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Touching story, and this jumped out:

 

Tracking someone's mental state is a very complex process, requiring predictions and picking up subtle real-time information to support or correct those predictions. It is much easier to know your preferences, and even absent many other capacities, it is possible to formulate manipulative moves to try to get what you want  

 

Personal update from me: the stage-play has finished, which means a vacuum of meaning and social life for a while, but I think I got through the worst of it yesterday. This quote I found nailed me to the floor:

Avoidant individuals had to adapt to caregivers who were non-reciprocal, dismissive or derogatory...As children they learned to be both self-soothing and self-stimulating, a pattern which makes adult couple relationships difficult.

 

A couple of other things I wanted to share:

 

Here is a neat primer on paradigmatic causality written by a real live Platonist. Via this podcast.

 

A handy phrase: "Double H effect", or "double hermeneutic" which is about how "The findings of the social sciences very often enter constitutively into the world they describe."(Giddens). Found via this excellent long interview with the author of:

We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power.

This is pretty much why I veer away from metaphors reinforcing the picture of humans as homunculi sitting at consoles.

I'm waiting for the book Homo Ludens to arrive - that seems like a better picture. I haven't settled on a blog title yet. I thought of "Play Plays", but maybe that doesn't quite scan. It would be a reference to Hopkins' "Christ plays in ten thousand places", but with play itself as the agent rather than Christ.