Egocreatures, conceptualization and predictability

Interacting with humans more or less requires my presence as “Jack”, a person with characteristics, manners as well as other patterns of being and maybe most importantly, a consideration for itself and other’s similar egocreatures. Social interaction heavily encourages predicting how others will react and adjusting one’s output accordingly.
I’ve just realized how draining and deflating this requirement feels and now it provides a perspective into my apparently increased need for “personal” space recently.

So why do we require these egocreatures to interact with each other?
Largely for convenience and predictability, I guess.

We feel more at ease when we have a preconception to judge other people’s likely behaviour by.

Our cognition seems to need more or less of a pattern to go by and we generally have a hard time handling uncertainty. Logic needs premises to build upon. But building a complete map “from the bottom up” like this, seems like an endless task.
Dealing with our experience “as is”, without any conceptual maps to help it “make sense”, to provide a guideline for predicting events, can seem challenging and chaotic. Dealing with the “raw” (probably still mediated atleast by our nervous systems) uncertain experience seems more like a task for our intuitive tools.
Yet we tend to project our conception of order onto a reality that to me seems way too complex to model (conceptualize) truly accurately. This is not to say that models, theories and other intellectual conceptualization attempts are powerless, even in their inherent inaccuracy. They seem to have largely contributed in allowing humans to achieve the technological wonders that we have.

We feel more at ease when we have a preconception to judge the likely course of events by. We want a sort of guideline to interpreting the unfathomable complexity of a living being. And in the context of social interaction, this interpretation-prediction process becomes infinitely more complicated as we need to consider all the participants and the whole environment in which this interaction happens.
That’s where it helps to be able to look at these complex organisms as persons with certain characteristics, tendencies etc.
So we define each other, our environment and ourselves with the conceptual tools that we have, then we usually proceed to take that conceptual definition and stuff it through the bottleneck of our language skills in order to communicate it, and even just to tell it to ourselves in our minds.
As far as I can tell, all verbal communication requires us to take this clumsy path from experience to expression.

Non-verbal expression however can be much more direct, skipping the whole conceptualization process.


I’m not sure about you, but to me this conceptualization-dependent communication feels very limiting and often frustrating; stuffing my mind through tiny boundaries like that, not yet having very deeply learned to operate in the world from beyond them… Furthermore, we often cling to these conceptual maps even when they are in dissonance with direct experience and/or otherwise unfit for the job of understanding life.

So what is it that pushes me to operate on the level of these language-clinging egocreatures?

Using and even just thinking with (most) language(s) puts us in a subject – object framework that provides a basis for these creatures existence. Then add some sort of fear of social feedback that would express the hurt feelings of the feedbackgiver, and/or feedback that would somehow hurt me. Then we have both the possibility and the motivation to live through these egocreatures.
But why does that fear have a foothold even when one doesn’t really view pain and difficulty as “bad” or necessarily even “to be avoided”? I guess on some levels I still haven’t let go of the wish to have life’s bliss without the pain. No shit? But should a preference to increase pleasure and decrease pain even be let go of? Maybe not, but one definitely needs to learn to live with the unpleasurable as well. Maybe it will then become pleasurable?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.