[FRIAM] mentalizing threats

[Marcus Daniels]

Long term relationships are an interesting bounding case.  Like an esoteric 
academic community, but a smaller and more rigid set of alternative lenses. 
For some, inferences are evidence built on experience.  For the couple, only 
by seeking assistance of a therapist  (or lawyer) can they be disentangled. 
For the analogous academic community, maybe a referee that can see the 
incestuous situation.  Every minor gesture is projected into a latent space no 
one else can see.   With enough at stake, priors are sensed everywhere.  The 
paranoia is mutually reinforcing, and racing in circularity and depth.



From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Jon Zingale
Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2026 10:54 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] mentalizing threats



The image I have in mind is of the husband sensing at different levels of 
perception: successively deeper degrees of modeling, mediated by increasingly 
object-structured priors. I intend *Objective* here to mean structured around 
objects, not *most real* or however some people try to use the word.

Two analogies come to mind:

1. Optical processing or convolutional layers: Building objects from the 
neuronal activity of earlier layers.

2. The mathematical practice of studying a space through its hom-sets: taking 
a loop, for example, considering its maps into a space, then quotienting by an 
equivalence relation, i.e., the general game of doing homotopy theory.

I mention these because one might use sensing broadly enough to include 
higher-order objects, while hoping that an empathetic conversational partner 
will correctly and perhaps lazily infer the intended domain of definition. 
Still, in the case of threats and allegations, one *should* be open to 
clarifying what exactly is to be taken seriously.

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