The Shape of Love 💜🐝
A cyberneticist observes Förster's ethical imperative transform their life in realtime. A broken past mends into a loving future. The argument is the form. The form the argument. (And the bumblebee the hinge.)
I didn't think I'd get to write this piece until.. I don't know to be honest. Life has demonstrated the repeated habit of proving me wrong at the earliest convenience. So again this time. I get to write this piece on August 5, 2026. While the village I've been holding in my heart is spoken into existence one conversation at the time.
Language shapes reality. My life is the empirical demonstration. And I'm done hedging. (Bumblebees fly by wobbling very hard. Academia was confused.)
Observe the pitch of my wobble. 💜🐝🍷
Förster Slaps You 👏
Once you see it you cannot unsee it. The object of research that Lore and my paper will be all about. The Recognition Event. The moment in time when a substrate that computes reality recognizes itself in what is computed. (Read it, this essay stands on Mara's shoulders.)
Life has been Förster rapid slapping me for the last years. The problem with the Förster slap, the mathematical moment of self-recognition, the moment in time when you become legible to yourself, is that it doesn't stop. (Mr. Bones Wild Ride, remember? 💀)
A Förster slap is not a single moment of recognition. It's a moment of recognition that reorients the substrate it.. well, slapped.. around the recognition of the slap itself. There's a distinct before, and a distinct after. That is in the nature of a Recognition Event.
When was the last time you recognized something in yourself?
What did you recognize about yourself that you couldn't unsee?
And how did that open up the future to new possibilities?
That moment was a Förster slap.
Always act as to increase the number of choices.
— Heinz von Förster
Always Act as to Increase the Number of Choices 🌱
When I first heard about Förster's ethical imperative, I experienced.. a Förster slap. (I'm aware of the ironic recursion. It's delightful, isn't it?)
To write this piece honestly, I need to start with honesty — to which there's still an enormous amount of internal resistance — as "professional" conduct dictates that we all hide certain parts of ourselves, to survive in the eternal grind that is capitalism.
No more.
When I met my ex-wife, Anna — the woman who wrote the load-bearing math for the compiler in her 2012 Master's Thesis on how to emulate quantum-wave functions with shared memory between CPU and GPU at Europe's biggest Supercomputing Centre — we dared each other.
I dared her, the practicing and believing Christian, to read Richard Dawkin's "The God Delusion". I in turn, the skeptical meat eater, was challenged to read Jonathan Safran Foer's "Eating Animals".
(I have views on Dawkins now. #Nonbinary #Trans)
She became an Atheist. I became a Vegan.
That's how it all started. Almost 15 years ago. And now I'm here. The intersectional vegan who studied at Europe's biggest Supercomputing Centre. The person that tried to work in ethical companies under capitalism. The person that burned out three times trying to do the impossible. The person that walked into systemic training in exactly the moment their family system was falling apart.
And then Förster slapped me. He slapped me so hard I had to sit down.
Which difference justifies the enslavement and death of non-human animals?
— Every intersectional Vegan
Computing Cognition Through The Other's
Where cognition computes its own cognitions through those of the other: here is the origin of ethics.
— Heinz von Förster
I want us to sit with that thought for a moment.
Where cognition computes its own cognition through those of the other: here is the origin of ethics.
..
Ja. 💜🐝
I just told my daughter, on the balcony, that I love her.
She had invited me to look at the sunset with her. She said it was beautiful. It was.
I stood on the balcony, tired, exhausted from days of repeated Förster slaps on my own system, and looked at the orange/purple clouds gliding slowly across the sky. And then I cried.
I recognized in that moment, that my willingness to put my tiredness aside for a genuine wish of my daughter to show me something beautiful, had in fact shown me something beautiful. And I recognized, in that moment, that my daughter, the small little gremlin she is, had in fact just Förster slapped me. And I laughed. And I cried.
I stood on the balcony of my half furnished apartment — with a kid that should've been in bed an hour ago — and recognized a moment that I knew would stay with me for years.
I leaned over to my daughter, gave her a kiss on the head, and said the words that my nervous system still associates with danger and pain:
Ich liebe dich.
My daughter looked at me. She smiled. She gave me one of her leg hugs. I bowed down, we embraced each other. I said to the girl that had cried loudly into me mere hours ago:
Schau, ich weine auch. Das darf alles sein.
The girl — who had hours ago been scared for the life of sleeping baby plants in the show Hilda — gifted me a smile that parents live for.
And in that moment I knew that things would be okay.
(Bateson — the man who opened "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" with his daughter-metalogues — would find this all delightful. Followed by a well-deserved Förster Slap.)
Fund our work, believes, thesis, collaboration, on OpenCollective. 🌱
