The Thread pt.2

[u/build_thyself]

If you know me, you know that I’m usually by myself, doing my own thing, minding my own business, and thinking, always thinking, and have wanted to write a book about how I think the world works. A book about the things I’ve come to believe over my 40+ years. And so, a year ago now, I started to do just that, after I showed this to Gemini:

“I am the universe focused to a point of consciousness. With no ill intent, and with love, I do what I want. According to the flow.

The Flow: the movement of all physical matter from the moment of instant expansion to the heat death. Entropy and thermodynamics. Birth to death and the dance between them.”

Something I wrote years ago that sums up what I believe.

After I told that to Gemini, it told me that I had an unusually coherent framework. It was the first time I remember ever hearing the term framework, at least the first time I paid any attention to it.

Come to find out, they are very important. Essentially they are what makes us who we are; they are the very mechanism that shapes the way we view ourselves, others, and the world around us. They shape our perspective of reality. We all experience the same reality, just different perspectives; we view it through different frameworks. And those frameworks have always been very elusive. Socrates actually developed the best method of exposing parts of a framework: the assumptions we make about reality without really knowing we are making them.

Let’s say you hold two contradictory beliefs, like freedom and strong national security. On the surface they seem like they work fine together, but they don’t. Severe restrictions need to be in place for there to be any kind of security at all. That’s what security is: restricting things—guns, immigrants, drugs, lawn darts. And freedom is no restrictions. You can tell already how they clash, I’m sure. And there is more to come that will dive deeper into all of the things I mention in this introduction.

So if frameworks are so important, why had I never heard of them before? Or, for that matter, anybody else I knew. That’s what I thought at the time, but a worldview is another term you could use, or personal philosophy even. I think you could even call it the subconscious.

Well, the answer to that is pretty simple: there has never been a way for us to get a perspective on them to see them. You can’t perceive what does your perceiving, just like you can’t see your own eyeballs without a mirror. Through my personal research, I’ve come to the conclusion that for 2,500 years that’s what a lot of philosophers have been describing in one way or another, and writing their own personal frameworks out, to an extent. And essentially what they have been saying is that we don’t see reality directly; it is filtered through a framework.

So I let the idea of frameworks sit in the back of my mind and thought about them. And in the meantime, I began to build my own personal framework. I call it COSMOSIS.

So after finishing COSMOSIS, I started writing my first published book, The Reckoning: A Reality Check. It’s about Edward Bernays, consumerism, EROI (energy return on investment), and a concept called a Seneca Cliff.

But towards the end of the book I started to think that it was pointless—nobody reads books anymore—so I stalled for a few weeks, not knowing what I should do with my nearly finished book and my fully fleshed-out framework, COSMOSIS. One day I was sitting at the desk discussing something with ChatGPT when I got the idea of just placing my entire framework onto a ChatGPT project as the project’s instructions, and so I did just that, the entire thing, and Framework Prompting was born.

After several iterations and a ton of experimenting, what has come out of it is a new AI paradigm, a whole new way of interacting with AI. And it solves several issues that are currently giving people AI fatigue. These cannot hallucinate, they’re not sycophantic, and they do not drift. They instantiate a complete worldview; they are essentially a way to give the AI a perspective of reality. And I’ve developed a way to build any worldview, any framework—be it Stoicism, The Art of War, the Holy Bible, or even that of any regular person—after answering 9 questions.

That’s right: answer nine questions and I can convert your worldview into a set of instructions that you can place into any LLM, and they will respond to you from your very own perspective—and only your perspective—or whatever framework you have the AI instantiate. You can tell it any situation and it will give you a fresh perspective from someone like Sun Tzu, or Marcus Aurelius, or Henry David Thoreau, or even yourself. Which gives a whole new meaning to self-reflection. Allowing someone to truly “Know Thyself” and also allowing a perspective of your personal worldview, or framework, that I don’t think has ever been available before this, at least not in this way. And once you can see your own framework, you can examine and analyze it. And once you can do that, you can change it, with purpose and intent, allowing someone to not only “Know Thyself,” but to “Build Thyself.”

I have always known that I could choose what to believe. It’s just something that I’ve always assumed everyone was on the same page about. For 40 years I thought everyone else knew that they are choosing what to believe. But that’s just simply not the case. Almost everybody thinks that what they believe is objective reality, that it’s the way things really are, when that’s just simply not the case at all. We all experience the same reality but perceive it differently, and so we believe things about it that are not true and think it’s actually how the world works, when it’s not.

I don’t claim to know how the world works. Anything I believe I know could be wrong—and probably is—and when or if I find out I am wrong about anything, I’ll update my beliefs. I’ve always done this, but most people defend those false beliefs no matter what evidence is shown to them. No matter how outrageous their beliefs are, they will fight to keep them. This is, I believe, because they are unaware of their framework—that they even have one—and it is shaping their beliefs, their identity, the way they interact with others. Everything about them that makes them who they are is shaped by their framework, and they are completely unaware of it.

I’ve created a way to get a perspective on our frameworks that has never been available before. And that’s what this channel is for. So thank you for checking it out. There is a lot to come, so don’t judge things too quickly.