Mental Crystallography

I'm reminded of a set of papers (here's one of them) I've encountered, which treat human language in an rather interesting fashion. In their model, different individuals have different conceptual spaces, representations of all the concepts and information that the individuals know about. Language maps areas of this conceptual space to individual words and sentences. Communication fails when the words you use map to different areas in your and the other person's conceptual space.

As a way of illustration, see this image. The two images are the conceptual spaces of two people, with the lines marking the areas that different words map to for the two. As they put it in the paper:

We can consider an example illustrated by Fig. 2: a buyer agent expresses the wish for finding an item belonging to a specific category, represented as an area on the diagram. It may very well be that the selling agent understands the query differently and therefore the items considered as candidates by the selling agent differs from the buyers intentions. Within traditional epistemological theory, this situation could be considered through set theory: by a symbol the agents refer to different sets of items. However, as many features (or quality dimensions) are continuous, it appears to be more natural to consider the situation within a continuous multidimensional space. Moreover, the exact features of an item may not be known but they need to be considered as a probability distribution.

One implication is that in business transactions there should be means for checking what is a meant by some expressions via an access to a broader context (cf. symbol grounding). Moreover, rather than relying solely on a standardized conceptual system, one could introduce mechanisms of meaning negotiation. Before two business agents get into negotiation about, for instance, the price of some commodity, they should first check if they agree on what they refer to by the expressions that are used in the negotiation. This concern is valid both for human and computerized systems, even though humans are usually capable of conducting meaning negotiations even when they are not aware of it.

The need for meaning negotiations becomes even more obvious when one considers qualities like being ‘interesting’ or ‘beautiful’. The concepts of interestingness and beauty are highly subjective and the criteria used may depend on very different underlying features. These kinds of concepts are, however, the basis of a vast number of daily business related transactions. For instance, when a person is considering a gift for her spouse, she is usually, at least implicitly, considering the taste of her spouse, for which she has a mental model formed over time.

Personally, I've noticed that there's a great many deal of disagreements that vanish completely after I and the other person finally get our mappings in synch and realize that we agreed all along. After running into this problem several times with some close friends, I've come to the conclusion that I need to apply the heuristic "if somebody seems to be saying something that just doesn't make sense, find out if he's really saying what you think he's saying" more often.

This works on a number of levels, although perhaps the most obvious is the divide between styles of thought on the order of "visual thinker", "verbal thinker", etc. People who differ here have to constantly reinterpret everything they say to one another, moving from non-native mode to native mode and back with every bit of data exchanged.

This is an important point and I would also add 'social thinker'. That tends to be the non-native mode that I most benefit from emulating. I translate the words into what they would mean as bits of status processing rather than descriptions of reality and suddenly things make sense. I am not sure to what extent this kind of thinking is related to 'verbal'. I don't think verbally either, which causes me to be dumbfounded at times at the kinds of communications that people find most persuasive.

I don't think crystals make a good metaphor for brains and your post suffers from mixing metaphors all through, most notably by also using a lot of computer metaphors.

I like this topic. I've described "understanding" (click) as a form of pattern-matching before. It's also why I avoid "word arguments", where people endlessly debate definitions instead of going for the substance of the discussion (the crystals), and why I avoid technical words with heavily loaded definitions (big, complex crystals with tiny labels). It can also help explain why some people just won't get it... their brain might not have the processing power to fully contain a crystal (pattern) all at one time, or they might not be able to encode all of it into memory, so it ends up warped.

So I think there is something to this but I can't see it being practically helpful without a pretty full account of the different kinds of brain crystallography.

When you're trying to communicate facts, opinions, and concepts - most especially concepts - it is a useful investment of effort to try to categorize both your audience's crystallography and your own

But I don't have any categories to do this with! Can we try and list some?

Is it true that people process things so differently? Or is it more of a subtle difference with overblown consequences? Can we change the bounds of the way we perceive?

I'm a verbal thinker, I read really fast, I learn best by reading, my SAT verbal score was higher than my math score.

I think I'm missing a fair amount of knowledge and/or other types of intelligence compared to the median poster here but I can make up for it with linguistic magic.

It definitely would be useful if I could learn how to think more visually...

I have to say that of all your posts I've read so far, this one could most have used one of your little two-sentence summaries at the top -- and yet, it's like the only one that doesn't have one!

This works on a number of levels, although perhaps the most obvious is the divide between styles of thought on the order of "visual thinker", "verbal thinker", etc.  People who differ here have to constantly reinterpret everything they say to one another, moving from non-native mode to native mode and back with every bit of data exchanged.

Have you written more about those different styles somewhere?

Suggestion: replace the linked "this" in the final paragraph with a very short expansion, so that clicking the link is optional. E.g. "you can wind up with a frustrating result".

If your writing flows, don't break the flow. If your writing doesn't flow, rewrite. ;)

So.......luminosity equals subtlety of metacognition? Er, I'll read the sequence. :)

When you're trying to communicate facts, opinions, and concepts - most especially concepts - it is a useful investment of effort to try to categorize both your audience's crystallography and your own.

This is something of an oversimplification. Categories are one possible first step, but eventually you will need more nuance than that. I suggest forming estimates based on the communication being serving also as a sequence of experiments. And being very strict about not ruling things out, especially if you have not managed to beat down your typical mind fallacy.

And that's just for a simply dialogue. Communication in a public forum with other audiences and even other participants, well, that is even more complex.

O/T Nitpick: Gender-neutral language requires "person with a hammer" so as to avoid implying that only men can/should use hammers.

"When a brain acquires new concepts - even really vital ones - the new idea will leave recognizably-shaped brain-bits behind."

hmm, I think this could be better structured, not sure how though.