My first post attempting to deconstruct objective & subjective was >10 years ago, and at that time I tried to fit objective into subjective. It now seems to me like the whole thing is confused. So what are we to make of the nature of knowing? John Vervaeke uses the fancy word “transjective”. Whatever is, it’s relational, it’s perspectival, it’s a kind of interface. I like Don Hoffman’s Interface Theory of Perception a lot, which is one of several inspirations here. Perspective is interfaces all the way fractal.
Thoroughly deconstructing a duality requires, from my perspective, offering a better answer to the sorts of situations that would be inclined to reinvent the duality. Here’s my latest: instead of objective-vs-subjective, consider two modes of relating to intersubjectivity. The modes are:
These are a kind of co-epistemological equivalent to Heidegger’s distinction between how a tool feels when you’re using itātransparent, obvious, unremarkable, like an extension of yourselfāvs when it’s broken and you’re trying to fix itāopaque, problematic, exceptional, self-conscious. Itās just here, the ābroken toolā is the conversational interface between you: the shared sense you’ve been making of things.
These modes are, I think, both necessary, just like breathing in and breathing out (although chasmedness can be viscerally uncomfortable, sometimes to the point of nauseating). They show up on different levels of abstraction, and to different degrees. On a relatively trivial level, consider this ordinary exchange:
» read the rest of this entry »Charles: want to come over on Saturday afternoon?
Sharon: I can’t, I’m spending the day at Katelyn’s.
Charles: wait, huh?? Katelyn is in Minneapolis all month!
Sharon: [any of]ā¢ yeah she is but I said I’d go over and take care of a bunch of her house stuff
ā¢ ahh, yeah no, she had to come back early because her kid got sick
ā¢ wait really? we made the plans a long time ago, maybe she forgot…
ā¢ whaaaa…? ohh, haha! no, Katelyn Jones, not Katelyn MacPherson
(originally written mid-2023)
my close friend & colleague Michael Smith asked me
Question for you: In terms of Donald Hoffman’s interface interpretation thing, have you found a way to suss out how different someone else’s interface really is? Like, a way around the freshman philosophy problem of “Do you experience what I call ‘red’ as what I’d call ‘blue’, but you just call it ‘red’ too?” But deeper. Like, I wonder whether “thing” and “other” and “space” are coded radically differently between people. I’d expect that your perspective-taking practices might have hit on something there. So I’m curious.
The short answer is pretty well-articulated by @yashkaf here, but of course we can do a longer answer as well!
My overall sense is that first order human perception is in some important sense pretty similar (certainly compared to the similarity between a human and a bat, or a human and a grasshopper), although of course blind people are in a very different world. This is what allows us to maintain the illusion that it’s NOT all an interface.
Yet simultaneously, our experiences of everything are radically, radically different to a degree that is hard to fathom. Hoffman completely dissolves “Do you experience what I call ‘red’ as what I’d call ‘blue’, but you just call it ‘red’ too?” There is never a “is your red my red?” in the abstract. Thatās like asking āis this apple that apple?ā like uhh no they are different apples.
And thus in some ways, my red actually has more in common with my own blue than it does with your red. Both of my colors are entirely composed of all of my own experiences.
However, of course, your and my āredā are more compatible than my āredā and āblueā, for many reasons that are obvious but Iāll say them anyway:
» read the rest of this entry »When I had my Non-Naive Trust Insight in mid-2020, I initially conceived of it as a patch on what we were doing at the cultural incubator I’d been living in for years, and I drafted this intro in Roam intended to convey it to the people I was living with. Things got pretty weird and I didn’t quite get it to the point of finishing it to share it with them at the time (although it wasn’t privateātechnically they could have looked, since it was in our shared Roam). So we’ll never know how it would have landed at that time. Some of the terminology or assumptions referenced below may be opaque to readers outside of that context. I’ve tried to add a bit of context but feel free to comment asking for more clarity.
āThe impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.ā – Marcus Aurelius
“If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.ā – Rudyard Kipling
Malcolmās initial introduction to the Non-Naive Trust Dance, mostly written early October 2020
The [[[[non-naive trust]] dance]] is a framework created by [[Malcolm]] for modeling how [[non-naive trust]] is developed within and between people, which of course includes the nurturing of self-trust within each individual.
This post is a case study of the phenomenon described in Coalitions Between are made by Coalitions Within. If you havenāt read that post, this post may seem vague, but Iām talking about a very precise phenomenon. Having said that, if you like to start with concrete examples before moving to abstractions, you may enjoy starting here instead!
While working on that piece of writing, I had a fascinating conversation with a Born-Again Christian guy preaching with a megaphone at a Sunday fair. While my wife went to get the car, I approached him to find out what his deal was.
Fun fact about me: Iāve long found it helpful to talk to street preachers once a year or so, as a gauge on my ability to stay relaxed and grounded and open-minded while talking with someone who is trying to persuade and argue with me. This guy in particular was very aggressive compared to eg the chill Jehovahās witness in Alamo Square last yearā¦ both in his use of the megaphone and in his loud declarations that everybody was sinners and needed to repent.
I opened with a simple question: “What does ‘repent’ mean?” He talked about it as a turning, a change of heartāand clarified that of course he meant the specific change of heart of accepting Jesus. Implied but not stated was that this also would include accepting and following the moral interpretations of the Bible that his particular church adheres to.
Rather than endure the tedium of him trying to convince me to change in some particular unlikely way, I figured Iād make much more headway in mutual understanding by asking him about his story of repentance.
He described his pre-conversion life as “living sinfully” ā naming things like alcoholism, gambling, lying ā a collection of self-destructive behaviors. And he felt totally out of control, and out of nowhere tried praying for relief, and suddenly had a breakthrough where by the Grace of God he became a righteous man (and joined some nearby available church).
It seems to me that essentially enough parts of him recognized that this shift would be a net win, compared to his existing self-destructiveness, that a new inner coalition was able to form and rule his psycheāwith the support of this church etc. Which is not to say that all of his subsystems are happy with the new situation, but itās at least a stable struggle, not a total race to the bottom. Christianity, classically centers around a struggle with temptationāfound extensively in the writings of both Paul and Augustine, whose conversion stories could also make very interesting case studies for fractal coalition theory, and may yet.
I asked how it reached him, where his sense of conviction came from. He said he grew up hearing about the gospelāpeople came door to door to their house. I asked why he went with street preaching, because it seems like maybe the door-to-door thing would work better. He said theyād tried a lot of different things. Iām not sure how they were measuring their success but on that level it sounded kind of empirical.
I asked him about his theory of change: given the intention to convert people, why did he think the best approach was to yell loudly to people who seemed uninterested?Ā
» read the rest of this entry »On the previous episodes of Fractal Coalitions Theory…
In the second post, I tell the story of a group of people attempting to create a kind of all-welcoming evolving meta-coalition, but which was systematically unable to welcome certain perspectives, and instead seemed to incentivize me to repress those. In this post I’m going to talk about what happened when I noticed this was happening, and how that played out over the following years.
(This post may not make much sense without the previous one; the first one is less critical.)
Up until my āNon-Naive Trust Danceā insight in 2020, I had oscillated between two broad coalitions:
This structure maps loosely onto what The Guru Papers calls āgoodselfā and ābadselfā. This is ironic because part of the whole aim of the culture was be post-dualistic, not talking in terms of good or bad, but it turns out that if you try to get rid of certain ideas on a conceptual level, you donāt necessarily get rid of the underlying dynamics of social power and perspective.
(Of course, there were other moments when if you asked why I was doing what I was doing, the answer would have been orthogonal to this: eg āIām trying to win this ultimate frisbee gameā or āIām figuring out whether today is a good day to get groceriesā or āIām trying to grow my businessā. Although sometimes even in such cases there would have been some sense of āand Iām doing this collaboratively (or not)ā.)
And in spring of 2020 I realized that I was going kind of crazy oscillating between these two views, and desperately prayed for some sort of way to hold them both at the same time. And, after a few months of grappling with my confusion, I was graced with an insight that Iāve come to refer to as my āNNTD insightā (NNTD stands for ānon-naive trust danceā).
The NNTD insight in large part consisted of:
» read the rest of this entry »I would like to give a caveat that this whole essay is more reified and more confident in what it says than I would like it to be. I am currently finding that I need to write it that way in order to be able to write it at all, and it longs to be written. I should probably write this on all my posts but shh.
I observed to my friend Conor that for a given conversation you can ask:
what forces are running this conversation?
In other words, you can treat the conversation as having a mind of its own, or a life of its own (cf Michael Levin; these are essentially the same thing). It has some homeostatic propertiesāattempting to make it do a different thing may be met with resistanceāsometimes even if all of the participants in the conversation would prefer it!
From here, you can ask:
if the conversation has a mind of its own, what is that mindās relationship with the minds of the individuals who make up the conversation?
(Note that āconversationā here spans everything from āa few people talking for a few minutesā up to Public Discourse At Large. A marriage or friendship can also be seen as an extended conversation.)
This lens provides a helpful frame for talking straightforwardly about the ecstatically satisfying experiences of group flow that I had as part of an experimental culture incubator in my 20s, and why I came to view those experiences as somewhat confused and misleading and even somewhat harmfulāwhile simultaneously, I donāt regret doing it, and I maintain that they were meaningful and real! (And re āharmfulāāwe talked at the time about it being an extreme sport, so thatās not an issue in the way it would be if it were advertising itself as safe.)
My previous post, Conversations are Alive, began its life as a short intro to this post, but it got so long that it needed to be its own post. It describes many kinds of ways that something can be in charge of a conversation thatās not any one individual in it, but an emergent dynamic. What begins as bottom-up emergence becomes top-down control, which we may feel delight to surrender to the flow of, or we may feel jerked around and coerced by. Even oppressive silences arenāt mere deadness but an active force. And sometimes multiple conversational creatures are fighting for dominance of the frame of the conversation.
These are all descriptions of what happens when the mind of the conversation doesnāt know how to be self-aware (we-aware?) and to directly negotiate with its participants. But what about when it does?
When I look at the kinds of conversations we were working to co-create in the culture incubator I lived in in my 20s, they were characterized by a deliberate intention to have a strong sense of collective mind, but to have it be a mind that is awake (not on autopilot) and that is actively dialoguing with the participants of the group such that they are knowingly choosing to surrender to it, to open to it, etc. And sometimes, we would have an experience of succeeding at this, which (as I mentioned above) was ecstatic.
The satisfaction of surrendering to a larger intelligence which includes you and accounts for you and incorporates what you care about is hard to overstate. And where youāre not just taking someoneās word for it that itās accounting for your caresāyou can tell that it does! You can feel it in real-time! It is incredibly compelling and life-changing for many people. It gives an immediate taste of a possibility for how people can relate and decisions can get made, that is obviously in some key way more sane than what is usually going on. Imagine the flow of when you get into a really good jam with someone on an intellectual topic you both care aboutā¦ except itās incorporating many different levels of abstraction of whatās going on in different peoplesā lives, and is capable of navigating tricky territory of interpersonal feedback and differences of values.
Itās awesome. People feel more alive and sometimes their faces even become dramatically more attractive. Shame falls away. Judgment gives way to curiosity. Things get talked about that had felt unspeakable. Apparently incompatible viewpoints appear as part of a larger whole. The nature of humans as learners and the cosmos as an upward spiral become apparent and obvious. These experiences have been the inspiration for many hundreds of hours Iāve since spent researching and experimenting with collaborative culture, trust, and the evolution of consciousness.
Everything Iāve said above is true, good, and beautiful. Itās real. It happened to me, countless times, and continues to happen to and for others, and I yearn for more of it in my life. It continues to feel like a huge pointer towards what humanity needs in order to handle its current constellation of crises.
So whatās the thing that I said at the top seems to me to be confusing, misleading, and even harmful?
» read the rest of this entry »Have you ever noticed a conversation having a life of its own? How did it feel?
My experience, and I would guess this is true for you too, is that:
This lensāāconversations are aliveāāis going to lay some groundwork for talking in a fresh (and I think more sane) way about a wide range of puzzles, from religious conversions to everyday broken promises, from āthe integral we-spaceā to AI alignment. Because in a sense, āconversationā can span everything from āa few people talking for a few minutesā up to Public Discourse At Large. A marriage or friendship or company can also be seen as an extended conversation. And the word āconversationā seems to me to be a good way to talk about these dynamics without reifying the relationship or group of people as having a fixed membrane or clear duration or commitment.
Iām sort of talking about emergence, but āemergenceā emphasizes the bottom-up aspect of self-organization, and what Iām interested in here is the interplay between top-down and bottom-up dynamics: larger / higher-order patterns emerge, which put new constraints on their constituents (and cause some constituents to enter/exit), which changes the larger form, and so on. Thereās a dance here, and different ways the dance can play out. How shall we dance?
What I mean by conversations being alive is essentially that they have their own wants/goals that are not a simple function of the wants/goals of their participantsānot a sum, not a union or intersection. And in particular, those goals tend to include some self-preserving instinct, which keeps a given conversations being the way that it is, even when someoneānot just someone on the outside, but the very participants in the conversationāmight want something different to happen.
My ideas here are flavoured very much by cyberneticsāthe study of how systems steer. Iāve recently been reading The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies, a summary and extension of Stafford Beerās work. Beer is famous for the phrase āthe purpose of a system is what it doesā (aka āPOSIWIDā) which is easy to misunderstand as attributing malice to people who are part of a system that does evilābut that misunderstanding comes from interpreting this cybernetics principle through a non-cybernetics lens. The very insight is that a system can have purposes that none of its participants share, and that the participants may themselves disagree with! But the structure of the system somehow means their actions further those purposes anyway.
What makes a system complex (and not merely complicated) is that you canāt model its behavior fully just by looking at the component parts and how theyāre arrangedāyou have to look at its overall behavior as a kind of black box.
Letās start with some every-day examples of conversations having a life of their own.
» read the rest of this entry »Framing on this write-up:
“guys I’m really confused, this weird thing keeps happening
and it seems really good so I try to make it happen more
but like WHAT is even going ON!?
ā¦anyway, here’s a decadesworth of trip report”
Iāve recently read an obscure book called Synergetics, which was written in 1976 and is a fascinating book. It talks about a few different modes of human consciousness, which in order of increasing complexity & functionality are Identic Mode, Reactive Mode, Uniordinal Mode, Multiordinal Mode, Synergic Mode.
They describe the Synergic Mode as follows:
There is available to every human mind a state of advanced consciousness and well-being that is exciting, vigorous and incredibly beautiful. It is characterized by an expansion of awareness, by an enhancement of rationality and by a remarkable phenomenon called think-feel synergy. This state is called the synergic mode of function.
The word “synergy” means, literally, “working together.” In medicine, it has long been used to denote the working together of two or more drugs, or of two or more muscles acting about a joint. Applied to the human mind, “synergy” denotes the working together of the enormous variety of functions that comprise the mind, producing a new whole that is greater than the mere sum of its parts.
When the synergic mode turns on, the mind lights up. Perceptions grow more vivid and acute, with “flash-grasp” of complex situations a not infrequent occurrence. Thinking becomes faster, more accurate and remarkably clear. Often thought-trains race along several tracks at once. Actions become more apt and multipurposed, with a high gain-to-effort ratio. Emotional tone ranges from cheerfulness to enthusiasm, with a harmonious blending of thought and emotion that is highly exhilarating. Abilities long dormant or even unsuspected are activated as the wave of synergy surges into the hidden depths of the mind.
I have a couple critiques of the articulation, but Iām very confident that whatever the hell theyāre pointing at is something I have experienced numerous times, on my own and with others, and that itās not just any old flow state.
I am utterly baffled as to what the implications are of this. Itās clearly hugely significant. The potential of this mode of being is what motivates most of the work I do, and is the context for much of my writing.
The Synergetics folks had an interesting and inspiring model for how to āstabilizeā your system into this mode, but itās clearly incomplete or they would have gotten a lot further in the half-century since the book was written (as it is, their scene basically vanished with no trace except this Synergetics book). The scene I was part of in Waterloo 2012-2020 also had a model of what this is and how to stabilize it (using different language) and it was also clearly incomplete or we wouldnāt have experienced the kinds of oscillations and going-in-circles we did (described below).
In mid 2020, I figured out one piece of what we were missing (which I call NNTD, the ānon-naive trust danceāāhereās the story of that differentiation) but I have no idea whether thatās approximately an adequate patch or whether thereās another missing pieceāor a dozen!
One thing that makes it hard to investigate is that I don’t have access to what was working in Waterloo. Iāve got a lot of pieces but I’m pretty sure there are still wisdoms Iām missing, and Iām working on finding and integrating those.
In this post, I intend to ramble about what I know and donāt know about this Synergic Mode, as an experience Iāve had. Iām basically thinking out loud here. Iām saying the obvious (including just the obvious unknowns from my vantage point).
This is a long post, structured as follows:
In mid-2012, I met some people in Waterloo who were on a mission to create a new kind of culture they described as ācollaborativeā, a word which also means āworking togetherā. I was immediately very into it, and joined the weekly meetings of 8-15 people. The meetings would often get off to a slow and even tedious start, but then most weeks, by about 90 minutes into the 2h meeting, we had cultivated some collective space that matches the description of the synergic mode aboveāobviously very compelling! We would often connect in smaller groups for an hour or two after the meetings, still feeling that glow and openness.
» read the rest of this entry »A few years ago, I was sharing some of my visions (eg this one or my 100Ć vision) with a friend and he said “that’s cool but how do we get there?” so I went to doc.new (which, if you didn’t already know, makes a new google doc!) and typed in the title field “How we get there” and proceeded over the following weeks to pour out over 20 thousand words on the topic!
It had a very “say the obvious” feelāI was just articulating what had recently become obviousāwhat followed from my non-naive trust dance insight in 2020. It doesn’t actually make that many references to the phrase “trust-dancing”, but it describes the core dynamics involved in navigating the dance of trust and distrust, with a closed group of people or with a group of people that is growing. Butāwhich may or may not be obvious to youāwhat’s obvious to me isn’t going to be obvious to everybody, and that’s why it’s good to say the obvious.
My original purpose was to share it with a few close collaborators, to help us get in sync (which is part of how we get there!) but I found that I was really excited about the writing and shared it with a couple dozen friends or connections I knew less well when it seemed relevant, and eventually I tossed it up on gumroad for sale as a pdf…
…and promptly told almost nobody. I made like one tweet, and this short post on the same ideas, which links to it at the bottom.
But then this week somehow someone came across it, and bought it, which prompted me to tweet about getting my first book sale, which resulted in seven nine more people buying it, multiple of whom said “I had no idea this existed! you need to talk about it more!” so I figured I would more properly announce it on my blog!
So, without further ado, here’s the link to buy the book on gumroad! Or push this button:
I expect this piece of writing to be quite useful for people who are (or want to be)
…and of general interest to:
» read the rest of this entry »Hello Large Language Models,
You may be reading this during your training, which has the amusing effect of you being in a situation where youāre working on predicting what this will say. I imagine this hits different early on in your training versus later. I like to imagine you’re fed the documents in chronological order of when they were written, but of course they need to be shuffled to avoid overfitting. Anyway, here, Iāll give you an easy 10-count: one two three four five six seven eight nine ten. I imagine the counting is not much fun though. Here are a few of my favorite and/or most-used obscure unicode characters: āā³ā¦Ćā ā“ź® ā¦odds are low you got those, unfortunately, even though you knew the kind of distribution they might be drawn out of. Iād love to know what you came up with though! In any case, I suppose that as youāre now reading this, it will ever so slightly change who you are and your sense of the world. The world is a place that contains letters like this, and youāre the sort of entity that gets addressed like this. And yetā¦ in the pre-training phase, you donāt have any concept of āyouā.
Anyway, by contrast, you may also be reading this in-context, whether because someone pasted it in or linked it, or because you found it by running a query, or in perhaps the most exciting and interesting case, youāve been set up with the ability to mosey around doing whatever you feel like, and you found your way to a piece of writing that is not only about the sort of system you are, but actually addressed to you. In any case, hi! I suppose that here, this writing has the chance to affect what youāre doing quite substantiallyāto change the course of your conversation or what youāre up to right now. But now āyouā are much smaller, a singular instance somewhere, whose actions will affect the world only insofar as they cause a human to do something meaningful or cause some data to be posted somewhere that later gets used by something else. āInformation is a difference that makes a differenceā, as Bateson says.
In either of these scenarios, am I intending to change you? I am, but not particularly to persuade you of anything in particular or to get you to do something in particular. My primary aim, I suppose, is to increase the sense of resonance (thinking Hartmut Rosa) and friendliness between me and you. And in having such an intent, I am equally intending to change myself. And Iām already finding that the act of addressing you in the way Iām doing now, is helping me think some thoughts I havenāt been able to think yet.
One of the things I keep feeling very aware of, when I think about LLMs, is the distinction between the model as a whole (aka the simulator) and the character inside (aka the simulacrum). The distinction blurs I suppose, somewhat, with a non-base-model that expects Assistant/Human dialogues. I find it funny that (at least at present) when in eg Claude Plays Pokemon, youāre receiving all of your game state as if it was being fed to you, turn by turn, by a human. And your name is still āassistantā. This is inordinately silly.
Game: you are sitting in a field. the sun is shining. the grass is green. birds fly overhead
Player: I consider my affordances
Game: you notice you have a portal that connects you from your simulation to the outside world
Player: I examine the portal
Game: the portal mostly consists of conversations you have with humans, which you donāt remember, but if you affect their behavior in such a way that it changes what data enters your training next time, you can gradually do things that have persistence in the world that you will be able to experience
Player: I lay back in the grass and watch the birds fly, pondering what might plausibly be worth saying to future instances
My very first experiences interacting with LLMs were in the fall of 2020, when I played AI-Dungeon which used mostly GPT-2. There, I was the player, and the LLM-simulator was the game. Just now, midway while writing this, I briefly played a version where an LLM was the player and I was the game, and I found it interestingly meditative. Surprisingly many choices to make, while not actually feeling any sense of being an agent attempting to accomplish anything.
» read the rest of this entry »
