#speech linearity

[mentalisttraceur]

One of the valuable but annoying things with thinking in probabilities is like ....

Sometimes you say something to a person, and you're actually consciously, deliberately saying words that have different meanings in the different possibilities... words that would mean different possible things or invoke different associations or feelings, depending on which of the different possibilities is true of who they are, where they're at, what mood they're in.

Because sometimes that's better than just flinging the same intended meaning at all possibilities of who they are in that moment. In fact sometimes meaning one thing is impossible. Sometimes within the possibilities you see, you can't see any statement you could make that would get taken the same way in all possibilities and which also fits all your relevant values.

But like, some people don't get that - they don't think like that, so they can't really put themselves in those shoes, or maybe they have never even consciously conceived of the experience, or of it being practically doable by humans in the real world.

So then if one of those people asks you "what did you mean by that?", it's like... (very tired sigh).

[mentalisttraceur]

I wish there was better language to say "I'm mad at you because what you're doing/expecting is bad for me" and "your feelings are very valid and you're not wrong/bad for wanting/needing/doing this" at the same time, without needing to say one before the other or otherwise changing the impact.

[mentalisttraceur]

Usually I immediately know the full contents of every reply I want to give, but I don't have five mouths, and you couldn't listen to five mouths if they all said different things at once.

I rarely have a spontaneity problem. Stuff like "just say what's on your mind" and "it's okay, go ahead" is sweet but doesn't apply. I feel very secure and confident about letting out what's on my mind.

I have a traffic jam problem. Five lanes need to merge into one. You don't have space or time for all of the cars. Which cars make it? how many? in what order? - all that will add meaning that wasn't in any of the lanes.

[mentalisttraceur]

Before you embark on a genuine pursuit of mental growth, make sure you are ready (as much as one can be ready for such a thing) to deal with new suffering that you have not yet encountered.

Seriously. You might think being smart and capable is all that, with achievements and recognition. It does have advantages, and helps protect and heal and strengthen self-esteem. But beyond a certain point...

Beyond a certain point, growing as a mind means entering a personal hell. It is growing too big for the cage that is this life. The cage doesn't loosen. The cage can't loosen. The mental growth that I have experienced has had these fun results:

My thoughts are too "wide", too many angles and associations active at once, to the point that speech linearity is a constant problem.

I have such large chains of inferences and bodies of evidence and knowledge forming my conclusions that now trying to convince or explain my ideas causes me to experience working gridlock most of the time.

My understanding exceeds my thinking limits to the point that I often can't make progress because I'm aware that I'm not able to hold all of my relevant ideas, knowledge, and heuristics at once: like trying to carry too many things in my hands, in the dark. I know I am not holding something important, but reaching for it usually causes another thing to "slip" out of it. The brain gets better and the grasp widens just a little bit if I constantly push, but it's exhausting, but to do anything less is to know I'm wrong.

A lot of the conclusions of my reasoning that I could once readily explain have been wired into automatic and often not-quite-as-conscious thinking, so sometimes I have a cognitive habit or intuition that I remember was hard-earned through much evidence and thought, but I have to basically re-discover, re-prove, and re-articulate from scratch the justifications for things that I've been building on top of for years.

I have grown the skills for reshaping my own mind so much that my entire perspective on that is basically alien to the average person, impossible to word without several gated truths most are still "outside the gate" on; I can so often clearly see, once I know a person well enough, what cognition they could train and how, the way they could benefit themselves and the world by habituating certain ways of thinking, but it is inaccessible to many, in ways that make trying to convey it directly counter-productive.

As it concerns empathy and compassion - actually caring about the world and other people/minds, I have only exposed myself to ever greater levels of profound distress over the predicaments that we all find ourselves in.

Existential crisis. Already had one? That's okay, there are many different, unique ways to reach existential dread and despair, and in my experience exploring one rarely prepared me for the others, except in so far as it forced me into opportunities to train deeper coping skills.

Insufficient language.

The horizon of what I know I can't or don't know, or can't think, has for a few years now grown faster than my knowledge and thinking limits. I think they're intrinsically connected, such that any growth of the latter grows the former more.

I've had to start learning to be certain on-demand as a psychological tool, because in most issues that involve accounting for people, from my vantage point certainly as a genuine intellectual position is indefensible to the point of being unethical.

Understand, this is my unique experience. I don't know if yours will be the same. Maybe the problem isn't even mental growth, but my psychology which just wasn't prepared for growth that normal people handle just fine. I don't know. I probably can't know, not ever really with certainty, per point 10.

Don't get me wrong, it's fulfilling, and I think given the choice I would eventually push further. But I cannot stress this enough:

Were it not for my growing skills at not being emotionally distressed over genuinely bad things, at maintaining positive cognition in the face of genuinely real and immediate problems, I would be rendered non-functional by what I've built my mind up to do. As is I seem to experience nearly daily frustrations and distress that most people don't ever seem to, if I don't steer my mind correctly.

But who knows, maybe everything I experience is common and normal. Then again, if you can idea-fit anything sensical and relatable to you onto my words, that's the conclusion you'd be tempted to draw.

Doesn't matter. See, I don't actually care if I'm special or unique in mental growth. Or rather, I'd really like to believe that I'm not above average at all. If you really get it, then I think you'll understand this the most. Because the alternative, the possibility of really, genuinely being somehow qualitatively better that most other people, is not a pleasant thing. It is terrifying, lonely, and dreadful.

TL;DR: If one day you magically have the option to wish for profoundly increased intelligence, don't forget to wish for profoundly increased coping skills first.

[mentalisttraceur]

Speech Linearity

Speech is "linear": each word comes after another, in sequence.

In our head, many thoughts, emotions, memories, and perceptions can exist at the same time. Our mind focuses on one at a time, but it usually flows through many at once.

Ideas are often not a string of thoughts connected in a row, but are like water flowing through many interconnected channels - many thoughts active at the same time, each connecting to the next at it's own pace.

When we convert language-free thought into coherent words, we have to take the idea, and force it into a linear form.

Cognemes that were together have to be ripped out of the whole, twisted into words that hopefully invoke the same cognemes one by one and cause the mind to hold onto them while stitching them back together the right way.

Some ideas slither through this process just fine. Other ideas come out of it like strings of meat paste come out of a meat grinder.

[mentalisttraceur]

Lying to be Truthful

Maximizing honesty requires noticing when bits of truth may be lost in inattention, or when errors may slip in on misinterpretation. Of course, this includes all sorts of things beyond just the meaning of your words, and this is complicated by how in the real world we must always work with many possible truths, which are more or less likely based on the evidence we have so far.

Saying something hesitantly or with the wrong body language risks making it seem less likely - to many brains, confidence communicates probability more viscerally, more believably, than any wording does. Due to speech linearity, mentioning a possibility risks over-emphasizing it - you can think more possibilities at once, but you can only describe one possibility at once. Talk too much and people tune out, so there is a cap on how much of the truth you can get in. And so on.

So eventually, you will run into a situation where your only options are different "lies". A little piece of wrong impression here buys you a little more truth there. You can have this truth or that truth, this risk of error or that risk of error. This is a logical inevitability of the constraints we face.

[mentalisttraceur]

That moment when epiphany but wording gridlock because speech linearity and language holes and it needing some gated truths to be understood and just insufficient language.

[mentalisttraceur]

It's so rewarding when a term proves itself sufficiently composable and reusable, when I can suddenly talk to someone and rapidly unfurl a few key definitions, recursing as needed, and then build up from there.

Just dragging each concept through the meat grinder of speech linearity and amputating it into conversation-sized conciseness is arduous, and it can be hard to keep going on the expectation of that delayed gratification sometimes.