The Proficiologist

Hunches, Guesses, and Mistakes

Now, we see the lens for what it truly is –
A pow­er­ful but flawed entity grop­ing its way through an inter­nal environment.

We probed the inner work­ings of the generic mind and famil­iar­ized our­selves with lenses in our pre­vi­ous post. We also learned from the mere exis­tence of issues like the prob­lem of for­eign con­text that lenses can be less than per­fect. Now it’s time to take this issue to the next level and call our atten­tion to greater flaws lurk­ing just beneath the sur­face. We will begin by casu­ally observ­ing a lens in its nat­ural envi­ron­ment, and will even­tu­ally end by tor­tur­ing the poor spec­i­men with a bat­tery of thought experiments.

The Internal Environment

What is the best word to describe an abstract space gov­erned by a set of rules, capa­ble of host­ing enti­ties that inter­act with one another accord­ing to these rules? A group? A field? A sys­tem? I tend to think of these as envi­ron­ments, no mat­ter how abstract its rules or enti­ties may be. Just as the Earth is an envi­ron­ment occu­pied by count­less liv­ing organ­isms, the Internet can be thought of as an envi­ron­ment for data and pro­grams, and per­haps the law can be seen as an envi­ron­ment filled with doc­u­ments and his­toric cases. In much the same way, each generic sen­tient being con­tains a unique inter­nal envi­ron­ment host­ing a com­plex inter­ac­tion between mem­o­ries, emo­tions, and beliefs. Every obser­va­tion, action and moment spent in deep thought will affect the rela­tion­ship between the enti­ties in this inter­nal envi­ron­ment, even if the effects can be quite sub­tle. Conversely, the inter­nal envi­ron­ment will strongly affect the judg­ments a generic will make and the actions he will take. In fact, the inter­nal envi­ron­ment is prob­a­bly just as impor­tant to a generic as the exter­nal envi­ron­ment that he lives in.