Transmentality

An act/endeavor/process/etc is transmental if it involves violating/altering/infringing on the mental boundary of a mind. A transmental activity be consensual or non-consensual or in-between-ish or indeterminate in its consensuality. It can involve blunt violance but also surgical precision.

What constitutes a mind's boundary? A mind doesn't have a boundary in the usual physical-ish sense of the word "boundary". However, a mind has a kind of boundary that separates it from other minds, an inter-mental interface. Any mind's mental elements can differ in their context-dependent public/private (~exposed/non-exposed) status, i.e. whether they are included in the interface or excluded from it, respectively.¹ The (locally) public elements are there for another mind(-like entity), available for potential interaction.

Transmentality involves interacting more directly with elements that normally (in this class of contexts, for this pair of minds, etc) would be considered private.

One can think about this in terms of a (possibly implicitly assumed) pact/contract/promise that the interaction is going to adhere to some rules, procedures, proceed only via/on a specified, agreed-upon interface, perhaps only via messages that conform to some particular specification.

Naturally, this means that whether an act is considered transmental depends on the contract between the minds engaged in an interaction. That contract can change over time or be highly context-dependent. It can also be ambiguous, in which case it might happen that what one mind judges to be transmental is not transmental according to the other mind, even if they have propositionally agreed on the contract.

Having said all that, there still might be a stable, natural-abstraction-like, common core of contracts between minds whose interactions fall within some specific class in that it's convergent for such-and-such elements to be public/private in such-and-such situations.

Transmentality can occur between two minds, more than two minds, or between a mind and itself (e.g. if a mind starts reflecting on itself in a radically novel way, uncovering something deeply hidden (perhaps hidden for a good reason)). Transmentality can also occur between different parts of one mind (in which case we might call such an act "trans-sub-mental").

Importantly, a mental boundary violation can be transmental even if it is consensual. Asking an unusually private question doesn't mean that this kind of question and similar questions are now no longer private. Allowing/[consenting to] deviating from a script is not equivalent to modifying the script or nullifying the script in general. However, arguably, if what was initially a consensual transmental act were to happen repeatedly, it would be equivalent to an implicit change of the contract.

Some examples of transmental situations:

• Alice is interrogating Bob's reasons for doing what he has just done, elaborating on possible hypotheses for his actions.
  • Alice and Bob are behaving like scientists studying Bob's behavior (consensual).
  • Bob is being held captive by Alice, reluctant to confirm, deny, or otherwise disclose any information (non-consensual).
• Joe is asking Dave questions about his motives and evaluative stances and pointing out his inconsistency, asking whether he agrees with some straightforward implications of what he has said.
• Keepers in dath ilan. This is an example of (mostly?²) consensual transmentality, in which one agent deliberately seeks help of another agent who is trained specifically for (among other things) thinking optimally, including thinking optimally about how to help other agents be better agents.
  • On the other hand, it's somewhat more ambiguous because whether this is truly transmental depends on whether we are using the reference class of interactions with humans in general (in which case it is transmental) or interactions with Keepers for the purpose of helping the visitor cohere better (in which case it is not transmental).

Transmentality is risky because it usually involves doing things that are less practiced and therefore more likely to be executed unskillfully/uncompetently. Combined with the mental elements being touched on being private for some probably reasonable reasons, this might cause doing some damage to the mind. Moreover, an active participant can end up (possibly unknowingly) committing doxastic violence (forcing the other mind to believe something or state that they believe something) or axiological violence (forcing the other mind to change their axiology).

Here are some guidelines/principles that seem good to follow when engaging in a transmental activity.

• Acknowledge the transmental nature of the activity.
• Do not proceed with the transmental activity without informed consent.
• Aim to establish a local semi-contract: We are going to proceed with transmentality roughly in this way, roughly up to this point, but no further.
• Be particularly cautious and sensitive to signals of having crossed a boundary, especially if you expect the other party to be reluctant to explicitly declare that a boundary has been crossed (for whatever reason).

Much of this is more tricky and difficult when children are involved who cannot fully comprehend what's going. However, I still think that it should be possible to move more in the direction of explicit semi-contracts, caution, etc.