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Minds, Systems and Translations Thereof.
or
How I See The World & The People In It
Various things have prompted me to think about this lately, try to pull all the garbled impressions in my mind into something translatable. Because I keep seeing people reacting to each other without understanding, judging based only on their own systems of understanding, not on a mix of the ones involved. Gah! Don't take that as an accusation! It isn't meant to be, and I'll try to explain why soon. Bear with me, please? I mean no insult to anyone at all, trust me.
Okay, before I start this, I guess I should explain a few things, give you an idea of my position. My family is a little complicated in terms of how they see the world. My father and my youngest sister have Aspergers Syndrome (they prefer to be called Aspies, though), an Autistic-spectrum condition. I myself haven't been officially diagnosed either way, but I score as borderline Aspie on the tests. My mother and my other sister are closer to what would be considered neurotypical (fancy term, I know, but it's all I got. I flat out refuse to say 'normal', because I don't think such a state exists), but have kinda adapted to living around the rest of us. That's the immediate family. There's more in the extended.
This means nothing about my ability or fitness to judge the mental processes of others. There is no position of right or entitlement that comes with proximity or personal problems. However, what this situation has done for me is given me a wider range of examples to study and learn to understand. I generally try to understand everything I meet. It's a function of how my mind works.
And actually, perhaps I should try to explain that first, so you have an idea of what I'm trying to translate from. Because that's the major problem with people trying to understand other people, you know. It's all in the damn translation. Because every mind perceives and builds an understanding of the world and people in different ways, when it comes time to try and interact, each mind has to first try to translate the foreign system into something understandable to its own, then work out how it wants the interaction to go, then translate that mix back into something the other system is going to understand. Now, a lot of people have the kind of instinctive translation software that they don't even notice having to do this, until they meet a system too alien to link into. But some have further to go to manage. Back to that later.
Okay. My mind. Now, owing to my rather introspective nature, my curiousity, and the fact that my own mind is one of the few that stays still long enough for me to explore, my mind is possibly the one I have greatest understanding of, but even my own mind I don't understand completely. Eyes can't turn around and look inside the head after all. I know full well there are parts of my own mental systems that I am blind to. But.
In terms of perceiving the world, my key senses are visual, tactile, and sixth sense (yes, I believe in it). I'm keyed in particular to light and shade, weight and motion, energies, connections and patterns. Colour, sound, taste, scent - I use them all but not to anywhere near the same degree.
Other people have different key perceptive systems, so they put the world together in different ways than I do, and different ways to each other, yes? I know people with a gift for math could give me a list of possible permutations on the theme/system. All I know is that there are lots. So there are lots and lots of ways to see the world to start with.
Then you have to add that to how each mind puts those pieces together to create a picture, an interpretation, that it can understand, yes? And this is where things get really complicated, and really interesting.
Now, my mind puts things together in terms of systems. Three dimensional, kinetic models in my head. Gah! I keep trying to explain this, to make it translate, but it really doesn't. In my mind, the world is all shape and movement, weight and arc and light and energy, drawn into patterns, woven and built into models and set into independant motion. Actually, I rather think my mind is like the factory floor of Magrathea, from 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. A planet building other planets. And my gods, but I can't explain to you how beautiful, how absolutely beautiful the world looks through my eyes. You have to understand, for me beauty is linked to understanding. The more I understand of a thing, the more complete my model, the more beautiful it is to me. That means the potential for beauty in the way I see the world ... everything is beautiful now, but layered and layered inside, with each new insight, is the potential for more. It's ... exquisite, an expanding infinity of wonder.
Anyway. Because of this, the subjects I pick up fastest are the likes of physics and geography, the tactile sciences. (Oh, geography. Some of the greatest epiphanies have come to me through it. Geography has opened more than the world to me). Also languages. In fact, anything that has a pattern, a system, though it's easier if that system can be translated into something tactile, physical.
What I want to show here, though, is how that way of working influences how I see other people. Other minds. My mind leaps at patterns. Systems, links, connections. So my mind sees other minds in terms of how they work.
For example. My father's mind. To my eyes, his mind works on a very mechanical basis, yes? Like ... rising links of chain. His mind fits what it sees into rigid categories, linked into certain chains of thought. Connections between concepts in his mind are often unwieldy, forced to flow along certain paths where in other minds they would just jump across the gap between chains of thought, or divert one train into another. He himself often describes the process of switching subjects 'changing discs', going from one database to another manually. His mind does not necessarily create omnidirectional connections between concepts. It must follow the right path to the right information and then crosslink the database.
However. Because of this system, his mind can create connections that more fluid or less articulated minds wouldn't make. Because his mind puts things in the database they fit easiest into, instead of a database formed from context, his mind can often differentiate more clearly what type of information is being recieved, because he views it as an entity entire of itself, slightly removed from concept. He's a detail man, yes? He sees the specific, where others see the 'big picture', or context.
Now, that is how my mind sees his. That's the system model my mind has built to interpret how his mind works, da? Please understand, this is only as acurate as my internal translation software. I have to perceive cues from him, translate them to my own understanding, then look at how you might see it, and try to translate it again in order to write that description. I mean, there are whole layers of sensation and image in my understanding of that mind that don't translate into english, complexities to it that I could never articulate, and my understanding isn't even accurate to start with.
That's the problem when people try to interact with other people, when they try to understand how their mind works in order to translate their meaning. It's like ... it's like each mind speaks a specific language. Some languages are linked to a common ancestor, common cultural backgrounds, containing more or less the same concepts, alike enough to move relatively easily between them, like the romance languages. Some are more distant, containing more concepts that simply have no counterparts, different systems of putting words together, different grammar, syntax, etc. Those languages are therefore harder to understand for people who speak the first language. And then there are languages completely alien, languages not even built of words, languages of alien concepts, that they cannot understand at all. But maybe one language has something close, to start reaching out, da?
Minds work like that. Most on them work on systems that are fairly alike to each other, within a certain range, say, containing enough similarities in terms of what they use and how they use it to build an understanding of the world around them. For people whose minds work on those systems, or close variations thereof, translation is relatively easy. But other people work on more outlandish principals, by comparison. People who put the world together in different ways. And for them the effort of translation is much greater. In some cases, too great.
That sounds cheap, doesn't it. Like an excuse. They're no good with people because they don't make the effort to understand, because they don't make the effort to be 'normal'. *fists clench* Dammit, but I do hate that view, and I've heard it a hell of a lot. Because most people do fit within a relatively translatable range, so the overall system of interaction that we call society makes no particular effort to reach beyond. It's a system that does not forgive flawed attempts at integration. Some systems do, you know. You can try, make mistakes, try again. Unfortunately, a lot of human systems are not among them.
Let me try to explain. I know I'm not very good at it. My own translation software ain't all that great. But.
Imagine a mind that does not recognise ... time, say. A mind that can't make sense of the forward motion of time. Okay. They might have some problems making day plans, yes? But. In almost every process, there is a time factor. Things take time to happen, and some things happen because of time passing, yes? Now, for a mind that doesn't register time, none of those things make sense. Nothing at all makes sense, not that way people who understand time would understand it. Things would happen in a series of unconnected moments, instances without link. That mind would have to build a completely different way to operate, just to exist. And it would, by it's nature, not be one most would understand. I mean, look at consequence. In a mind without time, there is no such thing, because there is not process by which things link from one to the next. Now, without understanding consequence, how could a mind understand what effect their actions had? How could they understand right and wrong? So they could do terrible things. But not out of evil. Evil wouldn't have a meaning to them. The person, the soul behind the mind, might be the purest and most decent in existance, but without a framework through which to understand consequence, their actions could be anything but. All because their mind doesn't register the progression from minute to minute.
Now that ... that would be an extreme example of the way a certain blindness in a mind could affect the way it interacted with the world. But there are lots of others, ones we take for granted. People can only see things the way they see things. Each person has to work within the framework of their own understanding. And there are things so elemental to each system, things understood on such an instinctive level, that the person simply cannot imagine someone who doesn't see that way. And so, they cannot understand the person or explain themselves, either.
Blindnesses that I have met have been varied. My sister doesn't register foreign emotion easily. She knows her own, but the perceptive systems necessary to register emotions in others is ... rusty. Maybe inoperable. So it takes her forever to notice when something she does has an emotional impact on another person, and longer still to build an understanding of how and why her action had that effect. You see? Now, a lot of people view her as callous, because of this problem. But it is not that she does not care what her actions do to others. It's that she honestly doesn't see the connection between action and emotion until much later.
I have a friend who doesn't see pictures in her head when she reads. Now, I think this is because visual keys wouldn't be one of her prime translation keys. She doesn't translate concepts in terms of images, so she understands words via some other vehicle that I can't understand, or at least one that she can't explain to me. Because I am such a visual person, it's hard for me to understand that system. I lack the ability to translate it. And because of the way she sees words, things like books have little attraction to her. But it's not that she's illiterate, and certainly not that she is less intelligent because she reads less! Books just don't translate to her. They don't give her joy. Now, films, with the images ready made ... that's a whole other ball game. You see?
Having a different system by which you process the world around you, in my opinion anyway, is no indication of intelligence. It isn't! People with a system based on visual keys, or math keys, or other more common keys, understand intelligence from the way it's expressed in certain forms. For people for whom those forms mean nothing, intelligence is a different thing.
Everything is subjective. Or rather our connection with everything is subjective. How we interact with everything is dependant on who we are and how we understand the world.
So social interaction, the human system, is not something that had a universal meaning, any more than any other. Some people cannot understand the connections between people. Some can't even see that they exist. Can't. Not won't. Won't is a whole other ball game and far closer to evil, in my opinion. But telling the difference between can't and won't ... that's another problem, isn't it?
The way I see the world ... layer on layers of pattern and interaction, connections and voids, and everything linked back, linked in to the wider pattern. A pattern universe-wide. But some pieces react in isolation to their surroundings. Eyes blind, feeling their way labouriously.
Some people see numbers. Some people see shapes, motions, emotions, colours, zones, races, rules, systems, flows, incidents, connections, isolations, blank spaces ... the permutations are endless, and in some cases mutually exclusive. Not every system can translate to the others. Not every individual system can fit inside the larger ones we build. Not every individual can see the larger systems, or even the other individual systems, or how any of them might connect to the others. Maybe they're only blind to certain types of system or connection or process, but ... no-one sees the whole picture. No-one (if you believe in something omniscent, insert exception here). So everyone has problems translating for those who don't see as they do.
Some people just have more trouble than others. Everyone only has so much energy, and the more of it that's taken up with the effort of translation, the less there is for living. Eventually, everyone has to find a balance in how much of their focus is translating themselves for others, and how much is one doing what they were born in this world to do. Some people make the choice to withdraw from humanity, from the effort of translation. Some people have no choice, when the effort is literally too much, the systems too dissimilar. Sometimes no amount of effort on behalf of only one party can bridge the gap.
Maybe, if the other side tried to reach out in the other direction, create a half-way point, a mutual translation programme ... but outside a certain range, larger systems have a tendancy not to do that.
In some cases, though, the large systems cannot do it. Same rules apply, unfortunately. There's only so much energy to go around, only so much adaptability, and large systems like society, if they are to work for the majority, simply can't work for all the outliers.
Some systems simply can't integrate.
That ... that sounded terribly cold, didn't it? I know it did. I know that sounded clinical, cold, mechanical. Because I called them systems, yes? Because I look at people as systems, same as rivers and computers and everything else. But that's translation error. It is. Because 'system' doesn't mean to me what it means to you. I see systems in everything. To me, systems are the most beautiful things, each unique, each connected, each unfolding in layer and layer of meaning and understanding. Emotional systems, moral ... I see them all. Because I understand things as systems. That doesn't lessen them, cheapen them. It doesn't mean I don't treasure them.
I do. Gods, but I do. I told you above, tried to explain. How beautiful everything is through these eyes, and how beautiful everything I come to understand is. The more I know about someone, anyone, anyone at all, the more I love them.
There is one thing that is ugly to me. Not being able to see, to understand, that I forgive. That I understand. But to be able, and to choose not to understand, that I can't. To know what you do would hurt someone, and do it anyway. To understand consequence, and still act. Willful ignorance, that is ugly to me. Acting on it to hurt, uglier still.
I know there are more moral greys that that. My only point is that there are people who don't understand the harm her actions cause. That isn't evil, no matter how terrible the action seems to the outsider. Dangerous, hell yes! But not evil.
The only evil in this world lies in people who choose, knowing and understanding what it will do, what it will mean to hurt someone, and do it anyway.
Evil is in the choice, not the ability.
And on that note, since I've gone from trying to explain into preaching, I should probably stop there.
