Comment by balamatom

My wordmangling and mathsolving happen in that sort of logico/aesthetical space, too!

The twist about words in particular is they are distinctly articulable symbols, i.e. you can sound 'em out - and thus, presumably, have a reasonable expectation for bearers of the same language to comprehend if not what you meant then at least some vaguely predictable meaning-cloud associated with the given speech act.

That's unlike e.g. the numbers (which are more compressed, and thus easier to get wrong), or the syntagms of a programming language (which don't even have a canonical sonic representation).

Therefore, it's usually words that are taught to a mind during the formative stages of its emergence. That is, the words that you are taught, your means of inner reflection, are still sort of an imposition from the outside.

Just consider what you life trajectory would've been if in your childhood you had refused to learn any words, or learned them and then refused to mistake them for the things they represent!

Infants and even some animals recognize their reflection in a mirror; however, practically speaking, introspection is something that one needs to be taught: after recognizing your reflection you still need to be instructed what is to be done about it.

Unfortunately, introspection needing to be taught means that introspection can be taught wrongly.

As you can see with the archetypical case of "old and wise person does something completely stupid in response to communication via digital device", a common failure mode of how people are taught introspection (and, I figure, an intentional one!) is not being able to tell apart yourself from your self, i.e. not having an intuitive sense of where the boundary lies between perception and cognition, i.e. going through life without ever learning the difference between the "you" and the "words about you".

It's extremely common, and IMO an extremely factory-farming kind of tragic.

I say it must be extremely intentional as well, because the well-known practice of using "introspection modulators" to establish some sort of perceptual point of reference (such as where the interior logicoaeshtetical space ends and exterior causalityspace begins) very often ends up with the user in, well, a cage of some sort.