There is something about this writing that is prone to be read and get misunderstood. In the passage that I wrote about the anonymized character being “mine”, you really have to look at what I’m talking about, and put aside your moral stuff on the corner for ten simple seconds. I’m talking about the “construction” of a real person in my mind. In the movie JoJo Rabbit, the kid has a construction of Hitler, and you know that is a construction of the horrific person in his head and not a real one. While that creature is very comically portrayed so that you know is an imaginary friend, I wanted to show you we have one such of these imaginary friends “per” each people we know.

When we interact with people closely, we don’t have to simulate them, we let them simulate themselves (Makes me remember Maestro Victor ’s quote on Dynamicland: “You don’t have to simulate reality when reality simulates itself”), but the moment you are far from a person, when you talk with them over the phone and you have to simulate their everything except the voice. In chatting you even have to simulate their voice. You surely have read a message and heard it play in the voice of the author in your mind. This is nothing strange or new, you just do these things intrinsically and never realize that you have a version of another person constructed in you.

But here is the thing: the version you have constructed of that person in your mind, understands things with the graph of reference of your own mind graph , and this is such a massive massive massive massive thing. When you think of “What another person would think”, you don’t have access to their mind graph , you have to use your mind graph to construct a simulated version of what would they do.

The perfect case study of this is the alien movies. Star Trek is the absolute perfection here. You have a spaceship that houses an army fleet of explorers and scientists who goes to all of the galaxy and is made of creatures of all planets and cultures, and all of these creatures share the human anatomy with just a little bit of skin variation. The whole ship has the corridors, rooms, cafes, doors, decks, … that are designed for the human use. Even the accessability features are human centered. The “computer” has an audio visual interface that works with English. Even the Vulkan people read and write in English. Neil Tyson has a very good analogy in here where he says in a gas planet, aliens may look like very big jellyfish. Even the aliens portrayed in the movie “Arrival” is way more imaginative, but then maybe they are gas that we walk through and never realize, maybe they live inside of cells with different configurations, maybe the whole planet is a creature we don’t know, maybe they are made of anti-matter and we can never find them.

Hollywood keeps going back to the human figure because they say it is cheap to build costumes for, and yet it sounds like total crap because even when they fully animate the film, they figures are still human like. And that is something you see everywhere. When they animate animals, those animals wear suits and have jobs and suffer from the exact same things humans suffer. What the fuck is that? And perhaps that is why the animation “Flow” was such a masterpiece. Instead of making the poor animals an anthropomorphic nightmare, it had tried to be as faithful as possible to what we know of animals. And you see what happens in here? Mid-sentence you think I’m going to say they did the good job, but then you realize that movie will never make any sense to a cat. We don’t know what they mean when they meow, we don’t fully understand their gestures, and we have a very very very very reductionistic view of everything: “This means I want food”, “This means I want sleep”. Everything we do is from within our Graph Of Reference , and that is why “we” cheer up that the capture is “exactly like a cat”, and no actual cat will ever have an understanding of what that thing on the wall even is.

When Europeans came to our lands we became their “Oriental Dream”. The movie Prince Of Persia shows a dream world with people named after Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, who are actually characters of an American game about a boy who wears an arabic outfit, and lives in a deserted place with an architecture that is very much like a mix of all arabic countries, and looks like none of them. In modern terms the movie is an AI Slop and nothing more.

In Being Defined By Words; And Not Being Defined By Words. , I tried to explain why something like this happens. To the American/European audience who has no graph ecosystem for our world, they have basic schemas and words and embedding points that they could map our world into. And so that is simple template that captures the whole of Turkey, Arabic Countries, █​‌‍​█⁠‌‌​█⁠‍​‌█‌⁠​​, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia… They have forms of buildings that are the mix of all of the buildings we have, and none of us actually has. (This breakthrough just happened in the writing of this paragraph, I had not noticed this myself before… wow… oh boy…) And well you see that is all because we are seen from the standpoint of a European’s graph of reference .

In the movie, Harry Gregson-Williams has created a theme that is by all means, an American graph of reference 's most faithful “Arabian Theme” you can find out there. It features a European philharmonic orchestra with strings, brass, wood winds and everything that makes it “Anything but Persian”. For some reason the American culture has decided to use very high pitched strings to represent music that goes with us. There are sounds like Ney and they have the usual style of melodies that an “American Thinks We Would Play”. This culture and music style exists nowhere but in the imagination of the American people.

I used to watch this documentary by VOX about the China Town’s Aesthetics and that it had nothing to do with China and its culture. Just read these quotes from the video (I’ll make sure the video is in the day’s videos so that you can find it easily):

And all because of this little sentence you hear in the video:

American people have their own China. And it can be violating to Chinese people but hey, Chinese also have their own “Silicon Valley”. Our culture is really like navigating in a quantum world and every communication every thought is really generating a new dimension, a new configuration, a new reality. We walk in infinite numbers of compound feelings and mind graphs and cultural graphs and the Hyper-Message is always evolving.

The design of this archive is inspired by many things, “my understanding of those things”, my understanding in my graph of reference of those things. Maybe Apple designers come see the LavaScroll and say what the hell! that is exactly what we wanted to make! And maybe the come and say this is the ugliest thing in the world, farther from anything we could have imagined, we hate this. And they may come and say this is unlike everything we know, but we like it. I have a Mac OS X Leopard in my mind that has been driving me for such a long time. Weather Apple likes it or not, weather their patents and copyrights and things can control.

Maestro Stallman to me is a hero. He saw in software something no one ever saw in the whole of the media that way, and it was that when you have information in your hand, weather it is a software or a document, it is yours and you should be able to change it. I always believed in the Free Software movement—and honestly too weak to not use Apple products. In █​‌‍​█⁠‌‌​█⁠‍​‌█‌⁠​​ we don’t have any form of copyright. (The rules don’t even apply to our own creations, no one can defend a copyright case here) and so █​‌‍​█⁠‌‌​█⁠‍​‌█‌⁠​​ has a truly free and libre culture. Here you can remix everything and use anything to do anything. A very funny comedy series in █​‌‍​█⁠‌‌​█⁠‍​‌█‌⁠​​ featured █​‌‍​█⁠‌‌​█⁠‍​‌█‌⁠​​ in the future and it had a character called لوک هوانورد which exactly translates to “Luke Skywalker”, he is the old Luke, having an old Iranian Coffee House and has the picture of his father (Vader with his ridiculous Dark Suit) and a black ribbon (to honor the dead) on top of the picture on the wall.

In the rest of the world, you would have had them put into prison, or they had to buy rights and protect the characters, make them these PR-safe things that you see in say “Wreck It Ralph”, good, nice, and only funny in the known things the studio has allowed. █​‌‍​█⁠‌‌​█⁠‍​‌█‌⁠​​ doesn’t have that and so there is so much natural creativity in our culture. People here make T-shirts with famous football players portrayed as LEGO Minifigures, Naser al-Din Shah in a Coca-Cola ad… We don’t use iMessage with its corporate controlled boring stickers that you have to buy, in █​‌‍​█⁠‌‌​█⁠‍​‌█‌⁠​​ people use Telegram and there you can make sticker packs of anything you want, and you can mix and remix any of those stickers, so the stickers are as naturally developed as the language itself. And this is the freedom of the elements and language and the graph, while in say in rest of the world you don’t have the right to use all the elements.

In the morning we were talking with A. █‌‍‍‍█‍⁠​⁠█‍⁠‌​█‌‍⁠‌█​‌⁠‍█‍‌​⁠█⁠‌‌‍ about Tanya ’s Korean learning and I was talking about how their alphabet is way easier thanks to a king, then I was thinking what a stupid violating language is Chinese or Japanese that makes it impossible for a person in one specialty to read about the other. Their language really should be a violation of human rights. It is stupid that you can’t express yourself in iMessage and you have to use only the boring sterile corporate washed stickers. In Telegram we have such explicit, juicy, outrageous, and sometimes violating stickers that the communication is orders of magnitude more different.

I personally honor copyright and never buy the T-shirts I talked about because I still think this is stealing. However that level of freedom is a demonstration of humanity should be, and I think the Free Software Movement and its cheap and horrible knock-off, the stupid open source has shown this in the computing world. The mix and remix, the having the world from different points of understanding, … these are not only liberating, but they are the essence of humanity.

And so back to Robbin again. I honor the real person so much, and I have respect for her in ways that are hard to compress in words. If I see her on the street someday, I will not approach her to say hi and take a picture because I’d see that as making them uncomfortable or distracting. But there exists a version of this person in my mind, made of reading her work, holding the memories of her talking in the interviews, and that image is fully mine, just like Cobb’s image of Mal was truly his.

In psychology this is established that we have internal images of our parents that guide us when our parents are not present. We even get their tone and gestures, we simulate them and internalize them so much that sometimes we even understand why they did what they did only through the sheer accuracy of what we have internalized and modeled and simulated. A few years ago, there was a paper who’s title I have forgot, and it said its not just the parents that have a role on the development of a kid, everyone the kid interacts with has a part. Well how can they not? We learn from any input that finds its way to our graph and so this is nothing new. But then exactly because of that, we have internalized versions of everyone we know, with different levels of accuracy, richness, and attachment. We see our parents and best friends and family so long that we have a very internally big image of them. We are able to say things like “He would never do that!”, well that is in itself the prove that we have internalized someone’s internal algorithms and rules and kernel and graph .

And so I have a Robbin in me, and I have a counterpart image of every person that I know, and they all also have images of everyone and everything they have met and seen in their whole lives and that is nothing bad or strange or crazy. You my friend have only began to see what my work really truly means.