Tag: Communication Errors

Notes on FIML vocabulary

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On this site we have generally been using the term semiotics to indicate the amalgam of a sign, its meaning, and the emotions associated with it.

The word semiotics literally means “the study of signs and how they are processed or understood.” Just as we can speak of the psychology of a person or activity, so we can speak of the semiotics of a person or activity or anything else that uses signs for thought, feeling, perception, or communication.

The purpose of FIML practice is the optimization of interpersonal communication. Communication cannot but use signs. Interpersonal communication cannot but include emotion. This is why we use the word semiotics as we do—to indicate the amalgam of a sign, its meaning, and the emotions associated with it.

On this site we use the word index to mean a small sign that may be associated with a vast library of meaning. When an index appears or arises during interpersonal communication it starts as nothing more than a small sign. If an index is not held in abeyance, it may “call up” a library of much more complicated meaning.

A jangle is an emotional response to an index. Jangles are often negative. FIML practice seeks to identify jangles and use them as indicators that an index has appeared and that that index must be held in abeyance; that is, it must be prevented from accessing the emotional library of meaning it is normally associated with.

Ideally, a FIML query should be initiated the moment a jangle and index are noticed by a FIML partner. Often this partner is the listener, though partners who are speaking may also observe indexes in the partner who is listening.

The FIML query is designed to stop the index from immediately referencing the library of feeling and meaning typically associated with it. Doing this allows the partner making the query to ask of the other if the index/jangle they have perceived is based on something that actually happened or is simply a mistake based on a library they are holding in their own mind which does not reference anything that the speaker actually meant.

In the Peircean (Charles Sanders Peirce) branch of semiotics there are three kinds of signs—symbolic, iconic, and indexical. When we use the word index on this site we do not mean a Peircean indexical sign.

FIML practice is designed to help partners deal with the great welter of semiotics that each of them uses to communicate, think, feel, and understand the world and each other.

The FIML term idiotics indicates the unique welter, or agglomeration, of semiotics held by each individual human being. Just as each of us speaks an idiolect, each of us thinks, feels, and communicates with a unique idiotics.

The FIML term sociotics indicates the basic social (or public) semiotics of a culture or subculture. Just as all human beings have a unique idiotics all cultures have sociotics. The sociotics of large groups tend to be fairly simple semiotics that effectively communicate with many people. Sociotics hold cultures together and make communication work well-enough in many situations. Strongly held group sociotics within interpersonal relations can be a disaster, though, because, by definition, they deny individuality, even as they may attempt to define it. FIML partners are encouraged to form their own sociotics unique to them, thus distancing themselves from unwholesome attachments to group sociotics that may not suit them.

FIML practice has great “reach”; that is, it can and will have beneficial effects on many areas of life—communication, psychology, our understanding of culture, other people, and so on.

NIMH Delivers A Kill Shot To DSM-5

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From the article:

DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. (Thomas R. Insel, M.D., Director of the National Institute of Mental Health)

I think this is very good news. Notice how it changes the semiotics of mental illness. A better paradigm for mental illness is that intolerable stress causes a wide variety of symptoms in people. A major stressor of this type is, of course, interpersonal stress. FIML cannot by any stretch of the imagination fix all mental illness, but it can help suitable partners greatly reduce interpersonal stress.

Edit: Yesterday, I read reasonable objections to Insel’s statement to the effect that we are not able to obtain “laboratory measure(s),” or biological markers, for all mental illness. I completely agree with this objection.

The synthesis of the two points of view (Insel v/ the DSM) seems to me to be that drugs should only be very guardedly prescribed, if they are prescribed at all, in situations where there are no “laboratory measures” or biological markers (both are fairly vague terms).

Does interpersonal stress produce biological markers? I bet it does. Does interpersonal stress of the type that can probably be cured by FIML practice produce biological markers? I bet it does. But I also bet that it would be far better to try FIML, or something else, long before resorting to drug therapy.

Another point: I believe it is probably healthy to feel nervous, anxious, depressed, repulsed, etc. when around people who communicate dishonestly, manipulatively, or with strong ulterior motives. Since I also believe that most people communicate pretty badly, it actually seems to me that many psychological “problems” are thus healthy, valuable responses.

Non-Muslims Carried Out More than 90% of All Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Soil

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This piece is well-worth reading. I am posting it because it deals with current events, current semiotics, and current cultural/religious misperceptions. It is important that all of us frequently refresh our understanding of how we view the world around us. The linked article also relates to our post on FIML and sociotics. I hope that FIML partners will consider how deeply they are affected by sociotic information and how that information frames the ways they see the world.

Venn diagrams and FIML

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Our understandings of each other at any point in time can, at best, be visualized as Venn diagrams. At worst, there is no overlap, no comprehension, no mutual understanding.

Each of us uses language in unique ways and each of us understands the semiotics that underlie speech differently. This is why we can never expect another person to entirely understand what we mean by any statement, even when we know that person very well and even when we are certain they are very well disposed toward us.

It is a fundamental characteristic of language, speech, semiotics, human biographies, and the human brain that two people will never be able to make perfectly overlapping Venn diagrams concerning any utterance spoken between them, no matter how trivial. You might guess correctly once in a while, especially if your context is very limited, but as a rule you can never be sure of your guess and you will very often be completely wrong, especially if the context is complex.

Interpersonal contexts are virtually always complex. FIML practice is designed to work in real time with complex interpersonal contexts. FIML helps partners understand where their Venn sets overlap and where they do not.

If you do not frequently pursue in real time where your Venn sets overlap and where they do not, you will have a bad time. It cannot be otherwise because the divergence in mutual understanding that accrues between many poorly understood Venn sets will snowball.

I can’t think of another way to pursue the Venn sets of interpersonal communication besides FIML practice or something very similar. If pursuit of these sets is left to “take care of itself” or done solely or mostly with extrinsic generalities, it can’t work. It can’t work because generalities are the enemy of interpersonal set analysis, while things “taking care of themselves” is the mother of all generalities.

FIML and sociotics

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In a previous post we coined the term idiotics to mean “the idiosyncratic agglomeration of the semiotics of a single individual.”

An individual’s idiotics indicates the agglomeration of public and private semiotics that comprise the unique signaling system of their mind; this signaling system is what we normally call a person’s mind.

Each individual brain has an idiotics that is unique to it. The signaling system that employs and organizes this unique idiotics works internally within the individual and externally as a system that signals to other people.

Problems in signaling—both internal and external problems—occur when the signaling systems of two (or more) people are not in good accord. That is, when two (or more) people misunderstand the signals they are sending to each other or the signals being sent to them. Obviously, mistakes in signaling can and frequently do compound, or snowball, leading to very large errors.

To control for error, human beings have probably evolved master semiotics that provide general ways for people to comprehend (pretty badly or well-enough, depending on your perspective) the signaling of other people.

Let’s call these general semiotic categories that allow for crude comprehension between people sociotics.

Sociotics is a compound of the words sociology and semiotics. It means the “public semiotics,” or socially agreed upon and accepted semiotics, of just about any group you can think of.

Most sociotics is emotional. A good deal of it is very emotional. The beliefs of a religion, the stories of an ethnic group, the values of a community can be extremely emotional.

In this respect, a great deal of sociotics binds very deeply with human emotion to form an intoxicating blend of meaning and feeling.

Most people do not see any choice but to adopt a sociotics. Without one, they feel lost, empty, undefined. Even the sociotics of science can be very emotional, to say nothing of the sociotics of political, gender, or ethnic identities.

FIML partners will surely find that their idiotics have strong sociotic components. Rather than accept their inherited and often mindless and emotional sociotics, partners would do well to analyze them and transfer their emotional allegiance away from them and toward rational bonding with each other based on FIML principles.

FIML has much greater power to organize the sociotics and idiotics of FIML partners than does any other traditional communication system. This is so because FIML practice provides a means for partners to understand each other without resorting to thoughtless extrinsic sociotic categories for mutual definition. FIML practice helps partners form wholesome bonds with each other without becoming entangled in the emotional and irrational sociotics of large groups.

Another way to say this is FIML is a sort of “operating system” for the mind/brain, while sociotics are broadly shared public references that are fairly static and not too complex.

Ideally, good scientific practice is also an operating system rather than a static sociotic. The scientific method deeply informs FIML practice, but since FIML is an interpersonal operating system, it cannot be the same as science. FIML can be investigated by the scientific method and it can be confirmed or falsified by the scientific method, but this is not strictly (in the sense of formal science) the job of FIML partners. FIML partners, however, if they are doing FIML correctly, are engaged in a practice that is fundamentally rational and objective and that removes mistakes from partners’ signaling systems, including sociotic mistakes.

FIML and macro explanations

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In FIML practice, partners learn that even very small misinterpretations that arise within a few seconds of communication can seize the mind and grow into big mistakes. Mistakes about the other person(s), mistakes about the “self,” and mistakes about how the world is. FIML practice is designed to catch these mistakes and eliminate them as soon as they appear, within seconds of their appearance if possible. FIML is designed to prevent false micro-interpretations from becoming huge mistakes that distort human experience.

In a somewhat similar fashion, FIML practice can also show us how macro-interpretations, or macro-explanations or stories, can be deeply mistaken and what to do about that.

Our macro-explanations tell us who we are, what we are doing, and why. Some of our macro-explanations were established long ago and seem to be part of the very fabric of our being and some of them are acute. That is, they arise in moments of crisis when we are suddenly thrown into turmoil by events beyond our control—financial hardship, divorce, serious misunderstanding with a friend, etc. At such times, we often flail around like a swimmer drowning in a whirlpool as we grasp for some explanation or story that will give us secure feelings and a secure sense that we understand what has happened and what to do next.

Sometimes we do arrive at a good understanding and a reasonable sense of what has happened and what to do next, but often we do not. In our emotional turmoil we may be strongly tempted to choose mistaken macro-explanations or stories that answer our (also mistaken) emotional needs at the expense of a more reasonable and more profound understanding of our situation.

This same basic scenario also describes how groups of people tend to react in times of crisis. Groups, cultures, nations, religions, clubs, and societies tend to react emotionally to crises and seize on mistaken macro-explanations in much the same ways as individuals. Like individuals groups tend to favor explanations of difficult events that make members feel good about themselves and that provide a cohesive sense of how to move forward, what to do next. If we are born into or brought into an existing group, some of its macro-explanations will be quite old, even ancient. It is difficult for groups to eliminate false macro-explanations and stories without disturbing group bonds.

For example, in some parts of the world, even today, people are burned to death due to superstitions, which are fundamentally very bad macro-explanations. Once a superstition is invoked by a group, it is all but impossible for an individual to go against it lest they also be caught up in the madness.

If your community decides that someone is a witch who must be burned, you may be burned along with them if you try to defend the accused.

When Tony Blair claimed that Saddam Hussein had WMD that could strike London within forty minutes, many of us howled with dismay at his obvious lie, but many of us were caught up in a war-fever that was as superstitious as belief in witches, and far more destructive. Other “evidence” that promoted the war in Iraq were the yellow cake forgeries (which have never been seriously investigated), Iraq’s fictitious connection to 9/11,  and mobile weapons units that were falsely presented as missile launchers. If you doubted a single part of these dangerous explanations, you would not face much criticism, but if you doubted the whole story—the macro-explanation that constituted an excuse for war—you risked condemnation from many in the American community.

Once Bush’s basic macro-explanation of the world after 9/11 became an all but required belief, Americans were forced to accept a slew of further consequences that stemmed from it. New laws, new security departments, and new ways to search our private lives followed upon the basic macro-explanation that “you are either with us or you are with the terrorists.”

FIML practitioners will recognize how it happens that huge consequences can and will flow from a single misinterpretation, a single failure to ask the right questions at the right time.

Some other examples of bad macro-explanations that hinge on narrow emotional “evidence” are:

  • Any explanation based on the need to be right as opposed to the desire to search for what is right (which is often very complex and not as emotionally satisfying initially).
  • Explanations that involve “value reversals” that accuse others of what we are doing or preparing to do. These are very effective rhetorical devices that confuse the emotions of listeners. Some examples are:
  1. “They are terrorists so we must shock and awe them!”
  2. “You are a kook if you want more evidence!”
  3. “Anyone who opposes our idea of what is best for us clearly must hate us!”
  • Attributing a complex problem to a single cause often indicates a false macro-explanation.
  • A simplified story about the history of a group commonly emphasizes only one side of complex events.

It is sad but true that a great deal of human history is filled with and flows from false macro-explanations, which are hardly distinguishable from superstitions.

The deep problem is humans are emotional animals. We bond with each other emotionally and are strongly motivated to work together based on emotional bonds that flow from false stories. The simpler the stories, the better. “You are either with us or you are with the terrorists!” “Whatever is best for us!” “My country right or wrong!” “Shoot first and ask questions later!” “God will sort it out!” And so on. There are so many of these, you have to marvel that humans can ever behave rationally.

Basic FIML practice, and the cognitive experience it brings, can be a great help in removing erroneous macro-explanations.

In basic FIML practice, partners learn to notice jangles—the emotional signs that a micro-misinterpretation may have occurred—the moment they arise. Not all micro-misinterpretations carry an emotional charge, but most of the serious ones do. Emotion is an important clue that a misinterpretation or a bad explanation is forming in your mind.

Similarly, erroneous macro-explanations can be analyzed and successfully replaced with more truthful ones by looking for emotional clues.

To use the first example mentioned above, if you feel a strong need to be right and/or an unwillingness to consider that you might be wrong, you may have trapped yourself in an erroneous macro-explanation and are guarding yourself from the need to reevaluate your feelings.

If you find yourself attacking people who disagree with your position by using “value reversal” arguments, you may be using strong language and simplistic arguments to dominate or drive away people who disagree with your position.

If you find that you are emotionally attached to a simple and/or deeply emotional history of your people, your religion, your nation, your gender,  and so on, you may very well be using emotion to bolster your explanation of who you are and your justification for what you are doing.

If you claim, after reading this, that everyone does that, you may be using an erroneous single-cause explanation to protect a position that deep down you know is wrong.

In basic FIML practice, partners learn that even very simple misunderstandings can be extremely complex and that they often lead to long analyses, which completely change our understanding once they have been completed.

The way to fix false macro-explanations is similar: start by looking for the emotional attachment and then analyze the factors that have produced it and that maintain it. What you will very often find at bottom is a profound need to make emotional sense of whatever the issue is.

For example, if you strongly identify with an ethnic group or a religion, you will probably be very reluctant to give up the false stories they use to explain their understanding of who they are and what they are doing.

Another kind of macro-problem occurs when we are in the midst of a difficult and complex life situation. We may lie awake at night wondering what to do, what to think, and most of all what to feel. More often than not it is the need to feel right about the situation that drives our explanations. Since none of us are all that smart, we frequently make mistakes in this area by taking on feelings before we have a good explanation.

If you find this happening, take the time to speak at length with your partner about how confused you are, how you don’t know what to think. Describe the various aspects of the problem as honestly as you can. Don’t be afraid to admit you feel like a jerk, a worm, an idiot. It is very hard to admit that we are feeling like a worm or a jerk, so look for those feelings. They can often be found at the core of erroneous macro-explanations.

With the help of your partner, you will almost surely gain a much deeper appreciation for the complexity of the problem, its multifaceted nature. Analyze it from as many angles as you can. Consider the perspectives of others and how some of the conditions that brought the problem about cannot be changed and that they may not originally have been anyone’s fault.

Eventually, you will feel better about the problem. The resolution you arrive at with your partner will contain a wholesome emotion that follows reason and sober analysis, not an unwholesome one that precedes it.

The key to eliminating both micro and macro false interpretations can often be found in the underlying emotions from which these interpretations have stemmed. Basic FIML practice makes it fairly easy to deal with mistaken micro-interpretations because basic FIML is designed to work with very small incidents. It is easier for partners to analyze small mistakes, understand their origins, and admit them openly than it is for them to deal with large mistakes.

Nonetheless, basic FIML practice also provides a reliable guide for how to prevent, correct, or eliminate erroneous macro-explanations, which may arise suddenly during times of crisis or which may be part of a traditional culture to which we belong. Needless to say, false macro-explanations are often a driving force behind false micro-interpretations.

__________________

Note: In semiotics, a macro-explanation can be understood as a “library” that is called up by a micro-interpretation, which is itself an “index.” An index is a sign that references something else, usually something much larger (a library). Of course, libraries can also influence or determine indexes.

    Notice how easy it is to change an explanation—macro or micro—if there is no emotional charge attached to it. If you have always believed a wrong explanation about how electricity works, for example, and someone tells you the right explanation, you will probably feel grateful to that person and find it easy to change your understanding. In fact, you may also experience a sense of wonder as you contemplate the new explanation. Contrast this to the emotions that may be generated by being supplied with solid facts that disprove your position on the gun debate or some other burning issue of the day.

    Macro-explanations in politics and public life often acquire cult-like features, if they do not actually originate in cults. Mass media generally treats hot issues as being little more than debates between diametrically opposed cults. I doubt there are many of us who do not enjoy hearing someone who supports our position let loose with a scathing attack against the other side. This is an example of how emotion can become a central part of an otherwise rational position. We do this in the sphere of public semiotics and we do this with our private semiotics—our idiotics. From the point of view of semiotics, there is much that is similar in the public and private realm with regard to how we engage emotion and get it mixed up with reason. Psychologically, it is probably more true most of the time that emotional suffering is best dealt with by examining semiotics and idiotics, rather than spending long hours generating and/or revising macro-explanations based on hypotheses about what may or may not have happened to you as a child.

Idiotics and mental illnes

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In a previous post (here), we defined idiotics to mean a combination of “idio” and “semiotics.” A person’s idiotics are unique to them and are not the same as the idioitcs of any other person.

Idiotics is a useful term as it allows us to denote the tangled web of meaning and symbology that underlies language and is woven into everything we say or do.

When there is no organic cause for mental illness, we would be right to strongly suspect that the source of the “illness” lies in the individual’s idiotics—the unique web of meaning and sensibility that gives rise to their perceptions, communicative acts, and self-awareness.

Since idiotics underlie language, cognition, and perception and give rise to virtually all acts of communication, a person with disturbed idiotics will also show disturbances in these areas.

Why do we need a separate term—idiotics—to describe mental/emotional problems when existing terms already work well enough?

The reason is the core problem in mental illness without an organic cause is not speech, not communication, not perception, and not cognition per se. The core problem is a person’s uniquely acquired and uniquely interconnected semiotics, their idiotics when these are  filled with mistakes.

If we investigate only a person’s experience and extrapolate from that “causes” of their mental illness, we will very often be led astray because we will be attempting to cure a fairly concrete malady by addressing the ambiguities of memory and the falsity of self-assessment through the use of a subjective appraisal based on a general theory. It doesn’t matter that vague statistics can and have been compiled on what kinds of experiences lead to what sorts of mental disturbances, because there are as many exceptions and deviations from these data as there are comformances to them. At best, data of this sort describes correlations. But correlations of what? No one can really say.

If we use a concept like idiotics, we can begin to work with good data that can be called objective by many standards. The gold standard for working with data of this sort is FIML practice and the gold standard of psychological objectivity between two people is the degree to which they can agree on what has just been said or communicated. If both partners agree on what was just said, their standard of objectivity is quite high, probably as good as can be achieved without very sophisticated brain scanning equipment, which does not yet even exist.

When a patient works with a professional analyst, this high degree of objectivity cannot be attained. This is so because the analyst, at best, can only rely on an extrinsic standard of objectivity and this standard is fully subject to the faulty idiotics of the analyst herself. If an analyst tries to avoid this problem by sticking strictly to “objective” extrinsic standards, she will fail to address the subjective, intrinsic idiotics of the patient she is trying to help. She can only communicate with her patient on a useful level by engaging the patient’s idiotics with her own. But there rarely is enough time for this and it is unlikely that patient and analyst will be compatible for this sort of practice.

So what’s an analyst to do? If the patient has a friend they can do FIML with or if such a friend can be found for them, teach them how to do FIML. Check on them often enough to be sure they are doing it correctly. In some cases, advanced instruction can be given in areas of particular interest to the FIML partners if the analyst feels competent to do so.

What about patients who have no friends and for whom no friends can be found? Or patients who are not capable of doing FIML? Patients of this type can and should be treated by the other best practices of the day.

FIML and karma

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FIML illustrates karma in the sense that karma is an action that initiates a cycle of cause and effect.

For example, if you do not care about what your partner is saying, you will not understand how you are listening and thus you will not understand yourself. If you are not honest with your partner, similarly, you will not be able to perceive the depths of meaning in your own listening and speaking. Your not caring and/or not being honest are actions that will initiate a cycle of delusion, a cycle of less than optimal communication, less than optimal mutual understanding, and less than optimal self-understanding.

You harm yourself when do not care or are not honest. Of course, there are degrees of caring and honesty. But if partners do these actions well-enough, they will see for themselves that caring even more and being even more honest has very real and very important benefits for each of them.

If you care about what your partner is saying, you will come to understand how ideas, values, and meanings actually function in your mind during dynamic moments of communication. And this will save you from a great deal of delusive thinking and feeling. The same is true for being honest. If you are honest with your partner, you will help them free themselves from delusive thinking and feeling. They will see that you are being honest and respect you for that. In return they will be more honest with you.

And all of this will become clearer and clearer to both partners as they progress in FIML practice. These cycle of good karma—good cause and effect—will enrich and liberate both partners

In addition to the above, it is good to see that there are significant selfish reasons to be honest and to care about your partner.

5 Psych Disorders Have Common Genetics

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This article is quite good. It describes a large study that seems to show fairly conclusively that five of our most important psychological disorders have a close genetic foundation. The five disorders are autism, ADHD, bipolar disorder, depression, and schizophrenia.

This supports the model that nature (genes) when stressed (nurture) can lead to a variety of psychological disorders, which when diagnosed by behavioral manifestations alone may seem to be very different.

In my view, a major psychological stressor that affects virtually all people is the low resolution of the language of interpersonal communication. In sensitive individuals, this stressor can and often does lead to psychological problems.

By “low resolution,” I mean that our language (gesture, symbols, words, semiotics) of interpersonal communication is crude compared to what our brains/minds are capable of. The crude nature of this language forces us to blur subtleties in communication, and this leads to confusion and dissatisfaction, which in turn may manifest as a psychological disorder.

No doubt, some instances of the five disorders described have a strong genetic foundation making them all but inevitable. But all things human can be understood as lying on a spectrum of varying degrees. Thus, most human beings at one time or another will experience aspects of one or more of these disorders due to problems in their interpersonal communications.

Edit. Here is another article on this subject: Same Genetic Basis Found in 5 Types of Mental Disorders.

Peace of mind

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In my relationship with my partner, my peace of mind is very much dependent on her wisdom. And the same is true for her with respect to me.

This is why it is of paramount importance that FIML partners be able to depend on each other to bring up contretemps the moment they occur.

A contretemps is defined in FIML practice as a misunderstanding or potential misunderstanding that arises during interpersonal communication. It is often characterized by an emotional jangle, a sudden feeling of being insulted, demeaned, threatened, lied to, etc.

FIML practice is designed to catch contretemps the moment they happen.

Contretemps tend to happen due to how we habitually listen to other people. When we are able to examine all contretemps that arise in our interactions with our partner, we will soon discover that they tend to be of a few general types. Once we see this and understand that they are arising in our own mind and were not the actual intentions of the speaker, they will begin to occur less often and eventually stop.

Deep peace of mind comes in FIML practice when you are certain that your partner is able to recognize jangles and contretemps the moment they happen and that they will bring them up immediately. This is the wisdom of my partner that I depend on.

Peace of mind is knowing that your partner is not thinking some weird stuff about you, and knowing that they know neither are you thinking some weird stuff about them.

You can assert that you don’t think weird things about each other, you can vow not to do it, you can feel that your partner is not doing it, you can trust them, but there is no substitute for knowing that your partner is not doing it and knowing that your partner has the means to deal with any weird thought, no matter how trivial, the moment it arises.

Why we use the term semiotics

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The reason we use the term semiotics on this site is when FIML partners do a FIML query, the data in their minds at the moment(s) in question is best described as raw semiotics. That is, it is the raw material that makes up the composite of consciousness at the moment(s) in question. This material, or data, can be sharply focused, vague, irrelevant to the subject at hand, emotional, associative, organized, disorganized, and so on. When partners get good at observing this data accurately and describing it to each other, they will find that much of it, if not all of it, is connected to a psycho-semiotic network that underlies awareness and gives rise to it. Understanding this network is extremely valuable and will provide partners with great insights into how and why they feel, think, and behave as they do. It is very difficult (and I think impossible) to understand this network through solitary pursuits only. The reason for this is a solitary mind will fool itself. In contrast, two minds working together will be able to observe this network with much greater accuracy. Language, semiotics, and emotion are fundamentally interpersonal operations, so it is reasonable to expect that deep comprehension of these operations will be best achieved through interpersonal activity. ABN

Error correction

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While reading David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, I came across the following sentence:

What is needed is a system that takes for granted that errors will occur, but corrects them once they do—a case of ‘problems are inevitable, but they are soluble’ at the lowest level of information-processing emergence. (p. 141)

This statement comes from the chapter “The Jump to Universality,” in which Deutsch argues that “error correction is essential in processes of potentially unlimited length.”

Error correction is fundamental to FIML practice. In fact, the nuts-and-bolts of FIML practice could be described as being little more than a method for correcting errors “at the lowest level of information-processing” during interpersonal communication. This level is “the lowest” because FIML deals primarily with very short segments of speech/communication. In many posts, we have called these segments “psychological morphemes” or the “smallest speech/communication error” we can reliably identify and agree upon with our partner.

If you try to tackle bigger errors—though this can be done sometimes—you frequently run into the problem of your subject becoming too vague or ill-defined to be rationally discussable.

I haven’t read enough of Deutsch’s book to be sure of what he means by “universality,” but I do think (at this point) that FIML is universal in the sense that it will clear up interpersonal communication errors between any two qualified partners. “Qualified” here means that partners care about each other, want to optimize their relationship, and have enough time to do FIML practice.

We all demand that our computers be error-free, that buildings and bridges be constructed without error, that science work with error-free data as much as possible. But when it comes to communication with the person we care about most, do we even talk about wanting a method of error correction, let alone actually using one?

You can’t correct big errors if you have no method for correcting errors that occur “at the lowest level of information-processing,” to use Deutsch’s phrase. Once you can correct errors at this level, you will find that you and your partner are much better able to tackle bigger questions/errors/complexes. This happens because having the ability to reliably do small error-correcting gives you the capacity to discuss bigger issues without getting lost in a thicket of small mistakes.

Your ability to talk to each other becomes “universal” in the sense that you can tackle any subject together and are not tethered to static ideas and assumptions about what either of you really “means.” As mentioned many times on these pages, FIML does not tell you how to think or what to believe. In this sense, it is a universal system that allows you and your partner to explore existence in any way you choose.

To use Deutsch’s words again, “error correction is essential in processes of potentially unlimited length.” Your relationship with your partner can and should be a “processes of potentially unlimited” growth, and error correction is essential to that process.