Samesidedness refers to that lovely experience when you’re navigating some sort of interpersonal problem and instead of fighting/arguing etc, the experience is one of being on the same team trying to figure out what to do about the problem. There are various things that can get in the way of samesidedness, one of which is being too close, ie tolerating being involved with someone to a degree that is unworkable. But a different one is that you have a mistaken assumption that it won’t be possible to come to an outcome where both/all parties can be deeply satisfied at the same time. This exercise is intended to help with that. You can do it solo, prior to having a difficult conversation, or you could have a group do it together if there’s buy-in for that.
Consider what you want in relation to this situation: your careabouts.
You might just mentally enumerate them, or if you have a journal handy you might write them down.
Note that your concept of your careabouts is not the actual careabouts. You in some sense don’t actually know the full shape of your careabouts in advance, but on some level you know what you’re aiming for. The words are not the thing—someone might do something that theoretically matches some description you made of what you wanted, and that doesn’t mean “now you should feel satisfied.” It’s possible to be profoundly satisfied and profoundly surprised-by-how-that-happened at the same time. With sufficient skill at non-naive trust-dancing, it can even be common.
Get in touch with how it would feel for you to have all of your relevant careabouts be completely satisfied, and ground in the sense of how much you truly want that for yourself. Spend only the minimum attention needed imagining the details of how the careabouts get satisfied that you need to feel that satisfaction.
If some part of you objects, then try to include the objection itself inside what wants to be satisfied! For example, if the objection is “that would be naive,” then you could say “okay, maybe there are some versions of that would be naive. How would it feel to have these careabouts satisfied in a way that was not naive?” Or if the objection is “if I were completely satisfied, that would necessarily mean someone else were suffering as a result,” then you might include that with “clearly also one of my careabouts here is that other people not suffer in order for me to be satisfied. So suppose that somehow I achieve that—all my careabouts are satisfied, and other people aren’t burdened by that at all.” (Anyway, handling such objections is a huge topic on its own, but for now I’ll just say “do your best” and “it’s a learning process; it’s okay if you’re having difficulty!”)
Tap into what the other peoples’ careabouts might be. Not in that much detail, but a general sense.
What would have come up for them in step 1?
Imagine how the other people involved might feel if they also had their careabouts completely satisfied. Even more so here, don’t pay too much attention to how, yet.
While doing so, maintain the sense that you could also be completely satisfied.
You might find more objections here, particularly ones about an apparent impossibility of satisfying their careabouts while also satisfying your own. To those, you can say, “Yes, it may be impossible, given the available resources or even in some absolute sense, but suppose it were possible for me to be deeply satisfied and for the other person to be deeply satisfied. How would that feel?”
Orient to the actual situation and start trying to understand together what the collective set of careabouts are and how you might go about satisfying all of them.
Unless you’re in a leadership position or otherwise empowered to just call the shots in this situation, then ultimately you’d need to do this phase together, but you can also simulate it if you’re journalling before a conversation. If you’re doing that, I’d encourage you to question your assumptions about what the other person wants. “What is this really about for them?” Consider that you might really not know. This humility may also help you realize that even if you can act autonomously here, you might want to learn more first.
The important thing is that each person pays attention to their sense of what would actually deeply satisfy their own careabouts, and being willing to be surprised and update their concept of what they want or what the other person or people want. For instance, you might think you want to do a particular thing, only to realize that much more salient is a need to be heard and understood by someone about that thing not having happened at some time in the past, and that once you feel heard, you discover that in fact your original careabout doesn’t need any further addressing.
Tips for use: This practice is intended for use in relation to interpersonal conflict, though it can also be useful for internal conflict, as well as in general. It’s probably best to practice it with a concrete conflict first—something that can be well-described with a physical quantity—before trying it on a conflict about meaning, relationship, identity, or situations involving feelings like “I don’t feel heard” or “I feel betrayed.” The practice is also probably easier if it’s about a relatively fresh or new situation, although with sufficient skill and capacity it should be helpful for things tangled with resentment or regret as well.
This exercise maps onto the 3SED (3 Steps for Empowered Dialogue) technique, which is essentially the same process but for “what you know and understand” rather than “what you care about“. It’s for frame battles rather than object-level fights.
(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)
There’s a puzzle that shows up when talking about intersubjective verification: how can I ever really know what’s going on in your head? What is it like to be you? What are your desires, goals, understandings? If I have an insight, can I tell that you have the same insight?
It seems to me that: indeed, in some sense I can’t ever know what’s going on in your head—there’s a measurement problem.
But I can come to trust things about you, and what that means is that I know it’s good enough for my purposes. It is sufficient for all the purposes that I have for now and the foreseeable future that I can just treat this as how things are. I don’t even want to say “treat this as true”—to say that it’s true is to again enter into the objective lens, which is irrelevant. It’s how things are, as far as I’m concerned, as far as I can tell.
And that’s good enough—trust is, by definition, what’s good enough. I don’t need to make a further claim that it’s true.
I’ve talked about trust as “what truth feels like in first person”—this is the dimension of trust that’s less about safety or alignment and more just about the sense of how things are. It’s your basic sense of things.
And trust is dynamic, of course. I’m trusting a bridge until one step is rotten, and then oop! Maybe I proceed with caution. Maybe I turn back, relaxedly trusting the steps that I already walked on. Maybe I observe that the ropes are clearly holding even if the beams aren’t, so I try walking with my feet towards the outside, holding onto the ropes.
To say I know something about you (or that something is true of you) is to say that others should agree. But to say that I trust something about you is to say that I’ve done the checks that I need to do, given my needs and purposes. You, who have different needs and purposes, will not in general trust what I trust. You might trust something on the basis of my say so, but you might not. It depends on, well, everything—your purposes, your needs, your sense of me and mine, your trust in my motives for speaking, and the quality of my assessments, etc. And you don’t make those choices consciously, you just find out: when I say I trust something (or say why I trust it), does it result in you trusting it, or not?
Anyway! This is one of those funny things where everybody is doing this just fine all the time, but then philosophers come along with a framework that makes it seem impossible. Wikipedia’s page on intersubjective verifiability says:
While specific internal experiences are not intersubjectively verifiable…
They aren’t if you have to force things to be objective—if you have to find the one standard for all time that you can apply. But if we’re allowed to intersubjectively verify things according to our own unverified personal gnosis (ie our trust) not an objective standard, then we can just do it, the way we always do it in order to form a common sense of things.
The most obvious cases are practical social situations—being able to trust that a particular employee understands the assignment, or being able to trust that your spouse actually gets the thing that really bothered you about what they said this morning. Or developing a share sense of why someone was being weird or whether they’re safe to invite to another party, by debriefing things. Sometimes things add up, to an experience we trust… and other times they don’t add up, and we don’t trust them.
Then there’s intersubjective verification of understanding of eg physical or mathematical phenomena—the phenomenon might be objective, but the question of whether someone understands it is not! So getting a common sense that it’s understood by a group still involves this engagement with whether it it feels like you can treat it as commonly known or whether you feel that you need to keep hedging or treating it as debatable or unclear.
Then, consider intersubjective verification of buy-in—this is very relevant to game theory. If you’ve got a stag hunt (a game where there are two options—solo-hunting rabbit, which produces a small win for anyone who chooses it, and co-hunting-stag, which produces a massive win for everybody if and only if everybody chooses it, otherwise those who choose it get nothing). If everybody trusts that everybody else will choose stag, then everybody will want to choose stag, thus will choose stag. If we only somewhat trust that, then we might. Even if it were true that everybody else would choose stag, the operative question for you is whether you trust that they would. And so the matter of buy-in needs to deal with the question of trust—each person’s trust, which may need to be earned differently. (And, as Duncan Sabien pointed out, in practice someone who can’t afford to risk getting a zero win this round is not likely to be able to choose stag, so trust will be best earned in an iterative game by having a few rounds where everybody agrees to stick to rabbit, to build up that surplus and to build up the experience of people doing what they said they would do even if it wasn’t risky.) These same dynamics apply to much more complex situations of team buy-in
This also dissolves solipsism, in a sense. Can I know that you’re really there, having experiences and dreams and so on? Moot point—acting like you are works better than acting like you aren’t, so I trust that you are. The important point is that’s all I ever have—there never was certainty anyway. It was all always just made of trust.
Where this gets really interesting is in matters of subjective science and reflexivity—when the map changes the territory. Take some insight that is of the interior, not the exterior, such as buddhist no-self, IFS Self, or the NNTD insight, or religious experiences… how can we know that each other has also experienced this? Well, once again it’s a matter of trust-building. We start simply not knowing, and as we trust-dance in relation to it (basically allowing our interfaces to come into honest contact) until we develop trust that we’re experiencing something compatible enough for our purposes… or until we start to distrust that. Or we just don’t know how to proceed any further and we still don’t know.
One open question or edge for me is that it seems pretty obvious to me that even in reflexive domains, where there are multiple stable possibilities, there can be something like objective facts about what the stable possibilities are. And eg the core NNTD insight (“you can’t trust what you can’t trust”) seems very obviously true to me, not merely one of many stable ways of viewing things. If someone said they disagreed, I’d say “we’re clearly not talking about the same thing”, the same way as someone would of a mathematical knowing. (This is less true of the whole NNTD framework that I’ve developed based on the insight—see the many meanings of NNTD—although even there I’m pretty sure most of it basically holds given some assumptions (some of which I may not be conscious of).)
So I have this sense that I can tell for myself that NNTD is true (ie not just that I trust it, but that anybody who investigated it thoroughly would also come to trust it) but the most obvious truth of it somehow routes through subjective experience. I can give reasons, and you can reason about those reasons, but ultimately the question is not “does that logically hold?” but “do you see it?”
And—just between us—the question is not “do you see it?” but “can I trust that you see it?”
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 »
