Life in the Jelly

everyday philosophy and thoughts on authentic consciousness

Art by T + Midjourney

I

The basic problem of subjective experience is that it’s impossible to fully communicate to another person. Everyone is having their own subjective experience at all times, and although we have plenty of language for describing the world around us in terms of the reality of objects - that chair, that road and car and tree, the green-ness of green and the foggyness of fog, we don’t have language, common language for describing the symbolic layer of existence on top of that.

We interpret a tree as a tree, and that gets melded in with the visual of the tree itself. We feel the presence of the tree in our internal space, which is different from how we feel trains, or people, or memories. There are words for this. Qualia. Worlds and Universes. But before we go into philosophy it’s nice to think in terms of imagery.

There’s a really strong version of this effect which happens around other people. Let’s call it the snowglobe. The snowglobe is not necessarily small, but it is thick. It is swarming. When we’re around people we like, the effect is subtly energizing. Something is there in the snowglobe, making the air thicker, buoying up the snow. Making the interaction meaningful. Adding the shared narration layer. Working to coordinate the conversation. We don’t always notice it when these things are there, because such moments feel normal. But when the they are gone, there’s an emptiness in their absence.

All these things that make a situation easy, also make up the tone and flavor of the fluid inside the snowglobe. Let’s call the snowglobe fluid jelly. Aether was the proposed fluid for light. The jelly is the fluid for social and subjective reality. Jelly is shared subjective experience. Jelly is the vibe. Jelly is both frequency and wavelength, lol. Jelly is the mood in the room. Jelly is reading the air. Maybe rizz is an attractive force in jelly.

Real snowglobes are filled with water, antifreeze and glycerol, which slows down the snow. That is useful practical information. What do I do with jelly?

Do you know how you meet someone from where you’re from, they can say the equivalent of hey what’s up, and instantly, everything feels better? In the right snowglobe everything feels easier. Thinking and talking become easier. When a group of people are sharing the same snowglobe, things feels harmonized. The group is one amoebic hazy dream. From the inside, jelly is sustenance.

We could study how to get there on a practical level – Make Friends and Influence People, etc – or a neuropsychological level – all those brain waves are definitely rhythmically in sync, but there’s something really important about the metaphorical level, because it’s the easiest level to communicate.

Shakespeare said All the world’s a stage. But in any social moment there are actually many different snowglobes, all stacked up and tangled with one another. Your one power-seeker friend who is at an advanced level in their career is in a different snowglobe from your hippie friends who are always talking about trying to start a commune. Extroverts and introverts live on dramatically different snowglobes. Depression could be seen as the lack of a snowglobe.

It’s easy to observe when people are in the same snowglobe. They move at the same pace, with the same intonations. It’s like they’re on a movie set, where someone has curated the lighting so that all the important objects are lit in intriguing ways. They’re not exactly mirroring each other, but their motions are in harmony. Two people in the same snowglobe are in the process of becoming more like each other.

II

The implication of the term Jelly is that it is in the physical space between people, but it may be better defined as being a property of something else, such as an embedding in the space of all possible humans.

Every culture is a superset of these globes. If you wanted to, say, become Italian in preparation for a new job in Italy or just for a short trip abroad, you’d need to learn Italian but you’d also want to learn to be Italian. Which is not only about knowing the language and factual information about the culture. It means learning the pace of life, the rhythm of friendships, the relative importance of different things: family vs work, perfection vs acceptance, harmony vs pursuit, and the kind of joy that Italians in music and friendship and food. We learn how to become other people all the time, and because of this, we know very deeply that there is individual variation in subjective experience, but it’s hard to remember, that every single time we talk to someone, every single second we are talking to someone - we’re travelers across little worlds.

Perhaps the simplest way to think of jelly is as a shared perspective: a way of seeing.

“In whatever way we may be conscious of the world as universal horizon, as coherent universe of existing objects, we, each "I-the-man" and all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the world; and the world is our world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this 'living together.' We, as living in wakeful world-consciousness, are constantly active on the basis of our passive having of the world... Obviously this is true not only for me, the individual ego; rather we, in living together, have the world pre-given in this together, belong, the world as world for all, pre-given with this ontic meaning... The we-subjectivity... [is] constantly functioning.” - Edmund Husserl The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936):

It’s probably time to approach the philosophy of the thing. Next post!

Thanks to:

• AL#2 for hype, DY for geometry, the MIT Tech Caller who put up with me musing about this on the courtesy 45 minute conversation before touching for cash for Aether, SB, JPO for lifeworld, AP for introvert/extrovert distinction, MC, AL#3 for that good-good sweet heady prismatic shared jelly.