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my most woo belief: ābody languageā is a lossless + comprehensive communication medium, everyone in proximity knows just about everything about each other all the time spoken language is a reducing valve to protect each other from uncomfortable info and maintain harmony
many of the people we informally call āautistsā (i.e. not actually autistic just norm-divergent) are exceptionally sensitive to nonverbal comms, overwhelmed by it most of the time, and actively working to block it out from conscious awareness
@RichDecibels > Youāre saying I can dodge eye contact? < Iām saying when youāre ready, you wonāt have to. https://t.co/DFNeWG2qHs
@RichDecibels Reminds me of this thread https://t.co/QEvtxOPaDn
i'm gonna explain this a bit. there is a "secret language" spoken by children and animals that uses the whole body as a way to send signals, this language is nonverbal and vibes-based, it's emotional, felt, and intuitive. our society is very dedicated to ignoring that signal.
@RichDecibels this somehow reminds me of "A General Theory of Love", which is actually really about the mamalian brain https://t.co/ZgSkMKLvIM
Halfway through my reading of āA General Theory of Loveā, I feel like I got more than what I was expecting. Chapter six ends on this: āWho we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we loveā. Which echoes with āI am a Strange Loopā from Douglas Hofstadter. https://t.co/NgLFpbEw7f
@RichDecibels Corroboration, it's not at all uncommon for most 1:1 interviews with oneās Zen teacher in an established relationship to conclude as soon as you finish bowing. They see what's up, send you on your way to keep on, back at it.
@mudlott @RichDecibels Don't like to be seen through, eh? Most people, if they realize what's going on, do find it intensely uncomfortable at first. I know it scared me shitless. Sometimes, sitting in line waiting for the encounter, would sweat through my robes, heart racing. Good training!
Iāll push back a bit. Body language isnāt really all too comprehensive in my experience. We can easily misunderstand body cues, and filter them through our own experience of embodiment. ie; my partner sometimes asks me why Iām breathing so loud am I angry at her?! And that interpretation often comes from a discomfort in her own current embodied state. We donāt see the world as it is; we see it as we are. Language here serves as a releasing valve for us, to offer us the extra info we need to interface better. Whatās alive in you now? Where do you feel that in your body? We canāt guess the location and intensity of each otherās current visceral moment. I also think this flavor of woo is dropped in the Kool laid of Empaths who can tooootallly read a room and who tell me how Iām feeling, and so Iām sure thatās inspired me to respond here haha
@RichDecibels checks out but wdym by "spoken language is a reducing valve"? Doesn't your belief imply that language can't add any more info? I would have said: spoken language is a tool to create *common* knowledge, c.f. emperor's new clothes. maybe we're saying the same thing
@RichDecibels this is true, but an important caveat is it is much more true within roughly shared cultures. navigating across cultures (both in the local communities sense and in the international/linguistic/ethnic sense), it is wild how similar body language can connote super diff things.
@RichDecibels love it.i raise you a woo: body language is a small death of some part of self. it exists in similar fashion as evolving to die: under the assumption that some goods we cannot know to choose for ourselves, & we instead leave the negotiation to our bodies & the outside universe.
@RichDecibels many are saying this https://t.co/wKfxxZaXFZ
it's insane to me how much it DOES NOT matter what you say in conversation. all that matters is the emotion & vibe you're communicating. you can literally make gibberish sounds no matter how many times i read, see or hear this theoretically, i continue to be gobsmacked by it
@RichDecibels This isā¦ surprisingly UN-woo! A connected idea is that individual outcomes are basically always exactly desired. If we want to know why someone did something ā we need look no further than the outcome natural to the action.
@RichDecibels itās not woo it just sounds like a tautology because you canāt find the (lossy) words to fully explain what you couldā¦ show even spoken language carries more than the words, and you can play even with THAT to change the feeling of the reading if you wanted to
@RichDecibels I was thinking a thing to say about this that Iāll probably not ever write because my brain is better at the idea of ideas than ideas themselves but it involved the structural importance of traverse beliefs to the social fabric. it was a woo brow response.
Yes, in a "the purpose of a thing is what it does" sense, so you don't have to acknowledge its other affordances in this context (eg what it is vs what it affords vs what it tends to do.) Through that lens we must also acknowledge that language helps manifest potential. So the way language misrepresents is not a lie, it's an aspirational goal. In the zoomed-in scope of the conversation, it's about pulling participants into alignment with the situation's potential, through language. In this way we can on-board (bootstrap) ourselves into better and better places. Injecting the lie of unrealised potential into every frame is the only way to escape the closed loop of the human condition.
@RichDecibels It's not just body language. Our hearts naturally connect and know each other deeply through feeling. Minds arent privy to most of it, and the little bit that gets through usually gets misinterpreted as "my feeling".
@RichDecibels > spoken language is a reducing valve to protect each other from uncomfortable info and maintain harmonyhmm hmm hmmthis hasn't clicked for me yet but I think it wants to click(also lol ironic that it's sort-of spoken language, maybe I need to see you say this in person)
@RichDecibels https://t.co/1sxCqPUA9r
This is the belief that almost shut me down a while back. If experienced enough you can know so much about a person in a glance. I think a lot of the skill comes from knowing the common tells and extrapolating from there. If you can qualify how they act & the current situation to some degree, you can place them in a category/model that can fairly accurately predict their state of mind. Then from there, reverse engineering how that state came to be as you gain new information.
@RichDecibels I feel that way sometimes too, but I've also seen misunderstandings in body language. For example, my freeze response has been interpreted by some people as "quiet, mysterious, and intimidating" when actually I was just scared.
@RichDecibels Related to something I've seen here theorized a few months ago: people perceived as creepy are often just tense, which is interpreted as "jamming" the signal - "why would one suppress one's body language, what are you hiding?"
@barryogg https://t.co/1q4xLwHQY2
@RichDecibels Oh wow I totally forgot you tweeted this https://t.co/vu9h6PAPJA