One of the key things I’m weaving through the stuff I’m writing offline is partly about how we’re all ‘trapped in our heads’.
We are, pretty much. Our senses relay stimuli to our brains that allow us an approximation of the world around us, as far as we have needed to survive so far.
We think the world is green because that just happens to be how we perceive light, and while we all agree that trees are green, the actual color isn’t necessarily what we all see. My version of green could look to you as I perceive purple, but we both call it green because it’s how we perceive the same thing. The same wavelengths of light may appear different to us individually, but consistently enough so that we can agree on words like ‘green’ to describe the color.
I’ve been thinking about stuff like that for quite a long time. We have these approximations of the world in our heads, and that world has the people in it, but the people we perceive are not necessarily the people as they are – something that keeps counselors and therapists in the black with their accountants.
How we perceive each other shifts as we ourselves change. We call it growth sometimes, but to be cover the conditions where change isn’t growth, I’ll call it change. It’s the difference between progress and change. Progress is implicitly a vector, it has a direction, whereas change can go either way.
I’d fiddled with this idea in the context of Schopenhauer’s “Hedgehog’s Dilemma” and even went as far as considering ourselves (simplified in my mind now) as matrices of attributes. It didn’t go anywhere, but it was an interesting exercise and kept me out of trouble for a while.
I write all this because I came back across, “You Are A Network” from 2021 that actually fills some of the problems I was having with some of the matrix stuff, conceptually – because your network also affects you and implicitly becomes a part of your own world, where the perceptions of those around you are also a part of your personal matrix.
I think it’s around here that some people might have a headache. Yet all of this is very, very important on many levels, especially now in technology with artificial intelligences.
Who are we? The more complex we become, the more complex the answer to that is, perhaps even exponentially.
“Heavy” but so true, All the things “we” have to accept “as is”. Reminds me of talking to my young daughters, whilst they were eating ice cream. With me “trying” to open their minds to the world around us. “Look, see and ask”. Making an example of a nearby fort on an island in the Sound. Feeling content with doing one of my many “father” things. The youngest asks her sister “what colour was the bubble gum in the bottom of the ice cream? Perhaps I misjudged the timing of my quest. Or had the educational system, got to her?
We can become, especially in this tech age, so narrow minded, however, glad to say she has got a chip off “this old block” and “Looks sees and asks” now.
Well said.