We are pattern-making creatures, building castles of prediction that separate us from some more fundamental source. The Free Energy Principle suggests we exist to minimize surprise, fitting our internal models to external reality through elaborate structures of expectation. These patterns become predictions—any regularity anticipating future regularity, surviving because they prove useful, like genes encoding successful proteins.

But intuition operates differently. It feels adjacent to our established timelines, as if accessing information that doesn't quite fit our carefully constructed models. Perhaps this is what serendipity offers: a glimpse of alternative pathways, adjustments to our priors that transcend worn tracks of experience. When something feels intuitively right but rationally inexplicable, we might be detecting patterns our conscious architecture hasn't yet catalogued.

Meditation invites us back to what exists before division. In the present moment, there is no prediction and no past—only a uni-dimensional pulse of immediate experience. This return to formlessness isn't escape from pattern-making but renewal of it. Moving out from no-form allows more basic shapes to reform, potentially creating more accurate pictures of reality as it currently exists rather than as our accumulated models insist it should be.

The challenge of our era is over-fitting: complex forms that work perfectly for yesterday's conditions but fail catastrophically when circumstances shift. We see this everywhere—in social media silos, in algorithmic feedback loops, in minds trapped by their own predictive success. People rebuild endlessly from the same priors, unable to adjust.

Attention itself becomes a form of prayer, an offering of presence that can interrupt these cycles. Where we place our awareness shapes what patterns emerge, what possibilities we can perceive. The practice of stepping back to the unnamed and undivided—through meditation, through walking, through this kind of unstructured writing—creates space for fresh rationalities to emerge.

Perhaps wisdom lies not in abandoning our pattern-making nature but in learning when to dissolve our carefully built structures back into the formless, trusting that what reforms will be better fitted to the world as it actually is, rather than as we've learned to expect it to be.

Prompt: Transform this stream of consciousness writing into an 333-word contemplative essay. Preserve the essential insights and authentic voice, but give them architectural form. Write in the style of reflective philosophical prose - neither academic nor casual, but with the quality of someone thinking aloud about something that matters. Find the thread that wants to be followed and follow it fully. Where the original circles or fragments, find the underlying movement. Honor what's trying to be said rather than what was literally said. End with something that opens rather than closes.

Raw ramblings:

Starting new habit of journaling post-meditation and playing around with what comes out. Order and chaos seem to be the themes. Moment vs future. Intelligence and predictions. Will work with AI to see what comes out.

We create ordered structures. We are here to minimize surprise, machine internal models to external reality says Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle. There is the selfish gene but there are also selfish patterns. Patterns are also predictions. Any kind of regularity is a prediction of future regularity that might fit incoming signal of environment to an established model Those that are useful survive, just as useful genes predicting protein function survive.

Intuition seems like a model that doesn't quite fit. It's as if it is adjacent in the timeline. Perhaps this is serendipity as well. How are serendipity and intuition related if at all? Serendipity I hint at possible intuition? A new timeline to follow. Path adjustment from established priors?

So we build these castles of pattern and division that give new powers of prediction to build and fit new solutions to the environment. This all separates from a kind of source before division. To meditate, to invite noise of the moment. In the moment there is no prediction and no past, so it is just a uni-dimensional pulse. To access that is to perhaps let native pattern-fitting take hold with a fresh look, unhindered from past worn tracks of experience. Moving out from no-form allows for more basic shapes to reform and maybe create a more accurate picture of the world as it is. Getting out of ruts through walks, not drinking, meditating, stream of consciousness writing unencumbered by order and let the AI create the order. But what prompts? David Hinton is a good model. Hunger Mountain is about taking unformed from nature and creating form in pictographs. Re-presenting and attention are a kind of prayer, an offering. Attention is divine? Careful where you put it. Another way that taking a step back from order can influence future paths. Step back to the unnamed and undivided. Once cannot escape divisions, it's called ratio-nality for a reason, but one can start over with fresh rationalities and re-fit to current circumstances rather than try to overfit the models with very complex forms. Over-fitting can become a problem. We see it every day in social media. Everyone trying to keep rebuilding from priors. Then there is no way to adjust and people get stuck in silos of their own creating. The quest to stay open yet effective against the tide of the algorithms is the battle of the current era.

Now onto products that solve real problems. AI is going to get more and more niche and expert driven. Currently very vague, but similarly need to provide the right models and right expertise for prediction. What is being "in the moment" for AI? Not sure we can ever know, without analytical tools we don't even know how problems are getting solved in detail, only that they seem to work.

Amazing how things that are fresh in mind get trafficked into working memory. These are all ideas that have been swirling around for a few days but haven't made it down onto another format. Let's see what a clean slate can bring if we keep this up for 108 days. Now to re-learn about the number 108.