Evan Urquhart

At this point, we’ve officially established that the part of language we usually pay attention to is a whole-ass convoluted mess. Oh, but it gets better. Because our minds have a whole mechanism that’s used to translate language.

At its most basic, the brain saves time and energy by collapsing things it can categorize into a symbol it uses as a callsign. So when I say “man”, your brain doesn’t bring up every man it’s ever seen. Instead, it brings up a symbol that represents the category of “man”.

This is one of the most brilliant evolutionary aspects of the brain. Internal Artifacts give us the ability to think fast and efficiently, and to recognize the properties of whole categories of objects without too much thought. What could go wrong? I’m glad you asked.

Since each person grows up differently, and has unique experiences, the symbols (IAs) that our brain uses to collapse a particular category are different. For example, if you say “tree”, my brain will find the context and then bring up an IA that corresponds to that context.

In my mind, I see the Maple tree that I made a fort in. I get a warm feeling from a good memory. But in your mind, it might be the tree that you fell out of and broke your back, and the memory might feel dark and cold. So the same EA can lead to us seeing very different IAs.

This is just one word. Every word in our language is an example of this, though the most obvious differences are found in nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Internally, these artifacts aggregate into our individual perception of “The World”.

In simple, practical terms: everyone lives in their own little world. This is something we don’t take seriously enough. While external phenomena have their own genuine reality, it’s a reasonable bet that not a single person alive has ever actually fully seen it.

When we’re arguing about something like gender, one of the things we’re actually doing is asking the other person to change the way their minds categorize a symbol. And if they’ve put that much stock in it, changing the way they see that symbol can literally break their world.