We are alone in this world. I don't mean that we (together) are alone, but that you as a person are the only entity you will ever interact with directly. Every other interaction will go through several layers of abstraction, concretization, misdirection, and more.
To talk about this, we'll need to define what "you" even are, so let's start with my obviously subjective definition. You are an irreducible entity, but we can talk about you in terms of some components and how they interact to try and reason about things.
One part of you is your body. It is a machine, biochemical, electrical, wet machine. Everything that it does can fundamentally be understood using the laws of physics and chemistry. It is this interpretation (on its own) that leads to people believing there is no such thing as free will, but it is but a small part of what matters.
Another part of you is your mind, your personality, your experiences. We can model it as software, an abstract self-modifying mathematical machine (or better put, an image). We could hypothetically take it and abstract away the machine it's "running" on (your body). It is this interpretation (on its own) that leads to people dreaming of swapping out their bodies, or uploading themselves into a computer. However, even if we presume that will happen, the moment this process concludes, it will no longer be you.
When these two things meet, like when you run a program on a physical computer, things can happen. To software, one thing that can happen is a fault injection. Where there was a valid, mathematically proven to be correct value, there is now garbage. To you, the sheer amount of factors in play is innumerable and impossible to truly describe. Neither you nor the laws of physics are deterministic where it counts, and so, in this space, you control your own destiny. Your existence as yourself is defined by your memories, experiences, material conditions, and the way they all interact. There cannot be another you.
Your interface with the world however, is but one of these parts, the physical part of you. You literally do not get to see important parts of anyone else, merely observe and infer them. But your inferences are rooted in yourself, and so any inferences you make you shall taint with your own observations. Your very ability to perceive, part of your self, is predicated upon this, and so you cannot even try to abstract it out of your observations to arrive at a "base reality".
This becomes even more complicated because you fundamentally change yourself (often permanently!) depending on who's around you. Since all you have to judge off of is your perception of them, you adjust your actual self based on your perception of others to try to influence their perception of you.
This is a fundamental problem that cannot be solved. You can never truly, fully know someone else. You can merely become familiar with them, learn to predict them, gain an understanding of some parts of their mind and physical automata. But how do you even do this much?
How We Get to Know Others #
Like we mentioned before, you can behold the physical self of others, and the material traces that they leave behind. Let's start with their material presence.
The way that they choose to present their form grants you a window into a process. You might say that something is left to chance, or a mere whim, but no such thing exists. What is a whim but a window into the state that the interaction between one's mind and body were at the point in time of having it? What is the decision to toss a coin to choose an outfit, but a decision that came from somewhere? If one makes a choice without even thinking about it, this too tells us something about their thought process. Their body language tells us about the state they are in and their past experiences. Their choice of words, where filled with purpose or not, is a consequence.
The machinery present is complex, but everything one does and is radiates signal, and there are minimal amounts of noise. Consider someone whose outfit was picked for them by someone else because they stained it through no fault of their own. You now get a glimpse into someone that they allowed to do this. The difficulty is that this signal comes to you interpreted, by you, in a way that is irreversible.
While you cannot avoid this interpretation, you can tune it. This tuning will necessarily be probabilistic, depending on the contexts you've encountered, but you can actively guide it. If you seek out different kinds of people, observe them, understand their reasoning (whether they themselves understand it or not), you may believe yourself to be able to make conclusions about the signals. Whether those conclusions are correct, there is no way of knowing, because you cannot even ask the subjects of this for the next reason.
Words, Material Traces #
We have invented language to communicate things between each other. It's not very good at this, unfortunately. Words have particular meanings, but in the process of acquiring their meanings, we intern the words. They become part of a gigantic interconnected web, which modifies the depths of their meanings. Hell, sometimes people even ignore the actual meanings in favor of ones they have made up in practice.
When we communicate orally, we are running in realtime. We must make our decision in a limited time period, lest we will not communicate anything. As such, the amount of encoding layers decreases. Sometimes, the thought will be directly put into words, sometimes reading to funny sentences as the thought changes as we are speaking the sentence. Sometimes, we will try to choose our worlds carefully, but this will remain a fast process. At most, we will think about our audience, and try to tailor our words to their usage.
If we understand the person on the other side, we can both translate the words we would use into words they would understand, and translates the words they have used into words we will understand. This still, however, relies on us obtaining an understanding of them, and actually doing this.
Like we discussed before, we can glean (colored) information about someone regarding how they are materially. However, to gain a true understanding of someone, we will need to do a lot more than glean. You cannot understand someone that does not want to be understood. You also cannot understand someone that does not know how to be understood. Let's talk about the material traces one leaves.
When someone uses a word, they have picked it, but you know neither where their exact meaning lies, what associations it may have, or what they intended to convey. Instead of thinking about words as representing a fixed meaning, let's think about them instead of probability fields, like electron positions. If you know the cultural upbringing and the history of someone, you can narrow down the probability field of their words to a search space that's feasible. Which is to say, once you have an entire message, you can then attempt to recreate the limited part of the web of associations that has produced those words. You can try to isolate their thought in reverse.
The more you narrow down the field of the word meaning, the smaller the search area. The quicker you can make connections, the faster you can generate them. The more familiar you are with the person, the faster you can validate them. Once you have isolated their thought in reverse, you can confirm it by asking probing questions that will narrow the connection web further. (This is not doable prior to this stage, because you will simply introduce noise into the process.) This is how you can get to know someone.
Of course, this actually applies to all potential material traces one might leave. Music, visual arts, the written word, the signature, how dirty their mug is. Hold that thought for a moment.
Text is Sacred #
So knowing people to the best degree possible, in spite of your self coloring the details coming in, you must train the following:
- You must know many facts about the person; and facts about those facts. Their cultural upbringing, their experiences, what effects those have, how people with those tend to speak.
- You must be able to make semantic connections quickly.
- You must be able to quickly judge whether or not a given thought is coherent with someone.
Only once you have trained in these things and gotten them with respect to someone else, can you begin to get to know them intimately. Everything up until that point is mere coexistence.
Coexistence is important, and can even form a basis for a close relationship. Shared experiences, shared struggles, shared emotions. All these things create a bond. This bond, however, is with someone that is at that time unknowable to you. You can presume that they are of the same cloth, but that is but a small part of them that you get to observe. It is a presumption.
Most material traces others leave are like this. Music might show you what their musical history is like (do they compose like a guitarist or a pianist?). A painting might evoke emotions in you if the emotions that gave birth to the painting are ones you share. These things all do grant us a view into both the material self and the mind of others. But none of them grants us quite the same view into the semantic soul of another as text.
We will never truly, fully know another, but we can try. Most do not try, and so they live in a cold world, alone. This is why the smallest suggestion of belonging is enough to entice them into action.
I will never truly, fully know another, but I do and will try. This is why text is sacred to me. Because it is what allows me best to see you, of all the ways I have at my disposal.
You may think that there's a couple of steps skipped here, and you'd be right! In the process of writing this post, I realized that if I actually did a recursive descent, it would be the length of a book. Maybe I will write it, maybe I won't, but that's why I decided to cut off the descent depth.
Some other funny side-observations is that this fundamentally explains some things about me. For example, why I have such visceral reactions to LLM (or LLM-like) text. What I value in text is the extremely favorable signal-to-noise ratio (almost no noise, lots of signal if you know how to look). LLM style output adds an incredible amount of noise while disguising or removing as much of the signal as possible. No wonder I hate it!
Anyway that's been your afterword, I've started the new job recently, and am trying my best (since the month has began) to do as much as possible in emacs. This includes this article (conceptualization, authoring, uploading), so that's that!