Salience

Epistemic Status: Speculative, a theory that works well for the experiences I’ve had. I’m interested in how it overlays onto other people’s experiences.

When I come across a lesson or a theory about the world that I’ve run into before, particularly after a long period of time, I often experience a feeling of increased understanding; that THIS time I’ve grasped the concept and its relevance.

For example, there’s a quote attributed to Plato (although apparently not his words) that goes “The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself”. Recently I’ve been noticing a lot of issues around self-discipline in myself and so have been quite conscious of things along this axis. It feels like now, when I read this, I’m truly getting the essence of it. But when I read it as a teenager I thought I did too, even though, now, it doesn’t seem like I had as much of a handle on its significance then as I do today, and I’m sure every time I encounter it in the future it will feel like I’ve finally fully grokked the idea that the words are trying to convey.

This feeling used to scare me. If you could be exposed to the same idea and it still appears novel, then how can you make sure you’re improving your understanding of the world and not just caught up flitting from concept A to concept B back to concept A like a philosophical dory? And it has implications for interpersonal relationships, too. A friend will tell us something, or try to teach us, and perhaps it will come across as a meaningless platitude, even though this is a person who we hold in high regard for their wisdom. Or you’ll try to explain a thought you’ve had that seems so significant to you, but others won’t be as enamored with it as you. How do you ever know to what degree you are talking about the same thing as someone else?

The root of all of this is simply that our brains are trying their best to model the world around us given the evidence they have so far. So when we hear Plato/not-Plato talking about conquering ourselves as a teenager, we just don’t have the same breadth of life experience and self examination as we do today. The feeling of increased significance comes from a weightier evidence base supporting that idea. I’ve been calling this salience—the property of a thought being noticeable or striking—and the ability of salience to change has some interesting implications.

The mistake is to think at any point that you’ve fully grasped an idea in its entirety. Given the approximation we use of the world around us, this is literally an impossibility. This might sound terrifying, however a nice consequence of gaining salience with time is that we almost always move towards a richer experience. In a year you’ll have a greater breadth of experiences and knowledge to draw from , and more so the more life you expose yourself to. We can affect this process, too—by actively expanding our evidence base in a certain arena we can ensure that we have a deeper intuitive sense of it. Reading about somebody else’s experiences with meditation can expose you to the concepts and give you some second hand evidence for it. By practising it you get first hand, full body evidence.

This all seems self-evident—of course when you spend time doing something you gain knowledge about it, however what we’re talking about here is specifically the feeling of knowledge, the feeling that the knowledge we have is correct. I think increased salience is a marker of confidence in our model, which stems from having a larger body of evidence backing it up and manifests as a sense of significance.

This explains why our brains prefer novelty, and when you come across an old idea in new clothes your brain gives it renewed attention—it’s giving you another angle to look at and interrogate an idea from. Salience could be a driving force behind novel experience. It also explains why sometimes when you hear pieces of learning from supposed sources of wisdom, they can come across as trivial—because you don’t have the same evidence base to draw on. Maybe when you hear Plato talking about conquering the self it doesn’t connect with you as being significant. This would be be the case if you don’t have/haven’t noticed much evidence for or against his theory. The same lesson or piece of information can be understood/intuited on multiple levels/by multiple people (and there’s an argument for you at different points in your life being a different shade of person).

This isn’t to say you always progress towards confidence and salience, you can move both ways. In the example I gave earlier with Plato’s words, I was gaining more evidence for the idea and so my confidence in it increased. However you might get a greater understanding of an area and because of that lose confidence in a particular model of the world, which would result in a loss of salience. Salience also isn’t an objective marker of confidence—since all you have to go off is your own experience it can’t be indicative of how close to the truth you really are. It’s just indicative of how close you think you are, probably based on some of your meta-models (models of how good your models are). But it’s a useful tool to be aware of and sits in that often conflicted space, straddling logic and intuition.

A few definitions to stop things from getting confusing:

Model: I’m using this as a synonym for the map of the territory. Our brains, prevented from perfectly representing the world in our heads due to lack of complete knowledge as well as lack of computing space/power have to make do with set of models instead that approximate what the world is, based on the evidence we have.

Evidence: The data our brain has to build its models with. This is the combination of every sensory experience you’ve ever had, every thought you’ve ever had in response to these experiences and second hand experiences and thoughts from other people (conveyed through one of your senses).

Confidence: The degree of certainty you have in a model being an accurate approximation of the world.

Salience: The feeling of confidence you have in the model

Starslatecodex has a post where he dives into a similar idea. He talks about growing up in suburban America and not understanding why people talked about a loss of community until he was exposed to a higher sense of community in other, more integrated groups of people. In this example the idea of community attained greater salience through exposure to novel information. I can’t find the link to the article however it definitely laid the foundation for the thoughts I’ve written out here.