Live and Think with the Full Strength of Your Being

Nick Charter has a book called The Mind Is Flat. Taigo Forte wrote a decent summary on twitter:

... wut? If only Robin Hanson was here. In his place, I will clutch my pearls indignantly. Most of these claims strike me as ridiculous. I got a copy and hopped around to see if maybe Tiago was mischaracterizing. Maybe the thesis was a lot more sensible, and Tiago, in his ineffable wisdom, chose to make it more incendiary than it was. But nope, Tiago's summary is very faithful to the language of the book. He's only slightly more intense than Nick himself. So what gives?

Well, after a careful look-over, I'm pretty sure Nick and I would probably agree on a lot about how the mind works. But he wants to talk about it in a very different frame than how I want to talk about it. This is the 3rd or so time that I've read someone's work, had a first impression of "wow, they seem to be obviously and flagrantly wrong", then after carefully rereading a few times realized they had a really nifty idea that I bought, but just choose language I'm allergic to.

I sense a pattern, and the rest of the post is thinking on what leads to this particular communication gap.

Relational Understanding vs Objective Theory

There's a bunch of different ways you can know about or have an understanding of something. I'm going to point out two loose clusters that I expect everyone has had experience with, and name them for easy reference.

The first cluster of knowing I'm going to call Relational Understanding. This is understanding that's based in your experience with a thing, and concerns how it relates to you. Batteries are those things you put in electronics to make them work. David is that person I go to the movies with on Thursdays.

Contrast that with what I'm calling an Objective Theory. Here, objective is not used to mean "correct", it's meant to get across that the theory is trying to capture the thing in isolation, separate from how it relates to you. Think about what the first paragraph of Wikipedia might be like. "Batteries are devices with electro-chemical cells that provide electrical power"

These names don't need to line up with "intuitive vs reasoned" or "conscious vs unconscious", even though there might be a lot of overlap. Importantly, different people can have very different relational understandings. We'll get to that in a minute.

Some things I want to highlight about each:

First, for a lot of people, their relational understanding of any given thing/concept is more important and more salient than their objective theory. You don't need to know how a calculator implements math to use one. You don't need to know a persons entire back story in order to work on the same project together.

Second, it's a lot more shocking (and unlikely) to have your relational understanding of something refuted, than it is to have your objective theory refuted. It wouldn't take that much for me to be wrong about how calculators work, but it would take Cartesian Demon levels of deception for me to be wrong about how to use them. Simplified claim: people are (rightfully) way more resistant to having their relational understandings refuted, than they are to having their objective theories refuted¹.

Last exposition of these terms before we dive back into the book. Here's a quote from Consciousness Explained by Danniel Dennet (a great book with a shitty title):

Suppose a madman were to claim that there were no such things as animals. We might decide to confront him with his error by taking him to the zoo, and saying, "Look! What are those things, then, if not animals?" We would not expect this to cure him, but at least we would have the satisfaction of making plain to ourselves just what craziness he was spouting. But suppose he then said, "Oh, I know perfectly well that there are these things — lions and ostriches and boa constrictors — but what makes you think these so-called animals are animals? In fact, they are all just fur-covered robots — well, actually, some are covered with feathers or scales." This may still be craziness, but it is a different and more defensible kind of craziness. This madman just has a revolutionary idea about the ultimate nature of animals.

Suppose a madman were to claim that there were no such things as animals. We might decide to confront him with his error by taking him to the zoo, and saying, "Look! What are those things, then, if not animals?" We would not expect this to cure him, but at least we would have the satisfaction of making plain to ourselves just what craziness he was spouting. But suppose he then said, "Oh, I know perfectly well that there are these things — lions and ostriches and boa constrictors — but what makes you think these so-called animals are animals? In fact, they are all just fur-covered robots — well, actually, some are covered with feathers or scales." This may still be craziness, but it is a different and more defensible kind of craziness. This madman just has a revolutionary idea about the ultimate nature of animals.

Here, the madman has the same relational understanding of animals as anyone else (they're those things at the zoo that make noises). But he's got a very different objective theory of animals (biological guts vs robot mechs). I picked this quote because the madman follows a familiar pattern. "HA, that's not actually an X, it's just a Y." Not only is the madman saying that he's got a different objective theory of animals, he's saying that the word "animals" can/should only refer to the common objective theory (biological guts), and that since that theory is wrong, what we relationally understand and call "animals" should not be called "animals".

(note: there is not a "one size fits all" relational understanding for any given concept. A hunter has a different relational understanding of animals than someone who just visits the zoo. To the hunter, animals having biological guts is an integral part of his relational understanding of animals, because he also to deal with those guts when butchering. The hunter would have a much bigger beef with this madman than would a city slicker who only sees animals at the zoo)

"Actually, Just" in The Mind Is Flat and others

The Mind is Flat is Dennet's zoo madman raving about animals. After careful reading and mulling it over, it seems like it isn't attacking my relational understanding of hidden motives, implicit beliefs, or subconscious preferences. It does, however, refute a bulk of what might be called the "folk objective theory" of the previously mentioned concepts. I think there's better sources to hear that message from, but if you've never been exposed to the idea that your mind is not as coherent, orderly, and well structured as you thought, it might be worth a read.

The thing that annoys me about the book is that, like the madman, it asserts without discussion that the proper meaning of all of these words are their folk objective theories, and that you must be referring to these folk theories if you ever use these words, unless you're a pleb and using the words in a dull and uninteresting sense. It almost literally says all this (emphasis mine):

"So, except in a rather uninteresting sense, we aren’t really conscious of numbers, apples, people, or anything else – we’re conscious of our interpretations of sensory experience (including inner speech) and nothing more."

Seriously, it gets annoying. I get that he's not telling me my relational understanding of "unconscious motives" is wrong (cause that would be such an uninteresting sense to talk about unconscious motives), and yes his objective theory is shockingly different from the standard one and cool and interesting, but damn, from how he writes I get the sense that if I asked if he can pass the salt, he'd say "I don't know, caaaaan I?" (this is the end of me making fun of Nick, love you bb)

As foreshadowed, I've had similar experiences with other writing, How Emotions Are Made (Tiago's summary, I haven't read the book) and Where Mathematics Comes From both were exemplars of "wow, there seems to be a really cool idea here... why do they keep pausing from the really cool idea to say obviously dumb/false things?" for similarish reasons.

The Dennet book Consciousness Explained is one that is in a similar territory ("here's a wildyly different objective theory of a common thing you experience") and I like how he handles it better. He continues with the madman in the zoo:

If zoologists were to discover that this madman was right (in some manner of speaking), they would find a good use for their zoo in their attempts to explain their discovery. They might say, "It turns out that animals you know: those familiar things we all have seen at the zoo — are not what we once thought they were. They're so different, in fact, that we really shouldn't call them animals. So you see, there really aren't any animals in the ordinary understanding of that term."

That's something I can take well. He's got a different objective theory, and is making an explicit bid for a change in language. The Mind Is Flat unilaterally declares that if you use the existing language you must be talking about the old folk objective theory. Bleeeeeeeh :(

I want to beef with all of these authors about how they should spend more effort drawing the distinction between one's relational understanding of TOPIC and one's objective theory of TOPIC, and how they should be using language which makes clear which they are talking about. But that would be boring and ornery, so I'm going to change angles.

Unwanted Fusing of Understandings

For some reason or another², it's often hard to distinguish between one's relational understanding and one's objective theory. Even though it's pretty much always going to be the case that parts of your relational understanding aren't reflected in your objective theory, and vice versa, I've been in periods where it felt like they were one and the same. There was just "my understanding". When I acted, it would be through my relational understanding, and when I reflected, it would be on my objective theory, but somehow I didn't notice they weren't the same thing. It's like a particular flavor of cognitive fusion where instead of your objective theory being taken as true, it's taken as the entirety of your understanding.

Two consequences of this:

First, it can make you resistant to changing your objective theory. Since your relational understanding is strongly and rightfully anchored, and since cases made against your objective theory feel like refutations of your relational understanding, the "meager evidence" that people summon on the intellectual level will feel like no match for your lived experience, and your objective theory won't change.

Second, it can make you change your mind in damaging ways. You encounter a compelling refutation of you objective theory and you throw it and your relational understanding out the window. Now you have no idea how to act or be in relation with the thing.

I think this is can happen sometimes with nihilism (the angsty sad boi version, not the interesting worrisome version). "Nothing is actually meaningful, it's all fake and made up." You have your relational understanding of meaning built from just living life, but maybe you also had a particular objective theory (perhaps an eternalist narrative?). At some point, you encounter a compelling argument for why that eternalist objective theory is wrong, so you freak and conclude that your relational understanding is also wrong, misery and angst ensue.

(note: I'm not saying this explains what happens for everyone, just some people)

There's a similar way that one could get freaked out about free-will. What's your relational understanding of choice and what's your objective theory? The folk objective theory of choice might be wrong, but what sort of bullshit would it take for your relational understanding to be wrong?

I dwelt on this from a different angle previously in this twitter thread:

I've had personal experience with this. My relational understanding of meaning being fused to my objective theory, my objective theory taking big hits, and feeling like I needed to throw out all of my understanding because I no longer had an objective theory backing it up. It hurt a lot, and wasn't good for me. Remember, there are many ways of knowing. Watch out for memes that tell you that some are worthless and others are to be venerated. Live and think with the full strength of your being, whatever that means :)

1. When might someone actually turn out to care a lot about their objective theory? Maybe the theory is mostly held for signalling "purposes", maybe they've built a narrative which has become load bearing which puts importance on the theory. Many reasons, all of which aren't investigated here :)↩
2. I'm guessing there's a baseline level generic difficulty to doing this separation, because nuance is hard, but I bet it's extra likely to be hard if you're in a memeplex that heavily emphasizes explicit, "scientific", legible, easy to explain knowledge.↩