I'm working on two long essays: one about existential meaning and one about the function of the basal ganglia in time perception, attention, task engagement, and impulsivity. Hopefully those will be complete some time mid-May. Until then, here's some crap about an indecorous quale.
The internet does a good job chronicling idiosyncratic human pleasures. One cluster of these I will call "visceral fit", for lack of a better term. (Edit: What a bad term!) The stereotypical elicitor is popping bubble wrap. Visceral fit is felt in response to some haptic stimulation, and other-modality cues that co-occur with that haptic stimulation. Also, I don't know quite how to say it, but, the stimuli which produce the specific quale I'm pinpointing are more textural, and do not extend as clearly to muscular stimulation such as in massage or the relieving one's bladder. (Edit: They're cutaneous sensations!)
One evolutionary domain giving rise to visceral fit qualia is close interpersonal contact, especially through grooming and sex. Elicitors from this domain include the sounds of head scratching, whispering, and various fluid sounds - produced not only by the movement of saliva in the mouth. Connoisseurs of abrasive and fluid sounds can be found at /r/asmr and /r/gonewildaudio, the latter of which is of course porn. Probably the prickly sound and feeling of hair clippers on one's neck falls here too.
Another domain for which the elusive textural stimulation quale pings is that of food. John Allen writes an opinion piece about the evolution of human preference for juicy, crunchy food, concluding that the preference was made adaptive by the prehistoric advent of cooking techniques, rather than finding fixation through the benefits of eating arthropods with chitinous exoskeletons. Some food consumption sounds will provoke disgust in the ordinary human audience, but certainly there are also sounds, perhaps relating to the consumption of crunchy and juicy food, that are pleasing, and which perhaps evoke tactile mental simulation. Maybe the pleasant crackling of fire falls here too.
Disgust does not fully inhibit tactile sensory pleasure, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the reddit community which delights in viewing ruptured cutaneous pathologies. This is the dark and forbidden side of grooming pleasure, and I will not provide a link.
Those are the more easily interpreted elicitors. /r/oddlysatisfying chronicles many other things which produce the quale: Things fitting tightly into receptacles or coming into synchronous alignment. Materials being cut and abraded from surfaces of objects. Changes throughout entire object volumes, such as by crushing, shattering, shredding, melting, and deformations to elastic solids, viscous fluids, and semi-solid mixtures.
There is a great diversity of things that produce tactile simulation pleasures, and the whole thing feels a little bit naughty. Someone with too much time or the right comparative advantage should write about it with a better informed and more cutting analysis than I have provided here, because brains are interesting, and shared aesthetics are kind of important, and naughty things are fun.
Edit: Q-tips in ears! Can't believe I didn't think to bring that up. When stimuli in other modalities trigger a tactile response, the cross-modal response is so very much like cotton swabs in the ear. As for other-modality stimuli that I failed to mention: Some people get gooseflesh when they listen to music and call it "frisson" (though most of the stuff on /r/frisson doesn't do it for me, so maybe there's wide variance in which music triggers which people?). I should look at what else produces gooseflesh. And let's not forget sparkles! Some people get ASMR from looking at sparkles. Like a visual-to-haptic synaesthesia. So now I'm looking into tactile hallucinations, goosebumps, and music-frisson generally (which has a much larger literature than ASMR for some reason). Did you know that there are different cutaneous receptors for different kinds of mechanical stimulation? Maybe I can distinguish elicitors of good feelings associated with each kind of cutaneous mechanoreceptor. If that categorization seems compelling, it would make for a pleasing correspondence between aesthetic concepts and aesthetic hardware. To the literature!
The English Texture Lexicon
Categories excerpted from (Bhushan, Rao, Lohse, 1997), with small modifications where I feel like it.
I. Structured?
II. Lines and edges:
III. Random placement of small convex regions:
I. Structured?
- Well ordered, repetitive: faceted, crystalline, lattice, regular, repetitive, periodic, rhythmic, harmonious, well-ordered, cyclical, simple, uniform, fine, smooth,
- Random, disordered: complex, messy, random, disordered, jumbled, scrambled, discontinuous, indefinite, asymmetrical, nonuniform, irregular,
- Semi-ordered, irregular segmentation: marbled, veined, scaly,
II. Lines and edges:
- Linear orientation: pleated, corrugated, ribbed, grooved, ridged, furrowed, lined, striated, stratified,
- Local linear orientation: wizened, crows-feet, rumpled, wrinkled, crinkled, cracked, fractured,
- Global contours: flowing, whirly, swirly, winding, corkscrew, spiralled, coiled, twisted,
- Two linear orientations: matted, fibrous, knitted, woven, meshed, net-like, cross-hatched, chequered, grid, honeycombed, waffled, zigzag,
- Multiple orientations, non-orthogonal, indistinct edges: gauzy, cobweb, webbed, interlaced, entwined, intertwined, braided, frilly, lace-like,
III. Random placement of small convex regions:
- Two dimensional, indistinct edges: mottled, blemished, blotchy, smeared, smudged, stained,
- Two dimensional, sharp edges: spattered, sprinkled, freckled, speckled, flecked, spotted, polka-dot, dotted,
- Three dimensional (raised, depressed): bubbly, bumpy, studded, porous, potholed, pitted, holey, perforated, gouged,
Cue Integration and Sensory Fusion
One paradigm in psychology for modelling perception is that of cue integration, where a few sensory cues are presented to a subject, and researchers elicit judgements of some parameter value of the subject's model of the data generating process. This method is a bit primitive, making no use of modern neural imaging technology or statistical learning theory, so we expect that the cue integration paradigm must fail to shed light on many aspects perception and reasoning, such as the formation of structured conceptual categories and intuitive theories of, say, classical dynamics, natural language grammar, or social interactions. Still we have learned some things from cue integration studies, and this post will engage with some of the ideas of the sub-field.
Some signals (or our distributions for them) are mutually informative: learning testable information about one signal reduces the entropy of our distribution on the other signal. We know intuitively to look for relations and correspondences between cues which are coincident (co-occurring or source co-located). When percepts are higher dimensional, they can often be summarized with spatiotemporal coordinates, and correspondences between the coordinates often take the form of alignments, which might be produced by transforming signals to a common frame of reference. For example, neuronal columns originating in our retinas follow their initial retinal organization (their eccentricity (central vs. peripheral location) and their polar angle) surprisingly far into the brain, but their data are eventually transformed into a common coordinate frame through depth estimation, which is largely done by inverting the parallax disparity of the two visual streams. More abstract percepts with coordinates, like scene maps, are also fit objects for alignment.
The correspondences mentioned so far (signal co-occurrence supporting an inference to a common signal source, and alignment of spatio-temporal coordinates when high dimensional percepts are gained through different perspectives of a common referent) are sort of, like, workable inferences from immediately present data. If we leverage prior information, then we might get more "semantic" data correspondences, like the inference that small people have higher voices (or that deeper heard voices probably originate in larger vocal tracts). That inference is sort of supported by an intuitive theory of acoustic resonance, and other semantic correspondences often have interpretations as relying on intuitive modelling of domain structure. For example, cultures intuitively cluster animals by a hierarchy of types, with degrees of similarities described through familial relations ("chimps are cousins to humans"), which is like an intuitive theory of phylogenetic origin of species through natural selection on individuals with mutated phenotypes in a breeding population.
Whatever the source of structure, perceptual cues are often mutually informative, and brains leverage this in estimation of world states. One simple way to combine cues is to take a weighted average of measured values (for example, estimates of a thing's position based on visual sense vs. haptic sense). If our state of knowledge about the signal modality is normal (like if we just know the first two moments of our received data over past observations and we expect that these statistics will hold for future observations), then we are licensed by our information to model the data sources with normal distributions - and if we take each signal's averaging weight according to the reliability of the distribution (the inverse of its covariance), then we're probably doing something like maximum likelihood estimation with a Kalman filter, and our end estimate will be an improved Gaussian (because the reliabilities of the measurements sum, maybe) over the thing's position.
That kind of combination of signal evidence in estimation is the thing that's most often meant by "cue integration". Another thing you could kind of call cue integration, or better yet "sensory fusion", concerns how things get efficiently represented in the brain, and is more related to the domain structure learning (like of concepts and theories), which then support those simpler cue integration parameter estimations.
Short of bayesian nonparametric structure learning or whatever the hell you're doing when you throw a neural net at a problem, we could just model the relation between two recurrent sensory cues in isolation. One way to examine how the brain relates two mutually informative sensory cues is to experimentally introduce systematic bias in one of the cues, and observe the learning times before subjects recalibrate their estimates. For example, psychologists going back to Helmholtz have enjoyed placing prismatic goggles on subjects and watching them stumble around. In addition to manipulating mean values of sensory cues, you could probably introduce changes in signal covariance, with interesting results (I guess it would be like gain modulation, if averaging weights are based on reliabilities).
I feel like I should have more to say confidently about sensory fusion, but I'm mostly drawing a blank for anything motivated by even a hint of mathematical understanding. How about some wild speculation?
Speculation on reliable coupling vs. efficient coding: the more reliable is the relation between two recurrent sensory cues, the more likely the brain is to produce a sensory fusion, i.e. to consider or remember only the final combined estimate. This reduction of redundant information to sparse signals is why we think intuitively of vision and taste-smell as being roughly two and half sense modalities, rather than because of the differential presence of receptive organelles at the periphery of those senses. Also, something something short codes for things of common importance, degrees of neural representation as a determinant of estimate dominance in addition to distribution reliability.
Speculation on reliable coupling vs. learning plasticity: if the relation between two recurrent sensory cues is important but unreliable (where "importance" as an experimental construct might come from, like, introducing a loss function in a decision problem), then recalibration occurs faster than if the relation were reliable. If a relation is expected to change only slowly, then beliefs will be revised only slowly (or by small revisions).
Further, if cue coupling reliably occurs in one of a few parameter regimes, then learning will be fast in changing between those regimes as representations, but slow in calibrating to new ones. For example, your eyes are basically a fixed width apart, but there's a tiny bit of variation because they can swivel in their orbits; thus wild speculation predicts that the brain will have dedicated machinery for quickly adapting its interpretation of binocular signals over a small range of monocular swivels, but that perceptions will be screwed up if eyes are swivelled a lot, or if parallax disparity between monocular signals doesn't match what you would see for eye sockets situated a fixed distance apart within your skull. Or, instead of continuous variation in the parameter regime, maybe you're just used to having psychologists put prismatic goggles on you, and so you can switch your motor coordination pretty quickly with altered context.
The end?
Some signals (or our distributions for them) are mutually informative: learning testable information about one signal reduces the entropy of our distribution on the other signal. We know intuitively to look for relations and correspondences between cues which are coincident (co-occurring or source co-located). When percepts are higher dimensional, they can often be summarized with spatiotemporal coordinates, and correspondences between the coordinates often take the form of alignments, which might be produced by transforming signals to a common frame of reference. For example, neuronal columns originating in our retinas follow their initial retinal organization (their eccentricity (central vs. peripheral location) and their polar angle) surprisingly far into the brain, but their data are eventually transformed into a common coordinate frame through depth estimation, which is largely done by inverting the parallax disparity of the two visual streams. More abstract percepts with coordinates, like scene maps, are also fit objects for alignment.
The correspondences mentioned so far (signal co-occurrence supporting an inference to a common signal source, and alignment of spatio-temporal coordinates when high dimensional percepts are gained through different perspectives of a common referent) are sort of, like, workable inferences from immediately present data. If we leverage prior information, then we might get more "semantic" data correspondences, like the inference that small people have higher voices (or that deeper heard voices probably originate in larger vocal tracts). That inference is sort of supported by an intuitive theory of acoustic resonance, and other semantic correspondences often have interpretations as relying on intuitive modelling of domain structure. For example, cultures intuitively cluster animals by a hierarchy of types, with degrees of similarities described through familial relations ("chimps are cousins to humans"), which is like an intuitive theory of phylogenetic origin of species through natural selection on individuals with mutated phenotypes in a breeding population.
Whatever the source of structure, perceptual cues are often mutually informative, and brains leverage this in estimation of world states. One simple way to combine cues is to take a weighted average of measured values (for example, estimates of a thing's position based on visual sense vs. haptic sense). If our state of knowledge about the signal modality is normal (like if we just know the first two moments of our received data over past observations and we expect that these statistics will hold for future observations), then we are licensed by our information to model the data sources with normal distributions - and if we take each signal's averaging weight according to the reliability of the distribution (the inverse of its covariance), then we're probably doing something like maximum likelihood estimation with a Kalman filter, and our end estimate will be an improved Gaussian (because the reliabilities of the measurements sum, maybe) over the thing's position.
That kind of combination of signal evidence in estimation is the thing that's most often meant by "cue integration". Another thing you could kind of call cue integration, or better yet "sensory fusion", concerns how things get efficiently represented in the brain, and is more related to the domain structure learning (like of concepts and theories), which then support those simpler cue integration parameter estimations.
Short of bayesian nonparametric structure learning or whatever the hell you're doing when you throw a neural net at a problem, we could just model the relation between two recurrent sensory cues in isolation. One way to examine how the brain relates two mutually informative sensory cues is to experimentally introduce systematic bias in one of the cues, and observe the learning times before subjects recalibrate their estimates. For example, psychologists going back to Helmholtz have enjoyed placing prismatic goggles on subjects and watching them stumble around. In addition to manipulating mean values of sensory cues, you could probably introduce changes in signal covariance, with interesting results (I guess it would be like gain modulation, if averaging weights are based on reliabilities).
I feel like I should have more to say confidently about sensory fusion, but I'm mostly drawing a blank for anything motivated by even a hint of mathematical understanding. How about some wild speculation?
Speculation on reliable coupling vs. efficient coding: the more reliable is the relation between two recurrent sensory cues, the more likely the brain is to produce a sensory fusion, i.e. to consider or remember only the final combined estimate. This reduction of redundant information to sparse signals is why we think intuitively of vision and taste-smell as being roughly two and half sense modalities, rather than because of the differential presence of receptive organelles at the periphery of those senses. Also, something something short codes for things of common importance, degrees of neural representation as a determinant of estimate dominance in addition to distribution reliability.
Speculation on reliable coupling vs. learning plasticity: if the relation between two recurrent sensory cues is important but unreliable (where "importance" as an experimental construct might come from, like, introducing a loss function in a decision problem), then recalibration occurs faster than if the relation were reliable. If a relation is expected to change only slowly, then beliefs will be revised only slowly (or by small revisions).
Further, if cue coupling reliably occurs in one of a few parameter regimes, then learning will be fast in changing between those regimes as representations, but slow in calibrating to new ones. For example, your eyes are basically a fixed width apart, but there's a tiny bit of variation because they can swivel in their orbits; thus wild speculation predicts that the brain will have dedicated machinery for quickly adapting its interpretation of binocular signals over a small range of monocular swivels, but that perceptions will be screwed up if eyes are swivelled a lot, or if parallax disparity between monocular signals doesn't match what you would see for eye sockets situated a fixed distance apart within your skull. Or, instead of continuous variation in the parameter regime, maybe you're just used to having psychologists put prismatic goggles on you, and so you can switch your motor coordination pretty quickly with altered context.
The end?
Virtue and Vice
Content: some rambling thoughts on the particulars of a vast psychological construct; dense with lists.
A lot of virtues/vices concern treatment of others. General distinctions of treatment toward others include praising vs. blaming, complimenting vs. insulting, welcoming vs. shunning, helping vs. interfering with, caring for vs. hurting, giving to vs. taking from, expressing gratitude vs. contempt toward, and forgiving vs. remembering transgressions.
Depending on your social roles/titles, others will think that you have a duty to treat certain people/groups well, and depending on whether you do a supererogatory or insufficient job of this, they may designate you with corresponding virtues/vices, like respectful/disrespectful, loyal/disloyal, reciprocating/exploitative, trustworthy/manipulative, and scrupulous/prejudiced.
I don't have a good grasp on what sort of standard relationships exist in human societies. There are some more reciprocal/bidirectional relations like kin, partners, friends, fellows, members, citizens (with nouns for the corresponding standards of behaviour generated by adding the suffix "-ship"), and then there are more asymmetric relationships like between (omitting the second party of the relationship for brevity) designers, producers, lessors, rulers, judges, guardians, caretakers, representatives, mediators, advisers, teachers, managers, investors, patrons, and employers. Maybe these relationships are all like vendor/customer pairs, and they each detail a different set of social goods provided - tangible goods, information goods, designs, advice, transferable resource access rights, domain expertise, services, loans, insurance, stable trade opportunities under the employer's conditions, persuasive/prestigious/impartial decision making, protection, repairs, improvements, customization, et cetera.
Ownership and stewardship are commonly thought of as relations between a person and an inanimate object or resource, but these relations also have normative consequences for other parties - just as much as the other relations detailed so far1, and the presence of these relations in a community/society also contributes to communal/institutional judgements of what preferential treatment an actor should perform toward which parties.
That sketches some conceptual content surrounded virtues/vices which are based on interpersonal treatment viewed through role obligations derived from established social relations. Another large swath of virtue and vice falls under the heading of willpower: patience and caution vs. recklessness, diligence and high standards vs. carelessness and neglect, abstinence and moderation vs. desire and indulgence, and regulated emotional stability vs. unregulated emotional volatility.
One commonly finds words with positive connotations on both sides of the pairs in this section, but largely the trend in moral rhetoric is to endorse more self-control.
Also, people can get virtue/vice credit through the abstinence/indulgence facet based on whether they engage in or avoid acts that evoke disgust or indignation in an ordinary human observer, regardless of whether the actor feels tempted or resists temptation. Standard elicitors of disgust are things associated with pathogens (bodily effluvia, symptoms of transmissible disease, body envelope violations, corpses, spoiled food, vermin), some sex acts (often based on the partner, and often having an interpretations as being costly to the one's reproductive fitness), and some atypical/abnormal physical/psychological conditions (where the emotive force probably comes from a mix of the disease-avoidance and costly-mate avoidance heuristics).
The largest remaining part of virtue/vice construct as it appears to my introspection at this late hour is competence/incompetence. When there is no large harm or temptation or indecency surrounding an act, then we apply somewhat less morally charged labels for judging conduct, like elegant/inexpert, productive/wasteful, clever/hackneyed, versatile/limited.
I don't have any good idea of why some personality descriptors seem (to me tonight) like virtues/vices, while some others have positive/negative connotations, but do not seem like virtues/vices. I should probably check these ideas against my rambling notes on the topic from previous years. Maybe that will be a future post.
-:-:-
1. For example, full owners can manage the access and use that others make of a resource, can revocably transfer rights for trustees to manage others' use and access of the resource, and can irrevocably alienate their title of ownership to another party. In the absence of these acts or in the other party's absence of particular knowledge as to how the owner has parcelled out jural rights to other parties, then parties usually have in rem duties to respect the owner's reasonably-assumed exclusive access, use, and management of the resource without term limit.
A lot of virtues/vices concern treatment of others. General distinctions of treatment toward others include praising vs. blaming, complimenting vs. insulting, welcoming vs. shunning, helping vs. interfering with, caring for vs. hurting, giving to vs. taking from, expressing gratitude vs. contempt toward, and forgiving vs. remembering transgressions.
Depending on your social roles/titles, others will think that you have a duty to treat certain people/groups well, and depending on whether you do a supererogatory or insufficient job of this, they may designate you with corresponding virtues/vices, like respectful/disrespectful, loyal/disloyal, reciprocating/exploitative, trustworthy/manipulative, and scrupulous/prejudiced.
I don't have a good grasp on what sort of standard relationships exist in human societies. There are some more reciprocal/bidirectional relations like kin, partners, friends, fellows, members, citizens (with nouns for the corresponding standards of behaviour generated by adding the suffix "-ship"), and then there are more asymmetric relationships like between (omitting the second party of the relationship for brevity) designers, producers, lessors, rulers, judges, guardians, caretakers, representatives, mediators, advisers, teachers, managers, investors, patrons, and employers. Maybe these relationships are all like vendor/customer pairs, and they each detail a different set of social goods provided - tangible goods, information goods, designs, advice, transferable resource access rights, domain expertise, services, loans, insurance, stable trade opportunities under the employer's conditions, persuasive/prestigious/impartial decision making, protection, repairs, improvements, customization, et cetera.
Ownership and stewardship are commonly thought of as relations between a person and an inanimate object or resource, but these relations also have normative consequences for other parties - just as much as the other relations detailed so far1, and the presence of these relations in a community/society also contributes to communal/institutional judgements of what preferential treatment an actor should perform toward which parties.
That sketches some conceptual content surrounded virtues/vices which are based on interpersonal treatment viewed through role obligations derived from established social relations. Another large swath of virtue and vice falls under the heading of willpower: patience and caution vs. recklessness, diligence and high standards vs. carelessness and neglect, abstinence and moderation vs. desire and indulgence, and regulated emotional stability vs. unregulated emotional volatility.
One commonly finds words with positive connotations on both sides of the pairs in this section, but largely the trend in moral rhetoric is to endorse more self-control.
Also, people can get virtue/vice credit through the abstinence/indulgence facet based on whether they engage in or avoid acts that evoke disgust or indignation in an ordinary human observer, regardless of whether the actor feels tempted or resists temptation. Standard elicitors of disgust are things associated with pathogens (bodily effluvia, symptoms of transmissible disease, body envelope violations, corpses, spoiled food, vermin), some sex acts (often based on the partner, and often having an interpretations as being costly to the one's reproductive fitness), and some atypical/abnormal physical/psychological conditions (where the emotive force probably comes from a mix of the disease-avoidance and costly-mate avoidance heuristics).
The largest remaining part of virtue/vice construct as it appears to my introspection at this late hour is competence/incompetence. When there is no large harm or temptation or indecency surrounding an act, then we apply somewhat less morally charged labels for judging conduct, like elegant/inexpert, productive/wasteful, clever/hackneyed, versatile/limited.
I don't have any good idea of why some personality descriptors seem (to me tonight) like virtues/vices, while some others have positive/negative connotations, but do not seem like virtues/vices. I should probably check these ideas against my rambling notes on the topic from previous years. Maybe that will be a future post.
-:-:-
1. For example, full owners can manage the access and use that others make of a resource, can revocably transfer rights for trustees to manage others' use and access of the resource, and can irrevocably alienate their title of ownership to another party. In the absence of these acts or in the other party's absence of particular knowledge as to how the owner has parcelled out jural rights to other parties, then parties usually have in rem duties to respect the owner's reasonably-assumed exclusive access, use, and management of the resource without term limit.
Valuing Names and Learning to Care
I intended to put these ideas in a post called "Living in Your Name" (which I might finish writing someday for all you know!), but they stand alone pretty well, so I'm posting early.
I. Valuing names
Consider a type of impression management, where you select your conduct with regard to descriptions and designations that people might plausibly apply to that conduct. This might be termed "acting with regard to names-in-general."
You might concern yourself determining the applicability of conduct labels because:
Learning to care:
Preferences are often not easily categorized into just one of these three templates, especially not in the presence of stable causal contingencies. For example, if an indicator (like a person's verbal judgement) is reliably informative about something that you care about (your conduct), then, as you become accustomed to that contingency, you may find yourself caring about the indicator value even when it's not informative about the value of the indicated thing. Likewise, if good chess performance reliably protects your soul (or is exhilarating, or trains your rationality, or whatever), then the desire to be (more) competent at chess at any moment will start to feel more terminal, and perhaps it does in fact become a more terminal preference. If so, then the establishment and extinction of stable causal contingencies is a potent source of value drift in humans, but in a totally uninteresting way.
Edit: If phenomena like the endowment effect and sour grapes are not merely instrumental or performative - if we learn through habit of motivated focus to more strongly and terminally prefer those world conditions (outcomes, experiences, stable attributes of moral character, ...) that reliably hold, and to more strongly and terminally dislike conditions that we reliably can not easily achieve - that suggests there are a few more kinds of adaptive preference formation worth including in a rich classification of issues that prevent a clean factoring of preferences over applicability of conduct labels according to paths of derivation from stable terminal preferences. Maybe? Hmm.
I. Valuing names
Consider a type of impression management, where you select your conduct with regard to descriptions and designations that people might plausibly apply to that conduct. This might be termed "acting with regard to names-in-general."
You might concern yourself determining the applicability of conduct labels because:
- Terminal: Your preferences over conduct label applications are fairly terminal, ex. you want to hear compliments, or you want others to think well of you (perhaps even if their beliefs are mistaken). If you had no other terminal preferences but these, it would perhaps be desirable to intervene directly on (to force the value of) your beliefs, or others' speech, or others' beliefs about your conduct, at any given time.
- Evidential-Terminal: Your preferences over conduct label applications are based on the evidence they give about your conduct, about which you have relatively terminal preferences. If you had no other terminal preferences in this case, hearing a person apply some preferred label to your conduct would generally be good news, but you would be indifferent about it if you learned that the person was uninformed/misinformed about your conduct, or that they were being dishonest, or even if you realized that you'd already accounted for their information about your conduct by conditioning on other indicators. Likewise you would be indifferent about label application if you were certain about the character of your conduct. Unless you (the rhetorical subject, momentarily assumed to have evidential preferences over label applications) also had terminal preferences over label applications, you would probably be indifferent to making, or would want not to make, a direct intervention on others' speech or on your beliefs in regard to labels, unless you had good reason to believe that doing so would improve your conduct, or unless you were sure that your conduct would not suffer but that you could receive some other gain.
- Evidential-Instrumental-Terminal: Here again, the contours of your preferences over applied labels come from how those labels inform/constrain your beliefs about the desirable character of your conduct, but then those desirabilities in turn are derived from how you expect your conduct to achieve terminally desirable conditions (which, in full generality, might include preferences over your conduct beliefs, others' beliefs about you, your actual conduct, et cetera ad infinitum). Psychologically, many of our more-terminal-seeming preferences seem not to make reference to manners of conduct, and instead focus on ....momentary, local material conditions of individual experience? Those words aren't quite right, but some kind of temporal independence gets close to the issue. I dunno. Here's a dumb example of a solely instrumental preference over conduct: you want to be good at chess because you're playing Death for your soul, but external conditions held equal, you don't care about your chess competence, and absent the causal contingencies which make the manner of conduct useful, you wouldn't trade desirable external conditions for greater chess competence.
Learning to care:
Preferences are often not easily categorized into just one of these three templates, especially not in the presence of stable causal contingencies. For example, if an indicator (like a person's verbal judgement) is reliably informative about something that you care about (your conduct), then, as you become accustomed to that contingency, you may find yourself caring about the indicator value even when it's not informative about the value of the indicated thing. Likewise, if good chess performance reliably protects your soul (or is exhilarating, or trains your rationality, or whatever), then the desire to be (more) competent at chess at any moment will start to feel more terminal, and perhaps it does in fact become a more terminal preference. If so, then the establishment and extinction of stable causal contingencies is a potent source of value drift in humans, but in a totally uninteresting way.
Edit: If phenomena like the endowment effect and sour grapes are not merely instrumental or performative - if we learn through habit of motivated focus to more strongly and terminally prefer those world conditions (outcomes, experiences, stable attributes of moral character, ...) that reliably hold, and to more strongly and terminally dislike conditions that we reliably can not easily achieve - that suggests there are a few more kinds of adaptive preference formation worth including in a rich classification of issues that prevent a clean factoring of preferences over applicability of conduct labels according to paths of derivation from stable terminal preferences. Maybe? Hmm.
A Condensed Pile of Sacred Persuasive Tactics
While starting to read Sister Sarah's recent essay, "What is Ritual?" I became predictably sidetracked, by the second sentence. It's such a good sentence! She references six pages of hopeless confusions about what rituals are; how can I resist the temptation to engage with that implicit challenge? In particular, here, I want to see, prior to reading the rest of her essay, if I can synthesize a good description of Ritual by combining the better points from those six pages of hopelessly confused definitions.
The short version, consisting of the things that seem especially important to me after having done that synthesis, is this: Rituals are theatrical productions wherein participant actors are made to suspend their disbelief in their stylized narrative interactions, so that they will feel strong emotions, the perception of which leads them to revise their concepts of their communal relations in non-ritual contexts, and to more strongly adopt traditional cultural values and ideology.
Here's the very long version, which doesn't add much (now is a good time to stop reading):
A ritual is a certain formal, customary, traditional event. It is distinguished as extraordinary from mundane, quotidian affairs. It is scheduled to occur at a specific time (an occasion of cultural significance) and at a dedicated place. The event is an extended episode, having a prior-specified and commonly known sequence. The beginning and end of the ritual are distinguished and clearly recognizable to the ritual's audience.
The ritual consists of standard, pre-specified, scripted and rehearsed coordinated acts of a group of people who normally interact as a community. Individual participants will suppress the salience of their daily interests, and temporarily adopt-as-play some indicated role-identities, with associated ritual acts.
"Play identities" is meant to point in the direction of assumptions which are commonly understood as false, but which the group temporarily acts toward as-through-true. This sense of play as common-understanding pragmatic dishonesty, in other contexts often serving the purpose of entertainment, does not require gaiety of the participants, and is to be distinguished from insincerity: ritual participants, suppressing their mundane daily interests, will often feel serious and intense emotions aligned with their false, adopted role-interests.
The role-acts of rituals are often stylized, animated, rhythmic gestures. Spoken dialogue may imitate the speech of iconic (historical or mythic) figures. Acts may form a narrative, presenting interactions between participants having culture-specific symbolism. Strong emotions are evoked by narratives involving vivid perception of past remembered or imagined experience, and by other topics of far-mode value significance, such as personal human connection to primordial and cosmic order.
The actors of the ritual are also its audience. There is a cycle of anticipation and satisfying confirmation of the rituals's continuation that the audience finds in the multi-modal stimulation of their senses by the ritual acts, which is achieved by rehearsed familiarity with the ritual and by within-ritual repetition.
The audience's deep emotional involvement, far-mode orientation, suspension of disbelief, and shared focus make them commonly receptive and suggestible to far-mode narrative messages, which the ritual provides by highlighting the importance of cultural values, concerns, ideology, and norms. The narrative may frame traditional values as solutions to narrative dilemmas, or scripted dialogue may directly call for participants to assert their regard for cultural values, or participants may implicitly affirm ideology which is implicit in the concepts of their dialogue, as when one's lines include an appeal to gods for miraculous intercession. These messages might be called morally persuasive or Meaningful with a capital M, in the that they prioritize communal values over mundane personal interests, and they are presented through narratives with stirring far-mode cultural icons and symbolism. These messages are often framed as the result of communication with the Sacred and Supernatural.
Another function of ritual is to use the colour of authority of the Sacred or Supernatural to make legitimate in the minds of the community some newly established (negotiated or imposed) social roles and relationships, which will be recognized outside of the ritual context. These involve whether the person will be ostracised or allowed present, and what the conditions of their participation will be, or what normative conditions will apply to people interacting with the subject, as summarized in the subject's duties, liberties, claim-rights, authorities, et cetera.
Of course the first function of ritual, the motive-internalization of communal values, concerns, ideology, and norms, will be a factor influencing the negotiation of roles, along with more mundane things like whether the person has adequate skills to receive some specific status upgrade.
The short version, consisting of the things that seem especially important to me after having done that synthesis, is this: Rituals are theatrical productions wherein participant actors are made to suspend their disbelief in their stylized narrative interactions, so that they will feel strong emotions, the perception of which leads them to revise their concepts of their communal relations in non-ritual contexts, and to more strongly adopt traditional cultural values and ideology.
Here's the very long version, which doesn't add much (now is a good time to stop reading):
A ritual is a certain formal, customary, traditional event. It is distinguished as extraordinary from mundane, quotidian affairs. It is scheduled to occur at a specific time (an occasion of cultural significance) and at a dedicated place. The event is an extended episode, having a prior-specified and commonly known sequence. The beginning and end of the ritual are distinguished and clearly recognizable to the ritual's audience.
The ritual consists of standard, pre-specified, scripted and rehearsed coordinated acts of a group of people who normally interact as a community. Individual participants will suppress the salience of their daily interests, and temporarily adopt-as-play some indicated role-identities, with associated ritual acts.
"Play identities" is meant to point in the direction of assumptions which are commonly understood as false, but which the group temporarily acts toward as-through-true. This sense of play as common-understanding pragmatic dishonesty, in other contexts often serving the purpose of entertainment, does not require gaiety of the participants, and is to be distinguished from insincerity: ritual participants, suppressing their mundane daily interests, will often feel serious and intense emotions aligned with their false, adopted role-interests.
The role-acts of rituals are often stylized, animated, rhythmic gestures. Spoken dialogue may imitate the speech of iconic (historical or mythic) figures. Acts may form a narrative, presenting interactions between participants having culture-specific symbolism. Strong emotions are evoked by narratives involving vivid perception of past remembered or imagined experience, and by other topics of far-mode value significance, such as personal human connection to primordial and cosmic order.
The actors of the ritual are also its audience. There is a cycle of anticipation and satisfying confirmation of the rituals's continuation that the audience finds in the multi-modal stimulation of their senses by the ritual acts, which is achieved by rehearsed familiarity with the ritual and by within-ritual repetition.
The audience's deep emotional involvement, far-mode orientation, suspension of disbelief, and shared focus make them commonly receptive and suggestible to far-mode narrative messages, which the ritual provides by highlighting the importance of cultural values, concerns, ideology, and norms. The narrative may frame traditional values as solutions to narrative dilemmas, or scripted dialogue may directly call for participants to assert their regard for cultural values, or participants may implicitly affirm ideology which is implicit in the concepts of their dialogue, as when one's lines include an appeal to gods for miraculous intercession. These messages might be called morally persuasive or Meaningful with a capital M, in the that they prioritize communal values over mundane personal interests, and they are presented through narratives with stirring far-mode cultural icons and symbolism. These messages are often framed as the result of communication with the Sacred and Supernatural.
Another function of ritual is to use the colour of authority of the Sacred or Supernatural to make legitimate in the minds of the community some newly established (negotiated or imposed) social roles and relationships, which will be recognized outside of the ritual context. These involve whether the person will be ostracised or allowed present, and what the conditions of their participation will be, or what normative conditions will apply to people interacting with the subject, as summarized in the subject's duties, liberties, claim-rights, authorities, et cetera.
Of course the first function of ritual, the motive-internalization of communal values, concerns, ideology, and norms, will be a factor influencing the negotiation of roles, along with more mundane things like whether the person has adequate skills to receive some specific status upgrade.
Pragmatic Meanings of Tautologies
In this post, I fail to spend even twenty seconds searching google scholar for linguistics articles about tautologies. What a waste of time, recapitulating a trivial subject.
When people say "It is what it is," they're halting their negative affective valuations of the status quo, for lack of a foreseen exit ("I am what I am," and "Boys will be boys (regardless of your interventions)," have much the same character). There is a fair argument for the short-term instrumental value of this epistemic practice. An argument against the long-term rationality of using fatalistic arguments to trivialize the attentional import of present setbacks lies in the existence of slow learning rates affecting some instrumental motives and habits of behavior. Non-plastic motives and habits may become maladaptive in changed causal contexts, such as when an organism unlearns its natural agency to avoid aversive stimuli.
As with most issues of epistemic practice, this was put most eloquently by Steven Kaas:
When people say "It is what it is," they're halting their negative affective valuations of the status quo, for lack of a foreseen exit ("I am what I am," and "Boys will be boys (regardless of your interventions)," have much the same character). There is a fair argument for the short-term instrumental value of this epistemic practice. An argument against the long-term rationality of using fatalistic arguments to trivialize the attentional import of present setbacks lies in the existence of slow learning rates affecting some instrumental motives and habits of behavior. Non-plastic motives and habits may become maladaptive in changed causal contexts, such as when an organism unlearns its natural agency to avoid aversive stimuli.
As with most issues of epistemic practice, this was put most eloquently by Steven Kaas:
Many acquire the serenity to accept what they cannot change, only to find the "cannot change" is temporary and the serenity is permanent.
— Steven Kaas (@stevenkaas) October 16, 2010
Similar tautologies have similar fatalistic power to halt trains of thought: "What's done is done," seems to conflate our (usual) (in)ability to change the past with our ability to recognize the causes of a catastrophe and, armed with that understanding, to mitigate the potential re-occurrence of similar harms. "What will be will be," has some of the stopping-power of "It is what it is" to inhibit one's attempts to positively alter undesirable aspects of present courses of affairs, while also trivializing motives to seek information aiding prediction of future states.
There is another class of literal tautologies that people make common use of, exemplified by "Corn is corn." The pragmatic meaning of this utterance is that there is little variation across products-recognized-as-corn with respect to the functions one wishes to make of it, such that one quantity of corn can usually substitute for an equal quantity. Recognizing the fungibility of a good is, among other things, a way to trivialize the consideration one gives to the causal origin of the good (kind of like an assertion of path independence, saying your preferences are indifferent w.r.t. changes in the production of corn). If someone forcefully tells you that a class of things is itself, maybe it becomes prudent to investigate which variation in the attributes or origins of the things they are implicitly claiming you should be indifferent toward.
Here's another set of tautologies I think form a natural category; see if you can identify the commonalities of pragmatic meaning: "It's not over till it's over," "Enough is enough," "I'll see you when I see you."
The literal-but-pragmatically-informative tautologies I most want to talk about, and the ones that motivated this post, are "No means No" and "Yes means Yes", common political slogans of feminism. (It's kind of wondrous to me, from a emotionally-detached primatologist perspective, that humans can effectively rally around slogans that are tautologies.)
"No means No," endorses a social maxim of taking people's statements of preference at face value, or of setting a low bar for judging when demands of omission of performance are reasonable and deserving of compliance in the domain of sexuality, in order to reduce the expected harms of sexual assault from present levels.
"Yes means Yes" has much the same content, but it emphasizes and prescribes adherence to a social maxim of presuming-by-default the non-consent of other people to involvement in sexual acts, absent their verbal utterance to the contrary.
My understanding of the slogan since I first heard it had been roughly that. But it was only today that I read the phrase "presumed non-consent", and was able to articulate its actual pragmatic message. Unfortunately, I read the phrase "presumed non-consent" in a discussion about markets trading in human organs, and not in (direct) connection with feminism. Maybe tautologies aren't the best possible marketing scheme for clear transmission of ideas.
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Edit: ValueOfType on twitter mentions the case of "rules are rules", and attempts to give an explanation.
The first pragmatic interpretation that springs to my mind is this: There is some piece of advice whose value the audience is considering in their present situation. The speaker categorizes the advice as a rule - a category of advice whose central characteristic is that such advice is reliably and generally worth following, even in cases where the actor has salient doubts about the unconditional application of the advice. (Ideally the speaker judges the worth of the advice by a mature, informed extrapolation of the volition of the audience, but more realistically they will judge by their own preference (or by typical human preferences in cases where the speaker knows that their own preferences are non-representative)). The speaker, having made this categorization for themselves, does not consider the particulars of the situation facing the audience (since rules are applied unconditionally), and they pass without comment on the calculation justifying their categorization of the advice as a rule (which may not be persuasive given the salience of the situation facing the audience).
Instead of asserting, "This advice is a central example of a rule, meriting general compliance," they effectively assert, "Rules merit general compliance", and thus assume the categorization (and assume away issues of categorization) as part of the context or background assumptions of the conversation going forward.
(Framing a disagreement in this way, as depending on the audience's failure to consider an issue of common understanding, might make a good entry for an ArgumentTropes wiki, perhaps under the title Friendly Reminder Conceit).
This perspective unifies at least two of the previously analyzed classes of tautologies: "X is X," often means, "It is a firm assumption of mine that the case you are contemplating is a central example of the category X (with respect to my preferences and the uses I have for X), having the static and central characteristics of that category - which categorization does not merit further consideration of present particulars."
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