Henrik Karlsson (@henrikkarlsson): "I have a phrase in “Relationships are coevolutionary loops” where I write: It is rare for people to come into themselves if no one is excited and curious about their core, their potential. One reason for this is that reality is very, very complex. As a thought experiment, im…"

I have a phrase in “Relationships are coevolutionary loops” where I write: It is rare for people to come into themselves if no one is excited and curious about their core, their potential. One reason for this is that reality is very, very complex. As a thought experiment, imagine a person completely attuned to themselves, with a lot of empathy and understanding toward everything, including themselves, but without access to other people to talk to, without books or anything. That person wouldn't get very far! Understanding reality in all its nuance and detail, and especially understanding the reality of our inner lives, is so complex that we need to work together to make progress. It is a communal project, stretching back through the millenia. Take, for example, cognitive heuristics and biases—an important part of a sophisticated understanding of how our minds work. Even though we’ve had cognitive heuristics for 100,000s or years, the vocabulary and conceptual understanding necessary to talk about it and observe it with high resolution in ourselves wasn’t articulated and developed until the last fifty years. There are precursors in various philosophers and thinkers going back hundreds of years, but it took a large effort of many people for many years to refine this understanding and create this vocabulary. But now, millions of people use it to talk about their thoughts and to understand themselves better. That's an example of something that clearly took us a very long time to grasp. I would argue that basically everything is like that—even things that feel more obvious to us, like anxiety or happiness. All of these are concepts for thinking about ourselves that people had to develop. All words we use to make sense of ourselves are the result of endless thinking and conversation through millenia. If we tried to re-derive it from the raw experience of our own lives, most of us wouldn't get anywhere. It's very rare for someone with undifferentiated, unarticulated, murky experience to turn that into sharp understanding. We develop our understanding of ourselves and the world by borrowing concepts and ideas developed by others. We learn them by talking, listning, and reading. Then we might tweak them a little bit, and add insights drawn from our own experiences—but this is a much slower process, and most of us aren’t very good at it, so we rely on the collective process of developing understanding for the most part. This means our understanding of ourselves, as individuals, is to a large extent limited by what kinds of conversations we have access to. If we don’t have parents or peers who give us loving attention, and who can help us articulate our inner world, and if we never learn to turn to books with deep insights, we end up with a very limited understanding of ourselves, and with a very limited set of tools for orienting toward the world. https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/making-a-home-together

I have a phrase in “Relationships are coevolutionary loops” where I write: It is rare for people to come into themselves if no one is excited and curious about their core, their potential. One reason for this is that reality is very, very complex. As a thought experiment, imagine a person completely attuned to themselves, with a lot of empathy and understanding toward everything, including themselves, but without access to other people to talk to, without books or anything. That person wouldn't get very far! Understanding reality in all its nuance and detail, and especially understanding the r