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# We are all black boxes
- URL: https://larrysalibra.com/we-are-all-black-boxes/
- Published: 2026-10-24T15:59:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T16:23:46.000Z
- Author: Larry Salibra
- Tags: philosophy, day-107, daily

I've been thinking about [this X post](https://x.com/hmichellerose/status/2113402663635193890?ref=larrysalibra.com) from [Hannah Rosenberg](https://x.com/hmichellerose?ref=larrysalibra.com) that I saw last night before I went to sleep (yes, I know pre-sleep X use is not ideal!):

> People do not experience our intentions, they experience our actions.  
>  
> Intentions are like emotions, they are wildly important to the person who has them, but they are not measurable or fully communicable to those around us.  
>  
> Our emotions and intentions are incredibly valuable to us and our understanding of ourselves but they are unusable for others.  
>  
> What we do with our emotions and intentions is what those around us can measure and understand and experience.

This is, of course, obvious, but I've never really heard it described so clearly. Despite being very obvious that other people can't experience our emotions or intentions, in practice or in the heat of the moment, it's very easy to forget this.

Actions, especially speech, motivated by emotion or unspoken intentions are all too common in the lives of new parents. Since this was on my mind today, I found myself taking a brief pause before or, unfortunately, sometimes after I took an action that was motivated by emotion to think about the cause-effect relationship of the two.

Being somewhat nerdy, I started visualizing both my actions and emotions as RF radiation broadcast outwards towards the surrounding world from inside my body. In this imaginary model, emotions and intentions are high-frequency and attenuated by the matter in my body to the point where the signal others receive only includes actions. 

Another way I thought about this was as a programmer might think about communication as an API. The API that humans use to communicate doesn't have any parameters for emotions or intentions. These are, instead, implementation details that the person communicating with you doesn't know anything about unless you expose them. We are all black boxes and black boxes need to choose their messaging very carefully.