It seems that intentions are an offer, a negotiation of sorts. It's only a contract if someone accepts it and engages with us. Or can a contract be established by only one party with intentions?
--
A right is a valid claim. If I say 2 + 3 = 5 and that answer is "right," it means that based on the definitions of 2, 3, 5, plus and equals, a valid claim has been made. Same thing with other kinds of rights; they're valid claims. A property right is a valid claim. A liberty right is a valid claim. So this ...
> Discussion of rights is almost always wrong-headed and should be replaced by discussions of property and the CONTRACT by which its ownership or stewardship was acquired.
... seems to be an appeal to rights. "the CONTRACT by which its ownership or stewardship was acquired" is an attempt to establish a valid claim, no?
Hi, Dom! You've made claims about claims. How fun! There's a joke about insurance in here somewhere.
When I say crazy things, I am usually pointing out the gap between symbols and reality. One of those oft-apocryphal quotes attributed to Einstein is that math is only certain to the extent that it does not refer to reality; to the extent that it does, it is uncertain. This is because when we reduce reality to symbols, in order to do logic or analysis, we throw away almost every detail. If we've thrown away anything that matters, our analysis is doomed before we start. But we can't prove we didn't throw away anything that matters, short of checking our final answer against reality, which we can never fully do, for the same reasons.
Fittingly, you threw away some words when quoting my "Communicated INTENTIONS are contracts." I understand completely where you're coming from, but my point hinges on the FULL meaning of "communicated" which is why I followed it with "encoded and received." Also, I spoke a little loosely, so we might need to put a finer point on my choice of the word "contracts." But I am pointing out that every contract is a creature of thought and intent and the mutual understanding of both, entirely phenomena of the human inner experience, even though we pretend that we can write it up as a mathematical construct called "law." The smarter people in law understand this quite well, but our mass culture treats the law as if it is a precise mathematical exercise. All those definitions, all that logic, what could go wrong? It's amazing we are able to do as well as we do with it. This cuts to the heart of judging how a parent is treating a child, separating cultural norms from individual intentions (circumcision was a great example in Adam's episode) and intention from consequence, plus even judging what the consequences were. I mean, that last point bites off the entire epistemology of cause and effect. How can you ever PROVE that a specific parental act caused a specific child's result?
I developed Awareness Recursion Theory while thinking about this: how does communication REALLY work? I observe what you do (including what you say or write), and I ask myself, what inner state of yours would produce that behavior? To succeed, I have to be able to relate to that inner state, typically because we're both human from the same culture. Mathematically, I am inverting a model, assessing inputs from outputs, of an extremely non-linear system. And I am PROJECTING, hard. All communication is projection. It's the only way to do it. It's why peacocks sound sad. Are they really sad? CAN they even be sad? I have no idea, but their plaintive calls make ME a little sad. Because, imagine how I would feel if I were making that sound.
So your behavior, yes, opens a negotiation. I'm not bound to whatever you are thinking inside, but as soon as I respond with my own behavior, and we both make a few assumptions about what just happened, we have fallen into some implicit agreements. The best proof I can offer is that no matter how well we are getting along (and even if no words are spoken), one of us could "break the rules" at any moment in a way that the other finds unacceptable or uncivilized. If I act peaceful and docile and look at you in an inviting way, so you sit down near me, but then I smack you, you will decide I was deceptive and mean. The typical defense, that I never promised not to smack you, rings hollow. Likewise the old joke, "Do you know what time it is?" (Reply) "Yes." The answer is obviously not what was being asked for. Because, what INNER STATE would someone have in order to ask that question? Do you really think he was just idly wondering whether you happened to know what time it was? If you had to look at your watch to find out, was the answer "No"?
This take on communication is very adjacent to Hoppe's argumentation ethics.
--
On rights and claims, I would say that a right is a valid claim AGAINST someone, or FOR some kind of privilege. I wouldn't quite present a mathematical truth as a right.
You might say that I'm calling property the only true right. I would support that. My piece about free speech, which I linked above near the end of the post, digs deeply into that. Free speech isn't really a thing, separate from the property right to control your own property (specifically, the lack of anyone else's right to control speech on YOUR property), and all the problems that occur when a property owner/manager fails to control the property in a way that was implied by the behavioral contract of inviting others onto it.
E.g., if I say here's a public library, so come read books and bring your kids to learn stuff--and you'd better support it with coerced tax dollars, because it's EDUCATIONAL and FOR YOU and PUBLIC mumble mumble--but then I won't kick out unsavory bums who create an environment where you wouldn't want to bring your kids or relax for a good read, then I have broken that contract, haven't I? It's like acting all friendly and inviting but then smacking you when you come near. The library spends money on comfy chairs for enjoyable reading, and it will kick me out if I start singing (Hey, I paid taxes for that public place too, why can't I SING?), but it doesn't have the stones to kick out a smelly, muttering bum who makes everyone want to leave. Because it won't step up like a proper owner and ACT LIKE IT GIVES A DAMN about this property. Because "public." Did the bum even pay taxes?
I like what I understand your Awareness Recursion Theory to be: If we keep digging, we find that our expectations produce behavior, even social behavior. Did I get that correct? It's a lesson I tried to explain to a student at my Church who wondered if God could deceive us and still be a all-good, truthful God. The answer I steered him toward is that God can tell the truth and we can still be deceived by it if the truth doesn't meet our expectations. So, the real question isn't would/could God/truth deceive us, but do our expectations cause us to be deceived by God/truth?
That still transfers the question to: Why do I expect something? Is my expectation based on a prejudice, or on a logical demonstration in which I connect pieces of information validly (so, the answer is "right" 😉)?
Yes, I truncated your words to quote you. It's impossible not to. That's what an excerpt means. We all leave out almost all of the words and concepts that others have spoken, written, expressed. The key is whether the words omitted change the meaning. In the case of the excerpt I cited, I don't think it changes the meaning. Adding back "encoded and received" doesn't alter the fact that this communicated intention is only an offer, a negotiation, not an obligation on the part of the recipient of the communication.
Recursively, what are the expectations, again? If a person's expectation is that merely communicating to someone and having the other person react as if they noticed something, or even that they comprehend what the expressor expressed, establishes a contract, then that seems like prejudice being projected onto others.
Property as the only true right? Sounds like Rothbard, and it's a formidable argument. I'm a little familiar with Argumentation Ethics; another formidable argument. They each point to what I call the authority of personhood and how people encapsulate this reality. Yes, I made and continue to make "claims about claims"; the question is, are the claims valid (right) or invalid (not right somehow, incomplete, or even wrong)? Recursively, we may never really know, unless we agree on a premise or set of premises that serves as the base. I imagine you and I agree on much! But, then again, I might be projecting a prejudice.
> I like what I understand your Awareness Recursion Theory to be: If we keep digging, we find that our expectations produce behavior, even social behavior. Did I get that correct?
Your statement lies within ART but is not the whole thing.
My formulation:
Symbols acquire meaning when the receiver imagines what the sender's inner state must have been, in order to produce those symbols. The receiver does this by "putting himself in the shoes" of the sender, in the fullest context that the receiver is aware of.
Novice receivers can only imagine themselves as they are, placed in the sender's apparent situation, but advanced receivers are able to imagine what it is like to be someone like the sender, and then put that avatar in the sender's situation, with very nuanced perception of what that situation is. There is no precise way of formulating how to do this correctly. It is an ART, learned through experience by trial and error. When a group of entities interact in this way over time, they create CULTURE.
By "symbols," I mean really every form of behavior, even when the sender is not trying to communicate, as long as a receiver observes and assigns meaning. You might say I'm defining "symbols" to mean anything to which anyone assigns meaning. I probably agree with that.
Then the theory becomes,
"Meaning is assigned when an observer imagines an actor's inner state, whether the actor is writing, speaking, gesturing, making facial expressions, or taking any kind of action, or no action. The observer does this by 'putting himself in the shoes' of the actor, in the fullest context of the observation."
Ultimately, this includes an awareness that the actor is doing the same thing, assigning meaning to the observer's behavior, and so that each inner state includes a reflection of the other's inner state, nested as deeply as either party cares to take it (RECURSION!). Allow the actors to have an agenda, and this covers lying, propaganda, and other social manipulations. This is adjacent to Hoppe's Argumentation Ethics and Girard's Mimetic Theory.
This process describes not only human interaction but also sufficiently advanced animals, robots, computers, and all communicating entities. When my computer sends information to your computer, our computers are merely proxies for engineers, who imagined how the data would arrive, encoded by another computer, designed by another engineer who used the standard conventions that someone in that engineer's shoes would have used. Common error handling anticipates the errors and mismatches that an engineer would expect by putting himself in the shoes of the other engineers and users.
This is the path to true AI. Autonomous robots without a predefined language would assign meaning to others' behavior (human or not, verbal or not) by guessing inner state from observed outer state. In engineering, this is known as "model inversion" and is a common practice but does not seem to be in use for AI in the way I am suggesting. A novice robot might start by assuming every "other" is like itself, a naive baseline model, and it could improve that model through observation, called "adaptive modeling." The more detailed and flexible its models, the smarter it is at communicating.
CONTRACTS? They are a special case of communication. At some point, one or both of us assigns meaning, that we have agreed to something, whether we wrote anything down or not. This is very sticky, I agree. Try pondering the dynamics of unreasonable contracts, the crazy terms that a judge would throw out ("If the lessee defaults, he must amputate his own arm with a pocketknife..." or even "Employee will pay Employer an hourly wage..."), and you will see what I mean. The words are not the final say. Judges look at the social context of the words and ask questions such as, "WHY would someone agree to this?" Traditional cultures equate sex or pregnancy with an implied promise to marry, by the same process. "When you knocked her up, what did you THINK was going to happen?"
> The receiver does this by "putting himself in the shoes" of the sender, in the fullest context that the receiver is aware of.
Sounds like cognitive empathy, which I've developed over the years (I was bad at it for a long time, even into adulthood). Big fan of cognitive empathy. Understanding incentives in economics is basically cognitive empathy, unless you're projecting your own feelings onto someone else (which is reversed, fake empathy).
One thing I would say to complement your theory is that people can assign meaning to things in Nature or even that they dream/imagine. Meaning-making goes beyond person-to-person communication.
Yes, the "cognitive empathy" description you linked to in that post is the same thing I am talking about. Thanks for that reference!
And absolutely, "The world is my inkblot," as I wrote in "Woo Is Me" (https://www.twadpocklereport.com/p/woo-is-me). We project meaning onto everything. When we do it to each other, it becomes awareness recursion and enters the path from cognitive empathy to communication, even when we are reading hard numeric data, despite its objective appearance. I will be writing and talking more about this!
Fascinating stuff, Bernie - as always. I can't decide if you've uncovered part of a brilliant larger meta-theory that explains all human interaction or if you've woven a circular spider's web that will collapse as soon as I start pulling on a thread and examining it.
Or perhaps something else entirely.
In any case, these are fascinating and useful insights and frames that are worth considering. Thanks!
Good food for thought.
--
> Communicated INTENTIONS are contracts
It seems that intentions are an offer, a negotiation of sorts. It's only a contract if someone accepts it and engages with us. Or can a contract be established by only one party with intentions?
--
A right is a valid claim. If I say 2 + 3 = 5 and that answer is "right," it means that based on the definitions of 2, 3, 5, plus and equals, a valid claim has been made. Same thing with other kinds of rights; they're valid claims. A property right is a valid claim. A liberty right is a valid claim. So this ...
> Discussion of rights is almost always wrong-headed and should be replaced by discussions of property and the CONTRACT by which its ownership or stewardship was acquired.
... seems to be an appeal to rights. "the CONTRACT by which its ownership or stewardship was acquired" is an attempt to establish a valid claim, no?
Hi, Dom! You've made claims about claims. How fun! There's a joke about insurance in here somewhere.
When I say crazy things, I am usually pointing out the gap between symbols and reality. One of those oft-apocryphal quotes attributed to Einstein is that math is only certain to the extent that it does not refer to reality; to the extent that it does, it is uncertain. This is because when we reduce reality to symbols, in order to do logic or analysis, we throw away almost every detail. If we've thrown away anything that matters, our analysis is doomed before we start. But we can't prove we didn't throw away anything that matters, short of checking our final answer against reality, which we can never fully do, for the same reasons.
Fittingly, you threw away some words when quoting my "Communicated INTENTIONS are contracts." I understand completely where you're coming from, but my point hinges on the FULL meaning of "communicated" which is why I followed it with "encoded and received." Also, I spoke a little loosely, so we might need to put a finer point on my choice of the word "contracts." But I am pointing out that every contract is a creature of thought and intent and the mutual understanding of both, entirely phenomena of the human inner experience, even though we pretend that we can write it up as a mathematical construct called "law." The smarter people in law understand this quite well, but our mass culture treats the law as if it is a precise mathematical exercise. All those definitions, all that logic, what could go wrong? It's amazing we are able to do as well as we do with it. This cuts to the heart of judging how a parent is treating a child, separating cultural norms from individual intentions (circumcision was a great example in Adam's episode) and intention from consequence, plus even judging what the consequences were. I mean, that last point bites off the entire epistemology of cause and effect. How can you ever PROVE that a specific parental act caused a specific child's result?
I developed Awareness Recursion Theory while thinking about this: how does communication REALLY work? I observe what you do (including what you say or write), and I ask myself, what inner state of yours would produce that behavior? To succeed, I have to be able to relate to that inner state, typically because we're both human from the same culture. Mathematically, I am inverting a model, assessing inputs from outputs, of an extremely non-linear system. And I am PROJECTING, hard. All communication is projection. It's the only way to do it. It's why peacocks sound sad. Are they really sad? CAN they even be sad? I have no idea, but their plaintive calls make ME a little sad. Because, imagine how I would feel if I were making that sound.
So your behavior, yes, opens a negotiation. I'm not bound to whatever you are thinking inside, but as soon as I respond with my own behavior, and we both make a few assumptions about what just happened, we have fallen into some implicit agreements. The best proof I can offer is that no matter how well we are getting along (and even if no words are spoken), one of us could "break the rules" at any moment in a way that the other finds unacceptable or uncivilized. If I act peaceful and docile and look at you in an inviting way, so you sit down near me, but then I smack you, you will decide I was deceptive and mean. The typical defense, that I never promised not to smack you, rings hollow. Likewise the old joke, "Do you know what time it is?" (Reply) "Yes." The answer is obviously not what was being asked for. Because, what INNER STATE would someone have in order to ask that question? Do you really think he was just idly wondering whether you happened to know what time it was? If you had to look at your watch to find out, was the answer "No"?
This take on communication is very adjacent to Hoppe's argumentation ethics.
--
On rights and claims, I would say that a right is a valid claim AGAINST someone, or FOR some kind of privilege. I wouldn't quite present a mathematical truth as a right.
You might say that I'm calling property the only true right. I would support that. My piece about free speech, which I linked above near the end of the post, digs deeply into that. Free speech isn't really a thing, separate from the property right to control your own property (specifically, the lack of anyone else's right to control speech on YOUR property), and all the problems that occur when a property owner/manager fails to control the property in a way that was implied by the behavioral contract of inviting others onto it.
E.g., if I say here's a public library, so come read books and bring your kids to learn stuff--and you'd better support it with coerced tax dollars, because it's EDUCATIONAL and FOR YOU and PUBLIC mumble mumble--but then I won't kick out unsavory bums who create an environment where you wouldn't want to bring your kids or relax for a good read, then I have broken that contract, haven't I? It's like acting all friendly and inviting but then smacking you when you come near. The library spends money on comfy chairs for enjoyable reading, and it will kick me out if I start singing (Hey, I paid taxes for that public place too, why can't I SING?), but it doesn't have the stones to kick out a smelly, muttering bum who makes everyone want to leave. Because it won't step up like a proper owner and ACT LIKE IT GIVES A DAMN about this property. Because "public." Did the bum even pay taxes?
I like what I understand your Awareness Recursion Theory to be: If we keep digging, we find that our expectations produce behavior, even social behavior. Did I get that correct? It's a lesson I tried to explain to a student at my Church who wondered if God could deceive us and still be a all-good, truthful God. The answer I steered him toward is that God can tell the truth and we can still be deceived by it if the truth doesn't meet our expectations. So, the real question isn't would/could God/truth deceive us, but do our expectations cause us to be deceived by God/truth?
That still transfers the question to: Why do I expect something? Is my expectation based on a prejudice, or on a logical demonstration in which I connect pieces of information validly (so, the answer is "right" 😉)?
Yes, I truncated your words to quote you. It's impossible not to. That's what an excerpt means. We all leave out almost all of the words and concepts that others have spoken, written, expressed. The key is whether the words omitted change the meaning. In the case of the excerpt I cited, I don't think it changes the meaning. Adding back "encoded and received" doesn't alter the fact that this communicated intention is only an offer, a negotiation, not an obligation on the part of the recipient of the communication.
Recursively, what are the expectations, again? If a person's expectation is that merely communicating to someone and having the other person react as if they noticed something, or even that they comprehend what the expressor expressed, establishes a contract, then that seems like prejudice being projected onto others.
Property as the only true right? Sounds like Rothbard, and it's a formidable argument. I'm a little familiar with Argumentation Ethics; another formidable argument. They each point to what I call the authority of personhood and how people encapsulate this reality. Yes, I made and continue to make "claims about claims"; the question is, are the claims valid (right) or invalid (not right somehow, incomplete, or even wrong)? Recursively, we may never really know, unless we agree on a premise or set of premises that serves as the base. I imagine you and I agree on much! But, then again, I might be projecting a prejudice.
> I like what I understand your Awareness Recursion Theory to be: If we keep digging, we find that our expectations produce behavior, even social behavior. Did I get that correct?
Your statement lies within ART but is not the whole thing.
My formulation:
Symbols acquire meaning when the receiver imagines what the sender's inner state must have been, in order to produce those symbols. The receiver does this by "putting himself in the shoes" of the sender, in the fullest context that the receiver is aware of.
Novice receivers can only imagine themselves as they are, placed in the sender's apparent situation, but advanced receivers are able to imagine what it is like to be someone like the sender, and then put that avatar in the sender's situation, with very nuanced perception of what that situation is. There is no precise way of formulating how to do this correctly. It is an ART, learned through experience by trial and error. When a group of entities interact in this way over time, they create CULTURE.
By "symbols," I mean really every form of behavior, even when the sender is not trying to communicate, as long as a receiver observes and assigns meaning. You might say I'm defining "symbols" to mean anything to which anyone assigns meaning. I probably agree with that.
Then the theory becomes,
"Meaning is assigned when an observer imagines an actor's inner state, whether the actor is writing, speaking, gesturing, making facial expressions, or taking any kind of action, or no action. The observer does this by 'putting himself in the shoes' of the actor, in the fullest context of the observation."
Ultimately, this includes an awareness that the actor is doing the same thing, assigning meaning to the observer's behavior, and so that each inner state includes a reflection of the other's inner state, nested as deeply as either party cares to take it (RECURSION!). Allow the actors to have an agenda, and this covers lying, propaganda, and other social manipulations. This is adjacent to Hoppe's Argumentation Ethics and Girard's Mimetic Theory.
This process describes not only human interaction but also sufficiently advanced animals, robots, computers, and all communicating entities. When my computer sends information to your computer, our computers are merely proxies for engineers, who imagined how the data would arrive, encoded by another computer, designed by another engineer who used the standard conventions that someone in that engineer's shoes would have used. Common error handling anticipates the errors and mismatches that an engineer would expect by putting himself in the shoes of the other engineers and users.
This is the path to true AI. Autonomous robots without a predefined language would assign meaning to others' behavior (human or not, verbal or not) by guessing inner state from observed outer state. In engineering, this is known as "model inversion" and is a common practice but does not seem to be in use for AI in the way I am suggesting. A novice robot might start by assuming every "other" is like itself, a naive baseline model, and it could improve that model through observation, called "adaptive modeling." The more detailed and flexible its models, the smarter it is at communicating.
CONTRACTS? They are a special case of communication. At some point, one or both of us assigns meaning, that we have agreed to something, whether we wrote anything down or not. This is very sticky, I agree. Try pondering the dynamics of unreasonable contracts, the crazy terms that a judge would throw out ("If the lessee defaults, he must amputate his own arm with a pocketknife..." or even "Employee will pay Employer an hourly wage..."), and you will see what I mean. The words are not the final say. Judges look at the social context of the words and ask questions such as, "WHY would someone agree to this?" Traditional cultures equate sex or pregnancy with an implied promise to marry, by the same process. "When you knocked her up, what did you THINK was going to happen?"
I'd better just stop here. 😅
> The receiver does this by "putting himself in the shoes" of the sender, in the fullest context that the receiver is aware of.
Sounds like cognitive empathy, which I've developed over the years (I was bad at it for a long time, even into adulthood). Big fan of cognitive empathy. Understanding incentives in economics is basically cognitive empathy, unless you're projecting your own feelings onto someone else (which is reversed, fake empathy).
I've never written extensively about it, but I've mentioned cognitive empathy a handful or so times; here's the first time I linked to a fuller explanation of it (near the very end): https://goodneighborbadcitizen.substack.com/p/play-ball-literally-and-figuratively
One thing I would say to complement your theory is that people can assign meaning to things in Nature or even that they dream/imagine. Meaning-making goes beyond person-to-person communication.
Yes, the "cognitive empathy" description you linked to in that post is the same thing I am talking about. Thanks for that reference!
And absolutely, "The world is my inkblot," as I wrote in "Woo Is Me" (https://www.twadpocklereport.com/p/woo-is-me). We project meaning onto everything. When we do it to each other, it becomes awareness recursion and enters the path from cognitive empathy to communication, even when we are reading hard numeric data, despite its objective appearance. I will be writing and talking more about this!
Fascinating stuff, Bernie - as always. I can't decide if you've uncovered part of a brilliant larger meta-theory that explains all human interaction or if you've woven a circular spider's web that will collapse as soon as I start pulling on a thread and examining it.
Or perhaps something else entirely.
In any case, these are fascinating and useful insights and frames that are worth considering. Thanks!
🕷️🕸️🪰