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rambling vague psychobabble
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Human interactions are interesting things. One thing I have learned about them is that an incredibly huge proportion of every set of interactions between two given people (hey, I’m not about to solve some sort of weird psycho-N-body-problem… let’s just stick to two people)… are by rote. That is to say, most interactions are based on learned behaviour. And this learning is quite specific to each co-incidence of 2 people.

Stealing cryptography’s fictional characters ‘Bob’ and ‘Alice’ for a moment: It seems that after some fairly short window of time, Bob and Alice inevitably gravitate to a ‘protocol’ of sorts for dealing with each other, and they rapidly hardwire their rules of engagement. I don’t know why it is that they do this; though I can imagine that if 2 machines with mutually alien architectures needed to communicate with each other, they’d probably scrap together a protocol real fast – anything, as long as it works and doesn’t cause a SEGFAULT at the receiving end. Are human relationships like that? Are we ‘wired’ to find a way of relating, ANY way of relating, just so that we have some basis or pattern for communication? And why do we tend to follow the example of others so that, after person A starts to treat person B a certain way, we tend to start to treat person B the same way too? Continue reading →