Steve Smith wrote at 08/17/2013 04:40 PM:
I would say I "trust" people more who I believe to have an empathic response to me, and in general I believe that this is a resonant phenomena, that those whom I am empathetic with, are also more empathetic with me, etc. So a strong empathetic bond with someone leads me to "trust" them in a different way than I trust Rush Limbaugh (or Roger Penrose). My wife, my children, even Steve Guerin (when we are drinking together anyway).
Very interesting. You're talking about the _tightness_ of a coupling, I think. Empathy is already a great example of circular reasoning because it consists of you thinking about some thing/person as if you were that thing/person. That opens the door to an infinite regress (you thinking about you thinking about you thinking about ...). But you've added yet another layer of circularity on top of it: you thinking about another as if you were them, thinking about you as if they were you. In the end, that means you're talking about coupling between two objects, rather than a simple iteration within an object. And it's further, practically, reinforced by your mention of sensing the bond with people you have face to face, deeply intimate, or psychoactively induced/enhanced relationships. All three of those (f2f, intimacy, and psychoactive adjuncts) are classically effective methods for building trust. I would maintain, however, ... just to be combative I suppose, that such tight circularity can lead to just as much _distrust_ as it does trust. In particular, systems consisting of lots of feedback (and feedforward) loops would be more likely to exhibit unpredictable transitions from one attractor basin to another. You could quickly go from feeling trusting toward a person/thing to feeling betrayed by that person/thing. (This is why I love my Buell... I will never "trust" the thing to carry me safely across, say, Death Valley. And that's because I trust it to be untrustworthy. ;-) I suppose you might say that betrayal is an _acute_ form of distrust. So, perhaps it's reasonable to say that the tight circularity just changes the character of the trust, from chronic (loose coupling) to acute (tight coupling). -- ⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella I had my arm around a sundial
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