1. I happened upon a mental image I enjoy. Suppose you pick up a rock. You can see it, feel it, taste it if you want. You only have any direct sensory experience of its surface, though. Its interior is more mysterious. You can infer the properties of the rock’s interior in various ways, but you can’t feel them. If you wanted to know what the interior of the rock feels like, you might break it in half. In breaking a rock in half, we convert a bit of what used to be the rock’s interior into a new surface. It’s the inside of the rock if we relate it to the shape and size the rock used to have. It’s the surface in the context of the rocks as they are.

2. An episode of Sam Harris’s podcast with Andrew Sullivan includes some discussion of Trump that I find interesting. At one point, Sam says something along the lines of, “You don’t get the sense that he has any interiority.” Although I agree with Sam entirely on this, I think most people don’t share this view of Trump. We rely heavily on an intuitive theory of mind in social situations. We try to understand what the people around us are thinking and feeling, what they want, what would motivate them to take one or another action. Our intuitive theory of mind simply does not work with Trump.

With enough practice, we can become good enough at a skill—playing the flute, for instance—that we don’t have to think about the technique any more. The flute doesn’t feel like an object you’re trying to manipulate, but like an extension of yourself, a way of expressing yourself that is as natural as speaking. For most skills, it is very difficult for us to reach this point, and most of us never do. Personally, I never got beyond the “can make the right notes, but slowly and with effort” stage with the flute. Even those who reach that level of mastery, though, can still see the flute, can still observe and understand the technique. We reach only the point at which the technique and the instrument can be transparent some of the time, never a point at which they are transparent all of the time. A lot of our mental machinery is transparent all of the time. The visual blind spots, for instance, are right there in our visual field all the time, but there are little bits of mental machinery in our visual processing systems that let us see the world instead of seeing the errors and omissions in our visual field. We don’t have any conscious awareness of that mental machinery and we can’t tinker with it in any useful way. I think that for most people, intuitive theory of mind is transparent most or all of the time. Not as inaccessible as visual processing, but towards that end of the spectrum. People who are less comfortable in social situations, like me, may be more like a good flautist. Sometimes that part of social cognition is working smoothly and transparently, sometimes it’s a clumsy tool in front of us that we’re trying to manipulate. Or more like straining to see through cheese cloth than like looking through a window. This is a disadvantage most of the time, but may be an advantage with someone like Trump. Trump can manipulate people in large part because people don’t know how to make heads or tails of a social interaction in which the usual theory of mind simply does not work.

For instance, Trump lies even when it is blindingly obvious that he is lying. The rest of us need a fig leaf of some kind to let us maintain a pretense of honesty. Trump does not. That’s really disorienting, so we try to figure out what convoluted scenario would lead someone like us to behave like that. However, he is not like us. If there’s any understanding of his inner life that we can gain, it’s going to require some new tools. Luckily, trying to understand what is going on in Trump’s head is rapidly becoming less relevant. I’m sure he won’t be the last genuinely “other” person we interact with, though.