of way, not because they are predictable but because humans are bundles of heuristics and stupidity. They necessarily follow certain patterns. Social pressure narrows things even further. You will never pick out the meal they had three days after their 13th birthday, but you can figure out what their ideas of "random" are and get a good idea of what their life path was like.

Fun fact: this works really well in crowds because you can play statistics against them. Eyeball the average age group, describe a very common story for someone in that age group, and pick someone out of the crowd and say "You!" They'll say no, then you say a childhood friend of theirs perhaps, and OH GOODNESS YOU'RE RIGHT.



Right. So, that number. It was 7. But you probably changed your mind immediately after you picked that, and decided on 3 or 9 instead.

This is not hard to do. This will usually be the case for any human you talk to. I encourage you to try it.

So basically cold reading.  People remember the hits and not the misses, and will tailor or even manufacture memories despite themselves.