Instrument | Conduit

It has been years since I consumed a JBP video, but he deserves credit for showing me things I might not have noticed on my own. In particular, he deserves credit at least for speaking on the Internet about speech itself and how we conceive of it. He contrasted two mental models of language, by which I mean two different ways that people tend to think about the practical purpose of language. Probably these are not his original ideas because there is nothing new under the Sun; mathematicians are forever getting Eulered and philosophers Plato’d¹. The best I can do is to trace these ideas back to the person who showed me and that person was JBP.

the wages of truthful speech or something

Let’s outline those two models.

Tell Me What You Really Think

In the conduit model, speech is sort of like cables or other transmission media through which we pass mental pictures to others. We get ‘faxes’ of others’ mental pictures through these channels.

An obvious shortcoming of the conduit model is that we cannot achieve perfect fidelity in transmission even when we are doing our best in terms of honesty and bandwidth. We cannot dissolve into Mind At Large or cut the transmission distance to zero via Vulcan mind-meld. We have direct access to our own thoughts and feelings and the best we can do in sharing them is to cast their shadows on a wall and invite others to look at the shadows. A person too convinced of the conduit can grow frustrated if his shadows are misinterpreted. Or an instrument-wielder can prey upon him. At the pathological extreme he can forget his assumption and imagine that all of his shadows are the real deal.

“you can see them if you’re driving, you just run them over”

But its biggest shortcoming is that it is incomplete because it leaves out intent. Why do we bother sharing mental images at all? It is not honest to leave out intent.

Do It To Me

In the instrument model, speech is a power tool. You use it to induce changes in the world so as to bring the world into alignment with your wishes. To extract what you want from the world and to put into the world things you wish to see in the world. For a long time I thought that the instrument had the conduit as a dependency, but now I think that NPCs do not even bother to simulate your mind - they just learn the instrument.

According to my own rationalist bayesian data collection (read: general impression) on this topic, overreliance on the instrument in your dealings with non-computers consistently leads to chaos and heartache.

you lack the bandwidth to tune all of the dials

It has brought on administrative bloat and legitimation crisis in American universities and federal agencies. Through adjacency of our personal and work lives, it has infected to a lesser degree our communities and relationships with Newspeak.

In my early thirties I got it in my head that the instrument was bad and the conduit good, but overlooked the latter’s shortcomings. The struggle is real and a viable path forward demands a balancing act.

Coda

Let me find the strength to walk the Middle Way. Is this a consequentialist plea? Probably yes, but I think that it can be grounded in something deeper.

who is it that knows there is no ego?