Can you say more about why you call this shared reality? Most of the examples seem to me more like wanting someone to have the same emotion you are having (especially joy) in response to the same stimulus. Which is indeed great, but I think calling it reality obscures more than it illuminates.
Example: right now your parents don’t share your beliefs or feelings about AI. I agree that’s not a shared reality. But I would call it a shared reality if they were close to your beliefs (that AI is imminently dangerous) whether or not they shared your emotional reaction.
I think this isn’t just a naming issue, that despite me agreeing with basically all of your recommendations we have somewhat different gears in our models and the differences are interesting. But I could definitely be wrong, I go in loops when trying to explain the differences.
Sure! The main reason I use the term is because it already exists in the literature. That said, I seem to be coming at the concept from a slightly different angle than the ‘shared reality’ academics. I’m certainly not attached to the term, I’d love to hear more attempts to point at this thing.
I think the ‘reality’ is referring to the subjective reality, not the world beyond ourselves. When I experience the world, it’s a big mashup of concepts, maps, visuals, words, emotions, wants, etc.
Any given one of those dimensions can be more or less ‘shared’, so some people could get their yummies from sharing concepts unrelated to their emotions. In your example, I think if my parents had something closer to my beliefs, I’d have more of the nice shared reality feeling (but would probably quickly get used to it and want more).
Some side notes, because apparently I can’t help myself:
I think people often only share a few dimensions when they ‘share reality’, but sharing more dimensions feels nicer. I think as relationships/conversations get ‘deeper’ they are increasing the dimensions of reality they are attempting to share.
(I think often people are hoping that someone will be sharing ALL dimensions of their reality, and can feel super let down / disconnected / annoyed when it turns out their partner doesn’t share dimension number X with them).
Having dimensions that you don’t share with anyone can be lonely, so sometimes people try to ignore that part of their experience (or desperately find similar folks on the internet).
My examples seem to have been mostly about joy, but I don’t think there is any valence preference, People love sharing shitty experiences.
That said, probably the stronger / more prominent the experience the more you want to share (and the worse it feels to not share).
Thank you! I still find the term “shared reality” referring to subjective emotional state confusing, to the point it’s confusing other people don’t have this objection. I want to push for separating “shared facts” and “shared feelings”, held back only by the fact that I don’t understand why other people don’t think this is obvious so it feels like I’m missing something.
I tentatively propose “emotional resonance” for the feeling of shared emotions. Sounds like “shared reality” is already claimed by academia and maybe has conntations I don’t want, maybe the factual aspects can be covered by “shared facts” or “shared worldview” (which would include value judgements).
Hmm, I want a term that refers to all those many dimensions together, since for any given ‘shared reality’ experience it might be like 30% concepts, 30% visual & auditory, 30% emotion/values, etc.
I’m down to factor them out and refer to shared emotions/facts/etc, but I still want something that gestures at the larger thing. Shared experience I think could do the trick, but feels a bit too subjective because it often involves interpretations of the world that feel like ‘true facts’ to the observer.
Wherein I write more, because I’m excited about all this:
The first time I heard the term ‘shared reality’ was in this podcast with Bruce Ecker, the guy who co-wrote Unlocking the Emotional Brain. He was giving an example of how a desire for ‘shared reality’ can make it hard to come to terms with e.g. emotional trauma.
by believing the parent’s negative messages to you (either verbal or behavioral), you’re staying in shared reality: and that’s a big aspect of attachment. … especially shared reality about yourself: ‘they think I’m a piece of crap, and I do too. So I feel seen and known by them even if the content is negative’.
In this case, the parent thinks the kid is a ‘piece of crap’, which I expect doesn’t feel like an emotion to the parent, it feels like a fact about the world. If they were more intellectually mature they might notice that this was an evaluation—but it’s actually super hard to disentangle evaluations and facts.
I guess I think it’s maybe impossible to disentangle them in many cases? Like… I think typically ‘facts’ are not a discrete thing that we can successfully point at, that they are typically tied up with intentions/values/feelings/frames/functions. I think Dreyfus made this critique of early attempts on AI, and I think he ended up being right (or at least my charitable interpretation of his point) - that it’s only within an optimization process / working for something that knowledge (knowing what to do given XYZ) gets created.
Maybe this is an is/ought thing. I certainly think there’s an external world/territory and it’s important to distinguish between that and our interpretations of it. And we can check our interpretations against the world to see how ‘factual’ they are. And there are models of that world like physics that aren’t tied up in some specific intention. But I think the ‘ought’ frame slips into things as soon as we take any action, because we’re inherently prioritizing our attention/efforts/etc. So even a sharing of ‘facts’ involves plenty of ought/values in the frame (like the value of truth-seeking).
I very much agree that when you’re not getting feeling X it can be very difficult to distinguish territory disagreements from feeling disagreements, especially when you’re SNS activated. Having a term to cover all cases seems extremely useful. It also seems useful to have specific terms for the subsets, to help tease issues apart.
“Reality” to me seems much better suited towards the narrow, territory-focused aspect of feeling X, and I see a lot of costs in diluting it. Both because I wish I could say “reality” instead of clunkier things like “narrow, territory-focused”, and because having a term where it’s ambiguous whether you mean feeling X or objective facts is just begging for explosive arguments. I’m particularly worried about person A’s (inside view) refusal to change their view of facts without new data feeling to person B like a refusal to care about feeling X.
Ideas for feeling X:
“Shared subjective reality” isn’t great because it’s kind of long and the whole point of reality is it’s not subjective, but does substantially address my concerns, in a way “reality*” doesn’t.
“being ingroup” or “on your side-ness”. These aren’t synonymous with feeling X but are a lot of what I want out of it.
“shared frame” also is not synonymous but captures an important aspect.
man I really wanted a longer, better list but it’s pretty hard.
Also thanks for starting this conversation, I’m finding it really valuable even if that’s manifesting mostly as critique.
I have a hunch that in practice the use of the term ‘shared reality’ doesn’t actually ruin one’s ability to refer to territory-reality. In the instances when I’ve used the term in conversation I haven’t noticed this (and I like to refer to the territory a lot). But maybe with more widespread usage and misinterpretation it could start to be a problem?
I think to get a better sense of your concern it might be useful to dive into specific conversations/dynamics where this might go wrong.
...
I can imagine a world where I want to be able to point out that someone is doing the psychological mistake of confusing their desire to connect with their map-making. And I want the term I use to do that work, so I can just say “you want to share your subjective experience with me, but I’m disagreeing with you about reality, not subjective experience.”
Yeah I definitely don’t think calling it “shared reality” will ruin anything. It would be another few snowflakes in the avalanche of territory-map ambiguation, similar to when people use “true” to mean “good” rather than “factually accurate”.
I’ve made a couple of attempts at a longer response and just keep bouncing off, so I think I’m out of concepts for now. Would love to pick this up in person if we run into each other.
it’s confusing other people don’t have this objection
For me, the cow has left the barn on “reality” referring only to the physical world I inhabit, so it doesn’t register as inaccurate (although I would agree it’s imprecise). “Reality” without other qualifiers points me towards “not fictional”.
“emotional resonance” … “shared facts” or “shared worldview”
I notice I’m resistant to these proposals, but was pretty happy about the term “shared reality”. Here are some things I like about “shared reality” that I would be giving up if I adopted one of your suggestions:
Reality is immediate and brings my attention to what’s in front of me. For example, in “the reality of the situation is that not everyone will have a place to sit down if we have the party at my place”. Here, “reality” is serving as a term that means “the space of possibilities that are laid out in front of us” (it excludes things like outlandish situations or anything that could have been done before now).
“Shared reality” as a term sounds nice to me; it rolls off the tongue. As a result, it’s the sort of thing that I would use in casual conversation.
Shared reality spans both emotional content and statements about the physical world.
I can’t think of a term that hits these points well that isn’t reality, but perhaps you can think of something I missed. Of your proposed terms:
Emotional resonance hits (II) but fails (I) and (III).
Shared facts hits (I) but misses (II) and (III) for me.
Shared worldview hits (II) and (III), but is so far from (I) that I imagine I’d have a similar hangup as you do with ‘shared reality’ if I heard someone use that term to describe the experience of oneness when singing along at a concert.
I think this is not necessarily about emotion, but rather more generally paying attention to the same thing and having roughly convergent interpretations/representations.
Also think that “shared reality” makes it sound a bit too mysterious for my taste but perhaps it would make it more catchy for some people, which would help a useful meme spread? (babble)
Also, Tomasello’s concept of shared intentionality is probably very adjacent, although perhaps not exactly the same or at least puts emphasis on a different aspect?
Shared or collective intentionality is the ability and motivation to engage with others in collaborative, co-operative activities with joint goals and intentions
Can you say more about why you call this shared reality? Most of the examples seem to me more like wanting someone to have the same emotion you are having (especially joy) in response to the same stimulus. Which is indeed great, but I think calling it reality obscures more than it illuminates.
Example: right now your parents don’t share your beliefs or feelings about AI. I agree that’s not a shared reality. But I would call it a shared reality if they were close to your beliefs (that AI is imminently dangerous) whether or not they shared your emotional reaction.
I think this isn’t just a naming issue, that despite me agreeing with basically all of your recommendations we have somewhat different gears in our models and the differences are interesting. But I could definitely be wrong, I go in loops when trying to explain the differences.
Sure! The main reason I use the term is because it already exists in the literature. That said, I seem to be coming at the concept from a slightly different angle than the ‘shared reality’ academics. I’m certainly not attached to the term, I’d love to hear more attempts to point at this thing.
I think the ‘reality’ is referring to the subjective reality, not the world beyond ourselves. When I experience the world, it’s a big mashup of concepts, maps, visuals, words, emotions, wants, etc.
Any given one of those dimensions can be more or less ‘shared’, so some people could get their yummies from sharing concepts unrelated to their emotions. In your example, I think if my parents had something closer to my beliefs, I’d have more of the nice shared reality feeling (but would probably quickly get used to it and want more).
Some side notes, because apparently I can’t help myself:
I think people often only share a few dimensions when they ‘share reality’, but sharing more dimensions feels nicer. I think as relationships/conversations get ‘deeper’ they are increasing the dimensions of reality they are attempting to share.
(I think often people are hoping that someone will be sharing ALL dimensions of their reality, and can feel super let down / disconnected / annoyed when it turns out their partner doesn’t share dimension number X with them).
Having dimensions that you don’t share with anyone can be lonely, so sometimes people try to ignore that part of their experience (or desperately find similar folks on the internet).
My examples seem to have been mostly about joy, but I don’t think there is any valence preference, People love sharing shitty experiences.
That said, probably the stronger / more prominent the experience the more you want to share (and the worse it feels to not share).
Thank you! I still find the term “shared reality” referring to subjective emotional state confusing, to the point it’s confusing other people don’t have this objection. I want to push for separating “shared facts” and “shared feelings”, held back only by the fact that I don’t understand why other people don’t think this is obvious so it feels like I’m missing something.
I tentatively propose “emotional resonance” for the feeling of shared emotions. Sounds like “shared reality” is already claimed by academia and maybe has conntations I don’t want, maybe the factual aspects can be covered by “shared facts” or “shared worldview” (which would include value judgements).
Hmm, I want a term that refers to all those many dimensions together, since for any given ‘shared reality’ experience it might be like 30% concepts, 30% visual & auditory, 30% emotion/values, etc.
I’m down to factor them out and refer to shared emotions/facts/etc, but I still want something that gestures at the larger thing. Shared experience I think could do the trick, but feels a bit too subjective because it often involves interpretations of the world that feel like ‘true facts’ to the observer.
Wherein I write more, because I’m excited about all this:
The first time I heard the term ‘shared reality’ was in this podcast with Bruce Ecker, the guy who co-wrote Unlocking the Emotional Brain. He was giving an example of how a desire for ‘shared reality’ can make it hard to come to terms with e.g. emotional trauma.
In this case, the parent thinks the kid is a ‘piece of crap’, which I expect doesn’t feel like an emotion to the parent, it feels like a fact about the world. If they were more intellectually mature they might notice that this was an evaluation—but it’s actually super hard to disentangle evaluations and facts.
I guess I think it’s maybe impossible to disentangle them in many cases? Like… I think typically ‘facts’ are not a discrete thing that we can successfully point at, that they are typically tied up with intentions/values/feelings/frames/functions. I think Dreyfus made this critique of early attempts on AI, and I think he ended up being right (or at least my charitable interpretation of his point) - that it’s only within an optimization process / working for something that knowledge (knowing what to do given XYZ) gets created.
Maybe this is an is/ought thing. I certainly think there’s an external world/territory and it’s important to distinguish between that and our interpretations of it. And we can check our interpretations against the world to see how ‘factual’ they are. And there are models of that world like physics that aren’t tied up in some specific intention. But I think the ‘ought’ frame slips into things as soon as we take any action, because we’re inherently prioritizing our attention/efforts/etc. So even a sharing of ‘facts’ involves plenty of ought/values in the frame (like the value of truth-seeking).
I very much agree that when you’re not getting feeling X it can be very difficult to distinguish territory disagreements from feeling disagreements, especially when you’re SNS activated. Having a term to cover all cases seems extremely useful. It also seems useful to have specific terms for the subsets, to help tease issues apart.
“Reality” to me seems much better suited towards the narrow, territory-focused aspect of feeling X, and I see a lot of costs in diluting it. Both because I wish I could say “reality” instead of clunkier things like “narrow, territory-focused”, and because having a term where it’s ambiguous whether you mean feeling X or objective facts is just begging for explosive arguments. I’m particularly worried about person A’s (inside view) refusal to change their view of facts without new data feeling to person B like a refusal to care about feeling X.
Ideas for feeling X:
“Shared subjective reality” isn’t great because it’s kind of long and the whole point of reality is it’s not subjective, but does substantially address my concerns, in a way “reality*” doesn’t.
“being ingroup” or “on your side-ness”. These aren’t synonymous with feeling X but are a lot of what I want out of it.
“shared frame” also is not synonymous but captures an important aspect.
man I really wanted a longer, better list but it’s pretty hard.
Also thanks for starting this conversation, I’m finding it really valuable even if that’s manifesting mostly as critique.
Sure! I love talking about this concept-cluster.
I have a hunch that in practice the use of the term ‘shared reality’ doesn’t actually ruin one’s ability to refer to territory-reality. In the instances when I’ve used the term in conversation I haven’t noticed this (and I like to refer to the territory a lot). But maybe with more widespread usage and misinterpretation it could start to be a problem?
I think to get a better sense of your concern it might be useful to dive into specific conversations/dynamics where this might go wrong.
...
I can imagine a world where I want to be able to point out that someone is doing the psychological mistake of confusing their desire to connect with their map-making. And I want the term I use to do that work, so I can just say “you want to share your subjective experience with me, but I’m disagreeing with you about reality, not subjective experience.”
Does that kind of resonate with your concern?
Yeah I definitely don’t think calling it “shared reality” will ruin anything. It would be another few snowflakes in the avalanche of territory-map ambiguation, similar to when people use “true” to mean “good” rather than “factually accurate”.
I’ve made a couple of attempts at a longer response and just keep bouncing off, so I think I’m out of concepts for now. Would love to pick this up in person if we run into each other.
Yeah let’s do in-person sometime, I also tried drafting long responses and they were terrible
For me, the cow has left the barn on “reality” referring only to the physical world I inhabit, so it doesn’t register as inaccurate (although I would agree it’s imprecise). “Reality” without other qualifiers points me towards “not fictional”.
I notice I’m resistant to these proposals, but was pretty happy about the term “shared reality”. Here are some things I like about “shared reality” that I would be giving up if I adopted one of your suggestions:
Reality is immediate and brings my attention to what’s in front of me. For example, in “the reality of the situation is that not everyone will have a place to sit down if we have the party at my place”. Here, “reality” is serving as a term that means “the space of possibilities that are laid out in front of us” (it excludes things like outlandish situations or anything that could have been done before now).
“Shared reality” as a term sounds nice to me; it rolls off the tongue. As a result, it’s the sort of thing that I would use in casual conversation.
Shared reality spans both emotional content and statements about the physical world.
I can’t think of a term that hits these points well that isn’t reality, but perhaps you can think of something I missed. Of your proposed terms:
Emotional resonance hits (II) but fails (I) and (III).
Shared facts hits (I) but misses (II) and (III) for me.
Shared worldview hits (II) and (III), but is so far from (I) that I imagine I’d have a similar hangup as you do with ‘shared reality’ if I heard someone use that term to describe the experience of oneness when singing along at a concert.
I think this is not necessarily about emotion, but rather more generally paying attention to the same thing and having roughly convergent interpretations/representations.
Also think that “shared reality” makes it sound a bit too mysterious for my taste but perhaps it would make it more catchy for some people, which would help a useful meme spread? (babble)
Also, Tomasello’s concept of shared intentionality is probably very adjacent, although perhaps not exactly the same or at least puts emphasis on a different aspect?