Category: Lenses
Updated on January 3, 2021
The OpenSense Domain
Communication is essential in allowing individuals to cooperate in group activity, especially if the individuals differ in their roles or characteristics. Having open access to information greatly boosts the productivity of a group – in fact, this is the motivating principle behind the invention of patents, the internet, and open source software. Similarly, members of a team are expected to openly share their thoughts and tendencies so that the team can make up for each other’s weaknesses. In the OpenSense domain, we discuss what happens when important facets of generic thought are openly expressed and easily sensed by others in the environment. We will talk about how generics in this domain tend to form friendship groups, share information about themselves, and engage in play activities designed to uncover highly varied aspects of each other’s personalities. The senses in this domain are analogous to human emotions and the involuntary facial expressions / body language used to express such emotions1, but in this post I will mostly focus on the OpenSense dynamics in its pure form and only use human behaviors as illustrative examples.
Updated on October 12, 2020
Agents – The Source of Motivation and Action
The last two posts2 were focused on the lens. They discussed its various modes of operation, the dichotomy between the outward-facing “causal estimate” and the inward-facing “evaluation”, and the problems of foreign context and overgeneralization.
But it’s important to note that the lens is, at heart, a statistical machine. It is only concerned with how accurately it can perform its tasks (casual prediction, event interpretation etc.), and does not intentionally distort itself to satisfy any agenda. In other words, the lens lacks agency and a hypothetical “lens-only” generic is only good for making uninterested predictions or classifications3.
To breathe more life into the generic mind I introduced the agent, a cognitive process with an inherent goal to cause the production of certain evaluations. The concept behind its operation is as follows:
- Use the lens to perform value prediction. In other words, given some known prior information and the desired evaluations, figure out what must be in the posterior information for the lens to produce such an evaluation.
- Try to engineer the actions and circumstances of the generic to increase the odds that the right events happen. If this is done successfully then the lens will produce the evaluations that the agent desires.
Updated on April 4, 2018
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.
Updated on September 12, 2020
Of Lenses and Experiences
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.
