intentions vs rules

ID: bdcdc268-16f9-4cd8-b01f-e21af66ec0b4
MTIME: [2024-12-25 Wed 16:06]

Intentions and rules are both features of the imagined world that act upon the real world - i.e. heterotopias - but both do so differently.

An intention is an action together with a description of an action or a potential action. the thinking is that actions that you take "on purpose" are constructed as follows: you take your image of the world as it appears to be now, spin up a world with some differences, search for actions that make paths from one to the other, and execute one of those. An account of the differences between those worlds therefore relates to, you could say describes, the action - and that relationship is bidirectional: people observing your course of action can deduce things about the imagined world-difference that caused you to select that course of action. They can also deduce that you care about that difference, since it moved you to act. The scope of this deduction, when you do it in a principled way, is quite limited, because people don't succeed at thing with long time horizons very often. the further out you get and the more actions you consider, the fuzzier the overall picture. You can't even trust people to self-report thier desires or imaginations in a way that extends this very far. But you can make credible claims about the imaginary space that proximally causes action, and as humans making sense of each other out loud, we tend to think of this type of claim as describing the action - somehow directly absorbing the consequences of the action into the action itself, for e.g. "pumping water" instead of "moving one's hand up and down" or "having an argument" instead of "saying words out loud in a raised voice". And when something goes wrong in this process, like a misalignment between the imagined target world and the actual consequences, we point to the delta as the difference between intention and effect.

A rule is a very different type of imaginary machine.