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 itâtransparent, obvious, unremarkable, like an extension of yourselfâvs when it’s broken and you’re trying to fix itâopaque, problematic, exceptional, self-conscious. Itâs just here, the âbroken toolâ 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:
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]
⢠yeah she is but I said I’d go over and take care of a bunch of her house stuff
⢠ahh, yeah no, she had to come back early because her kid got sick
⢠wait really? we made the plans a long time ago, maybe she forgot…
⢠whaaaa…? ohh, haha! no, Katelyn Jones, not Katelyn MacPherson
Initially, they’re commongrounded, so Charles isn’t guarded towards Sharon, so when she says that she’s spending the day with Katelyn, he lets Sharon’s view of the world into his, and he’s suddenly got double-vision: this Saturday contains Katelyn being both here and elsewhere at the same time. In this particular exchange as written, he still expresses what he knows without doubt: not “I thought Katelyn was…” but just “Katelyn is”. In so doing, he’s putting this double-vision world into the middle of the conversation, to be shared with Sharon.
And then Sharon responds with something that attempts to reconcile the double-vision into one world that once again makes sense. In this situation, it probably only takes a few utterances, whatever the issue isâmaybe the confusion lasts a couple minutes, at most. But some are much more complicated, for various reasons.
Mostly I’ve been presuming this is an innocent misunderstanding, but suppose that what Sharon thinks when Charlies says “wait, huh??” is actually “oh shit, wait, the two of them had that weird date and afterwards he was super clingy… did Katelyn lie to him and say she was out of town? oh man what a mess” In this case, there’s a much deeper reality breakdown, that may not be readily resolvable in this scene, since Sharon may be inclined to lie as well to preserve what she assumes might be Katelyn’s secret. Not the best example, but you get the idea.
(Importantly, this phenomenon occurs to the degree that the people in the conversation are making sense of what they knowâCharles’ sense that Katelyn is in Minneapolis is likely not an isolated propositional knowing that he just tacked onto his sense of thingsâeven if it was mostly from something she said, it was also based on the vibe with which she said it, and his sense of her being reliable, and everything else he knows about the situation such that her being in Minneapolis fits with his whole sense of what’s-going-on-in-the-world.)
Linguistic presupposition is related, and comes with a “wait what?” criterion: if you can negate the wrongness by saying “that’s not true”, it’s not presupposition. But if someone says “the king of France is bald”, you have to say “wait what? France doesn’t have a king!” This article is a great introduction to presupposition.
How this is different from presupposition is that it’s about the stance you hold towards the other person and whether you can simply let their words affect your sense of things, or whether you have to kind of sandbox their utterances. And this kind of sandboxing can show up for reasons other than presupposition, such that suspecting that somebody is lying or leaving out key details… or realizing that someone is joking or playfully trolling you.
In a sense, “trust” and “distrust” are two words for these modes, but they’re extremely overloaded terms so I wanted to choose something different. Especially because some of these ruptures are so tiny that they auto-repair almost immediately.
I’d like to collect more central examples but in the interest of getting this post out, here are a few. Feel free to leave a comment below (or @Malcolm_Ocean on twitter) with other examples.
Awkwardness in the social fabric: consider what happens sometimes when someone mentions a party without realizing that someone in the room hasn’t been invited: awkwardness, as the scene adjusts around a shifting sense of the social web’s priorities. Or when you knew the event was happening, and assumed you were invited, and then you find out indirectly that you weren’t invited. A real example: when I got married a couple years ago, there was a friend/acquaintance who had known for months that we were engaged, and a few weeks before the wedding they asked if we had a date planned. When I said it was in a few weeks, I watched their face express mild shock and painâwhat I interpreted as a revelation not just (a) that they weren’t invited but also (b) that that implied some mismatched sense of the closeness of their relationship with us. We didnât talk about it at the time but weâve gotten closer in the years since and so Iâve been meaning to mention it because I think it could be good to hold the situation togetherânote that that being a good idea depends on your culture; in some contexts making it explicit would definitely cause someone to lose face!
Or suppose you’re at a new company and someone says something that at other companies everybody would consider obscene or offensiveâcould be racist or sexist, could just be a cruel remark about someone’s performance… and at this moment, nobody else in the room calls them on it. You’re left kind of wondering… do they not share my values? Does everybody secretly share my values but there’s some miasma that is running this convo and keeping them from saying it?
In these situations, people are still on the same page about the kinds of categories they’re using though: parties, invitations, friends, Minneapolis, etc.
Where things get really weird is when people encounter not just different facts, but the reality that they aren’t even experiencing the world in terms of the same basic primitives, which may not even be able to be named, or maybe we have shared vocabulary but wildly different webs of association. Consider the kinds of tensions that arise when talking about free will, or God, or morality, or coercion, or artificial intelligence, or intelligence in general, or parenting⌠or most of what I write about. This can be in the abstract, or it can be about some specific situation that invokes some of these terms.
Our maps are never, ever, the same. They are sometimes similar enough (for a given situation). But the operative question is not how similar they are but how compatible they are. In many situations, we don’t even need to be able to see how they line upâif we can navigate together, that may be good enough! In fact, many areas of human endeavour, from partner dancing to marriage to corporate teams, involve forms of specialization where people deliberately develop different interfaces with reality, that are designed to interface well with each other. See it’s interfaces all the way fractal for way more on this.
Also so far I’ve been talking about two individual people, but the same dynamics apply to some extent between groups and between parts of a person! Political parties often have a giant chasm where the words they want to use to even begin the conversation already trigger a giant “we can’t even proceed” chasm.
A different way it gets weirder is that sometimes in order to avoid some discomfort or awkwardness or stress caused by the chasmed mode, people make some sort of assumption or barrel forward or change the subject. this can be conscious (eg if Charles didnât blurt out âwait what?â but instead just thought âthatâs oddâ) or unconscious flailing, where the person doesnât even notice that their attention has gone somewhere else.
In the extreme, it can lead to an internal coup where the person’s entire sense of self becomes governed by a different set of forces than before! Recompartmentalization. This is particularly likely when there is social pressure to pretend there’s no chasmâto pretend that what’s being said can make sense to you when don’t. This pressure can result in repressing the subsystems of you that it doesn’t make sense to, and voila! Now it “makes sense”. Except secretly the “you” to whom it makes sense has been swapped out under the hood.
I totally get why you would want to know that but it’s actually not the core topic of this post! But I’ll say a few things and direct you to some other writings about it.
Navigating the chasmed mode is central to the dance of the metaprotocol: what do you do, when the protocols you have are not enough, or when you realize you donât have shared protocols in the first place? Sometimes this happens still in commongrounded modeâ”Parlez-vous français?” â “Uhh sorry, no” â “Ah okay English works”âbut the trickiest and most important level of metaprotocol dancing is made of chasm. In a sense, if the protocol breaks down but you have another protocol to navigate that breakdown, you’re still commongrounded. But if you’re adrift with no shared protocol, now you’re in the chasm… and using whatever sense of the metaprotocol you have.
Beyond that, here are a few tips:
…and more in the secret to co-gnosis.
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.
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