Due to a tragic shortage of outbuildings (to be remedied in the mid term but not immediately), my living room is the garage/makerspace of my home. I cleaned as one cleans for guests last week, because a friend from way back was dropping by. I then got to enjoy a clean-enough-for-guests home for several days, which is a big part of why it is nice to be visited by friends un-intimate enough to feel like cleaning for.
Then my partner-in-crafts came over, and we re-occupied every table with a combination of resin casting and miniature clay sculpting shenanigans. It’s an excellent time.
We also went shopping for fabric together because I plan to make a baby quilt kid-in-progress of the aforementioned friend from way back. Partner-in-crafts idly asked me when I was planning to do the quilt stuff, because historically I would be expected to launch into it immediately as soon as the fabric came out of the dryer.
However, I found something new in myself: A reluctance to start a new project without a clean place to start it in. I’m not sure where this reluctance came from, as I think it seems new, but I also think I like it. So I got to tidying up the stuff that was un-tidyable last night because the resin was still sticky, but is eminently tidyable now because it cured over time, and carefully examining my reluctance-to-tidy as it tried to yell at me.
In that reluctance-to-tidy, I find time travel again: We store information in the position of objects in our environment. Object location encodes memory, so moving someone else’s objects has certain commonalities with the rewriting-of-memory that we call gaslighting when pathological.
For better or worse, my architecture of cognition defaults to relying on empathy twice over when reasoning about moving stuff that someone else was using, or someone else’s stuff. By recognizing an object’s location as a person’s memory of where-they-left-it, I view moving it as rewriting that memory.
The double-empathy thing comes in where I reason about what moves of stuff it’s ok to make. If I put the thing where the person will have an easy time finding it, if I model them well enough to guess correctly where they’ll first look when they want it, then I can help them by moving it. I can move it from somewhere they’d look later to somewhere they’d look sooner, and thereby improve their life at the moment of seeking it, and that’s a clearly good act.
That’s the first empathy layer. The second empathy layer comes of a natural tendency to anthropomorphize objects, which I’ve considered trying to eradicate from myself but settled on keeping because I find it quite convenient to have around in other circumstances. This is the animism of where something “wants” to go, creating a “home” for your keys by the door, and so forth.
So there’s 2 layers of modeling minds—one of complex real minds who are likely to contain surprises in their expectations, and one of simple virtual “minds” that follow from the real-minds as a convenient shortcut. I guess one way to put it is that I figure stuff has/channels feelings kinda like how houseplants do—they probably don’t experience firsthand emotion in any way that would be recognizable to people, but there’s a lot of secondhand emotion that’s shown in how they’re related to and cared for.
Not sure where I’m going with all that, other than noticing how the urge to tidy up can be resisted by the same aesthetic sensibility that says it’s generally bad to erase anybody’s memories.
“to clean house” as implication of violence...
Due to a tragic shortage of outbuildings (to be remedied in the mid term but not immediately), my living room is the garage/makerspace of my home. I cleaned as one cleans for guests last week, because a friend from way back was dropping by. I then got to enjoy a clean-enough-for-guests home for several days, which is a big part of why it is nice to be visited by friends un-intimate enough to feel like cleaning for.
Then my partner-in-crafts came over, and we re-occupied every table with a combination of resin casting and miniature clay sculpting shenanigans. It’s an excellent time.
We also went shopping for fabric together because I plan to make a baby quilt kid-in-progress of the aforementioned friend from way back. Partner-in-crafts idly asked me when I was planning to do the quilt stuff, because historically I would be expected to launch into it immediately as soon as the fabric came out of the dryer.
However, I found something new in myself: A reluctance to start a new project without a clean place to start it in. I’m not sure where this reluctance came from, as I think it seems new, but I also think I like it. So I got to tidying up the stuff that was un-tidyable last night because the resin was still sticky, but is eminently tidyable now because it cured over time, and carefully examining my reluctance-to-tidy as it tried to yell at me.
In that reluctance-to-tidy, I find time travel again: We store information in the position of objects in our environment. Object location encodes memory, so moving someone else’s objects has certain commonalities with the rewriting-of-memory that we call gaslighting when pathological.
For better or worse, my architecture of cognition defaults to relying on empathy twice over when reasoning about moving stuff that someone else was using, or someone else’s stuff. By recognizing an object’s location as a person’s memory of where-they-left-it, I view moving it as rewriting that memory.
The double-empathy thing comes in where I reason about what moves of stuff it’s ok to make. If I put the thing where the person will have an easy time finding it, if I model them well enough to guess correctly where they’ll first look when they want it, then I can help them by moving it. I can move it from somewhere they’d look later to somewhere they’d look sooner, and thereby improve their life at the moment of seeking it, and that’s a clearly good act.
That’s the first empathy layer. The second empathy layer comes of a natural tendency to anthropomorphize objects, which I’ve considered trying to eradicate from myself but settled on keeping because I find it quite convenient to have around in other circumstances. This is the animism of where something “wants” to go, creating a “home” for your keys by the door, and so forth.
So there’s 2 layers of modeling minds—one of complex real minds who are likely to contain surprises in their expectations, and one of simple virtual “minds” that follow from the real-minds as a convenient shortcut. I guess one way to put it is that I figure stuff has/channels feelings kinda like how houseplants do—they probably don’t experience firsthand emotion in any way that would be recognizable to people, but there’s a lot of secondhand emotion that’s shown in how they’re related to and cared for.
Not sure where I’m going with all that, other than noticing how the urge to tidy up can be resisted by the same aesthetic sensibility that says it’s generally bad to erase anybody’s memories.