6 Degrees Of Integration - World

dragosroua (74)in #challenge30 • 8 years ago

This is the seventh - and the last - article from the series 6 Degrees Of Integration. There is a list of all the articles that are part of this series at the end of the post.

Value Is Context Dependent, Intention Has Inertia

In the first posts we discussed how value is entirely subjective, context-dependent and how context has an inherent inertia. Our intentions to modify the environment will always need a certain time to manifest and that time depends on the value we have created and how well adapted that value is to that specific context.

Although we entertain the illusion of control, the only thing that we can modify instantly is how we feel and what we do about our current situation. This obviously won’t change the situation instantly, but it will shape the value we create in order to change our experiences in the future.

We realized that we function on flawed hardware and software. That means our body is decaying every second and we can only perceive a fraction of what is surrounding us (can't see X-rays, for instance, or hear infrasounds). Our mind is wired in such a way that we can't understand something if didn't learn that first. We cannot recognize something unless we've been previously exposed to that piece of information and we formed some sort of a "mirror" concept of it.

So the basic approach to our daily interaction with the world should be: don't believe everything you see and don't believe everything you think.

We started with the first insertion point in the outside world, which is family (in the sense of the context in which we are brought up). We observed that at the child level we are completely dependent on what we are taught by our parents. At the adult level we use our partner or spouse to make ourselves accountable, and once we get old we reaped what we sowed.

The second insertion point is represented by friends, which are both helping create value (by offering support and validation) and act as a partial context for the value we created.

The third insertion point is represented by guilds, or professional circles. These guilds are helping us to calibrate our skills and complement our services.

The fourth insertions point is about clients, or people with whom we are transacting value. We learned that we should calibrate also our expectations and accept our liabilities in any potential transaction. Specifically because we live in a world we can't control, we try to project safety by enforcing it under the form of contracts. Contracts, as a way to enforce our intentions, are very difficult to implement and to maintain without continuous recalibration of expectations.

Now, we came to the fifth insertion point: the World.

Everything Else

We tend to perceive the world as everything else outside family, friends, guilds and clients. The world is made of other people. Persons that we don't know, but we have some proof that they exist. For instance, when you live in a democracy and there are elections, you get to learn a lot about other people preferences. Or when you join a new community, you interact with someone you never met before, and that person is obviously not part of your family, not your friend (yet), not part of a guild and not a client (yet). It's somebody from the world.

I tend to perceive "the world" as a big, elastic medium that will eventually return everything that we put into it. It's the most elusive and difficult to explain level of all six, because we can't name it, we can't put a finger on it, and yet it's the most powerful.

The world acts as an amplifier for our actions in whatever form we perform them. It expands and compresses with the consequences of our deeds at any of the previous levels.

The problem is that the entropy is so big, that we have a hard time tracking down which actions gets returned, and when. There is so much out there, that our inherently limited minds have a hard time comprehending all the ins and outs. We tend to see whatever happens to us as chaotically, lacking inherent reason and hard to explain. And yet, if we understand that everything we experience comes from a cause and everything we do generates a consequence, it makes perfect sense.

Our inherent confusion about who we are and what we do is making us create a continuous story in our minds, replacing the consequences with presumptions and the causes with delusions. As such, the world appear to us as a foggy, impossible to understand territory.

It's not. It all starts with us. Then with our families, it grows to friends, guilds and clients. This is the world.

The world is nothing but what we make of it, every second.

It's just taking a lot of time for us to be able to actually see it that way.

All the articles in this series:

1. 6 Degrees Of Integration - Introduction
2. 6 Degrees Of Integration - You
3. 6 Degrees Of Integration - Family
4. 6 Degrees Of Integration - Friends
5. 6 Degrees Of Integration - Guilds
6. 6 Degrees Of Integration - Clients

I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.