Tag: Mason Lai

Quantifiable

Mason Lai1 Comment

How should we assign meaning?

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

I wish I could quantify my existence. In a meaningless world, we place meaning where we believe it should reside. In doing so, we do ourselves a disservice, by attempting to quantify the unquantifiable: the subjective experience we’ve all come to know as “life”.

Our lives are inherently unquantifiable. So in a subjective world, why do we place objective values on things and titles? Similar to how we value flashy cars, expensive clothes, the most lucrative jobs etc, as humans we are always placing meaning in hierarchies, attempting to quantify our success as people by assigning more or less merit to arbitrary items or statuses we hold.

Why do we do this? Because we realize deep down that no one else can really tell us what matters and what doesn’t. And maybe it scares us to not have a scale. To not have an easily packaged number that tells us our score in life. It leads us to the question of success, and how much “success” we’ve accrued in our time on this planet.

Some might have this realization and turn instantly to nihilism, what I like to explain as the belief that “nothing matters, so everything I do is meaningless and therefore sucks.” This is most likely not the best belief to hold, but if you really like it, I guess the point is that, well, you should do you, no matter what. So go be nihilistic if that’s your jam!

But Albert Camus, a very intelligent Frenchman, had a different way of thinking. He believed that because nothing matters, we can place meaning in absolutely whatever we want. That’s a powerful belief to hold.

I believe that placing arbitrary values on deeds or accomplishments is just as detrimental as nihilism because it creates unnecessary competition. The economy is the only thing that benefits, I guess.

So if success is inherently unquantifiable, what should we do? Frolick? Eat all your favorite foods? Sleep all day? Well, that’s not the right move either, at least in my mind. One thing that’s been built into us biologically is our desire for movement. We always want to be moving towards something. Maybe that thing is a promotion, or a new opportunity, or a trophy. Whatever it is, we should chase it. But we should never be so consumed by the chase that we forget to enjoy those things that make the chase worth it. Because the chase was never the end goal. It’s just a vessel upon which we can sustain ourselves in this experience.

Sometimes I think it would be nice to be able to quantify my existence. To say exactly how kind I’ve been, how good of a brother, student, son, or friend I’ve managed to be, or exactly how much potential I have. But the very fact that success is unquantifiable feels like a breath of fresh air whenever I realize it again. Because I do get trapped giving others more negative weight than they should in my life.

I guess what I really want to say is, please don’t try to unnecessarily quantify your life. What makes life beautiful is that it can’t be measured. So come join me, on this little ledge. Yeah, right there is great. Scoot a little closer. Here, we can gaze out in the void, and smile.

A patch of manic, lovely grass

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Image by Ruslan Sikunov from Pixabay
Your pulse, a high-interest loan
of carbon and spit;
A frantic strobe light
in a collapsing pit.

Kick off the shoulds,
those leaden, orthopedic boots.
Stop watering your plastic at the roots.

Why offer a no
vacuum-sealed and dried
To a joy that’s finally hitched a ride?

Among a billion ghosts
in rented skin,
Clutching leaking bowls,
still wondering where the soup has been.

And the soil, yes,
a blind, impartial, gluttonous gut;
Digesting the Great and the Who? and the What?
It mulches throne and beggar’s cup
Into a patch of manic, lovely grass.

Don’t worry,
the prince and the fool
are the same shade of clover,
Once the lease on their breathing
is officially over.

Take a breath, take a breath;
Life’s the only thing that’s not like death.

Graffiti your name on a passing gust of wind;
The only sin is staying neatly pinned.

Ignite the ego, the hemp,
the existential spark
(Light a match under your own backside
if your world seems too dark);

It’s too cramped (ouch!) in the coffin
to start playing the part.

The Relational Consciousness Series: Why the Parts Don’t Add Up

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What Today’s Theories of Consciousness Explain, and What They Leave Out

Image by PIRO from Pixabay

In the last essay, I suggested that consciousness may be less like a spotlight in the brain and more like a groove in a jazz ensemble. In other words, not a thing located somewhere, but a pattern of coordination that sustains itself over time.

That idea doesn’t come from nowhere. Modern neuroscience and philosophy of mind have developed powerful frameworks for understanding how the brain integrates information, represents the world, and makes decisions. So in the realm of theories, we’re good. We have enough, so that’s not the challenge. The challenge is just that even our best theories often explain the ingredients of cognition without fully explaining the organization of experience.

To see this, it helps to look briefly at what these theories get right.

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) proposes that consciousness corresponds to the degree to which a system’s parts form an irreducible whole. It gives us a formal way to talk about integration and complexity. But while IIT quantifies how tightly a system is connected, it does not by itself explain why that integration should take the form of a unified, temporally unfolding field of experience rather than a static structure of relations.

Global Workspace Theory (GWT) describes how information becomes globally available to multiple brain systems, enabling reasoning, report, and flexible control. It explains why some information influences thought and behavior while other processing remains unconscious. But global availability does not guarantee experiential unity. A system could, in principle, broadcast information widely without producing a single, coherent field of awareness.

Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theories emphasize metacognition, where a mental state becomes conscious when the system represents itself as being in that state. This highlights the importance of self-representation, but it leaves open a deeper question. Why should layering representations on top of one another produce a seamless, continuous stream of experience rather than a stack of discrete, momentary snapshots?

Predictive processing models the brain as a hierarchical prediction engine, constantly minimizing error between expectations and sensory input. This framework beautifully captures the brain’s anticipatory, feedback-driven nature. Yet prediction alone does not explain why coordinated inference should be accompanied by a felt point of view, or why experience is structured as a single, centered flow.

Each of these theories identifies a crucial feature of conscious systems: integration, global availability, self-representation, hierarchical feedback. And they get a lot of it right. But they often treat these features as if each of them alone can be sufficient in explaining this enigmatic process. What remains underexplained is how these processes must be organized together in time to produce a stable, unified experiential field.

In other words, we know most of the musicians. We just haven’t fully described the conditions under which they lock into a groove.

This is where a dynamical, relational perspective becomes necessary. Consciousness may not arise simply because information is integrated, broadcast, represented, or predicted, but because these processes become recursively entangled across multiple levels, aligning in time and stabilizing into a pattern that can sustain itself. The difference is subtle but important: it shifts the focus from what functions are present to how their interactions are structured.

When we approach this question of consciousness from this angle, the central question changes. Instead of asking which module or computation “contains” consciousness, we ask: under what dynamical conditions do neural processes form a self-sustaining pattern that organizes thought and self-awareness into a single, continuous field?

The Relational Consciousness Threshold framework is an attempt to answer exactly that question. It does not replace existing theories; it reframes them as describing components of a larger process. Integration, broadcasting, prediction, and self-modeling become not competing explanations, but interacting elements that must cross a threshold of coordination before experience emerges.

The next step is to make that threshold explicit. What kinds of feedback must be present? How much temporal alignment is required? And what does it mean, physically, for a pattern of brain activity to hold together as the moment-to-moment “center” of experience?

Those are the questions we turn to next.

the infinity bucket

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Image by brittywing from Pixabay

i give,
you take.
they take
and blame gravity.
i give,
but i don’t lose,
not yet.
it comes from a bucket
i don’t look into.
last time i did
there was less of me
than before
and i chose not to notice.
my hands bruise.
the handle bites.
i switch arms.
i tell myself
this is what strength looks like.
i keep pouring-
everything,
everything.
until the word is hollow
and echoes when i say it.
i give
because stopping would admit
there is a bottom,
and i have been standing
just past it.
teetering.
i used to count
to prove it was endless.
now i don’t
in case it isn’t.
so i give,
give.
i don’t check
what’s left.

worldscapes

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it clicks into place while everything else moves
click
click
c  l  i  c  k
like bones rearranging themselves inside your chest

it moves away while another moves close
so close you can feel its gravity
sucking your fingers through themselves

you cannot hold
you cannot
cannot hold what is already
falling through your hands

the sand is screaming
your hands are bleeding
and still
you try

there are too many moving parts
for either of us to love just one
every focus a blur
melding
m e l d i n g
MELDING

every hand you clutch
vanishes
as soon as you move one
the rest
rotates
erupts
slips

laughs
at you
at you
at    y  o  u

and the quiet truth
is that you
you collapsing little observer

you think you're watching
(I did too)
we witnesses
gnawing our own shadows

the worldscape
worldscape
w  o  r  l  d  s  c  a  p  e
doesn’t notice you

it doesn’t stop
it doesn’t forgive
it doesn’t even care

it only moves
moves
m  o  v  e  s

and you remain

the one thing
that cannot

quite

keep up.

if nothing stays,
what will you hold?

Inside Out: The Discipline of Feeling

Mason Lai1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
When are you most happy?
View all responses

Pixar’s Inside Out is often praised for making emotions legible, by color-coding them, naming them, and placing them neatly at their respective spots at a control panel. While it may be easy to watch the movie and believe its message is the value of emotional mastery, this surface clarity reveals a more unsettling argument. Inside Out attempts instead to reveal the value of emotional tolerance. Its deepest claim is not that happiness comes from managing feelings well, but that constant contradiction of emotion is necessary to create identity.

I. Continuity

Joy begins the film as the keeper of continuity. She treats Riley’s inner life as something to be curated, and protected from contamination. Sadness, in her view, corrodes life. If sadness touches a memory, the memory changes, so Joy fears this potential narrative fracture. However, this fear is prevalent in modern culture. We believe happiness to be stability; we believe it to be a consistent mood, a smooth trajectory. Self-help language also reinforces this fantasy by encouraging us to “protect our peace” as though peace were a fragile artifact rather than a dynamic process. At the beginning of the movie, Joy embodies this impulse, believing that if the right emotions remain in charge, the self will remain intact.

II. Sadness

But Inside Out dismantles this belief. When Sadness touches Riley’s memories, they don’t crack or fracture; rather, they deepen. Riley’s joyful recollections of childhood play become tinged with grief, but not because the joy was false; that grief comes from the memories belonging to a time that cannot be recovered, something we have all experienced. The memory gains depth and complexity, and with that comes narrative truth. What Joy interprets as damage is really just maturation.

The film suggests that unpleasant emotions like sadness are necessary to complete meaning. Only through sadness can experience remain emotionally legible over time. Without it, memories become artifacts, forever frozen, incapable of accommodating change. Riley’s crisis emerges when her emotional system can no longer pretend that continuity is possible. Moving cities disrupt her internal story. Her old sources of meaning, her friends, routines, and landscapes, shift apart. And the attempt to remain cheerful under these conditions produces emotional turmoil.

III. Growing

The ultimate resolution to this crisis is not the restoration of Joy’s authority, but a deeper understanding of the emotional hierarchy. When Sadness is allowed to speak, Riley’s pain becomes shareable. The problem isn’t solved, but her parents can help because the problem has been named.

In this sense, Inside Out offers a corrective view to a culture obsessed with emotional optimization. It suggests that unlike popular belief, psychological health is not achieved by minimizing negative states, but by allowing them to rise up to construct meaning. The film implies that identity is a dynamic system that must remain open to revision.

IV. Conclusion

The film ends with memories that shimmer with multiple emotional hues, refusing closure. Riley’s inner life becomes more difficult to map out, but it becomes more real. Every emotion evolves together. If Inside Out has a lesson, it is not that sadness is good, or that joy is naive. The lesson lies in the fact that a self that insists on feeling only one thing at a time will eventually lose the ability to feel anything honestly at all. Emotional maturity, like narrative truth, requires the courage to let experiences change us. Even if it’s hard. Even if it disrupts the story we carry of ourselves. Because to live is to keep becoming, again and again.