Thinking in terms of latent space helps to understand the human condition. When we see the face of another person, we never see just that face in isolation. Instead, we see how that particular face relates to all of the faces that we have ever seen.
We don’t do this consciously — it’s something that happens in our brain far beneath the level of consciousness. And the same thing happens when we see a house, or a tree, or hear a guitar playing.
All of our lives, up until that moment, our brains have been busy classifying everything, and taking into account all of the variations within any given category. That range of perceptible variation is our internal latent space.
Similarly, when you have a conversation with somebody about romance, or politics, or sports, or movies, some topic of shared expertise, you are both exploring your shared latent space. There are unspoken rules for a discussion of any such topic, and we all know those rules so well that we don’t even think about them.
If you were having a heart to heart talk with a friend about relationships, and that person suddenly started talking instead about stamp collecting, you would be right to be worried. This is because the parameters of a conversation about relationships are generally unspoken, but they are also generally well known.
When it comes right down to it, every human dwells within the latent space that they have spent their life constructing. The external world is really only raw material for the construction of that latent space.
And we we spend much of our time discovering the ways that our respective latent spaces fit together. From those shared connections, we create meaning in our lives.