What secrets can we find, deep within the generic mind?
What secrets will he find, through lenses trapped within his own mind?
In my previous post, I explained how context deeply permeates every thought and action in the generic society, and how mistakes such as the internal attribution error or the rational choice assumption constantly prevent generics from connecting with one another. Did my overall pessimism about the generics’ ability to understand context change the way you view their society? Are most generics forced to experience life in total emotional isolation? What value is there in a life without shared experiences or the ability to form a deeper connection with others?
Sure, the generics constantly fight or argue over petty issues, but at least they haven’t collectively despaired and declared all their interactions meaningless. Generics are usually aware of their limited ability to contextualize each other’s actions, so clearly they must still value something. As it turns out, generics aren’t fatalistic beings waiting for a meaningless life to flash before their eyes. Each generic sentient being is on a journey of self-improvement, slowly tweaking his beliefs to accommodate the seemingly incomprehensible choices of those around him. The generics will find meaning in their interpretations and judgments even if they later find flaws in their reasoning. They feel euphoric when they understand a friend slightly better than before, even if his choices still seem like a complete mystery. If you had backdoor access to the generic mind, you could watch hundreds of generics bumping into one another trying making sense of their jumbled world, and truly appreciate the inevitability of this lifelong journey. The analyst in me naturally wanted to know if these generics had any hope of success. Of course, in my attempt to answer this question I ended up creating a very complex theory on the inner workings of the generic mind.
The Experience Foundation
It’s clear that every action exerts a physical influence on its environment. Burning a cigarette releases a cloud of smoke. Switching a desk lamp on uses electrical energy, which is ultimately provided by a power plant many kilometers away. Each flap of a butterfly’s wings shifts the air currents in an unpredictable way, even if its effects are imperceptible on a larger scale. In a similar way, all generic sentient beings have an internal environment, and every event influences the internal environments of nearby sentient observers. The generic contains within its mind an experience foundation, which encodes the events that the generic had experienced in its life as well as the meaning and personal significance of these experiences in light of other experiences. Instead of recording every detail of every event in an orderly fashion, the generic mind alters its entire experience foundation in subtle ways in response to each observed event. Past experiences shape the way a generic interprets future experiences, and future experiences can shine new light on past experiences.
Most events only induce microscopic changes that can’t be seen on a larger scale, but certain events can leave a lasting impact on the generic sentient being. For example, one part of the experience foundation might have great personal significance and can be linked to thousands of other points in the experience foundation. An event that seems relatively meaningless to generic A can resonate strongly in generic B’s mind if it happens to target such a sensitive part of B’s experience foundation. I call such an event a direct hit in recognition of the precision needed for a small event to affect a generic so strongly. An event could have an even stronger effect if it fundamentally changes the way a generic views past and future experiences. This can happen if a generic faces a large and sudden change in his way of life that makes many of his past fears and wishes seem like child’s play in light of his current circumstances. The result is what I call a foundation collapse where the generic is forced to change most of his experience foundation and find new meaning in future experiences1.
A First Peek at Lenses
The experience foundation tells the generic what to care about the most, but how does he know what to actually feel? One must imagine that there is something in the generic mind that constantly scans the events around it for emotional content. From what I can tell, the generics do have a highly versatile mental process that I call the lens, which performs multiple tasks including the act of event interpretation. In event interpretation, the lens processes two sources of information – the generic’s knowledge about the past (prior information) and the information available about a current event (posterior information) – to produce an emotional judgment of said event (an evaluation), as well as an educated guess about the true cause of the event (a causal estimate)2. During this process the experience foundation and the lens mutually depend on one another. The experience foundation provides prior information by linking a current event to many personally relevant past events, and the lens produces the emotional content needed to tell the experience foundation how it should feel about the new event.
Why should the lens produce a causal estimate? It did not play a role in event interpretation, so it seems like Occam’s Razor should be able to trim this output away. Some of you might object by saying that knowledge is power, or that asking “why?” questions helps you better appreciate the events that occur. Indeed, the causal estimate is useful because it is needed for the lens to perform causal prediction. In causal prediction, the lens is configured so that it can use prior information and an existing causal estimate to predict what will happen in the future. Where do the estimates used for causal prediction come from? Essentially, when a generic finds itself in a situation similar to one he has been through in the past, he should be able to compare the prior information immediately before a future event with the prior information behind similar past events, and piece together a meaningful causal estimate from these past experiences. To prepare itself for this process, a lens that is performing event interpretation tries its best to create accurate causal estimates that explain the posterior information from the prior information. Needless to say, a generic makes heavy use of causal prediction if he needs to make an important decision. Note that if other generics feature prominently in some event, then the causal estimate for that event will have to include the context behind the actions of all the generics involved. This is precisely why generic sentient beings find it important to understand context.
Foreign Context
There is a big problem though – what I call the problem of foreign context. A lens can only improve the accuracy of a causal estimate if it knows the true cause of an event. That way, it would be able to keep the estimates that were closer to reality and give up on the ones that were completely off the mark. For many physical events, the true cause can be found once you study the event with enough detail. If truly necessary, a generic could run a rigorous scientific experiment to thoroughly test any one of his hypotheses. It gets complicated once other generics are involved though, since even the best scientific equipment would fail to find the true context behind a generic’s actions. A generic typically has a strong understanding only of the context behind his own actions. If he’s not careful, a generic would learn to produce flawed causal estimates that assume all generics think the same way he does. Once he tries to perform causal prediction and completely fails to predict the actions of another generic, he will be tempted to see the latter individual as illogical or unpredictable.
Many generics recognize this problem, even if they don’t know what they should do about it. The wise ones will dutifully remain skeptical of their beliefs about other generics, and will try to make the most out of the few clues they have. It is possible for a generic to tell others what he knows about his experience foundation, his lens, or the context behind his actions, so theoretically a friend who is willing to listen should be able to predict his future actions with some accuracy. In practice though, it is easy to trivialize or misunderstand the beliefs of other generics, and even if the listener were quite open-minded it is still too hard for him to become (and remain!) intimately familiar with more than a small handful of individuals. A few lucky generics have the ability to pick up on subtle contextual clues from involuntary actions3, which can be a valuable asset as long as they don’t grossly overestimate the accuracy of their split-second observations.
In the end, even the most skilled generics will not be able to consistently overcome the problem of foreign context. A small amount of contextual knowledge can still go a long way though. Spending a fraction of a moment thinking about foreign context can help the lens understand that not everyone thinks the same way. Having even a superficial understanding of another generic can make one better appreciate his actions and respect his choices. Sharing thoughts and beliefs with just one close friend can be enough to make a generic sentient being feel less lonely in an otherwise uncaring generic society.
Footnotes
- Examples of events that can cause a foundation collapse can vary greatly in how stressful they seem to an outside observer. This is partly because a foundation collapse can restructure a generic’s experience foundation in a way that trivializes the kinds of events that caused the original collapse. A young generic A can experience a foundation collapse on the day he is forced to find work and live independently. Meanwhile, an older generic B who has been through a similar experience many decades ago would laugh at A’s naiveté.
- I apologize for this sudden influx of new words. The lens is a complex machine, and I find it easy to lose track of its many roles without using precise terminology.
- Facial expressions and body language immediately come to my mind. However, generic sentient beings can be so varied in form that they aren’t strictly required to have faces or bodies.