We live in the objective world, but experience occurs in our minds, in a sort of virtual reality version of the objective world constructed of knowledge and misconceptions we’ve gathered up to the moment. Unfortunately, each person’s best guess of the objective world is usually an absolute wreck. When we make “objective” statements, or judgment calls based on our terrible mental maps, they’re inextricably modeled on our flawed internal geometry.

If you’ve never seen a chicken, you’re going to base your impression on whatever you’ve been able to glean from the world. The Bluths in the show Arrested Development are too elite to have ever encountered a chicken, and taunt each other with preposterous impressions based on the vaguest ideas they hold from passing references plus their own fill-in-the-blank ontographic puzzle solving.

Everything we do is some part “decent guess” and some part “terrible guess” at the true nature of the universe. If we’ve discovered a very reliable principle to base our actions on, so much the better. Here are some I’ve encountered, stated to my best ability:

• 1 + 1 = 2
• Every choice has an opportunity cost.
• Human agency has infinite value.

I’d love to hear what principles you’ve been able to discover. Go ahead and comment below. Don’t worry if it’s not a very accurate chicken dance.

After this awesome conversation, he asked me some follow-up questions in a Facebook message. Here they are.

First, what are the implications of having this model of ontographics?

The most dramatic, actionable implication may be that this model makes it so we can dimension/measure the human mind. I spoke about the “angle of relationship” between a person and his mother. I spoke about the emotional distance between people. Angles and distances are the fundaments of geometry.

So if I could make an ontograph of the way I feel about people in my life, and you could, too, then we could compare them. We could make a survey of thousands or millions of very basic ontographs that only addresses one tiny part: how people feel about their relationships with people they know. Then if we see that someone has a very different take, perhaps we can see whether that increases or decreases their agency. Maybe it makes them more marriageable and we can learn from that and tweak our ontographs by spending more time with the right people. Maybe we can prevent acts of violence when we see that someone is too emotionally distant from the people they depend on most.

That’s just one tiny fraction of the ontograph, but an important one. Then again, importance is subjective. So another way we could measure the ontograph is we could have people rate what’s important to them and then if they don’t spend time on what’s important to them, they could change their life around so that they spend more time on what’s important. We could then see if that makes them happy. If it doesn’t, perhaps they could try pursuing what other people consider important, or what happy people consider important.

When something is measurable, it is addressable.

Now here’s a question about a fairly lofty possible implications, but simple enough to understand. In computer terms, how can we import/export ours and others’ ontographs?

In computer terms, you just did that using Facebook. You had a question in your ontograph that wasn’t in mine. You used the data compression capabilities of the English language to write it out and send it to me on your computer. I read it and reciprocated with this answer. This has been possible since the invention of the modem… or even the floppy disk. Making the process more efficient is already happening at breakneck speed. So rather than answer with speculation I hope I’m not being cheeky to say “we do it the way we’re doing it, but incrementally better for the indefinite future.”

In gospel terms, does this relate to the “convincing power of the Holy Ghost”?

I don’t expect my conceptualization of God is exactly the same as anyone else’s, so hopefully I’ll zoom out on this question not too little and not too much.

If a being with unerring perception of the objective world were to communicate pure objectivity about something to others, it would be a disclosure of capital-T Truth. People who believe they have experienced this often call it revelation. Some people nevertheless question their revelations. If the Holy Ghost were to tell you Truth and it was beyond your power to sincerely deny it, that sounds to me like the convincing power of the Holy Ghost. And in some theologies denying revelation from the Holy Ghost, even though you know with perfect certainty that the denial is a lie, is the unforgivable sin. (I know the implications and interpretations of that vary widely among sects, but that’s my impression of the majority interpretation among Christians.) That seems like rebellion against reality itself, and reality isn’t going to stop scraping against your ontograph, so you’ve chosen endless punishment as your hubris chafes your unprogressing soul forever. Humility is when you allow for the truth instead. If you pretend you can change objective reality just by saying it, that positions you as a Creator God in your own mind, one who speaks one’s imagination and the objective world conforms to it. Humans can’t speak simply any truth into being. Many have tried and it doesn’t end well. Best to keep humbly learning what’s really there. At some point, if you were to live forever, perhaps you’d know what was actually true and can humbly communicate that.

You are more than welcome to comment below. We’d both love to hear your insights.

If you were able to look back at all the things going on around you at any moment, you’d see unlimited events occurring that you didn’t have time to experience, consider, or intuit. It’s a little bit like matter. The amount of mass in a human body compared to the amount of space is surprisingly small. Our molecules are connected by intermolecular bonds and have space between them. Those molecules are made of atoms that have an incredible amount of space between their nuclei and electrons. The subatomic particles inside of those aren’t exactly touching, either, by our common understanding of the term. And just as our physical world is mostly space, our ontographs are mostly made up of the tiny fraction of what we’re able to sense and pay attention to at the moment.

Some people are more intuitive and probably grasp the situation they’re in pretty effectively. Some people are more focused and tend to miss things outside their field of attention. And of course we all have moments in which we’re more focused or more generally aware. But whichever kind of moment you’re inhabiting, you’re not doing both at the same time, certainly not to the degree that you’re keenly aware of everything going on around you. Human experience catches critical curds of substance, like a cheesecloth. And that’s probably best, since we don’t have unlimited attentive energy or sensitivity, which sounds overwhelming anyway.

That means our ontographs are interpermeable and overlapping. You could think of a Venn diagram where circle A is your ontograph and circle B is mine. We meet and your clothes announce to me your cultural heraldry. This expands my knowledge, and actionable knowledge expands my personal agency.

Next, you tell me about a book you just read, transmitting information from the author’s ontograph, through yours (with any alterations you include) to mine. I receive what you say through my clouded lens of imperfect perception, but perhaps I have new ideas that allow me to understand the world around me better. This increases my options for interpreting the phenomena I encounter in life.

We network our ontographs together this way–memetically. And communicating ideas that increase our adaptiveness boosts the combined agency of the human network. So far we’ve made it into space, and hopefully we’ll eventually be invulnerable to the expansion of the sun. Then the sky will no longer be the limit.

I didn’t want to limit the ontograph to perception, because an ontograph includes things that may not be perceived or understood in the moment. I didn’t want to confuse it with a biography, because a biography typically includes only those events and experiences that are relatable to others. I wanted to use the term Ontos because it encompasses a person’s entire existence. It also has a history in philosophy such as ontology, which is closely related to the project of exploring the ontograph.

Graph is Greek for recording: “to write.”

A record of geography is called a map or cartograph. As one makes decisions about what to do in pursuit of goals, one navigates a landscape much larger than geography–it is geography multiplied by dimensions of feelings, thoughts, intentions, and more. But our behavior still feels like moving on a map to some degree, so I chose that etymology.

I considered “ontogram” but there is already an object called an ontogram. I see it also referred to as an ontograph. I feel like it’s taking up one too many go-karts on this philosophical joyride, so let us grab the “-graph” term for this project because the ontograph behaves more like a cartograph, and the ontogram behaves more like a diagram. Those two familiar terms have enough established nuance in English that I’m happy to let them sit. I hope that’s agreeable to the esteemed developers of the ontogram.

I would be fascinated to hear any thoughts about this word choice. There may be an even better term approachable by Latin, German, or other means. Please let me know.

Your ontograph contains all your experiences, your feelings about those experiences, and even the parts of those experiences you can’t articulate. This makes a complete ontograph too complex to record, but we share pieces of our ontographs with each other and our future selves all the time.

When we share our experiences and impressions with others, it gives us an opportunity to detect inadequacies in our own ontographs and imagine improvements. If you hear a thought about a song that did not at first impress you, it may allow you to derive more pleasure from the song next time. If you hear about a construction project of which you weren’t aware, it may increase your ability to get to a friend’s house in time for an event. Communication multiplies the options available to an individual.

I am grateful for this opportunity to share with you my experience, to the extent I can articulate it, of pondering this concept. It occurred to me last year while I was considering the definition of wisdom and the patterns intelligent creatures to use navigate the worlds in their heads. I have a few thoughts a day about this right now, and I wanted a place to get them down in black and white. Or black and whatever this background color is called. Perhaps you can tell me the name of this color in your ontograph.

(Here’s a copy of the background color in case I change it later.)