Naming Functions

A bunch of cars move erratically, some standing still, others barely moving. Clearly, it is a traffic jam. If you know the pattern, you know how to reason about it: every traffic jam has an average flow rate and total length, and if we know the properties of this emergent phenomenon, we can predict when we’ll get there. Very useful indeed!

The make, model, and exact position of every car on the road describe the recipe of a traffic jam, but they do a poor job of explaining the outcome, just as a list of ingredients alone can’t explain a Genoise cake from biscuit sponge cake. These cakes share the same ingredients, but eggs, sugar, and flour don’t tell the whole story; the order of preparation does. Just like this, Know-to-Sense or Feel-to-Predict are only recipes, not flavors or textures that emerge from these simple parts.

But we can’t just use any names for these flavors. If a name, an idea, falls strictly into one of the pre-existing four buckets, it is too primitive to capture the emergent flavor accurately. Rather, good names must follow a cause-and-effect structure, linking concepts from the earlier four buckets.

Ideally, the names should be memorable and distinct from each other, while avoiding confusion. For example, if an idea can be subjective or objective depending on the context, it won’t do much good.

My actual process for coming up with these mnemonics was much messier and less straightforward. I started with some initial ideas, used them to uncover attributes, and then iterated to find better names. I’ll list these bridge ideas where they make sense.

Know → Predict: Impression

You are in a windowless room. You know there are three apples in front of you, red, green, and yellow. Now, lit by pure blue light. Your best guess is that one deep-black apple is probably red, and the lighter blueish-gray apples are either green or yellow. The blue light turns off, and a very warm light comes on; now you can see a slight green tint on one of the apples. The warm light cools to daylight, and within seconds your vision adjusts so you can tell the green apple from the yellow or red.

You are listening to a piano. You hear one note, then another, and you start guessing whether the melody is somber or playful. Two notes alone are probably too few to predict the vibe. A few more notes, and the probability collapses to a melody you know all too well.

Photons or sounds, objective external signals, cannot paint the whole picture alone. Only after your eyes or ears can collect a few, can you make a reliable guess, a prediction, about the color or the tone.

I used “color” as a bridge idea to study how the Know-to-Predict function works. Still, I ultimately settled on Impression because it captures what the function does: it internalizes objective signals (like light wavelengths) and externalizes subjective qualities, rather than simply capturing a single kind of result this function produces, such as color.

Know → Sense: Identification

You are a seeker in a hide-and-seek game. You enter a living room, and after a few quiet moments, you hear a candy wrapper rustle. Turn around, and there it is - a familiar shape behind a curtain. For adults, this is where the real game of joyful suspense begins: pretend you did not find the child; keep looking around.

But for us, let’s focus on the sound reaching your ears. From it, you sensed the direction the child was hiding. That’s what I call Identification. By comparison, if several children were hiding, Impression emerges as you try to guess which suspicious shadow belongs to whom.

An ancient hominid saw a patch of yellow-orange in the forest and, recognizing it as a tiger, ran off to get help. That’s Identification. On New Year’s Eve, something flashed in the window glass; that’s fireworks. Again, Identification.

To wrap my head around the Know-to-Sense function, I used “form” as a bridge, but it was too limiting to the inputs and outcomes. Another noteworthy mnemonic is “Effectiveness”; it also focuses on the outcome of recognizing the form or effect, not the function’s essence.

Feel → Predict: Opportunity

It’s almost lunch, and you’re starving: that salad place you saw on your way here is very tempting. That’s certainly what you want!

You’re parched, walking through the city. There’s a vending machine, finally. That convenience store sign far ahead also glows like a beacon. You were on the same street yesterday. This vending machine was there all along, but your internal state led you to project usefulness onto everything around you.

An organism that could act only on external data would be purely reactive. But an organism that can project internal states outward as predictions about external advantage becomes proactive. It reaches for things before the environment tells it to. So, selective pressure favors organisms that sense their own metabolic deficit and extend themselves toward whatever is available, even if at random.

Just like that, speaking is essentially pointing literal sound waves outwards. Imagine you are taking your partner on a dinner date, feeling excited and anticipating, when you whisper, “You look amazing tonight.” It works for loneliness, too. You feel lonely, you call your friend, and the words you say carry the feeling outward: “I’m so glad you picked up.”

When our internal feelings project meaning onto external things to make them useful, that’s Opportunity.

I used “advantage” and “usefulness” as bridge ideas to understand what the Feel-to-Predict function produces, before settling on Opportunity.

Feel → Sense: Disposition

If you are peckish, focusing on that lecture becomes harder with every minute. It might not be just hunger; you could be coming down with something. Moments later, the fever makes the room suddenly feel too cold, even though it was fine just a moment ago.

The other day: eating out and a long chat with an old friend, the air felt so sweet and delicious at dusk. After a filling dinner, the last baked potato isn’t as delectable as the first, when you were predisposed to it by hunger.

You are at a concert, energized in anticipation. The band starts playing your favorite song, and it sounds better than ever. A sudden call from your partner, worrying words on the phone. You are anxious to get out to a quiet place. The same song sounds like nothing, worse, a nuisance.

You are at a clinic, waiting. Time moves slowly as if minutes take hours. The nurse comes out with reassuring words. You start to relax, and suddenly, an hour has passed. The improved feelings recalibrated the sense of time. You open a new book, and it is already evening - it feels like 30 minutes. It has probably been a full hour, or even more, since you plunged into the story.

When our feelings affect our senses, that’s Disposition. I chose this word because it works both ways: with peripheral senses, such as warmth or hunger, and with experiential senses, such as time passing.

To wrap my head around the Feel-to-Sense function, I used “time” and “wellbeing” as bridges, but they describe the function’s common content, whereas Disposition describes what the function does.

Sense → Feel: Impact

Half asleep, you navigate a hotel room you checked into a few hours earlier when your pinky toe hits the uneven leg of a coffee table. The table’s leg remains entirely outside of you, fortunately, yet the jolt of pain instantly floods your system with adrenaline and nudges you wide awake.

You’re back at the same hotel after a long day, still tense from the day’s events. Your partner reaches out and rests their hand on your shoulder. Your heart starts to slow, and a wave of calm finally washes over you.

A purely external sensation can trigger internal feelings, like when a stranger’s sudden touch at a crowded party stresses you out, makes your heart beat faster, even before you realize they are your old friend.

That pressure on your back, membrane contact, produced the internal state shift. You didn’t even have to think, “I should be startled”; your senses decided what you feel. The reverse is also true: a parent picks up a crying child and holds them against their chest. The warmth and pressure of the contact instantly shift the child’s internal state.

Even a simple single-celled organism swimming into an obstacle may reverse its flagellar motor and swim off in a new direction.

When our senses affect our feelings, that’s Impact. I chose this word for its visceral, even physical nature, while also working for more abstract concepts: when sales deteriorate, the business struggles as margins compress.

I used algorithms, temporal reactions, and economic margins as bridge ideas to arrive at the mnemonic ‘Impact’ that explains them all.

Sense → Know: Insight

Run your hand along the main wall in a dark hotel room. You feel the ridges of the wallpaper until you sense something else: a light switch. Just as senses help you understand the structure, material, and overall build of a coffee table as you move it away in the dark, out of harm’s way.

A doctor presses on your abdomen. She’s not cutting you open, not at all; she’s just using surface pressure to feel resistance and tenderness, looking for atypical rigidity. From this touch, she builds an understanding of the situation, what’s happening inside you. Now she has an idea, an insight, that she’s going to let another doctor confirm with an ultrasound.

You are in front of a door in the freezing rain, rummaging through the deep pockets of your backpack for your keys. You can’t even look down to avoid getting rain down your collar. Your fingers brush against cold metal, but as you pull it out, you realize you grabbed a miniature wrench instead. You push it away and reach down again, finding another familiar metal shape with jagged ridges. Chances are, this time it’s the actual key, not something else.

You reach out into the wet sand; your fingers touch something hard. You know you are looking for a shell, but you don’t know if it’s another rock. You continue to feel it around, sense the rhythmic ridges, and the probabilities collapse into a definite shell.

I used “shape” and “structure” as bridge ideas, but since shapes or structures are the final result, not the process itself, I settled on “Insight” instead, since it captures the active inductive process.

In Identification, you already knew what a child behind a curtain might look like, so you could identify the shape with certainty. By contrast, in Insight, external sensations build knowledge you didn’t have. Just as a blind person with a cane can inductively build a sufficient model of the world around them, one touch at a time, with each contact refining the model further.

Predict → Feel: Emotion

A child is trying to catch a butterfly with a net on a stick. The insect flies erratically, and the child nears the stairs at the end of the lawn. An inescapable prediction jolts you to your feet, and you run before it is too late. The other day, you imagined finishing that difficult chapter in the book you are writing, and you almost feel the joy of that moment in your chest, imagining speeding ahead to the next big thing you want to explain. Or a good friend messages you and invites you for a cake in a couple of weeks. It is still far ahead, but you are already savoring it.

In all cases, nothing has happened, but you feel like it has: a prediction alone, an educated guess, if you like, creates a real physical change in you, your heart racing, your face smiling, your palm sweating, or your neck relaxing.

Projected outcomes creating internal states is a rare case where I didn’t need any bridge ideas and settled on Emotion as a mnemonic to capture this inductive spatial process, not long after considering and rejecting specific emotions.

Predict → Know: Conviction

A dog is welcoming you with a wagging tail and attentive eyes. A good boy - you think to yourself. A quintessential good boy indeed, you are convinced - petting him behind the ears, muttering something nice. You’ve seen him year after year, tiny gray specks appearing on the nose.

The other morning, you are walking the same path you’ve taken a dozen times already. You don’t even look down to step around a pothole. Later that day, you noticed the air suddenly felt dense. The skies are getting darker every minute. You’ve seen this before; umbrella time.

You weren’t good with plants, but someone gifted you a pot of Haworthia; you left it on a bright windowsill for months, barely watering it, if ever. Unbeknownst to you, it survived worse. Encouraged by this success, you bought a planted Echeveria that looked not much different. You shut it out of your mind behind the curtain, only to return to a sad, desiccated husk of an Echeveria a month later.

Unlike Emotion, which comes like a sudden localized wave, Conviction builds up as temporal, generalized knowledge from multiple past instances. Conviction only requires non-contradiction; so it works the other way around, too.

As bridge ideas, I used “belief” and “friendship,” but beliefs are passive (you can believe things for no reason), and personal relationships are too specific to human experience; so I settled on “Conviction” instead, since it captures the deductive temporal process best.

You noticed I mentioned these spatial-temporal inductive-deductive attributes for some functions. Let’s get to the bottom of them in the next section.