Faceting Reality
I’ve been trying to find a word to describe this pattern I’ve picked up on that’s been helping me understand the world. I’ve tried different ones — context-switching, debugging, etc — but they’re all either too clunky or inaccurate. I’ve settled on faceting but… if anyone knows of a better word, do let me know!
So… what is faceting, as I’m using it? Let me explain on an abstract level, and then give some specific examples. Say you’re trying to understand a particular class of things. You start off by looking at one member of the class. That’s not very useful, because you don’t know which features are inherent to the class, and which ones are specific to the member you happen to be looking at. Now let’s say you look at two members of a class. Already, this is much more handy, since you start picking up on the differences between the two.
Say that you’re looking at a blue Corvette, and this is the only car you’ve ever seen in your life:
Are all cars blue? Do they all have four wheels? Two doors? A steering wheel? There’s no way to tell.
Now let’s say you have two cars — the same blue Corvette, and a red Hummer:
Now you start getting a much better sense of this class of things called car. Yes, most of them have four wheels. All have a steering wheel (at least, at the time of writing), yet not all cars are the same color, and not all have two doors (we can then start subdividing into different classes of cars, but that’s tangential to this point).
The more members of a class you look at, the better you can define said class. In a sense, a class is defined by the commonalities of its members.
Hence, faceting is the act of looking at different facets of a class in order to figure out the underlying structure. It’s like looking at different facets of a gemstone. If you only have one perspective, it can be difficult to figure out what the shape actually is!
Let’s explore some other examples.
Travel
If you’ve lived in one country your whole live and haven’t traveled to others, you’ll have a hard time understanding countries.
There are these little things that change depending where you go — China (Wuhan, at least) has almost no sitting toilets, only squatting ones. Nobody uses cards to pay for things. Far more mopeds and bikes. Karaoke is a favorite pastime. Nobody tips. The city center is far less defined — there’s no such thing as downtown. Google services don’t exist. Journalists have to be accredited.
In Ufa, all traffic lights are black, not yellow as they are in Calgary. The curbs are higher. Many more flowers line the curbs. Much more marble on the buildings.
They sell nitrous at the bars in Vietnam.
Philosophy
Tim Urban came up with this idea of intellectual townies:
An intellectual townie has had exposure to only one philosophy or belief system, and therefore has nothing to say about belief systems as a class.
Industries and Scientific Fields
When you overspecialize, you can’t pull from other fields as effectively. So in a sense, overspecialization handicaps your understanding of the world.
The more different fields you look at, that more you begin to understand the structure underneath.
Perhaps this is the advantage of polymaths — your Erwin Schrödingers, Bucky Fullers and Kanye Wests. Faceting simplifies your model of the world by collapsing everything into a single, higher-level framework. Maybe everything in the world is exactly the same after all.
Psychedelics
Similarly, psychedelics let you access different states of consciousness. As a result, you gain a more intuitive feel for consciousness itself. It turns out, for example, that you can turn off your depth perception. You can turn off your sense of self. You can mess with your contrast and brightness settings. And all of those are valid conscious experiences. As I talked about in the last post, it makes me wonder what kind of realities other creatures perceive. They might be wildly different from what we can imagine. Yet if you lived your whole life only experiencing default human consciousness, it’d be much harder, if not impossible, to gain an intuitive sense of the thing.
Lastly, this very post is a product of faceting. I’ve been thinking about all of these different examples for months, trying to narrow in on a general definition of this specific class of phenomena. And I think I just did. Cool how that works out!
Note: The term faceting is used quite differently in geometry, and slightly differently in crystallography — it refers to creating facets, not analyzing them.
If you liked this post, feel free to share it with your friends! If you have any feedback or if I got anything wrong, please let me know!
This was fantastic and glad I can finally put a name to something I've been doing constantly all my life. My question is can you meta-facet? 🤣