making sense of “that makes sense”

• people say “that makes sense”, but what does it mean for something to make sense?
• to answer that, I’ll turn to another phrase: “my sense of things”
  • I, you, everybody—we each have a sense of things
  • this sense of things is our overall gestalt experience of what’s going on
  • all of our sense organs participate in constructing it
  • right now, I’m sitting in downtown San Francisco, and my sense of things includes the sounds of music playing, water rushing, a siren, and the sights of my computer and the fountain and street nearby
  • the mind, as the Buddhists note, is a sense organ, and it contributes all sorts of useful features to my sense of things, that I’m not directly perceiving in the moment
    • my intentions for writing this post
    • my awareness that I only have a few minutes before I’m going to head to work
    • my spatial sense of the train station I just left and the sense that the trains are running today
    • the sense that my office building will be open when I get there
  • my sense of things is “reality, as it seems to me”
• so now, when someone says something, and it makes sense to me, what has happened?
  • what they said has affected reality, as it seems to me
  • when a friend coming over texts me and says “I’m here”
    • my sense of things now includes them downstairs at my front door
    • it’s not merely that I have some propositional belief that they’re here: reality, for me, now contains them being there.  kind of like a hallucination, but only in the sense that it’s not in a direct feedback loop with my eyes. all sense is inference.
  • this situation so obviously makes sense that I wouldn’t even bother saying “that makes sense”, although if someone who I thought was out of town texted me saying “I’m here” I might go “huh, what? that doesn’t make sense” and it’s fairly likely that they texted the wrong person.
    • in this case, my reality has maybe been jabbed in the ribs by this strange text, but I don’t just coherently imagine that they’re at the front door.
  • maybe I have double-vision though (as described in commongrounded vs chasmed)
• non-exhaustive list of ways things might not make sense:
  • too vague
  • seems like a lie, or you don’t trust their motives
  • you haven’t been given enough evidence for something to feel right just adopting it
  • someone says X, X seems to you to imply Y, and Y seems obviously false
    • ie when you try to let X affect your sense of things, it produces a conflict
    • this could be about a worldly fact, or someone’s motivation, or a law of nature
  • if someone reports something but you don’t trust their judgment (or perceptiveness), perhaps because they’ve given inaccurate but confident reports in the past
    • about observations of the world, or about other people, or eg someone saying they’ll show up, on time, and that has almost no effect on your expectations
  • if someone makes a claim using words you don’t know, it may not make any sense at all
• “I trust [person]” can mean:
  • “I let your words simply affect my sense of things, without sandboxing or guarding”
  • likewise, of course, with “I don’t trust [person]”
  • part of what trust between people is, is this kind of permeability of sensemaking

(this post was written in about 20 minutes, in the “onepager” genre: my friend Visa’s challenge to explain your thing rapid-fire. my others: Non-Naive Trust Dance, Evolution of Consciousness, Bootstrapping Meta-Trust)

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