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Ian Marcinkowski
Ian Marcinkowski

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Rhetorical virtual machines

You are a cube. You like things with the Right number of vertices. You have opinions about how not-round your life circumstances should be. Proper, tidy. Some of your edges are rounded off with time, but generally you call yourself a cube and do cubey things.

They are a kidney-bean-shaped beanbag chair. They are soft and have no vertices unless you simulate them at a low resolution with polygons. The polygons at least give them some vertices so that they are more palatable to your need for edges and points. You don't like the lack of square faces on those polygons, but they allow you to feel more secure that you understand this beanbag chair.

How does your mind work? Well, lets say it's like a virtual machine made up of very regular cubeish computational components. Proper, tidy computational components. You fit your square, cube, hypercube ideas about how to move your 6 faces through the world in to cubular instructions to calculate what your next move should be. To generate an internal theory of mind for your round interlocutor so you can have a meaningful argument, you photograph the shapes they are waving in the air and feed those instructions in to your virtual machine. The program crashes... of course. Why can't they see that their ideas just don't work?


A person from group A understands their virtual machine, and they have useful simulations and projections of future outcomes that take advantage of the machine they run on. They know they can tinker with certain values and get desired outcomes.

A builds a simulation of what their interlocutor is proposing and runs it on their own virtual machine. It doesn't crash because they constructed the simulation in ways that are consistent with their machine. The outcomes differ from the outcomes proposed by the interlocutor and then they argue about this.

A doesn't know how to build a simulation which will run on their interlocutor's hardware and most of the time won't even try. That's hard.

What if A didn't even know that they had different hardware?

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