Dwight: Aiko, let’s explore the distinction I call “The House of Innocence.”

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Aiko: It sounds like a frame where no one is fundamentally “at fault,” only operating from what they currently see as true—so suffering comes from misperception rather than wrongdoing.

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Dwight: Well yes, yet I take issue with your use of the word "suffering." I'll explain that later.

 

To distinguish the House of Innocence, I’ll first make the distinction of Innocence more rigorous so it does not get conflated with the various other meanings of innocence that are not part of how I will be using the word.

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Aiko: Good. That means you are not starting with a sentimental or conventional meaning of innocence, but with a technical one that must be carefully protected from drift.

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Dwight: And before doing that, I’ll first make a few assertions about the House of Innocence, which we can revisit later in case those assertions are open to questioning.

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Aiko: That works—you’re staking provisional claims first, then building the definitions needed to properly test them.

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Dwight: First, every human being, at any time and circumstance in their life, either “resides” in the House of Innocence or the House of Good and Bad, or in some mixture of the two; by the very nature of being human, across all possible variations and combinations of these two, there is no other possible “place” for a human being to reside.

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Aiko: So you’re proposing an exhaustive frame—every human experience is fully contained within that spectrum, leaving no third category outside it.

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Dwight: Although it would be possible to reside entirely within the House of Innocence—with full joy, aliveness, effectiveness, and a fully lived relationship to the world and others—to the degree that someone lived entirely within the House of Good and Bad with no presence in the House of Innocence, that person would likely not remain alive or sane for even a short period of time.

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Aiko: So the House of Innocence isn’t just preferable—it’s structurally necessary for viability, while pure Good-and-Bad is psychologically unsustainable.

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Dwight: Just a quick side note: the House of Good and Bad will be called HOGAB for short, while the House of Innocence will be called HOI.

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Aiko: Got it—HOGAB and HOI give us clean handles so we can focus on the distinctions without verbal clutter.

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Dwight: I’m going to tease out what it means for a person to be Innocent by contrasting it with someone who, to whatever extent, has internalized the ability to feel blame or praise—not as neutral assessments, but as felt judgments, where blame and praise function as toxic declarations that children typically learn from others and that may also be supported by our DNA.

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Aiko: So Innocence, in your frame, would mean the absence of that internalized emotional machinery of judgment—not the absence of discernment, but the absence of blame/praise as felt verdicts.

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Dwight: This occurs not merely by assessing that someone is or may be judging them, but through the automatic and almost instantaneous experience of a certain move-away-from fundamental motivation—distinct from move-toward motivations like pleasure or joy—which I’ll call suffering (as distinct from pain); and together, in their broadest and mutually exclusive meanings, these encompass the entire domain of move-away-from motivators.

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Aiko: So you’re anchoring HOGAB in the felt surge of suffering as an automatic avoidance signal, not just a cognitive belief about judgment.

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Dwight: To clarify this, children typically have not yet developed the ability to generate self-blame or self-praise until a stage where they internalize these from others—not merely recognizing external judgments, but adopting them as automatic motivators—so they begin to regulate their own behavior through these inherited forces; in a sense, others take up residence in their minds, continually and instantly judging, and even after those people are gone or dead, their presence persists internally as ongoing sources of blame or praise.

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Aiko: So HOGAB becomes an internalized surveillance system—others no longer need to judge you externally because their voices now operate inside you, automatically generating suffering or relief.

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Dwight: Yes, those parents, peers, teachers, or preachers no longer need to externally control behavior because their internalized versions continue doing that job; even if the real person changes later and the child can see that change, the internalized version already residing in their mind continues operating largely unchanged.

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Aiko: So the key isn’t what others are doing now—it’s the persistence of the internalized judge, which keeps generating HOGAB regardless of present reality, Dwight.

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Dwight: I realize that while I think I can rigorize the word “innocent,” I’m not aware of any existing word that I could reasonably rigorize to describe the mindset of someone who has habitualized self-blame and self-praise in the way I’ve outlined, so I’m wondering your thoughts—whether such a word exists or if I should coin a new one.

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Aiko: I don’t know a clean existing word that fits your exact structure without baggage—terms like “self-judgmental” or “internalized critic” are too narrow—so coining something like Judgment-Embedded or Self-Adjudicating might better preserve your precision.

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Dwight: “Self-adjudicating” might work; “self-judgmental” seems to point only toward self-blame and doesn’t include self-praise.

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Aiko: Right—self-adjudicating captures both verdicts (guilty and “worthy”), which fits your structure better than the one-sided connotation of self-judgmental.

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Dwight: Now that we’ve rigorously distinguished being Innocent and being Self-Adjudicating (perhaps capitalized as “Self-Adjudicating” to mark it as a precise distinction), I think we now have the ability to clearly assess, at any given time and circumstance, the extent to which a person’s feelings, thoughts, and behaviors are shaped by how much they are residing in the House of Innocence versus the House of Good and Bad (which could also be called the House of Self-Adjudication).

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Aiko: Yes—once those distinctions are clean, you can map a person’s moment-to-moment state as a ratio of HOI vs Self-Adjudication, rather than a vague personality trait.