There are questions about our feelings not even God could determine

I met a guy once. Nice enough, but a cynical depressive.

1. Because he expected to see people not treating him well, everywhere he looked, he found people not treating him well. He interpreted ambiguous behavior as negative.

2. In turn, this gave him plenty of confirmation for his theory that people did not treat him well, thus making it self-sustaining. This made me think that- to idealize and overstate the case somewhat- a worldview is that which cannot be refuted by evidence. But I had thought these thoughts many times before.

3. What I realized for the first time was this: he wasn’t just reading negative mental states into people who didn’t have them. We humans are ambiguous creatures, not simply because the observer lacks knowledge, but due to our deepest constitution itself holding no answers. Often the very same action will be animated by both cruelty and kindness.

4. But more than that, often an act will be moved by something incomprehensible- a unique flux of conditions, never to be repeated. In a sense that flux might be called either cruelty or kindness, but only in the same sense Ursus Major might be called a bear. It wasn’t factually wrong that he saw my attempts to help him as patronizing, but that was only one way to read them. The problem isn’t lack of knowledge. If he asked whether or not I was being patronising, not even an omniscient being would have been able to tell him yes or no. The predicate “patronizing” was just like one animal or figure one might pick out of a suite of options, assign to a splay of stars, and call it a constellation. Mental language is, after all, just an imprecise set of heuristics for predicting the output of a hundred trillion firing synapses.

5. That is, our motivations are often genuinely indeterminate, we do not have an exact set of beliefs, desires, and emotions underlying what we do, and to the extent we do have such a set, the nature of the totality they come together and form in any particular case is underspecified. Sometimes our will becomes exceptionally clear, but sometimes- perhaps often- even someone with the power of telepathy wouldn’t be able to bind our acts to this or that interpretation. A cascade of theories, wills, habits, neurobiology and sheer chance crash together and generate our actions. Again we ask was I, then, being patronizing? Mu 無. It appears like a question of fact, but in the ambiguous case, it is as much a question of value- a question of how you orient towards the act as much as your active judgment of the origin point of the act.

6. So in the gap of interpretation- in the choice of what imperfect concepts to use, and what kinds of inaccuracies are most acceptable, the question of values becomes relevant. Imagine that you walked through a portion of the earth, and then tried to capture the terrain by making a model using a series of blocks in simple shapes- cones, spheres, pyramids, cubes, etc. Necessarily there would be a loss of fidelity, but you simply had to do the very best you could. Now someone else came along and made a map of the same territory, but it looked different. Partly this might reflect genuine differences of perception and skill, but partly it might reflect nothing more than a pure choice as to which kinds of infidelity to the thing modelled matter more. That’s the kind of choice that applying or not applying a predicate like “patronizing” can represent in a particular case. Nothing inherent to the thing itself instructs us as to what the most essential features about it are to be captured in a simplified model. Thus it is a choice partly of values- a choice about how to stand in relation to a person, and ultimately, the world- a choice about how to value the act and what forms of prediction error to minimize. Another gloss; an apparently factual question can really be a question about what plan to adopt.

7. But seeing evil in our fellow humans is a source of pain. In seeing manovelent motives in the vast patterns of clicking neurons around him, this man was doubtless wrong in many cases, and right in many others. But there was a third category- a very large category which was in a profound sense up to him, and in seeing it more widely than he had to, he hurt and alienated himself. Thus it is so very dangerous to see evil in places we are not compelled to see it.

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