Evan Urquhart

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.

This is part of why we see so many arguments from transphobes about how “gender ideology is destroying the world”. It isn’t destroying the larger world: it can’t. But it deeply threatens the complex matrix of Internal Artifacts that they’ve used as for organizing perception.

This is something I experienced and continue to experience. I once had very strict IAs for m/w based on secondary sex characteristics. Accepting myself and other trans people led to shifting those, but I still struggle to call any idealized form to mind for "nonbinary person".