I was on set yesterday, talking about some of “the crazies” (background acting in TV and film tends to attract a few each day), and I started wondering what my brain was like before I encountered general semantics.
I don’t think I’ll really ever be able to remember very clearly. So I started speculating about how other people’s brains were set up. How did they think?
That is actually a vague question, so let me be more specific:
‘What interpretations of reality did other people make when they observed things with their senses?
I thought of the tendency toward being unquestioning. That is, I thought that for some people, they take in information with their senses, and they react to that information in immediate ways, and for these people, they assume what they experience is fact. Almost like, “If I felt it, it must be true.” For these people, any emotion, inference, perspective, etc., they have is some revelation about reality, never simply a subjective experience of one person.
In this department, some people strike me as “crazier” than others. Some people to a certain degree understand the subjectivity of their experiences, and at many times will acknowledge this in their speech. Others, not so much. These are maybe the types of people that if they get something in their head, they act on it. I heard a story yesterday about someone I know digging through a boyfriend’s rubbish after discovering a condom wrapper, convinced he had been cheating, apparently without any questioning of the inference, when he later showed it was their condom wrapper. It was a camel-breaking event for the relationship as I recall it told to me. Truth or not, the story probably isn’t unfamiliar to humanity: The person self-deluded into problematic action.
So I figure my life before general semantics was a bit egocentric, believing my senses revealed to me truth rather than perspective. And if that is true, general semantics showed me in a few powerful lessons that my senses are anything but revealers of truth.
One of the most powerful lessons to me was Korzybski’s comparison of nervous systems. Your nervous system and my nervous system are structurally similar. I buy that. But, your nervous system and my nervous system have differences between them. I buy that, too. So, information you experience is not necessarily and probably would never be processed in exactly the same way as I process it. Add to that that you sit or stand in a different place from me when you receive information, so you are receiving information that is structurally (at least slightly) different from what I’m receiving. No matter how much I want to cite my experience as absolute or truth-revealing, another person could just as well say the same thing. Which is to say, neither of us has the absolute perspective. Fundamentally, our sensations differ. So statements that you have the right way of seeing something are going to be hogwash in a large number of cases.
If this depresses you, it shouldn’t. It’s liberating. It helps you call bullshit on the bullies who insist their perspectives are right. Don’t let their adamance fool you: They’re just another nervous system’s take, not the absolute take.
See also: egocentricity, nervous-system, perspective
April 14th, 2010
by Bruce Kodish
Very nice, post.
Of course, the jumped conclusion remains the standard theme of many or most situation comedies, so-called ‘reality’ shows, etc.
When we stop identifying our individual abstractions, maps, experiences, etc., with those of anyone else, we might together begin to develop more comprehensive ones which can give us maximum probablility of predictability. That’s what we call a ‘scientific’ attitude.
April 14th, 2010
by Ben Hauck
The Author
In improv practices with the old improv group I coached, I used this kind of general semantics principle often.
After some scenes, I might glean reactions from all of the teammates. This is one of those times when opinions may sound like facts, or get worded as facts. I saw it as my job to ensure that a) they were not worded as facts but as perspectives, and b) that there was a comparison of the different subjective experiences to the same basic elements of the improv we were talking about.
The chore, then, became coming to agreements on how we wanted to do particular scenes when there were disagreements in perspective. In improv, “pimping”–telling someone to do or become something humiliating against his will–is generally frowned upon. One person said that I was pimping him by calling his character retarded in a scene; I didn’t see myself as doing that, but instead I saw myself as endowing his character (something condoned). Do we accept my choice of behavior, reject it, or what?
Talking about different our perspectives is different from letting the other person bully me into thinking his opinion is a fact (bullying me to believe I was pimping him). By appreciating perspectives instead of thinking senses divine truth, we can come to understandings of the effects of my choices rather than willlessly* submit to some kind of authority.
* 3 consecutive els!