Gen/Eric Thoughts on What it Means to Follow the Monkey?

Scene from the TV show 'LOST'

What it Means to Follow the Monkey

Episode 288: Brian Shipman

"In summary, a feedback loop’s four stages explained in a way that are contextualized for S are
1. An individual gathers new information.
2. The irrelevancies of that data are stripped away and what matters is emotionally conveyed to the individual for rumination.
3. Insights – creative leaps (as the author of Godel, Escher, Back would call them) – from the new information drive the individual to continue to write his/her story with the new paths of choice that are illuminated.
4. The individual selects one path of illumination, recalibrating his/her behavior accordingly. Then the feedback loop repeats.
Communications between two people always include feedback loops.

The act of writing creates a feedback loop between author and reader.

What we witness in the marginalia of Eric and Jen’s writing is a concrete example of cybernetics at play: continuous feedback as both Eric and Jen learn more about each other and about themselves with each new message between them.
There is a very special kind of feedback loop, though, that does something more than just illuminate paths that might be taken in the future.

Sometimes information introduced to an individual – a new truth – forces what we call an epistemological crisis.

An epistemological crisis occurs when new information – a new truth – arrives in the feedback loop that challenges everything we already thought we believed to be true, forcing us to rewrite our former story with a new schema.
Most of us who watched Sixth Sense experienced an epistemological crisis.

We watched a story unfold and began forming a framework of understanding that story.

And then, at the climax, we were presented with a truth that forced us to completely rewrite our understanding of the story we had just witnessed.

All the events of the story were exactly the same, but their meaning changed entirely.

It was a true Ship of Theseus moment.

We had to ask ourselves, is it the same story, even though I just had to replace most if not all the parts of how I built the story in my head with completely new parts that integrated the new truth?"

This post is probably harder to solve than the S book of JJ's.

But good luck ... and follow that monkey to work it all out;-)
Thoughts On "S"~ by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst