Void : Absence of What?

The definition of "void" (confusion) is pretty exciting. It stems from the absence of something (clarity). Often, when you find a void, you are able to figure out what is missing. Have you ever come across a scenario where you just feel a void and are not able to figure out what is it that you are missing? It is a reasonable approach to ask WHY. In this post, I will try to answer everything in a Q&A format where I shall analyze this "void" philosophically.

Why do we feel a void?

Something is absent, the essence is you won't stumble upon a "void" unless you are expecting something. To rephrase, it is one's expectation that leads to the discovery of a "void".

Why is it not obvious what is absent?

This question won't be valid if you can figure out what is absent. It takes a deeper line of introspection to figure out what is it that one is missing so badly, that they encounter a "void". Well, it leads me to figure out you were expecting something.

Why expect?

If you aren't familiar with Neural Networks, here is a brief overview: it is a scientific study of how the brain works, that motivated us to reproduce a network of a computational block which learns solely from an input and output, and predicts on basis of input what output it should get. Similarly, we humans interpret based on a scenario, what we should feel. 

Why do we expect what we expect?

In the context of humans and few other animals, our brain gets tuned based on the situations we have been, the taught response in those situations (upbringing), where that is absent we tend to adhere to the social norm (much like Nearest Neighbour algorithm) i.e. when you are in a group and you encounter a new situation (a situation never encountered before) we unconsciously tend to tune our expectation to how the people around us act. Consequently, we can see a compound effect of our company, what we learn in our response (expectations).

Why does expectation not match reality?
Now, there are two things worth noting here, our expectation (prediction) of what we should do/feel/respond for a given scenario depends a lot on the situation (input) we have, i.e. if we have more details on what we are dealing with we can have a better (accurate) response to the scenario. Secondly, we keep encountering new situations throughout our lives (it is like the same situation with just a time difference is still different because time has changed) which really keeps raising expectations/responses we do not know are correct, a fancy word for the same is validation. Since we have no validation our thoughts start going haywire. We are stuck in the loop of rationality, is this correct or is this wrong? Here comes a trait of every being known as confidence, if you are confident about a response you will flow with it and exhibit it, but what about the case when you are not confident? It is exactly when you realize, something is absent.

To sum up the whole analogy, "void" is natural when we encounter a scenario that we have not encountered before or which we are not confident about. The default response which you get is your expectation but then comes the rationality check, if you deem your response rational (another way of saying "confident" unless you are a psychopath) is to enact it. However, how is rationality learned is again an abstract recursion of how you learn to expect, with the difference that here we learn about scenarios we are not in, i.e. transfer learning ( a typical example of it would be learning from mythology/religious texts).

P.S. : Encountered a void and came up with this!