Sensing Physical Necessity

Walking, I listen for sensations of physical necessity. It is surprisingly hard. Imagining myself jumping huge distances feels like imagining a normal step. Odd, that. Shouldn’t possible acts feel vivid, alive & real in a way fantasy isn’t?

I make some progress by tracking what I feel are obstacles, like that medium sized column splitting the pavement, or that tree. They’re like gaps in my planned routes. Feels like I could circle around in two ways. On noticing this gap, I think wait a moment, can’t I just climb over it? It would be a bit embaressing, but I could do it.

But going back to the column, there’s obviously a boundary there too: I can’t just walk through the thing! I could get a sledge-hammer, but my neighbours’d raise a fuss if I did that. But walking through it? No.

That seems sort of unlike a gap in paths which I can “interpolate between”. It and other obstacles are barriers. Imagining myself walking through it brings to mind a subtle sense feeling. In fact, if I wasn’t paying close attention, I would have missed it.

So is that what impossibility feels like? My brain just telling me “you can’t do that?”

Stopping, I consider jumping between buildings. Could I do it? Does it feel necessary that I’d fall to my death? Yes, same way I can’t walk through a tree.

I wonder what the equivalent feeling for more general plans is.

Hmm, if I imagine reverse-engineering my old contractor’s codebase in an hour, I get a different feeling, a sense of trepidation but not the thought that I can’t do it. But if I imagine myself saying to my contractor I can do that in an hour, I think “haha, no way”.

OK, what about some easier programs? Like doing karatsuba multiplication in one hour in C, which I don’t know? That feels like it’s on the edge, a challenge that maybe I could do at my best, maybe I could succeed, even though the thought’s a bit painful.

Though if I imagine telling a friend I can do this, it feels like they’d scoff. Though if I offered them a bet, they’d probably give me like ~ 1/5 odds. Those aren’t the odds you give for something impossible, right?

And if I bet my old contractor whether I can re-write his codebase in one hour, I feel like he might humour me with 1/30 odds. Huh, strange. Maybe because I showed him a library doing most of his code’s work? Plus, claude code.

It seems like considering a bet implicitly takes into account options that I’d miss if I just think “is this impossible”? So maybe thinking of bets about “impossible” things is the fastest way to check if I know they’re impossible?

Note to self: Clearly, this exercise was useful. Probably, I still don’t understand how my brain views obstacles and impossibilities. Tracking those feelings may reveal more ways to easily notice when something is not actually impossible.