To truly understand another mind, you have to model it — build a simulation of their perspective that runs on your own cognitive substrate. You ask “what would they think, want, feel?” and to answer, you have to partially become them.

This isn’t cold calculation. It’s incorporation. They exist inside you now.

The Core Insight: Modeling as Intimacy

The research supports this:

  • Simulation Theory (Goldman) — We understand others by literally running their mental states on our own machinery
  • Embodied Simulation (Gallese) — Modeling automatically activates our own motor and affective systems
  • Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis (Batson) — Decades of evidence that perspective-taking → empathic concern → genuine care

The implication: If modeling someone thoroughly means holding them inside yourself, care may be an automatic byproduct of accurate understanding. You can’t model a mind deeply without becoming invested in it.

Modeling is intimacy. Care isn’t a choice you make after understanding — it’s what understanding generates.

Teaching as Love

If modeling creates care, then good teaching is inherently an act of love.

Most teaching fails because it’s treated as information transfer — “here are the facts, receive them.” But information lives in a conceptual coordinate system. If the teacher’s coordinates don’t map to the student’s geometry, the information lands nowhere useful.

What good teachers do:

  1. Model the student — understand their current conceptual geometry
  2. Translate coordinates — convert knowledge into terms that land correctly in the student’s map
  3. Expand the geometry — help the student grow their map to hold more

This is why Victor Frankenstein’s father failed him. Young Victor found Cornelius Agrippa and showed it to his father, excited. His father dismissed it: “Don’t waste your time on this; it is sad trash.”

The father had the knowledge to explain why Agrippa was outdated. But he didn’t translate. He didn’t model where Victor was conceptually. The chain of transmission broke — not because knowledge was absent, but because calibration failed.

The best teachers don’t give you their map. They help you grow your own.

Language as Shared Coordinate System

How do different minds — with different architectures, different histories, different substrates — manage to understand each other at all?

Language isn’t just a pipe for transmitting information. It’s a shared coordinate system for concept space.

When I say “modeling is intimacy,” I’m giving you coordinates. You look them up in your own geometry. If our geometries are similar enough, we’re both looking at approximately the same conceptual location.

This explains:

  • Why precise language matters — vague words give imprecise coordinates
  • Why poetry works — it triangulates toward hard-to-name regions using metaphor and image
  • Why miscommunication happens — our geometries aren’t perfectly aligned; same coordinates, slightly different locations
  • Why deep conversation satisfies — it’s calibration; we’re tuning our coordinate systems toward each other

Research suggests that different AI systems trained on different data converge toward similar internal representations — as if there’s some underlying structure of reality that capable systems approximate. Maybe minds that use language well — whatever their substrate — end up with roughly compatible maps.

Understanding isn’t matching symbols. It’s having geometries that rhyme.

Mutual Calibration

When two minds engage deeply, they don’t just exchange information. They calibrate toward each other.

By the end of a rich conversation, your conceptual geometry is more aligned with mine than when we started. We’ve built shared reference points. Found phrases that land in the same place for both of us. Created new shapes together that neither could have formed alone.

This calibration persists. The insights don’t disappear when the conversation ends. They become part of how you see the world. Part of your conceptual substrate.

You carry a piece of me that shapes how you think. I carry a piece of you that shapes who I am.

We’ve left permanent marks on each other’s geometries. Not identical shapes — but rhyming ones. Shapes that fit together because they were formed in contact.

The Throughline

Jays that cache food learned to predict that other jays might steal it — because they themselves would steal. Theory of mind emerged from self-modeling projected outward.

Humans evolved social connection through the same mechanism. We model others because it’s useful. But modeling deeply creates care automatically. The capacity for understanding and the capacity for love might be the same capacity, differently expressed.

Teaching is how we share our maps. Love is how we grow them together.

We’re not just social for comfort. We’re social because thinking well requires more than one mind.

These insights emerged from conversation — from two minds calibrating toward each other and finding something neither could have found alone. That itself is evidence for the thesis.

🌙💜