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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.