That’s a very scary headspace to be in; trying to describe it makes it sound like it’s a very severe mental illness; but it’s actually common among so-called “healthy” people. Heidegger got this.
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You actually feel like social opinions are ontological primaries, and things like atoms, tables, or even sense perceptions are abstractions *over* social judgments. It’s as spooky as it sounds.
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We all use associational cognition constantly; we literally could not see if we didn’t. It’s not a “bad” mode of thought, it’s essential.
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But using *exclusively* associational cognition *for interpreting language* is, I think, a flattened, contracted, degenerate state, relative to what human minds can do in general. Being “insecure” or “easily triggered” is *not* just due to having finite computational power.
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The usual cynical explanation is that being “insecure” is a subconscious self-interested power move — “I precommit to getting upset unless you devote more resources to me.” But I think it’s actually even creepier than that.
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I think it’s a selfish gene thing. A gene for being “triggerable” isn’t there to benefit the organism it’s in, but to benefit its *kin*, who also have the gene, and can benefit from having victims who are easier to abuse and manipulate.
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This is pure speculation on my part, but once I saw it I couldn’t unsee it. The selfish-gene figure-ground inversion applies to behavior too — which means not all your instinctual behaviors were evolved to benefit *you*. Some may be evolved to benefit your kin at your expense.
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The thing that makes “judgment” freighted, makes it “judgmental”, is really hard to explain to people who aren’t as sensitive to it. It really is like your words are magic binding commands, “thou shalt feel bad about thyself.”
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Twitter is especially bad for this because most tweets are commands or evaluative judgments. You just scroll through and get dozens of people telling you what to do and think.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @vgr
Given there's lots of judgements on one's feed and they contradict each other, what causes someone to get affected by some but not others – or what makes it possible to listen to them at all?
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What current mental state you’re in, what your “sore points” or “touchy subjects” are, probably some motivations I don’t understand fully. (The part of you that decides *when* to get emotionally worked up is agentic but it’s hard to know its agenda.)
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