This post is half-baked, meaning semi-published.
Think of it like a draft that for some reason has been made available anyway.
It might disappear or change dramatically. But likely the url will continue to point at something relevant.
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, 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. That’s like asking “is this apple that apple?” 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 “red” are more compatible than my “red” and “blue”, for many reasons that are obvious but I’ll say them anyway:
All of which would lead us to create compatible or commensurate interfaces with red, such that we don’t encounter many differences there when we go to talk about it. And the word “red” is an interface we share for referring to this pattern.
For what it’s worth I suspect actually that there are real subtle interfacial consequences to things like the fact that red is higher wavelength (lower energy) and for humans the fact that our red & green cone cells are much closer to each other than either is to blue (rods are between blue and green). I don’t know what the consequences are, but in an important sense it must matter. A tetrachromat (with a fourth kind of cell) would experience most colors quite differently. And of course colorblind people do.
However, the question of similarity or compatibility has an implicit context. You can do that with the apples too: are these two apples the same apple? Well in some sense of course they can be, if we know what we’re doing. They can be fungible or equivalent or undifferentiated, for some purpose.
And of course there are many ways in which our interfaces with the color red may be incompatible. When I try to point at these, they seem symbolic, somehow separate from the level of perception.
If you’re American and I’m Canadian (which I am) then you might be surprised to discover that for me, red is associated with the political “left wing” and blue with the political “right wing” (I’ll caveat that these concepts are themselves ever-shifting coalitions, not very natural categories). In fact, my way is more common in the rest of the world (and historical America); the phrase “red states and blue states” originated in 2000 with one particular TV announcer’s choice of colors (from the american flag). So is my red your blue? In this sense, yes!
And this is helpful to talk about color because it’s true for basically everything you could possibly want to talk about, and color perception is the MOST basic aspect of reality you can get, or close to it.
Which is maybe why the philosophers use it in this thought experiments!
Part of why Hoffman is so radical is that he highlights that it’s actually something-like-meaningless to say “my interface with Y and your interface with Y are more alike than those interfaces are with Carol’s”. They can’t be alike or unalike; they can’t be compared; they’re made out of different stuff! Mine are made out of my experiences and yours are made out of yours. That’s all in terms of the subjective interface, that is—you can obviously talk about our behaviors having something in common.
The actual question is ITSELF about interfaces again. Not “do you and I see this the same way?”—we don’t. Full stop. Next question.
And the next question is “do we want to describe how we see it, the same way?” on a propositional level.
Or “is my interface with Y able to interface with your interface with Y?” on more of a participatory level.
And it might be that we can effectively dance together, even though we have radically different descriptions of what dance is or what it means to us or how it works.
Having said that… there’s still clearly obviously a thing that we mean when we talk about difference, or perhaps distance. While writing this up, I intuitively used the metaphor of “how far apart people are” and this is actually a different metaphor than similarity, although we often use distance as a metaphor FOR similarity. And maybe we’ll also talk about what lies in that distance—is it a smooth pathway or a complex dance?
Ah yeah, it’s like, how complicated is the transformation we need to do to my interface in order to turn it into your interface? And in some super simple cases that transformation is basically a null operation except for the “entirely composed of your experience, rather than entirely composed of mine”, but they share the same structure and they sit in each of us in a similar way, so we round them to “same”.
In particular, mathematical objects can be extremely like this (though not as much as people might assume). Also if we have a shared experience of something happening to us both together, that can become a reference point (assuming we experienced it “much the same way”).
So let’s try that.
have you found a way to suss out how
differentfar away someone else’s interface really is?
There’s a kind of vast vector space here, and again it depends a bunch on context.
Like if there’s certain kinds of things at stake, and low trust, it can be very hard to get people to agree with boring statements that they would other times themselves utter as axiomatic premises (eg “we live in a society” or “humans are a kind of animal”) because they don’t want to allow the other person to set the frame and then force them using logic into accepting some conclusion they disagree with.
In general, one of the things I keep an eye out for is if there’s something where it’s easy for me to express it to Alice and hard for me to express to Bob. that’s a sign that me and Bob have a big weird gap/chasm/shear—in relation to that topic or knowing, not necessarily “in general”.
Interestingly I suspect it’s possible (tho not super common) that Bob could ALSO express relevant things to Alice that he can’t express to me.
This could be because Alice has a viewpoint that is a deep synthesis of mine and Bob’s. [depth perception metaphor]
More commonly, Alice has the ability to take either of our perspectives at a given time, but not both. So she can step into one frame or the other, and resonate with what we’re saying. and both of those are sort of workable ways of seeing things for her.
Whereas if I were to try to see things Bob’s way, or vice versa, it would produce some major discomfort for me because it would seem to violate something I know about the world.
It could be that Alice does not actually have that additional knowing, and that’s why she’s able to hear us, or it could be that she has that knowing and also has some additional knowing that makes it not-an-issue.
Important to track here is a principle I have which is something like “everybody contains explanations of literally everything they have ever experienced. Necessarily this involves making a bunch of absurd generalizations”.
But people can have very compartmentalized explanations, where they can’t actually simultaneously explain X and Y, and if you get them to try they get distracted or flustered or angry.
This is kind of developmental stuff I guess also, except it doesn’t necessarily map onto any common ladder like Kegan stages.
As for…
Like, I wonder whether “thing” and “other” and “space” are coded radically differently between people.
This seems very very true to me, not just of the words but of what we would consider the referent.
[this post is half-baked and I didn’t finish this part and as of the moment I’m publishing it I’m not even sure what exactly I was gonna get at here]
Constantly consciously expanding the boundaries of thoughtspace and actionspace. Creator of Intend, a system for improvisationally & creatively staying in touch with what's most important to you, and taking action towards it.
Have your say!