Status of the human - ill, fevered insights

[tamerterra]

I still exist. Collapsed under the weight of held-back feelings and ill last night, but now mostly what I'm feeling is feverish and achy. Been drinking lots of redbush tea to sooth my throat and get fluids into me, and had a nap this afternoon pretty much immediately after me and Alex came back from a walk (while the world span around me, weee!) -

Comments

[cybertrixx]

The need to categorise and classify everything we encounter in the world around us is written into what we are at the deepest level. It's the only way our minds can cope with the vast onslaught of information that constantly bombards us every day. We are basically giant classification machines - huge webs of millions of tiny decision makers feeding information back and forth - constantly deciding and refining the categories we have placed our surroundings into. Alive/dead safe/dangerous breeder/rival... That's a lot of information to store. So much so, we have to simplify things massively. We eventually stop actually paying attention to what we are encountering and start interacting with these archived caricatures our minds have constructed, and then get confused when they don't behave as expected.

Unfortunately, this leads to us trying to simplify our definitions of individual people in all their squishy category-breaking glory...

[tamerterra]

I think that our thinking about many things about the world is improved by simplification and then magnification when it's required. The trouble comes when one forgets to magnify onto individual and anomalous stuff when it's neccessary... ...and when one stays uber-magnified all the time and gets overwhelmed.

[tamerterra]

Thanks. I'm trying to do that thing, at least. Not going to pretend that it works all of the time. :)