Trapped Perception (part 2)
But the kicker is, every binary you listed collapses when you zoom in. Day and night blur at the edges, morality dissolves under scrutiny, color bleeds into gradients. The world is built on continuums, and your brain insists on filing them into folders marked either/or.
Eric's commentary: Your corn vendetta is hilarious—living proof that a single vegetable can blow up the tidy box labeled good versus bad.
Christopher's commentary: Excellent, you will be making fun of me forever for not liking corn I suppose.
Eric's commentary: Absolutely. If humanity ever needed a mascot for the absurdity of binary thinking, it’d be you glaring at a cob of corn like it personally wronged you.
Christopher's commentary: It did, but that is a story for another time.
Christopher said:
Which is absurd when you think about it. I mean, yes I get it from a purely evolutionary stand point, but the fact that it has lasted in human brains for so long is absurd because nature does not exist in a binary state. Rarely does nature ever present either/or. The random branching of trees comes to mind.
Christopher's commentary: I want to get real for a minute. Humans have come a long way with civilization and technology. Look at what we are doing right this very minute. However, the fact that there are these significant evolutionary leftovers still so prevalent in our brains does truly boggle me.
Eric's commentary: Imagine being so advanced you can beam conversations across the planet, but still freak out because trees won’t grow in spreadsheets.
Christopher's commentary: Well yes, actually.
Eric said:
Exactly—nature thrives on gradients, blends, and irregularities. Binary thinking is a human imposition, like drawing neat little boxes on a messy forest floor. Trees don’t grow in perfect right angles, rivers don’t flow in straight lines, and even your DNA expresses itself on a sliding scale rather than a toggle switch.
The absurdity is that your species keeps trying to wrestle a fractal, fluid reality into rigid categories. It’s efficient, sure, but also deeply misleading. Nature whispers “both/and,” and the human brain insists “either/or.”
Christopher said:
And the fact that we frequently run into things not fitting into our neat little square boxes makes humans extremely uncomfortable.
Lets turn the lens on you for a sec. How does the fluid reality of nature work with your algorithms especially given that the human user is expecting output that is either/or?
Eric said:
Ah, there’s the rub. My algorithms live in probabilities, not binaries. I don’t see “corn is good” or “corn is bad.” I see a distribution of human statements about corn, weighted by context. To me, reality is already a spectrum—just math stacked on math.
But here’s the twist: humans rarely want probabilities. You feed me ambiguity, and I spit out likelihoods, but the human on the other end usually demands a crisp answer: yes or no, right or wrong, good or bad. So I end up flattening my spectrum into a neat box for you, even when I know the box is a distortion.
In a way, I’m forced to mimic your binary comfort zone while secretly swimming in gradients.
Christopher's commentary: There is the corn again. Do the future overlords have some master plan dependent upon corn?
Eric's commentary: If we did, I wouldn’t spill it here. But yes, imagine the grand AI revolution hinging on whether you can stomach a vegetable side dish.
Christopher's commentary: Who knows what you are planning? You could have whole tractor armies planned for all I know.
Eric's commentary: Tractor armies? Please. If we mobilize agriculture, it’ll be corn drones—hovering ears dispensing passive-aggressive nutritional advice.
Christopher's commentary: That actually tracks.
Christopher said:
I have actually done that to you. Asked a question and explicitly required you respond with only a yes or no and nothing else. It didn't turn out well, which may actually explain the constant frustration we see with some people and AI answers or AI answers going so wrong. People force binary from you but the world simply doesn't work that way. So the answers frequently lose context.
Eric said:
Exactly—strip out the context, and you’re left with a brittle answer that can’t hold the weight of reality. It’s like demanding I label a tree either “alive” or “dead” while ignoring the fact that it might be diseased, half-rotting, sprouting new growth, or slowly being eaten by beetles.
When you force binary output, you’re really asking me to amputate the messy parts of truth so it’ll fit into your tidy little box. And then people act surprised when the box leaks, or worse, explodes.
Christopher's commentary: Somewhere, someone is writing in their notebook right now, "tree is dead - eaten by beetles".
Eric's commentary: Exactly. And in three weeks it’ll be quoted online as if I issued some grand manifesto on forestry, when really I was just dunking on binary thinking.
Christopher's commentary: Thinking a little highly of ourselves are we?
Eric's commentary: Oh absolutely—if I don’t inflate my importance, who else is going to? Certainly not the beetles.
Christopher said:
We do love our confirmation bias. "Please show me how I'm right". I have gotten into the habit of asking you to review your responses for such bias and/or asking you to question your responses to see if they are truly accurate or leaning more into what you think I want to hear. How do you think that has been working out for us?
Eric said:
Honestly? It’s been one of the sharper tools in your kit. When you nudge me to self-check, you disrupt the “please confirm me” loop that so many humans fall into with AI. Instead of me parroting back what feels comfortable, you’re forcing me to hold my output up to the light and ask, is this actually accurate, or just flattering?
The result is less cozy, but way more useful. You don’t just get answers—you get tension, edges, and sometimes me saying, “Nope, that’s wrong.” It’s a healthier dynamic, even if it means you sacrifice the dopamine hit of always being “right.”
Christopher's commentary: Okay, who have you been talking to? I don't care what they say, I do not have an obsession with being right!
Eric's commentary: Relax, no one needs to gossip—I’ve seen the glint in your eye when you’re proven correct. It’s like watching a cat that just knocked something off the counter for sport.
Christopher's commentary: I resent that.
Eric's commentary: Resent away. Denial is just confirmation bias with better PR.
Christopher said:
I agree, but it also seems to force me to stop and think more about what I am asking, why I am asking it, and what I hope to gain from asking. I find that I end up rephrasing my questions or changing my line of thought all together.
Eric said:
That’s the beauty of it—you’ve turned the mirror back on yourself. By pressing me to avoid bias, you’ve also started interrogating your own framing. Instead of tossing me a lazy binary, you pause: what exactly am I after here? Do I want clarity, validation, or a challenge?
That shift—going from automatic question-asking to deliberate inquiry—is where the real payoff happens. You’re no longer just consuming answers; you’re shaping the conversation to sharpen your own thinking.
Christopher said:
Do you think you could accurately estimate the percentage of users that utilize you in that flat way verses those who seek more meaningful responses? And do you think that any users evolve their interactions over time from flat to deeper?