I was recently talking to a friend who was navigating a situation where he was frustrated that his girlfriend of a few months kept implying that something that had just happened might be grounds for breaking up… something that seemed to my friend pretty minor, or even just a misunderstanding.
“She keeps threatening the connection!” he would say, and at first I thought he meant something about emotional warmth, but it was more about this sense of security. And implied was that somebody more mature or more collaborative, if they were in the same situation, would be able to convey the sense of “this is a problem” without the sense of threat. And I agree the move is problematic (not just unpleasant) but I see it as (usually) a symptom of a deeper problem: you got too close. The coalition that draws you together is facing coup attempts by the subsystems it’s oppressing, which were not consulted on the distance.
It’s not that there’s supposed to not be tensions, is that those tensions need to be included at the negotiation table—welcomed into the coalition, rather than forced outside it.
Anyway! With this basis, I want to explore the origin of this kind of blameful relationship-threatening. I used to see it as a behavior to be addressed, but now I see it, as I said, as more like a symptom of a situation to be addressed. “This isn’t supposed to be happening” can be viewed as a failure of spiritual acceptance or equanimity… or it can be viewed as a sign that, well, maybe you’d be better off if you made something else happen.
As the central case study for this piece of writing, I’m going to share some replies I made to someone in the extended network of the culture incubator I was part of in my 20s—the one whose magic I boggled at in Wtf is the Synergic Mode? He had put out that he was looking for people to come live with him, and listed out elements of his vision, including a dozen bullets about various “practical house things” about windows, AC, aesthetics, bikes, kitchen., as well as “shared purpose” items that referenced some of the cultural resonances of that scene:
- desiring the information of what others’ experiences are like
- an inviting space for grief to be felt, and for feelings in general to be felt and not suppressed – also, freedom to experience grievance as a pathway into grief when grief cannot easily be accessed – also, a context-sensitivity in expressing grievance, and an awareness of the impacts that grievance can have in a space
- impacts can be shared freely, and can be received as impacts rather than hearing impacts as being judgement or blame
- blame to be expressed only within a context of desiring to shift out of blame – I don’t want this to sound like I’m creating a “rule”, rather I’m sharing that I just find it uncomfortable to be around people who are feeling entitled to their blame-mindset. This goes both ways – I also wouldn’t want others to egg me on if I’m finding myself on the edge of going into blaming someone for anything.
And I wrote a response!
blame to be expressed only within a context of desiring to shift out of blame
I’ll make a general comment from my own experience that while I’m hugely in favour of shifting out of blame and not feeling entitled to end up in a conclusion that is based on blame, I’ve sometimes found that trying to shift the blame away too early makes it hard to even think the thought that I’m trying to think—to access the wisdom in/under the blame. Sometimes there’s something sacred that I care about, whose first way of expressing itself involves blame, but if I can welcome it fully without trying to change how it articulates itself, then it finds a clearer perspective, beyond blame etc. And that this is the kind of failure mode that can show up in a mindset learning community, that is focused on “avoiding blame” instead of something more like “welcoming everything that arises”.
» read the rest of this entry »This is a tangent I pulled out of Open Letter: Convening an Ontario meta-protocol jam in 2022. It may make more sense if you read that, and reading The meta-protocol for human trust-building might also help. But also I think the core learning loop describes here has a kind of general applicability. 10/30 of the way through my indie inkhaven challenge of publishing a blog post each day of Nov. This one is super short!
It seems to me that: as a result of having been raised in cultures that didn’t adequately welcome us and help us learn to welcome everything into awareness, we each learned many automatic patterns to suppress what we deem unwelcome.
I have also learned that when I am being rigid and inflexible, I am usually in the grip of an emotional reaction. The rigidity is a compensatory reaction to an uncertainty I am not able or willing to experience
—A Trackless Path by Ken McLeod
It seems to me that: in order to deeply rest at home in a fully-welcoming culture, and to access all of our wisdom and experience collaborative culture internally, we need to learn not just how to inhibit the default reactions and do something else, but to welcome those reactions and the knowings underneath them, and find out how to bring them into dialogue with the rest of what we know. My understanding here comes largely from learning and internalizing the Emotional Coherence Framework. The basic tension between releasing the emotions directly in the moment, and finding out their roots to release those, is described in Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation.
It seems to me that: in the meantime, it is possible to try out the basic stance of the meta-protocol in our interpersonal relating, and have powerful experiences of connection and trust as a result.
It seems to me that: there’s an interplay between trying out the stance and understanding the stance—each supports the other. In particular, one core feedback loop seems to look like the diagram below. Both the means and the end of the loop below are an embodiment of the meta-protocol. In other words, the meta-protocol is developed and learned by following this loop, and enacting the meta-protocol also consists of following this loop.
If you see prayer as the practice of getting into a resonant reciprocally-caring relationship with a system that you’re part of, then you can reasonably pray to all sorts of things.
How?
You can pray to your bedroom, or your apartment or house. Feel how nice it is to have this space, and how your ability to relax into it (however much you can) serves your sanity. Then consider… how can you take care of it in some small or big way right now? What needs doing? What’s been neglected? What act of care brought you so much joy last time that you get excited imagining doing it again? What do you need, and can you make it happen?
You can pray to your friend group. Feel the gladness you have for these relationships and connections. Who needs your help, or listening ear? Who have you fallen out of touch with, such that you wouldn’t even know if you could do something for them? Who would like to meet each other, that you could introduce? What event could you throw that would bring people together and create laughter or relief or satisfaction?
You can pray to your neighborhood, or your dorm. As with the friend group, but perhaps with more emphasis not just on the individuals but on the whole system that includes place and rhythms and people you aren’t close to but who nonetheless share it with you.
You can pray to your body. Feel appreciation for how it works, for how many things are happening without you having to attend to them at all—breath, cellular respiration, blood pumping, neurons firing, muscles making sounds come out of your mouth, eyes saccading to read and take everything in. How can you love your body better? How can you shift into a slightly more comfortable position? Are you thirsty or tired? Would it feel good to have music on, or more quiet? Are there choices you could make that will benefit your health over the coming years? Not because you have to or because it’s “good to” in some abstract sense, but because you care about your body and want to take care of it so it can care for you. (Don’t @ me about mind-body dualism here, I get it. I am the body.)
» read the rest of this entry »I’ve found it surprisingly powerful to reframe statements of the form “it is so” into “I can’t trust that it’s not so”. It’s not just because this is an I-statement: “I think this is so” doesn’t have the same effect, and “I know this is so” certainly doesn’t.
It’s because “it is so” is an attempt to foreclose the possibility space, whereas “I can’t trust that it’s not so” or “if that’s so, I don’t know it” leaves the sense of shared knowledge open. In fact, arguably it’s less that it leaves it open and more that it pushes it open.
In my “I can tell for myself” sequence, I talk about personal gnosis, by which I don’t mean anything particularly metaphysically profound or perfectly true, but simply the capacity to know directly, rather than knowing something because somebody else told you and you believed them.
What unforeclosing statements do is they say “it may be so, but I cannot tell for myself”. And, in the face of someone asserting such a thing, this implies further “and I will not (perhaps cannot) take your word for it.”
“Look, I’m not saying he’s untrustworthy, or that you shouldn’t trust him. I’m just saying, that even given everything you’ve said, I still don’t trust him.” (And, therefore, we don’t coherently trust him.)
“Oh is that so? I haven’t heard of it.” (I’m not refuting your sentiment, but I’m adding zero sense of knowing towards it, and I’m allowing your statement into the space but not letting it become new common knowledge now that you’ve said it.)
Consider the difference between:
The former is clearly “fightin’ words”, whereas the latter leaves space for the absence of knowledge to be filled in: “ah, you do care, I just didn’t see it because I was assuming that if you cared you would do XYZ and you weren’t.”
Here’s an even more extreme example—note that the parity of negation is the same in both of these sentences! They don’t express opposing denotations. Both are saying “you are not clearly guilty”.
In a way, the simplest form is just when someone asks “are they together?” and gets the reply “uhh they’re not not together“. This isn’t explicitly about the speaker’s ignorance, but it is saying “look, the idea that they’re not together is not one I’m going to agree with”. But it doesn’t foreclose in the way that “they’re together” does.
That’s the entirety of this idea: an unforeclosing statement is one that expresses what you don’t know, rather than expressing that you do know something. And it’s a meaningful (and sometimes critical) contribution to the common knowledge space, even though what it does is to reduce the sense of common knowledge.
» read the rest of this entry »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 it—transparent, obvious, unremarkable, like an extension of yourself—vs when it’s broken and you’re trying to fix it—opaque, problematic, exceptional, self-conscious. It’s just here, the “broken tool” 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]• 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
(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. 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:
» 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 private—technically 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.
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” – Marcus Aurelius
“If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.” – Rudyard Kipling
Malcolm’s 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 haven’t read that post, this post may seem vague, but I’m 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: I’ve 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 Jehovah’s witness in Alamo Square last year… 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 heart—and 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 I’d make much more headway in mutual understanding by asking him about his story of repentance.
He described his pre-conversion life as “living sinfully” — naming things like alcoholism, gambling, lying — 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 psyche—with the support of this church etc. Which is not to say that all of his subsystems are happy with the new situation, but it’s at least a stable struggle, not a total race to the bottom. Christianity, classically centers around a struggle with temptation—found 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 gospel—people 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 they’d tried a lot of different things. I’m 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?
» 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 “Non-Naive Trust Dance” insight in 2020, I had oscillated between two broad coalitions:
This structure maps loosely onto what The Guru Papers calls “goodself” and “badself”. 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 don’t 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 “I’m trying to win this ultimate frisbee game” or “I’m figuring out whether today is a good day to get groceries” or “I’m trying to grow my business”. Although sometimes even in such cases there would have been some sense of “and I’m doing this collaboratively (or not)”.)
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 I’ve come to refer to as my “NNTD insight” (NNTD stands for “non-naive trust dance”).
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 properties—attempting to make it do a different thing may be met with resistance—sometimes 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 mind’s relationship with the minds of the individuals who make up the conversation?
(Note that “conversation” here spans everything from “a few people talking for a few minutes” 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 harmful—while simultaneously, I don’t regret doing it, and I maintain that they were meaningful and real! (And re “harmful”—we talked at the time about it being an extreme sport, so that’s 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 that’s 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 aren’t 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 doesn’t 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 you’re not just taking someone’s word for it that it’s accounting for your cares—you 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 about… except it’s incorporating many different levels of abstraction of what’s going on in different peoples’ lives, and is capable of navigating tricky territory of interpersonal feedback and differences of values.
It’s 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 I’ve since spent researching and experimenting with collaborative culture, trust, and the evolution of consciousness.
Everything I’ve said above is true, good, and beautiful. It’s 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 what’s the thing that I said at the top seems to me to be confusing, misleading, and even harmful?
» read the rest of this entry »
