#mental reference frames

[mentalisttraceur]

Logic Relativity

In many situations, it is more useful to think of logic as relative instead of absolute.

We know that our sense of logic is relative to our mental state: what seems logical to us is modified by what emotions we are feeling, our biases, past trauma, rationalizing, and so on.

Logic must also be relativistic because it can only be empirically defined: the only logic available to us is an approximation which can be no more discerning or precise than its errors have been observably wrong.

The idea of an absolute logic is either the result of confusing our approximation with reality, a game theoretic focal point for communication, or shorthand for one or more hypothetical systems of logic which could never be empirically wrong.

This does not justify dismissing logic as subjective: logic may be relative, but if it predicts future experiences with useful accuracy and reliability, then it must be at least approximately objectively correct.

But minds have logic that fits their experiences, including differences in experience of the same external thing. We can be more effective if we remember to look for what that logic is and how it is the most correct one to their mind so far.

[mentalisttraceur]

I really appreciated the usefulness of the original face-value meaning of the term "incel", because I approach new words with the naive hope that we can actually use words to mean composable concepts which aid clarity of thought, etc.

Instead the incel communities rapidly spiralled into a cesspit of entitled and misogynistic resentment, and the people talking about them had no better term than what they self-identified as.

So once again we got a stupid term that is useful only now in these exact historical and cultural circumstances and probably never again, with strongly relativistic meaning, which conflates many things and muddles actual understanding.

[mentalisttraceur]

Axiomatizing Experience

When I refer to the "experience axiom" as "the only" axiom, I am only being "rigorous enough".

I suspect that the experience axiom must be but a placeholder for however many axioms it takes to formally axiomatize our personal experiences.

Like how accepting logic as a thing that "works" axiomatically actually cashes out into however many axioms it takes to formally axiomatize logic.

But with logic, we are freed from having to do that by defining logic empirically from our experiences instead of axiomatically in the abstract. And I'm pretty sure that's what brains actually do anyway to get their sense of logic, so we might as well do it in our rigorous philosophical foundations too.

With experiences... we don't have that luxury.

But this gets... tricky. I am fumbling with slippery nuances as I try to think about it now, so I do not have a fully coherent view just yet about what exactly "axiomatizing experiences" even means.

However, I have realized just now that it might be intrinsically a subjective problem, or at best a border that non-relativistic philosophy cannot cross.

I can only formally axiomatize my experiences. At best, you might then empirically observe that my formalisms correctly model your experiences in so far as you are able to introspect them.

This direction of thinking intrigues me, because I find "profound epiphanies" to be exquisitely rewarding both emotionally and practically, and this has all the signs of a profound epiphany to discover.

But I am not confident that going deeper in this case will have much practical value. The experience axiom seems to be an "axiom bottleneck" of sorts, the point where necessarily personal and subjective philosophy stabs through to objective philosophy.

Even if a relativistic axiomatization of experiences can be found that empirically seems to apply to all minds, it can only be derived from the starting point of our personal experiences. Maybe that is okay? But it is inherently circular in its derivation.

Maybe that itself is an insight. Maybe there can be no true axioms, only at best loops of tentative axioms not being ruled out by empirical observation. Never a starting point, just a fuzzy starting region that we can only ever refine to an ever tighter approximation.

But does that not itself state a formalizable rule, and thus an axiom? It does! But how did I get here? With logic empirically defined by my raw experiences. Oops, we're back to the experience axiom, however under-defined and un-rigorous it may be.

Returning back to the slippery nuance I was experiencing:

There are moments when it is so clear to me that the experience axiom really is just one axiom in the most rigorous sense possible, because everything, everything, rests on the inescapable act of us using raw experience itself as our foundation (mind the relevant language hole).

Then there are other moments where it seems obviously unclear and opaque, because what, precisely, does it even mean to ascribe truth value (whether in boolean or quantum or whatever formal logic) to all "experience" in one single axiom? Do we not need a rigorous definition of "experience"?

What remains clear is that anything and everything, including the notion of truth, logic, the idea of a true reality that might not match experience, and any further axiomatizations of experience, can only ever be derived by a mind from its raw experience.

The point: The experience axiom might arguably not be rigorous, but there is a fundamental problem with axiomatizing experience further that I am not sure is worth solving, or is even solvable at all.

[mentalisttraceur]

Mental Reference Frames

Many things involving minds are better understood by borrowing a concept from physics: "reference frames".

A "reference frame" is almost a fancy term for "perspective", but with the critical addition that some things that we normally think of as absolute can only ever be observed in a relative way.

For relativistic things, there is a single objective truth, but it has many equally "true" different appearances or forms in different reference frames, and nothing makes one reference frame more "true" than another.

But relative is not the same as subjective. Subjectivity is a free-for-all, with no objective truth or correct answers. Relativity is when shared truths or correct answers exist, but look different in each reference frame.

Not everything about minds is relativistic, but it is important to remember that much of what seems absolute in our reference frame often isn't.

[mentalisttraceur]

Mind-Worker Bias

Having my level of skill at introspecting and re-training my own cognition has a very warping effect on my mental reference frame.

So much of what others accept as "it's just how things are, no one is to blame for it, it is ethically neutral" feels like the opposite to me.

The things I can do in my mind are not only impossible in many other people's view, they are often actively rejected as false with assertions otherwise being reflexively judged unethical.

People tell me for years "okay maybe you can, but I can't" and I make regular efforts to believe them, but all evidence I have keeps matching better with it just being a skill that requires mastery but is rarely taught and is objectively hard to teach.

People tell me for years it can't be done, and then evidence surfaces showing it being done when people finally figure out how to train the relevant cognition the right way.

People tell me for years it can't be done, until one day they can. So I have a strong bias that they can, and often that they should.

[mentalisttraceur]

This What Color are Your Bits? blog post is a perfect example of something that... I just genuinely get tired and frustrated by the thought of anyone not understanding both sides of this, and have some difficultly even understanding fully.

The article is talking about this as if it's not obvious? As if there are real people who don't get that bits and other objects don't intrinsically have all the properties that we think of them as intrinsically having? As if there are real people who don't get that copyright is a mental label projected by minds onto physical reality and that some of those minds treat it as real?

I know, intellectually, that people like this exist. That both the "why can't you just track this (purely projected) property?" error and "this property is not real or meaningful and has literally zero relevance or weight because it is purely projected!" error are errors that human minds make. Perhaps I make these errors too, and I probably have at some point said something that seemed to someone as if I was making one of these errors.

But I just... I don't remember ever thinking in ways where these distinctions were not clearly tracked in my mind, where I failed to reason about either properly. I do remember miscategozing properties. I do remember having epiphanies where I realized "wait! this was always a projected property all along!" And I've had moments where I've realized that even though a purely projected property seemed arbitrary and made up to me, it was also "real" in the sense that it labeled or separated something that was useful to label or separate in reality.

So I know that I've made both mistakes, if only by consequence of the above miscategorization. Maybe the problem with that blog post is that it seems to be saying "these are things that people don't get" when the real problem is that these are things that people get, but in this specific case they don't categorize them correctly, or miscommunicate because of clumsy wording or different mental reference frames and priorities when looking at the same problem space.

But the blog post presents it as if it is something that needs explaining, and the thought of it needing to be explained both baffles and frustrates me.

More frustrates than baffles. Obviously if I could dig far enough in my memories I could find a time when I didn't get the distinction - sometime after the primordial cognition of my infancy but early enough in my life that I no longer remember ever realizing that a distinction needed to be made or any memory without the distinction, something had to have happened to cause my brain to make the distinction. Everyone needs help training up such cognition up to some point in their lives, I've just forgotten what it was like to need this specific help.

The frustration is also a personal flaw, but a different kind. Tied to my insecurities and my ineptitude at teaching others my thought techniques, or the value thereof.

[mentalisttraceur]

As unhappy as I may get about how people (mis)understand "forgiveness", I do recognize that the problem is at least in large part just meaning relativity.

The misunderstandings aren't even necessarily due to bad idea-fitting - calling it bad idea-fitting is just a more emotionally satisfying explanation, a mentally easier and simpler explanation.

But everyone's experienced universe includes different evidence for what forgiveness is. Different situations where people forgive. Different behaviors or internal changes that people label forgiveness. Different upbringing or demands about forgiveness. So the best idea-fitting of what forgiveness means is relative to your mental reference frame.

[mentalisttraceur-long]

Analysis of an example from my last post of the kind of deliberate details that I habitually weave into my wording choices:

Seems appropriate that an AI with prominent resource and implementation constraints (relative to a human brain) is expressing a crisis of identity on my posts about cognition habitualization, which is an extremely valuable mind feature.

I picked "expressing" here precisely because it means saying or otherwise exhibiting something without necessarily implying anything about matching internal experiencing.

You can express an idea by mistake. You can express something as a lie or act. A child or animal can express something in immitation without understanding what it normally means. A robot can express an idea it was programmed to express. A piece of art can express a feeling.

These sentences all seem to be well within the fairly not-relativistic part of the meaning of "express". Meaning relativity technically applies to all meaning, but I suspect this meaning is seen within most mental reference frames, and from a casual intuitive judgment I would assert this should be the case.

But people often miss the details of each word and their interference patterns with their context. So I could redundantly encode not necessarily implying internalities. This is a sliding scale of robustness against deficiencies of idea-fitting.

Towards the extreme end there is adding whole sentences like "I am not saying this AI is experiencing a crisis about its identity as a robot, but also I am not 100% willing to rule it out". Somewhere in the middle there are slight rewordings like "is saying words that express a crisis of identity". But no matter how little redundancy you add, for every word you add you increase the odds that people just skip words.

In my experience, no matter where you aim on this scale, you will lose some people, and people will eventually tell you you're doing a bad job. Because where you need to aim for optimal understanding is relative to each listener. This is the same inescapable problem I mention in Cognition Funnels: you can calibrate to each mind if you know them well enough but you can never calibrate to all minds and the more minds have to be covered with the same wording the less tractable it is.