Having grown up with undiagnosed autism, I've been thinking about how to think for as long as I can remember. My models of the world never seemed to match anyone else's: I'd be confused at things others easily understood, and I'd understand easily things that others found confusing. I had to learn to reverse engineer how thinking itself worked so that I could anticipate the connections other people would make, and then use those insights to construct a social identity. I needed to understand why things seemed mean different things to me than they did to others - what is meaning, anyway?
And so I learned.
I learned that meaning is constructed - that when someone associates some things in some way that they create third thing, the meaning of which is relationally defined by things joined. For instance, maybe someone hears a piece of music while experiencing a pleasant emotion. That piece of music now 'means' that emotion for that person, and vice versa. So when that person is having a bad day and a loved one puts on that piece of music, that action 'means' that the loved one understands and remembers the meaning the first person created.
I learned that humans need shared meanings in order to be mutually intelligible. That if I recognize a meaning that nobody else does then no amount of reference to it will make sense to the people I'm talking to, right? And when they refer to meanings that I don't have, I learned how to piece them together into something that made sense. But that process is fraught, easy to mess up, and exhausting for the person doing all the one-sided catchup.
I learned that creativity is the ability to generate new meanings. Anything can mean anything, if we want it to, right? And yet at the same time nothing means anything. 'Meaning' is meaningless, until and unless we choose to imbue it with some sort of significance - which we do by combining it with other meanings to build increasingly rich models of understanding and cognition.
Most importantly, I learned that wisdom is knowing how to apply significance to meanings in a way that leads to a better outcome for myself and the people impacted by my actions. This means avoiding the delusion of madness (thinking that every meaning that comes to my attention is significant), but it also means avoiding the delusion of rationality (thinking that meanings are only significant if proven 'true' by scientific inquiry).
Divination, then, is the ability to generate surface meanings via some tool (e.g. tarot cards arranged in a specific way have the same surface meaning for everyone) and then use that surface meaning to create deep meaning (e.g. interpreting the surface meaning of a tarot spread into actionable and relevant meaning for the subject of the reading.)
This dual-level is crucial to understanding what divination is and how it works. We're not (necessarily) making any material predictions about the future - we are simply generating surface meanings using some formal system, and then generating deep meanings using interpretation. We can, if we want to, make our deep meanings with an eye towards predicting possible future states, or interpreting our surface meaning as having something to say about the future. That's fine! But it's not the core purpose of divination.
Creating meaning is.
In the past, people chose how to prioritize and rank meanings by appealing to various authority structures. This could be religious (e.g. accept those meanings that are in keeping with holy scripture, reject the rest on pain of death), it could be political (hey if the king says a foot is twelve inches then a foot is twelve inches), it could scientific (accept only those meanings that are generated by the rigorous application of the scientific method, discard the rest as superstition), etc.
In 2019, though, these structures have eroded past the point of utility. How can we allow a church to tell us what means what when they can't stop molesting children? We may be subject to the legal authority of government but how could we justify ceding our meaning-making capacity to their judgment when they're so horrifically wrong so often? Even science has started to crack - there are simply too many aspects of our lives that are experienced purely subjectively, and we can't keep pretending that they're not 'real' just because they can't be measured.
And the result is what you see when you look outside the window - people are living in fundamentally fragmented and irreconcilable realities, because the organizing principles that historically allowed them to coordinate their meanings have been torn down and replaced with advertisers doing market segmentation.
We have lost, in 2019, any general consensus about what anything means. And it's leaving us vulnerable to the predations of the worst of us as the best of us fail to mobilize any support to protect our planet's capacity to support human life.
I'm interested in exploring what we can figure out if we model divination this way. What tools can we build to help connect people through consensual meaning-making practices? Can we be intentional about the constraints we use such that the meanings generated tend to be healing, or helpful in some way, rather than merely novel? What does it mean when machine learning systems are literally training themselves to generate meaning for us without any real oversight or thought going into just how dangerous that is?
I don't have any answers in mind, but I do have a lot of questions and the skills to build out reasonably complex technological tooling in a relatively short amount of time.
And I want to figure out how we can start building new kinds of shared meanings to start healing the damage that this crisis has caused before it's too late.