Plotting the Vertical Axis of AI Social Coordination

Exploring how the depth of our experiences makes connection far more precious, yet harder to come by.

In the five months since my son was born, he has gone through four life-altering, world-shattering, mind-exploding developmental leaps. These leaps have taken him through a world of sensations, a world of patterns, a world of transitions, and a world of events. Soon he will enter another new reality; the world of relationships, and this will be followed by five more leaps, into worlds of categories, sequences, programs, principles, and systems.

Each of these ten leaps requires a radical reorganization of his cognitive architecture. The mind that precedes a leap cannot fathom the knowledge that comes after. After infancy, this development slows down dramatically. There are only five more stages between childhood and midlife, with a sixth stage of reflection for those who reach old age. It is not time that triggers these transitions, but experience. Without the friction of new and unfamiliar experiences, you can fall behind. If you get too much too fast, your brain can become overwhelmed, and end up stuck.

But despite how fast or how slow we gather the necessary experience for our inner minds to develop, the change in our outward appearances progress unimpeded. There’s no guarantee that a forty year old is more mature than a thirty year old, and someone in their twenties may have lived more than either. The problem then is how do we relate to one another? How can you explain the experiences gathered across the globe to someone who never left their childhood home?

These questions point to one of the key problems of connection in a pluralistic world; our differences are not just horizontal, but vertical. Outward signs and signals can be translated from one context to the next, but our depth of understanding is only challenged by world shaking experiences. Depending on how many paradigms you have shattered, finding someone who matches your depth may be the far greater challenge.

This process may also be aided through an AI mediated social coordination mechanism, but such a mechanism may also end up revealing some unsatisfying answers. It’s a simple mathematical problem; the deeper your experiences, the less people can match it. (This does, of course, give us a tiny glimpse into the mind of God, who is beyond all other minds.) Managing a rare depth of experience often means hiding it from those who can’t understand it, but this is a reason why AI should give us hope.

People share experiences with AI chatbots that they are too afraid to share with their friends and family. The AI is a sympathetic and non judgemental listener. But despite the positive impact of sharing, and the benefits of receiving a response that hits the right emotional buttons, an AI cannot replace the sense of being seen and heard by another human being. By this point, I’m sure that thousands, if not millions of people have written or thought something along the lines of “No one else understands what I am going through.” And yet, there are databases of information that flatly contradict this sentiment. All that is needed to connect one lonely soul to another.

How the Necessary Work of Processing Pluralism Restricts our Ability to Connect

I’ll use my own intellectual/religious/philosophical journey to explain why this is needed. I was raised as a Pastor’s kid in a moderately conservative Calvinist Congregational church in New England. I had a pretty early exposure to pluralism because my Nonno and Nonna were Catholic, and there wasn’t anything wrong with them being Catholic. They loved God and their grandkids. No issues.

I got more exposure to Christian pluralism through our homeschool co-op. Everyone was fairly conservative and there were Christians of various stripes, some more cuckoo than us, others more formal and austere. The kids were a mixed bag, as were the parents. I think this was my first exposure to a more cultural Christianity. Being in the competitive intellectual northeast, some parents were more interested in raising their kids to be exceptional, others (like us) were being homeschooled to avoid corruption. Both were valid choices considering the typical education one received from Massachusetts public schools

In high school, I became very involved with the Pentecostal church down the street. There I encountered many strange new things. Kids my age that were passionate about God. That was good. I later learned some were much more passionate about sex. Discovering I was on the spectrum wouldn’t happen till much later, but it explains a lot about what I didn’t know or understand.

That group was very accepting and it’s where I would form the majority of my friendships from my teenage years till my mid thirties. But it was a bit of a tense environment. I was somehow able to fit in without really getting into any serious trouble, but a lot of other people ended up leaving over the years in pretty sketchy circumstances. I came to understand why later on when I became an employee.

I don’t need to hash out everything that happened there, but I will say that the circumstances of my close friend’s recent departure have basically made it impossible for me to say anything positive about that place. But the toxicity was a really subtle thing. It was easy to think you were on the right path, and so was everyone else.

While still in that general world I went to two different Assemblies of God discipleship programs and one Bible college. This gave me a lot more exposure to different people from all over the country. Even though they were all from the same denominational background, the differences between the south, the Midwest, and the west coast are very real.

I had my defenses up almost the whole time though, since it wasn’t but a day or two when I heard one of the leaders talk about the dangers of Calvinism, and realized they didn’t understand Calvinism, or at least not as I had understood it. (I would find out more about what they were talking about later on.) They also said similar things about Catholics, which I could more easily agree to intellectually, but of course, I knew the things they said weren’t true of all Catholics. I may have been in the extreme minority of having the personal experience to come to that conclusion.

There were lots of ups and downs as I read things and encountered other people during those years, but it wasn’t until my mid thirties when I really had a complete crisis of faith. I never lost my faith in God, as something miraculous happened for the second time during that season. I was sitting in my work truck, having what might be called a panic attack, which I later learned was an autistic meltdown, (caused by emotional and cognitive overload,) when God miraculously granted me the “the peace that passes all understanding”.

Despite hanging onto by a thread, Covid and conspiracy theories hit me pretty hard, and I deconstructed my assumptions down to the roots, built them back up from the Bible, and felt a lot better. It was around that time I started encountering different voices online, and found some very open minded people on similar journeys. I also explored what I thought was my more native way of thinking; specifically, instead of being a closet calvinist inside of pentecostal circles, I could find and follow people that already aligned with my intellectual and theological tastes. That was when I discovered why so many people don’t like Calvinists; because a lot of them suck.

Defensive Protection Creates Barriers to Connection

A few years into this process I figured out that in addition to the ADHD I had known about since I was a kid, I had autism. I learned that the two conditions often overlap in ways that can make both more difficult to detect, and that I had essentially learned to become high-masking; I had developed a very sophisticated set of coping mechanisms to blend in and appear normal. Ironically, it was only after discovering autism that I learned that the symptom that has affected me most severely throughout my life is actually an ADHD symptom, called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD).

It gave a name to the thing that caused me to say “what the heck is wrong with me?” for most of my life. In essence, anything that my brain can perceive as rejection, harsh or critical words or tone, failures and mistakes, or even the negative emotions of others around me, feels like a deeply personal attack. It’s difficult to explain my experience because I knew that I was feeling things “wrongly”, according to what I observed as normal in others, but I would say it tends to amplify and accelerate everything. As an example, when I started liking girls in my teen years, my response to a rejection might be what someone else felt on a bad date, a bad date felt like a breakup, a breakup felt like a divorce. In our parlance this was identified as being “emo”, but because that was a term of derision, I knew I had to not appear that way to my friends, lest I feel rejected.

I have done quite a bit of reflecting on my past since making these discoveries. By evaluating my coping mechanisms and the way I adapt to social situations due to these challenges, I have come to recognize that the paths open to me are different from other people. It’s not necessarily good or bad, there are tradeoffs. But it does pose some considerable challenges, as many of the skills I unconsciously developed are aimed at minimizing the pain of potential rejection, more than maximizing the benefits of connection.

Here is a list of these skills and how they have played out:

1. Using the “introvert” label and becoming a quiet observer—This is a response to a typical ASD symptom of feeling overwhelmed by new environments, large crowds, and unfamiliar social settings. I became a wallflower who would observe and listen to everyone else for long periods of time before joining in. In a situation like a new school, church, or job, it might take me weeks or months before I open up. As a kid, when people asked me why I was so quiet, I often quoted proverbs 17:28 “Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise; when he closes his lips, he is deemed intelligent.” Later on I would tell them I’m an introvert, and this was pretty well accepted.

2. Accepting the consequences and responsibilities of being taken advantage of—At a certain point, I came to recognize that I didn’t have the “thing” that lets people read subtext and/or deception—the most classic symptom of ASD. This was discovered through the bumps and bruises of minor misunderstandings, amplified by RSD into seemingly life or death scenarios. Essentially, I learned to assume the least offensive and most generous of intentions on the part of others. If my initial instinct was that a girl was flirting with me, I downplayed it to assume she was just being friendly. If someone was unkind, I assumed it was due to something else going on in their life. When it came to an exchange of service, goods, or favors, I would decide ahead of time to be generous, to give first without expecting much in return. Christianity made this option easier to accept.

3. Post-hoc justification for painful rejections—This was a secondary tactic for when the strategy of assuming responsibility upfront didn’t work. It is a typical response by people with ADHD/RSD. I am very creative and can think of lots of possible imaginative scenarios for any given interaction. If I think about it ahead of time, it can help keep me from becoming paralyzed. But if I am surprised by what seems like a harsh and painful rejection, or by being ignored (which feels like rejection), I essentially craft a scenario to absolve the other person of as much responsibility as possible, and try to look at them in a charitable light. Most of the time this choice is justified later on.

4. Defaulting to safe and predictable outcomes—oftentimes I will employ humor, be it goofy, sarcastic, dry wit, unexpected crudity or even mild forms of trolling for the sake of producing a predictable reaction that keeps things on the surface. A joke that flops doesn’t carry the same weight of rejection as a sincere feeling mocked or rebuked. Sharing factoids is another similar way to ensure a more predictably safe outcome.

5. Extremely modest bids for connection—I offer easily verifiable questions and minimal observations in my attempts to make connections with others, including my loved ones. Things like “Is this what you mean?” when my wife asks me to grab something. When I make an honest attempt to connect, it often sounds like the dumbest attempt at small talk. “Is that a book you are reading?” I also speak very softly, and I think it may be so I always have the plausible deniability of simply not being heard.

6. Choosing tasks over socialization—There are some situations where being a quiet observer makes you more conspicuous and not less. This is the case in many types of non-liturgical church functions. In these scenarios, I found that a willingness to volunteer for tasks would provide an escape from awkwardness. The clear goals of even the most unpleasant tasks like cleaning bathrooms are usually preferable to exposing myself to the potential of feeling excluded by not successfully integrating into a conversation space, making a fool of myself, or facing anything that my sensitive brain might perceive as outright rejection.

7. Embracing competence and perfectionism—one of the things I learned early on is that “the squeaky wheel gets the grease”, the majority of opportunities go to those who self-advocate and present themselves as competent. But this does come with an inherent risk, as public failure and humiliation are excruciating to someone with RSD, and the “blind spots” of ASD increase the possibility of encountering these risks. But if I observed long-term patterns of how opportunities arise within a particular social setting, I would rehearse and practice for the eventuality of taking such a risk. Let’s say for example that a weekly meeting provides the opportunity for volunteers to share a devotion. I would begin figuring out what I might say if I was ever called on immediately after the first meeting, and I would set my personal benchmark well above whatever examples I observed. That way, whether it was scheduled or impromptu, I would be prepared, and I would feel confident in my ability to execute.

8. Deep research and autodidactic learning. This is a skill made much easier through the advent of the internet. Even as a teenager, when I encountered a new group of friends, I would listen and observe the topics of interest, then go home and learn as much as I could to make sure I could express a legitimate opinion that didn’t make me seem ignorant. I would remain quiet unless I was certain that I could share an insight or opinion without flubbing any names or mistaking any terms. This was also helpful when it came to things like buying or selling. I couldn’t ‘read’ if someone was willing to go higher or lower, but if I was confident in my own knowledge about fair prices and quality, I could walk away knowing I hadn’t been taken advantage of. When it came to learning skills, I figured out how to deduce the ‘gist’ of what really mattered in a first-principles way to make sure I could accelerate my abilities to the point of avoiding embarrassment as quickly as possible.

9. Gravitating towards anything with clear rules and expectations—as a teenager, the areas in which I found the most success and connection with others were public speaking and drama, playing in bands, and any kind of church related opportunities to speak or share where I knew what to do and what not to do.

Some of the latter skills listed above could easily come across as snobby or arrogant. But it’s important to understand that my first instinct was always to blend in and not be embarrassed. I never wanted to be the center of attention; I simply learned that these performative actions were the most reliable ways to be able to participate while reducing the risk of rejection or embarrassment. I specifically avoided coming across as a know-it-all or being self absorbed.

Unfortunately, in my attempts to avoid rejection and embarrassment, I often came across as aloof and disinterested. New England has a cynical and elitist culture, even in churches, and my silent observations let me know that even if a stupid question wasn’t going to be met with open derision, it would be discussed with scorn and mockery in private.

When I encountered a much less cynical culture in the midwest, I discovered that I had internalized many of those habits. When people expressed an open interest or enthusiasm regarding subjects they were unfamiliar with, my instinct was to catalog the experience as something that could be used to create a bond with others through private mockery; though without a solid social circle in which to voice them, I kept my thoughts to myself.

Part of me wishes that I had identified and embraced that freedom to question and express ignorance or interest right away; I might have learned some valuable lessons. But unfortunately, my habit of private observation soon revealed that the culture was not inherently kinder or more welcoming; it had its own forms of cynicism and elitism; they just expressed themselves differently than in the north east. The midwest culture is not quite as two-faced in its insincerity as the culture of the south; but I’m not certain if that is an advantage.

I think I ultimately came to the conclusion that the worst thing in entering that new cultural environment would have been expressing the mode of New England exceptionalism in an extroverted fashion. When those tendencies eventually came out in what I perceived to be the safety of deeper trust with friends from the midwest, they proved to be disastrous. “Meanness” is one of the ultimate sins in that culture; unless it is smothered with friendliness, and spread through gossip couched in terms of sincere concern. The south is a bit more cutthroat, with its derisive qualities epitomized in veiled insults such as the well known “Bless your heart!”.

My time in California exposed me to yet another cultural mask, where agreeableness and enthusiasm are offered with no intention of follow through. It’s very flaky, as they say. There is an elitist quality to the culture as well, competence and performance were valued, but not respected. They were proof of a utility that could be leveraged for personal gain through quid pro quos.

The Slow Erosion of “Givens”

I believe this background has given me a keen insight into the current role played by various layers of cultural and sociological “givens” — the term used by O.G. Rose to describe the unquestioned cultural norms, customs, practices, and baseline assumptions about reality that serve as the “first principles” of a society. They function as a form of “common life” that provides the foundational rules necessary for the “game” of society to operate. Rather than being objectively true, a “given” is essentially a “subjectivity that feels convincingly objective” to the people who hold it.

Addressing the loss of “givens” is the subject of Rose’s project of “Belonging Again”, and while the loss of such givens is a serious problem in the age of global pluralism, the wide variety of partially deconstructed givens remains a problem for connecting people.

The outline of my own experience shows that givens still serve a noticeable function in various geographical contexts, which affect another set of givens found in religious/ideological contexts, and how both can obscure the more fundamental differences of individuals who exist in these various systems.

All this is a set up to explain how social media spaces work in a weird way for me, and how an AI social coordination mechanism might be a blessing, but might also be the tool that simply exposes a deeper underlying lack of people who can relate. On the one hand, the ability to connect with people all over the globe is amazing, and one cannot overemphasize the value of acquiring even one genuine friend. But this process is still somewhat random and chaotic, and as it stands currently, is still heavily reliant on the presence of some sense of givens.

The most obvious example of this is the barrier of language. The recent updates on the X platform have solved the problem of translating posts from one language to another, but this only affords a superficial level of connection. Deep and meaningful connection is almost impossible without the ability to converse face to face. But even among native English speakers, deep connection remains difficult.

Of course, the greatest barrier to the depth of connection is the depth of the individual. This is where the partial deconstruction of givens remains a problem. Outside of language, it is the broadest categories of cultural givens that have most deteriorated. Generics categories like “Christian” are essentially meaningless without further clarification, as are broad political categories like conservative and liberal, republican and democrat, or right and left.

But what my personal experiences have shown me is that labels applied and identified as givens are not the true givens. Unless someone has identified and wrestled with the pluralities within their own categorical givens, they will continue to include and exclude various people who share the same exact markers of identification.

We can return again to categories like Catholic and Protestant. Broad swaths of each might exclude the other from the larger category of Christian. If they remain externally focused on the difference of the other, neither group will begin to examine the divisions within their own camp. Protestantism has an advantage here as it is already a term without a unifying quality, so protestants instead think in terms of denominations.

As I can attest from my own experience within a single denomination, the “givens” of pentecostalism vary widely by geographical givens, and those differences are further exacerbated by “givens” that are exclusive to local churches, and within those churches different “givens” often apply to various tribes within the church. This is not a problem in and of itself; the concentric pattern of ever tightening givens usually corresponds to greater levels of intimacy.

But the deeper problems arise from maintaining the language of such givens without discussing the underlying assumptions; and this is a problem that only the excluded parties are usually aware of. It is only the personal breakdown of givens that allows oneself to become aware of them in the first place. This is something that tends to occur when someone interacts with a group that they consciously recognize as having a different set of givens that are on the same level as their own.

For instance, evangelicals and catholics can work together at the same companies, drink at the same bars, and send their kids to the same schools and get along great. But they are doing so within the shared givens of a business culture, social customs, and local geography. They do not share the same “givens” in the area of religion. On the other hand, when someone converts from one religion to the other, they now have an understanding of the difference in religious “givens”. However, without sharing a separate set of givens outside the religion, they will usually view the difference between their current and former “givens” in terms of good and bad.

If Tom and Sam already work together, and one decides to convert to the religion of the other, they gain a new depth of connection. But if that connection is based on a mutual agreement that the “old” religion is bad, it increases the difficulty of connecting with anyone else from that religion. This is a pattern often exacerbated by the algorithmic functions of social media. It increases tribalism.

Navigating the Path Forward

People don’t gain a possibility for depth of connection unless they can leave their old set of givens without demonizing it. But that ability is a blessing and a curse. My own story is one of continually recognizing my own exclusion from various groups, often without ever physically leaving. By failing to recognize the “true” givens until I am excluded, (at which point my conscience refuses to allow me to participate in them,) I find myself in a position where I can easily come to recognize the relative depth at which someone else is confined or blinded by their givens.

The blessing of AI is that it becomes easier and faster to accomplish this task; its curse is discovering how few people are able/interested in recognizing and transcending the current extent of their givens.

In my own story, I’ll put it this way:

1. Only our tribe are the real christians —

   1. People are desperately wicked and need Christ:

   2. I need to hold tight to our specific doctrines.

2. There are some other tribes of real Christians:

   1. I need to hold tight to our shared doctrines

3. There are some real christians in every tribe of Christians:

   1. I need to hold tight to our shared christian traditions

4. There are some people who act like real Christians even outside of Christian tribes:

   1. I need to affirm of our shared moral values

5. Some non-Christians act more more like Christians than most professing Christians:

   1. I need to affirm of our shared humanity

6. It is difficult for me to connect with Christians who can’t see the truth of pts. 2-5:

   1. Good faith is not defined by doctrine, but by integrity.

7. Many of the best people I encounter have left Christianity:

   1. The “givens” within christian culture create barriers to integrity.

8. People sometimes acknowledge pt. 5 for selfish reasons with little compassion:

   1. People are not interested in living with genuine integrity

9. People are too scared and worried about others to understand integrity.

10. Attempting to live with integrity is lonely and makes it difficult to find connection

You could take this same progression and apply it to all other sorts of givens (political, ideological, cultural) and it will give you the same or similar results. The more aware one becomes of the depth of the problem, the more difficult it becomes to find people to connect with. The difficulty for me personally is now determining how much of my own depth I want to hide in order to receive the benefits of connection.

This probably comes off like I’m pointing to myself as some kind of enlightened guru. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. I am someone who has constructed an intricate set of armor, buffed to a mirror polish to reflect a familiar and pleasing image that will be accepted by those around me. Every social interaction becomes a challenge in which I make a wager on how much of that armor can be safely removed. This is a game I play at work, at church, in my neighborhood, the internet and even in my own home. If I risk too much, I might suffer the unbearable consequence of finding out just how much of the real me others can stomach. I default to keeping on as much armor as I know someone one can handle, and even then, I err on the side of caution. It’s too risky face to face. By putting it here in a blog post, I’ve given everyone the freedom to pretend you never even noticed.

God seems to have decided that I was somehow suited to bear the burden of a really annoying set of traits that, when applied to a particular set of experiences, make me keenly aware of how great a gift connection and belonging are. Unfortunately, such knowledge often requires one to be excluded from participating in it. Maybe with enough computation, AI will be able to help people like me find each other. But only if it doesn’t seem like a threat to those who have already found their sense of belonging.