14h ago

It's surreal to have innate feelings and thought patterns that are completely intuitive to you, but it turns out that 99% of people think differently.

I always assume that my brain is structured in a way that at least 5% of people could relate to my general thought processes, but it turns out that some of my experiences of being a human are really just a "me" thing. I've often told myself that I'm just like everyone else, and that all of my personality traits are explainable by a mishmash of stereotypes and systemic influences. But I guess there's more to it than that, and I've been selling myself a bit short.

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For me it's the opposite: I'm always shocked when broadly different people end up aligning on certain similar traits along multiple axes. Like conlanging and Linux or trans girls and communism.

I can't get over the fact that due to how thoughts work in our brain, we can't even be certain that when we are looking at something that is red, we are seeing the same color. How our mind interprets the shared data we get from external stimuli isn't necessarily shared itself. And we can't really describe color in any way other than with feelings, or the hard data of physics and wavelengths and how light interacts with the eyes (again, tho, not how the mind interprets that data). There isn't even a word for what I am talking about other than "color."
- There is a word in philosophy of mind—the qualia of redness.

The opposite extreme is also true and something I have faced, where people can even be mistaken between one another because people forget that no mindset is at 0%. It's not like DNA where nature makes sure we all have a unique said (heck handwriting and signatures aren't even like DNA, which has always been a bombshell whenever I bring it up), and there is no hard rule about how often two people coincidentally operate the same way, something that has made its way into the world of scienctists.

Imagine the following: you see a room with a table and a chair in the middle. On top of the table there is a ball. A kid comes into the room, climbs the chair and tries to grab the ball that sits on the table. Did you finish imagining? I want you to answer for yourself now what was the color of the hair of the kid? What about of what he was wearing? Did you imagine these kind of details or you just imagined some concepts?
In my case I did see all the details and many more. My imagination is like a movie. I can imagine my future house with a lot of details inside. I can build it and rebuild it in my mind. Some people have problems to do that.
- Don't assume the gender of my imaginary child.
  
  Ha ha, true! I was imagining a boy.
- What did the ball smell like? That smelly rubber smell? What did the chair and table feel like? Could you feel the texture of the wood and the coolness? How did it feel to walk and move, like when you had your child body?

This line of thought always leads me towards a silly sentence: logic is a sacred cow that as nothing sacred to it.
Most people take logic as granted. It is a basic element of human minds, thoughts and how those are externally expressed. But what is logical to one individual may be completely illogical to another.
Even if expressed in rigourously defined terms and expressions, the ideas a given logical sequence tries to convey and explain may be totally and completely flawed and irrelevant to another or simply wrong.
We are able to share concepts in its widest of forms but we can never truely and correctly express what we really think and understand to another because we are, in fact, even if in the most minute of ways, unique.
So, don't sell yourself short.
- But logic isn't innate. It's a pattern. And human brains are basically very good at patterns.
  But there are many, many, many patterns in life and logic is only one of them (and it isn't even particularly useful if you don't have some other patterns backing it up).

It's more either or, but whether your thoughts are spoken (hearing your thoughts) or images (seeing your thoughts) is a good one. Makes for an interesting conversation to have with friends and family!
- I feel like I lean mostly towards images, with words coming in when needed (imagining conversations, thinking about explaining something, etc). Visual thinking is a much faster ‘processing lane’ for me.
  I was thinking about this subject just this morning when I was making oatmeal and groggily trying to remember what ingredient my oatmeal was missing; in a few instants the image of cinnamon in the oatmeal, our container of cinnamon, and where the cinnamon was in the drawer all flashed in my mind as images. How would someone who thinks in words do that? Do the words just come as fast for them as images do for me?
  
  I think about the process of making porridge.
  Step one heat pot Two add oats 3 water 4 cook 5 cinnamon Ohh missed the cinnamon
  These steps run through my brain very fast, but that's how it goes.
  I can't fathom having pictures in my brain to understand the world outside.

I once managed to puzzle our HR person into silence when I explained why I did something a certain way.
- Are you neurodiverse? Cos we often think outside the box
  
  I don't have any official diagnosis or anything, but some neurodivergent friends have sent me some stuff and I'm probably some form of neurodivergent, yeah.

We're all a combination of nature and nurture. No one is totally unique and no one is exactly the same.

Recently experienced this with my wife. We both described ourselves as internally organizing information "like bullet points".
She means memorization of countless individual facts all stored/categorized at the same level.
I tend to use bullet point lists to organize things hierarchically. Least indented is the high level takeaway, indented ones below are extended info for the less indented point above. That's how I tend to organize knowledge. I've learned that apparently this is not as ubiquitous as I believed.
It illuminates some deep seated causes behind a some of the friction in our relationship, but unfortunately it doesn't do much to help me see any way around them unfortunately.

Can you give some examples?
- I used to think it required an emotional connection for most people to find someone else "hot," because that's how I work. But it turns out that I'm in a small minority.
  
  I can appreciate æsthetics independently of emotion.
  But I need emotion to get "turned on".
  So I'm in this weird space where I can admire the looks of people (in about the same way that most people admire scenery) without wanting to fuck same (in about the same way that most people don't want to fuck a forest ... or a couch).
  
  I think the name for that is being demi sexual
  
  I've grown into this way of thinking and feeling. I used to see attractiveness in aesthetics with emotional connection as an after thought.

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