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.<\/p>\n
I don’t think I’ll really ever be able to remember very clearly.\u00a0 So I started speculating about how other people’s brains were set up.\u00a0 How did they think?<\/p>\n
That is actually a vague question, so let me be more specific:<\/p>\n
‘<\/span><\/div>What interpretations of reality did other people make when they observed things with their senses?<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I thought of the tendency toward being unquestioning.\u00a0 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<\/em>.\u00a0 Almost like, “If I felt it, it must be true.”\u00a0 For these people, any emotion, inference, perspective, etc., they have is some revelation about reality, never simply a subjective experience of one person.<\/p>\n
In this department, some people strike me as “crazier” than others.\u00a0 Some people to a certain degree understand the subjectivity of their experiences, and at many times will acknowledge this in their speech.\u00a0 Others, not so much.\u00a0 These are maybe the types of people that if they get something in their head, they act on it.\u00a0 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<\/em> condom wrapper.\u00a0 It was a camel-breaking event for the relationship as I recall it told to me.\u00a0 Truth or not, the story probably isn’t unfamiliar to humanity: The person self-deluded into problematic action.<\/em><\/p>\n
So I figure my life before general semantics was a bit egocentric, believing my senses revealed to me truth rather than perspective.\u00a0 And if that is true, general semantics showed me in a few powerful lessons that my senses are anything but revealers of truth.<\/p>\n
One of the most powerful lessons to me was Korzybski’s comparison of nervous systems.\u00a0 Your nervous system and my nervous system are structurally similar.\u00a0 I buy that.\u00a0 But, your nervous system and my nervous system have differences between them.\u00a0 I buy that, too.\u00a0 So, information you experience is not necessarily and probably would never be processed in exactly the same way as I process it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Which is to say, neither of us has the absolute perspective.\u00a0 Fundamentally, our sensations differ.\u00a0 So\u00a0statements that you have the right way of seeing something\u00a0are going to be hogwash in a large number of cases.<\/p>\n
If this depresses you, it shouldn’t.\u00a0 It’s liberating.\u00a0 It helps you call bullshit on the bullies who insist their perspectives are right.\u00a0 Don’t let their adamance fool you: They’re just another nervous system’s take, not the absolute take.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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.\u00a0 So I started speculating about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[53,54,27],"class_list":["post-484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-semantics","tag-egocentricity","tag-nervous-system","tag-perspective"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":493,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions\/493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}