#emperorseighthand — Public Fediverse posts

(I thought that the original was lost, it actually is archived.)

From my Dreddit comments:

So, we get communications, class, wealth, status, and complexity of thought, in one package.

I'd run across an item at Nautilus (fantastic online source, by the way, and they're actively soliciting support currently), "How Your Brain Decides Without You":

The structure of the brain [Lisa Feldman Barrett] notes, is such that there are many more intrinsic connections between neurons than there are connections that bring sensory information from the world. From that incomplete picture, she says, the brain is “filling in the details, making sense out of ambiguous sensory input.” The brain, she says, is an “inference generating organ.” She describes an increasingly well-supported working hypothesis called predictive coding, according to which perceptions are driven by your own brain and corrected by input from the world. There would otherwise simple be too much sensory input to take in. “It’s not efficient,” she says. “The brain has to find other ways to work.” So it constantly predicts. When “the sensory information that comes in does not match your prediction,” she says, “you either change your prediction—or you change the sensory information that you receive.”

http://nautil.us/issue/19/illusions/how-your-brain-decides-without-you

To which I observed on the Inevitability of the Eighth Hand, by the Emperor, that is, the decisionmaking centre of society:

Thus: the emperor must always have the eighth hand, and proper interpretation and framing of the Universe requires more processing power then sensing power, and/or the obligation to discard information which cannot be integrated into the receiving frame.

As I believe I'd commented on Yonatan's original thread, another consequence of this is that the Emperor can therefore always understand, and communicate, at a level greater than that of any other entity. That's both a blessing and a curse --- clearer vision, but also an inability to communicate that in its entirety to anyone else.

All of this is of course fiction-on-fiction. But it's a beautiful little allegory in my view.

@johnwehrle @woozle @CadeJohnson #YonatanZunger #EmperorsEightHand #StarWars #VaporatorDroids #Parable #Communications

When Owen asked C-3PO if he spoke the binary language of moisture vaporators, the proper answer for him to give (in binary) would have been "with neither too many hands nor too few," that being the idiom for speaking politely and properly. Moisture vaporators use their hands as communication ports, each finger transmitting or receiving a single channel, and touch hands to one another in order to speak; if you were to speak with more hands than the listener had available, they would miss part of what you were saying, and (especially if that were crucial metadata) they would not be able to understand you. Conversely, if you spoke with fewer hands than they listened with, your transmissions would be slow, stilted, taking far too much time. Speaking with the appropriate number of hands is a key aspect of their culture.

But as with many societies, etiquette conceals notions of class: the number of hands a moisture vaporator has is largely determined by wealth and their role. As a result, a common worker with only two or three hands will always seem slow-witted and foolish when trying to speak to a five-handed member of their bourgeoisie, and that burgher would in turn feel profoundly uncomfortable in "seven-handed society."

-- Yonatan Zunger @ G+ https://plus.google.com/103389452828130864950/posts/1spcaDjGZUE?hl=en (archived)

@johnwehrle @woozle @CadeJohnson

#YonatanZunger #EmperorsEightHand #StarWars #VaporatorDroids #Parable #Communications