Connecting? ****- well, I like to think of it as the process of forming relations 😁

How do we do it then? And why is it so natural?

Let’s think about the two key problems we encountered in the previous section, and the ‘standard’ approach to solve for these:

As we pointed out in the previous section, the first challenge with this situation is the act of combination itself - we are being asked to experience something outside of our boundary, which seems fundamentally impossible.

The second challenge is just as significant - when we consider our entire life, any shared experiences will form a very small part of the total (even speaking for 4 hours daily with someone else accounts for only 25% of your waking life).

💡 As we touched upon earlier, we deal with these problems by establishing structures that allow us to :

• Agree on the words we use (and their definitions) for a set of shared concepts
• Combine definitions to convey complex ideas quickly

The principle here is quite simple, and on the face of it, sound - establish a set of terms that both parties agree on, and agree on a set of ways in which these terms can interact with one another.

The problem here is hidden in the word ’establish’ - using global dictionaries creates a sense of common ground, but the process of understanding, and being able to use these terms/rules, is very different for different people, which complicates our original problem - we think we’ve solved for a problem that’s still there, and this makes the problem worse 🤦‍♀️

🎨 Consider the ‘art and artist’ question -

The ‘opposing’ stances can be expressed as:

• One cannot separate a creation from the life and actions of its creator
• One cannot disregard a creation because of the life and actions of its creator and these stances are in no way inconsistent with each other!

The trick here, is to avoid bringing external elements into the relation without actively working on understanding them with each other😁 Or, to use a term we’ve probably come across before, we have to contextualize!

To clarify - establishing common words and rules is a valid approach to connecting - but the choosing and defining of the words and the rules must be done by the people involved in the relation, not any third party.

And the most effective way to do this is through repeated interaction - the more experiences we share with people, the greater access we have to impressions that we receive from the same third-party source, which gives us a richer dictionary from where we can start conversations.

😁 Of course, we don’t always need the same extent of context to communicate, but in our close personal relationships, as also scenarios where we are working with others, the need for context increases, and so too does the difficulty of communication

Now let’s take a look at a highly simplified version of a single person’s relation map:

Because all of our relations ultimately share one node (ourself!), we eventually have to translate between the dictionaries that we use for our different relations - not for the sake of others, but for ourselves!