Essay 3: Things

Essay 3: Things

Pay attention, this is the most important essay I will write. Everything going forward will rely on the principles established in this essay, and the universals presented will likely be used throughout every claim I make going forward. The reason why is quite simple, all human development from this point on requires making sense of the world around and within us, this is what this essay discusses. Why do we see things? The knee-jerk reaction is just to say that they are there but that could not be any further from the truth. We see them for the same reason we tell stories, through the same mechanism we build habits, and by making order in the world. My claim is quite simple: things, habits, and stories are all expressions of the same underlying principle; one which I call subjugation. I will substantiate this claim by defining stories, showing how stories are connected to the concept of habits, detailing how habits are the core of the process of subjugation, and finally describing what exactly is being subjugated and how they can broadly be defined as things.

What are stories? When people think of stories, they likely think of a series of events with some moral. I want to slightly adjust that definition and define stories as a series of connected interactions. This definition needs further clarification, which I will do by discussing what “interactions” and “connected” mean. Interactions are moments of confrontation with a thing from the perspective of your urges. When we drink water, for example, that is an interaction. The interaction is not that you drank water from a cup, it is that you had an urge called “thirsty” so you performed the various actions associated with the habit of “drinking from a cup” and that helped resolve the urge in question. Interactions are not analyzed from the perspective of “what happened objectively”, they can only be analyzed from the perspective of “what happened phenomenologically” and at our core, everything phenomenologically boils down to the resolution of needs and urges. Thus, all interactions in the past tense are memories of how a thing and our response to the thing in question, worsened or resolved an urge. Whereas “connected” means that the interactions in question are all related to the same thing. This applies to fictional tales too. In one, we know the story as the name of the story and all actions taken are done from the perspective of the main character. When the main character greets someone, we see how they handle the greeting and from it (and likely an internal monologue) we can infer what the main character got out of the greeting. When breaking down the interaction component of the definition, the thing can be thought of as the other person. The interaction is the identifying of the other person’s existence, the action of the greeting, and whether any urges were resolved or worsened. Multiple such interactions in various situations are all still done by that same character and thus are connected by that character. This means that you can have stories from different frames of reference. If the thing connecting a series of interactions is the other person in this instance, this sole interaction and potentially the preceding and resulting incidents may be the only components of the story as only interactions featuring said other person is that incident if they are a stranger you never knowingly saw again. Whereas if the thing connecting a series of interactions is the character that did the greeting, then said character’s entire lifetime of interactions with everything may be a part of the story. In the context of most fictional tales, all interactions written about are connected via the moral of the story, presented in such a way as to maximize entertainment (or whatever the creative intent of the tale is). In effect, the thing connecting all of the interactions present in a fictional tale is the revelation the main character comes to near the end of the tale, which as such includes all the relevant actions and pieces of context necessary to understand what drove the main character to come to his/her revelation. Yes, a revelation or moral can be a thing, bear with me I will define that word in this essay. So to reiterate, all interactions connected to the thing that connects said interactions are candidates to be featured in a story, and the story is the accumulation of those interactions. The difference between a fictional tale and a story is that a fictional tale is truncated to those moments which also fulfill the creative intent of the tale, whereas a real story does not offer any such truncation (although it can, but that’s beyond the scope of this essay); all relevant interactions shape the story.

The first point I need to detail to argue my claim is that stories and habits are connected by some underlying, uniting principle, which is also the easiest one to substantiate. For those who remember from Essay 2: Certainty, habit forming is the process of turning a task (task for the sake of simplicity, it does not have to be one, we will get to that) that was once a new, full-brained, high-energy exercise into a localized, low-energy neural process. This is why a baby can have such a hard time eating from a spoon even while being fed and get tired just from the task of doing so whereas we as adults likely can feed ourselves with and eat from a spoon as if it is second nature; all of the associated actions that have to do with eating from a spoon are distinct, new, and tiring things back then, but combine into a single, unified action that can be done thoughtlessly and treated as a single thing. Yes, actions can be things too, we will get to that. For those paying attention, you may see where I am going with this. Every time we use a spoon to eat in our lifetimes, it is an interaction. Remember an interaction is composed of urges, things, and actions taken to turn the things in place into an outcome that either helps satiate or worsen said urges. In the case of eating with a spoon, the interaction is that we have the urge we call hunger, there is a spoon and food in our line of sight, and the various hand and mouth actions associated with putting the food on the spoon and putting said spoon in and out of our mouth that contribute to the resolution of the hunger. Obviously, this is a gross oversimplification of the scale of all three components present in every interaction but it gets the point across. What is important to note is that all of these considerations (among many more) which would take all of our mental faculties to keep track of in the case of an entirely new interaction begin to turn into a single, refined, low-energy interaction with continual repetition. This mechanism is functionally identical to a habit and is a habit. Note though that the repetition in question is a series of interactions connected by a certain thing; that is the stated definition of a story. So the various interactions we have with a thing both create a story and a habit. Through interactions, we subconsciously build a repository of ways we can act, given the thing being interacted with, that helps us best act with the thing in the future. The more frequently we exercise a certain type of interaction (as defined by the urge, thing, and action), the more skillfully and intuitively they can be repeated which is a habit, but the accumulation of all such previous interactions is a story. There is no real difference, habits just describe the biological tendency to make certain interactions more efficient, but the series of interactions the habit is being formed from is a story, often a more specifically defined story but a story nonetheless. To build upon this, as I also mentioned in the certainty essay, habits can be neurologically defined as the way we make sense of the world around us (both are “the localizing and strengthening of the neural pathways that need to be activated when interacting with a… [thing]”). Thus, as habits are built upon stories, my argument also must imply that stories are at least a component of how we make sense of the world.

We make sense of the world through a process called subjugation, a term inspired by the story of Genesis that I think best exemplifies that which there is no single word for in the English language. Subjugation is the certainty-creating process of ordering the chaotic potential of the world through the creation of things. When one really thinks about it, we have yet to discover purpose in any materialist sense. This is not to say that purpose is not intrinsic to the world itself as that is a whole other debate, but if it is there it is not something I believe falls within the realm of science to discover. Because of this, how do we differentiate or individuate things from one another? For that matter, why is the world not some amorphous blob that is free of distinction? There is the case to be made that it is that way but we are the ones that distinguish the ceiling from the floor from the table from the person walking on it. Why do we do this? Because we need to interact with the floor differently from the person, the person differently from the table, etc. Evolution came about because the first organisms realized that while interacting with the world uses precious energy, we can get more energy more reliably through focused interaction as opposed to passive existence. Interaction implies the perception of things to be acted upon, and thus the perception of things is necessary as it serves as a storehouse for stories. The stories that distinguish things from each other allow us to interact with each thing in a way that best suits our needs (addresses our urges), and that distinguishing is necessary for us to focus our interactions. Until we perceive a thing that is properly actualized and interactable, all there is is nonsensical potential. So through perceiving, we turn the amorphous blob of pure potential that is our world before perception into a set of things that can be interacted with. This is the process of subjugation. Subjugation is a continuum that follows the same mechanisms as habit formation. As a baby, we do not have a developed, iterated story built on a series of interactions so we narrow the chaotic potential of the world into a thing by putting a part of it in our mouth and otherwise interacting with it. This stage of the process is exhausting as it is an energy-intensive, full-brain process that forces us to confront what we do not know. This does not only apply to babies; do anything that is sufficiently new and something similar will come about. By continually narrowing the chaotic potential of the world through regular interaction we form things, which is subjugation. When we interact with a thing or category of things thousands of times, the process of subjugation only requires a glance. Note that glancing or sensing is not a passive process; it is also an interaction. There is the thing being sensed, the urge of certainty to make sense of it, and the action of moving our eyes hundreds of times a minute to place different parts of it in our fovea to make sense of it. This is a continually self-enforcing process, as every time we successfully fulfill the urge(s) present in the interaction (subjugation being the interaction in this case) our brains release dopamine which serves as the physiological agent that further reinforces the neural connection of the story of the thing and makes us want to interact with it in that same way in the future. The final question that needs to be answered here though is what is it that subjugation is being acted upon? Funny note, this may be one of the least intuitive questions I ever asked.

I described things as a slice of reality, distinguished from the others by the stories we give each one. This is not a complete look though as it fails to answer what things are. They are not the stories as things are a character or item being interacted with in the story, so what are they? Things are units of purpose, the building blocks of logical space, and that which we assign attributes to through language. Things are not only tangible, they can be intangible. Things are not only objects, they can be actions and more. Things are not just there for us to observe without error, we, through our stories, create things in real time through subjugation. Things are an outcome of our desire for certainty, as the sole purpose of them are to be concepts that can be interacted with in a way that is distinctive from all other things. Things are the metaphysical principles that form the building blocks of logical thinking. Whereas a thing refers to something specific, the state of being a thing is the concept of “noun” using its linguistic equivalent. Through stories, we can come to recognize the attributes of a thing and these attributes are what distinguish the ways we interact with different things. For example, we may remember interacting with a boulder while hiking and learning that they are hard to move even though they are not connected to the ground. Thus we assign the attribute of heavy to the boulder and the next time we see one we know that lifting it will be anywhere from difficult to impossible. Over time we may even come to be able to estimate how heavy the boulder is. The boulder is the thing being interacted with, but the thing is not the word itself or the material itself, those are attributes we assign, the thing is the metaphysical concept we assign the story of “boulder” to. 

This claim is heavily backed by research. For example, there have been studies done on cocaine addicts where they had images flashed in front of them quickly while their brains were monitored in an MRI machine. There was time between each image but each individual image was only on the screen for a period of time shorter than what it takes for our minds to properly make sense of what the image is depicting. At irregular intervals, the image being flashed was cocaine or some related image, and while the person being scanned could not properly identify what was being shown, cravings still occurred. We see something’s purpose before we even properly make sense of what it is. Things are not material, they are units of purpose. When we see a cup we do not see it as a material thing, we see its purpose relative to our goal. If we are thirsty and see it, it’s a drinking item, if we are in a fight it's a weapon, if we are cooking it's a unit of measurement, etc. Additionally, we do not actively identify the handle, the bottom, the sides, or even the name before the thing itself, those are still all attributes.

So to summarize, stories are a series of connected interactions. Interactions are composed of urges, things, and actions that either lead to the resolution or worsening of the urges. These interactions are connected via a common point of similarity which can be any of the three components of an interaction (almost always a common thing the interactions provide context for). This process of continuous interaction is exactly what allows for the formation of habits. Both stories and habits rely on a series of interactions at their core, but while the former relies on their connectedness, the latter relies on the neurological process of making the action more efficient. Both are continuous, self-reinforcing processes that allow us to make sense of the world and that process, otherwise defined as “the certainty-creating process of ordering the chaotic potential of the world through the creation of things” is subjugation. Subjugation helps us turn the un-interactable potential present upon the presentation of something new into a narrow, familiar concept with attributes that can be interacted with. Those concepts are things, which is a metaphysical point upon which all previous terms can be applied. That’s all, see you all sometime by January 17 for Essay 4: Uncertainty!