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- If it takes 4-8 months to discover we have feet, I suspect that in a very literal sense we never discover all the mental muscles we have
Robert Kegan’s ‘stages of development’ discusses how growing up involves learning how to treat more and more elements of our inner worlds as objects — when we’re small there are many aspects of experience that feel like non-negotiable conditions that we are subject to. Later, we learn to treat some of these conditions (‘rulesets’) as objects that we can look at, manipulate, & choose between
Vasocomputation suggests this corresponds with progressively learning to clench more and more areas of our vasculature. Being able to physically clench the vasculature in a subregion means being able to control the patterns flowing through it
In the future, I suspect we’ll be able make a map of where our hand of the mind has learned to grip — and this map will correspond with what classes of computations/sensations we have *phenomenological agency* over
This suggests that aphantasia is a muscular development issue — something I’m calling a ‘deficit of vasomuscular access’. Fixable with the right mental calisthenics
(Fwiw it looks like we have somewhere between ~10m-1b ‘vascular addressable units’ just in the brain alone; clenches can be tiny)