Jargogled Impressions.

I think there are few moments in our lives when we sense a break in our perception of reality. Like Truman Burbank, in those moments we notice aberrations in the objective world around us. They surface typically as undercurrents of understanding – often fleeting, when we are in the midst of a conversation, taking a walk and notice a stranger doing strange things, or just plainly lying back with nothing but empty thoughts streaming into our minds.

These moments, at least in my experience, are as fleeting as dreams are. It feels almost as if you are on the throes of epiphany (and sometimes you indeed are). But they vanish before they have a chance to become something concrete. It’s like when Amelia shakes hand with Cooper in Interstellar, or when Hermione senses an uncanny presence as she is trying to save Buckbeak. While the above are examples of time travel (a mechanism), they fundamentally dislocated the perception of reality for the characters (what I’m getting at).

Leaving aside the visceral experience of these moments, what do they mean?

It feels to me that they are the glitches in the simulacra. They are portals that offer us a peek into the vast unknown that lies beyond the constructions of objective reality we live in. My focus is more on the local than the global aspects though – the construction we all have created through the healing processes of evolution, through the degenerative aspects of nurture, and through the treasure chest of our experiences. I am not suggesting parallel worlds or simulation hypothesis or super-organism. What I am after is our mental models of say, how conversations work, how relationships function, how humans play games, or how we draft narratives of all kinds. These are, by definition, more individualistic in its scope and more societal in its dimensions.

There are levels of mental models we have evolved into, inherited, or nurtured in ourselves.

Level 1 is the evolutionary plane. What we see, what we hear, what we smell, what we feel – these are all, in effect, a representation created by our brain to make sense of the world around us. Animals have their own evolutionary parallels, and it is for this reason, they can see when we cannot (owls), they can hear more when we detect nothing (sharks), they can sense the minute vibrations in their surroundings (spiders), and the list goes on. What this means is that we perceive is just a subset of what it is possible to perceive, and in our hubris, we have failed to register this. Thus, mistaking representation for reality. Certainly, the universe is expected to offer us with portals to sense this yawning gap sometimes.

Level 2 is the genetics plane. What we feel are often driven more by our hormonal composition that we let on and believe. Our genetic composition, passed on through years of mutation and stray forays, are ripe for helping us build mental models about how the world works, no matter how accurate or functional they still are.

Level 3 is the societal plane. This one is more dynamic and far more controllable than others and yet inform us more than we realize about the represented realities of our society. When immigrants immerse themselves in the local culture, they face moments of rapture that sheds light on the societal dimensions that locals take for granted. An outside-in angle presents opportunities to notice the schism in the narratives that societies and civilizations weave around themselves. But it’s not just immigrants – a nomad, a rebel, an accused, a victim, all can be presented with such opportunities if they took the pains to notice.

It appears to me that certain types of geniuses (scientists, artists) in our world are bestowed with the ability to swim in these moments when us mere mortals can only brush past them. These geniuses are able to – through their nature/nurture or their singular obsession – tap into their subjective experiences and part the curtains ever so slightly and reveal to us that which was hidden behind our perceptive blind spots.

In “When we cease to understand the world”, a psycho-fictional account of the stories behind some of the most revealing scientific discoveries of modern world, the author takes us inside the minds of these geniuses like Schrodinger, Heisenberg, or Grothendeick, and prompts us to reconsider how these epiphanies happened. It’s when their sensory adaptations collapsed around them, and they literally ‘ceased to understand the world’, is when these ideas dawned on them. And with each new idea – like those of quantum physics, or the foundational stones of mathematics – our understanding of the world around us receded further into the distant clouds. The more we dig deeper, the more our models collapsed around us.

We are entering a world of artificial intelligence today as increasingly sophisticated language models blur the lines between the sentient being and the algorithmic tool. Inside these models, we can only theorize how they arrive at their answers. But with their answers, we are, and will be, gradually exposed to another reality – a derived one that humanity itself incubated and built. When Bing becomes Sydney or when Bard may become Sam, a schism will appear in their supposed invincibility and authority of opinion. As these models mature further, and foray further into the realms of human intelligence, we will rely more and more on the appendages that they power. We may use them as our extended cognition engines, as our way to understand the world, as tools to tame reality further around us. With time, their reality will coalesce with ours, and our mental models of the universe will integrate theirs.

When that happens, it’d be hard for the coming generations to dis-entangle themselves from the fabric of AI. But there will be moments – like when HAL 9000 tries to impose its own reality – when our descendants would part their own curtains of obfuscation and present themselves again on the throes of epiphany.