Jeddex

It's interesting how we, as the dominant species on the planet, who are the self-proclaimed smartest, don't really outperform many other animals in the most rudimentary cognitive tasks; we're beat in short-term memory by chimps, in certain spatial tasks by pigeons, and in processing-speed by most other birds. Point being, we as humans don't excel in the animal kingdom because of our mediocre memory, spatial ability, or any other basic cognitive ability.

So what exactly makes us stand out? I'd say that our ability to abstract out and think categorically has allowed us to dominate the scene really. First of all, what is abstraction? I'd say abstraction is our ability to detach experiential properties from our experiences and then generalize them across a set of situations, these properties having a sense of thingness, we call them objects of intuition; once we could spread out our objects of intuition into the manifold layers of reality, we learned how to operate in a very clairvoyant mode of existence. We no longer thought of a predator but rather of the class of predators, and from that we detached the experiential property of danger, which we could respond to via preparing for the potentiality of them. How exactly? By sacrificing the present for the future. Through discovering the future, we learned we could elevate our existential mode and focus on higher-order goals.

What are higher-order goals in the first place? You might think of them as goals that extend beyond the immediacy of our experiences, which is accurate, but it leaves out an important aspect. Our way of being is rooted in a conceptual framework that we cultivate through two key forces: the ethos we are raised in and the individual definite patterns of being we are born with. When we're young, abstraction is developed through the impressionability of our senses; the more sensitive you are to external-stimuli, the more distinctions you'll be capable of extrapolating and thus creating abstractions in proportion to that, which shapes your conceptual framework of the world. But for more intangible aspects of life, we largely rely on social expectations conveyed by our parents; social expectations being intersubjective means that we will understand part of them subjectively. That subjectivity with age will become more personalized.

As teenagers, we begin to detach from the expectations imposed by our parents since those subject interpretations have fully personalized; we start testing the abstract frameworks we've developed. We attempt to impose these nuanced ideas of identity on the world around us, however, the world often fails to conform to these expectations, and this clash causes insecurity in our adolescence, often fomenting us.

An anecdote I can proffer to show some insight into how abstraction regulates us: While I was walking my dog, she kept pulling on the leash to stop and smell trees or anything that she found interesting. Every time she pulled, I felt a tight red knot form on my forehead, and it irritated me. But as I continued walking, I began to think about how things that don't tangibly affect us in any manner can provoke such a visceral pain-like reaction.

I realized the only reason this happens is because I had this expectation I was imposing on the world, not because my dog kept pulling on the leash. Which is dumb because if my expectation about the world didn't align with reality, it simply meant that whatever was happening instead should be my actual expectation. Once I realized that, that tight red-knot feeling on my forehead vanished, and I no longer experienced any distress. It reminded me of a quote by Seneca: "We often suffer more in imagination than reality".

So much of our suffering comes not from reality itself, but from the expectations we impose on it.

Of course, we do need to impose expectations on the world because otherwise we wouldn't be sane. But too much insistence on trivialities can cause more suffering than necessary.

Our abstraction has enabled us to act with clairvoyance in relation to the world,(compared to the immediacy of the animal kingdom) but sometimes when abstraction has detached too far or incorrectly from actuality it can cause us distress or get us lost in a maze of senseless meaning. In order to leverage it properly, we must go meta by detaching ourselves from abstraction and evaluate it practically.