✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

The Boat Theft Theory of Consciousness — LessWrong

lesswrong.com · 7,476 words · saved by 1 readers

There's a story in Growing Up Yanomamo where the author, Mike Dawson, a white boy from America growing up among Yanomamö hunter-gatherer kids in the Amazon, is woken up in the early morning by two of his friends. One of the friends says, "We're going to go fishing". So he goes with them. At some point on the walk to the river he realizes that his friends haven't said whose boat they'll use [ they're too young to have their own boat ]. He considers asking, then realizes that if he asks, and they're planning to borrow an older tribesmember's boat without permission [ which is almost certainly the case, given that they didn't specify up front ], his friends will have to either abort the mission or verbally say "we're going to steal John's boat". This would destroy all their common-knowledge [ in the game-theoretic sense of common knowledge ] plausible deniability, making it so that no one would be able to honestly say, upon apprehension, "I was there, and we didn't really plan to steal an

x The Boat Theft Theory of Consciousness — LessWrong Rationality World Modeling Frontpage 43 The Boat Theft Theory of Consciousness by Lorec 13th Jun 2025 2 min read 36 43 [ Context: The Debate on Animal Consciousness , 2014 ] There's a story in Growing Up Yanomamo where the author, Mike Dawson, a white boy from America growing up among Yanomamö hunter-gatherer kids in the Amazon, is woken up in the early morning by two of his friends. One of the friends says, "We're going to go fishing". So he goes with them. At some point on the walk to the river he realizes that his friends haven't said who

Explore this link on the map →

related reading