What I'm calling "Gap Theory" here is a model for how a person can apply sentience in a constructive and integrated way.

  1. I as a sentient being am capable of imagining possibilities which don't exist in reality. This imagining is part of the process by which I am able to create in the world. I use my model of reality, mix it with my desires, and from the concoction am able to choose a path of action. It's a fully natural and deeply derived ability, a legacy of the entire animalian path of evolution: "I see food, I move in the world to acquire it."
  2. I as a person naturally live in a state of continual awareness of differences between what is and what's possible in reality, possibilities which I would either prefer or abhor. I call these "gaps" between the real and the possible. Each person apparently has his own set of gaps, and there's no limit to how many gaps are present for a person, nor how complex those gaps are. I can easily come to an assumption that I experience desire itself as a gap, because I'm so accustomed to exercising that creative facility as a response to my desires. In fact though, desire is just one component of how a gap comes to be.
  3. The other component is my model of reality. It's important to note that no single model of reality is entirely complete nor accurate; this is partly because each such model was derived through the experience of just one perspective; there's also a fidelity problem just in the means by which reality can be translated into the model: the senses cannot be considered adequate for understanding all of reality. To the extent my model of reality is wrong, I am likely to be frustrated in bringing about real satisfaction of my desires. Keeping the model tuned up requires continual diligence and a sort of humility and openness in my approach.
  4. We could talk about good and evil as based on possible futures which we prefer (good) or abhor (evil). However, for the purposes of this exploration, I want to focus on the choices that I make; I want to focus on the gaps that I would like to resolve, rather than the possible futures which just might "happen to me" despite my will. As such I will talk about good and evil in a different way as follows:
  5. As I experience gaps in my internal life, I can choose how I interpret the meaning of a gap. For example, I may feel a gap as a frustration: i.e. a desire I have is stifled in reality, "I can't get no satisfaction", or "the world is not as it should be". With this interpretation I sense a form of evil. And it's interesting that in such cases, the whole world, and all the actors in it can easily appear to be evil. It's funny that my single limited perspective could be so bold as to judge the entire universe of which I am a part as evil or wrong or inadequate. Yet that's what I do when I overestimate the applicability of my unrealized imaginings. Unlike the good and evil described in the previous point, which is having an opinion of things that (might) happen, this type of evil is a judgment of the beings themselves in a static sense. That is, far more than "That event would be a bad thing for me," here I'm saying "The world itself (or some part of it) is wrong or evil." When I see the gaps as problems, I find myself at war with those problems. That means I'm at war with a gap. And since a gap is really just me expressing my creative imagination, this interpretation means I'm at war with myself.
  6. There's another way to interpret the meaning of a gap: as an opportunity for good which is as yet unrealized. Taken this way I readily see that it's up to me to play some role in realizing it if I choose to, and that I can't expect it to just happen on my behalf without engaging myself; after all, it's only my own unique imagining; how could anyone else be expected to realize it without my involvement? This way I see my own imagination as a good thing, and I see what it imagines as good. And just as important it puts my model of reality in the proper place being fallible and improvable.
  7. Important to my worldview and sense of general contentment with the world is how I choose to measure (evaluate the goodness or badness of) my gaps. Do I set the 0 of the ruler on reality or on my imagined possibility? If I put the 0 on the imagined and desired future, I run into a lot of bad results: the gap is measured as a degree of failure of the world, that is I get a negative measurement; also I'm trying to place the origin of my ruler on something which is poorly defined, so how accurate could it possibly be? But if I measure by placing the 0 on reality, which means to fully accept reality as it is, then every bit that I measure out is in the positive direction, toward what I imagine as desired. So, by always accepting reality as it is and then measuring toward the positive direction, I can see every choice I might make as an act of good rather than a battle against evil.
  8. I seem to have some kind of freedom to choose, but that freedom does not include the power to make the world whatever I can imagine. I think the conscious freedom I have is constrained to managing how I interpret things. I can't always get what I want to happen in the real world, but it is within my power to decide how I interpret my gaps and how I interpret my experiences to tweak my model of reality. What I've discovered is that interpreting my gaps as opportunities is a much more peaceful path than interpreting them as problems; similarly it works better to remain humble and open to changes in my personal model of reality.

This is a distillation of the microcosmic ideas introduced in

BestOfAllPossibleWorlds

. For the macrocosmic ideas see

GoodInConflict

.