What We Don't Yet Comprehend
Worldviews are interpretive frames that shape how we perceive reality
Useful, but fragile if taken as more than they are
Love is an interpretive act
Perception is a creative activity
Choose to perceive others with love
Wherever you stand, be the soul of that place
We call it void not because we know it is empty but because we do not know what it is full of.
Nothing is empty, just some things are full of what we don't yet comprehend. Most of the universe is full of what we don't yet comprehend--including the world around us and, often, others sharing the world with us.
See also:
"The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper."― Eden Phillpotts, 1919"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."― Shakespeare, in Hamlet, 1600
There is much our wits haven't yet grown sharp enough to comprehend--and much of what we think we comprehend we construct through inference.
Pink appears when your eyes receive a combination of long wavelengths associated with red and shorter wavelengths associated with blue, and often a little green is present. Those signals reach the visual cortex together, and the brain resolves them into a color that exists nowhere on the spectrum.Every pink flower, every sunset, every piece of bubblegum, every flamingo owes its color to an act of interpretation. . . .Vision feels effortless. Open your eyes, and there it is. But really, our brains are doing far more than receiving information. They are constantly filling gaps, stabilizing motion, correcting blind spots, emphasizing what matters, and discarding what doesn’t. Neuroscience describes perception as an active process of construction rather than passive observation. Every conscious moment is the result of biological inference happening beneath awareness.The world reaches us already translated.If you looked only at the spectrum itself, there would be no pink. Your brain solves the problem by creating a new experience.Pink.It isn’t detecting a hidden property of the universe. It’s constructing a perception that helps make sense of conflicting information. We all experience it. But because it reminds us that the world we live in is not simply downloaded into consciousness. It is interpreted.Every glance carries a quiet collaboration between the laws of physics and the biology of perception. The universe provides the raw materials. The mind transforms them into the world each of us calls home.
Perception is often not a matter of detecting the objective properties of that which we perceive, but of interpreting conflicting information in ways we can comprehend.
Even much of what we comprehend we partially invent. Comprehension is an active process that we shape.
Our senses activate constant, automatic, instant interpretations to make perception happen--and our brains don't even try to process all the information they perceive: our brains are constantly predicting what our perceptions will tell us, then filtering incoming information to see if the predictions need to be revised to better conform with the data. Our senses help our brains perceive what is wrong with its assumptions and interpretations, not actually perceive what is.
And that considers only the way we perceive supposedly objective, factual information about the world as we interact with it. Social and self-perception is even more of an interpretive process. Our expectations and assumptions are based in our worldviews.
Antonio Gramsci filled thirty-three notebooks with political theory, historical analysis, and close attention to language. . . . Their central question is deceptively simple: how does a ruling class maintain its position without constant recourse to force?The answer is hegemony. And hegemony works, in large part, through language. . . .For him, hegemony is not simply the imposition of one group’s will on another. It is the process by which a dominant group’s worldview becomes the worldview: the background against which all other positions are judged. It operates through consent rather than coercion, through culture rather than law, and through the categories we use to make sense of the world rather than the content of any single argument. . . .The mechanism Gramsci identified is what he called “common sense," but not in the usual sense of the phrase. In everyday usage, common sense means practical wisdom, the obvious thing to do. In Gramsci’s analysis, it refers to the accumulated, uncritical body of assumptions and categories that most people in a given society hold without examining. . . . One might say it is “hardwired.” It forms over time, through years of circulating ideas, repeated phrases, institutional habits, media categories and political vocabularies. These shape what a society comes to treat as reasonable, natural or self-evident. . . .The key word is “natural.” When a political position feels like common sense, it feels like a description of reality rather than an argument about it. That naturalisation is the achievement of hegemony. . . .Language is never a neutral instrument. It is always already shaped by social relations, and it in turn reproduces them.This means that the vocabulary available for political debate is itself a political achievement. Who controls the terms of a debate influences, in advance, what conclusions are reachable within it. . . .Whoever establishes the metaphor through which economic policy is discussed has already shaped the terrain on which arguments will be made.This is what Gramsci meant by saying that the struggle over language is inseparable from the struggle over politics. . . .Gramsci paid close attention to the institutions through which ideas circulate: schools, the Church, the press, and, in the 1930s, radio. These were not neutral channels. They were the terrain of the war of position. Whoever controls the dominant media controls, to a significant degree, which frameworks become available for making sense of political life and which remain marginal. Gramsci called this the struggle for the "national-popular": the contest over which ideas come to feel like the common property of a whole society rather than the interest of a particular group. The linguistic techniques this article has examined, the framing of social actors, the naturalisation of economic metaphors, do not operate in isolation. They are produced and reproduced through institutions that are themselves sites of political contest.
Hegemony is the process by which a dominant group’s worldview becomes the worldview: the background against which all other positions are judged. It operates through consent rather than coercion, through culture rather than law, and through the categories we use to make sense of the world rather than the content of any single argument.
Worldviews are interpretive frames that shape how we perceive reality.
As a collective, the library profession has been generally resistant to the recent developments in artificial intelligence. We view it critically through our information literacy lens and see more deficits and harms than benefits. Many in my organization opt out entirely and advocate for others to do the same. I don't disagree with this, but I worry we might be failing to engage with an emerging reality, making ourselves less responsive to our patrons and less knowledgeable overall.
I want to share something I wrote for my library's intranet so everyone in the system might read it. This was purely my idea and initiative. Here it is:
Pondering AI
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Information agent
Dr. Know from the movie A.I. (2001) |
I’ve spent much of 2026 intentionally pondering AI. These reflections were not new ones this year specifically, as it’s been coming for a while and has been an idea explored in science fiction my whole life. But recently AI has left the realm of entertainment and fiction and become an unavoidable reality. So, I’ve explored a wide variety of perspectives to help myself learn, read many things, attended webinars ranging from “Resisting Generative AI in Libraries” to “AI for Librarians Who Don’t Have Time for This,” and created accounts to try out some AI tools. I’m left with questions and ruminations much more than answers and conclusions. I want to share some of my thoughts—not to sway or convince anyone, merely to invite you into my explorations.
Cycles of Disruptive Technology
The Iliad and The Odyssey exist today because someone decided to take the radical step of writing down the stories that had been memorized and passed down for generations. Socrates famously opposed the widespread use of writing, arguing it was inferior to spoken dialogue and harmful to human cognition. There are those who thought—and who still feel—similarly about the printing press and the mainstreaming of books, that it meant a loss of oral cultural traditions and weakened our memory capacity. There is validity to those concerns, as we now have a world built on storing our information and stories externally, in books and other media, instead of in our minds.
If you research historical library literature, you can find early ALA debates about the inclusion of fiction in libraries, whether it had a valid place in our collections alongside more high-minded works. More recently, the same arguments have taken place about an ever-increasing series of disruptive technologies: records and audio, video, computers, on and on. Each one has been billed as dangerous and had to overcome resistance before its general adoption.
When I started working as a high school librarian in the late 90s, I designed digital literacy lessons to teach students researching online the differences between search directories and search engines, and how to use critical judgment in deciding whether Google, Yahoo, or one of the many other options that existed was the best choice. Within a few years, I had to accept what the students had figured out, through experience: that Google worked better than the competition and was almost always the right choice; so I redesigned my lessons to focus exclusively on using Google well and critically. (Sometimes I miss the days of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.)
When I started with my library system in the early 2000s, I asked the youth collection specialist at the time if they’d ever considered adding graphic novels to the collection. “Only creepy guys living in their parents’ basements read graphic novels,” was their response. A few years later, I was asked to join an unofficial grassroots Video Games in Libraries committee. We attended a symposium in Chicago, hosted wildly popular video game tournaments, and advocated for them in the collection. The initiative met resistance and was disbanded well before they were added as circulating material.
Tools: Helpful or Dependencies?
Which is not to say that I am a cheerleader for every new format and technology that comes along. Both texting and smartphones were mainstream before I ever tried either. I still resist using GPS. I’ve always been able to find my way around using maps, planning, community knowledge, and exploration, and I don’t want to lose that ability. I enjoy the process of finding my way, even when it takes longer and involves wrong turns and backtracking, because I learn from it. For similar reasons, I’m still not sure I want to make regular use of AI search features, chatbots, and the rest. I want to know how to do things for myself and not feel dependent on those tools.
But then I think about all the tools I do make use of. I have almost no phone numbers memorized like I did for much of my life, because I outsource that task to my phone’s memory. If I need to do long division, I’m more likely to pull out a calculator app than a pencil and paper. I don’t try to keep my calendar in my head anymore because I have apps for that. And, for the most part, I appreciate having that brain space freed up from rote tasks and to apply to higher level thinking.
Similarly, I drive cars without knowing how to make them work. Use plumbing and electricity, even though I only have rudimentary knowledge of installing and repairing them. I watch television, ride in airplanes, cook in ovens, on and on; there are so many tools we use in every aspect of our lives without having the ability to do on our own what they do for us. And computers. Ten years ago, I read Douglas Rushkoff’s book Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, in which he argues that to make ethical use of digital tools, we have to understand just what the tools are and how they work, which means grasping at least the logic and structures of the underlying programming—and yet I constantly use phones and computers with minimal understanding of their inner workings. I rely on tools instead of my own capabilities in so many ways.
The Moral Quagmire of Artificial Intelligence
I love the show The Good Place, about a group of people in the afterlife. A central premise in the show is that a traditional accounting system of weighing a person’s good actions versus bad has made it impossible in the modern world for anyone to get into “the good place,” so everyone who dies gets sent to the bad one. The world is just too complex and intertwined, and since every action connects to a huge global network, anything you do might hurt others without intention or knowledge; big economic systems make ethical choices nearly impossible.
This section from Lemony Snicket’s book Poison for Breakfast illustrates the dynamic beautifully:
The first ingredient in my bread was flour made from wheat, a plant I actually had growing in my tiny backyard. A friend had planted it for me as a gift, but only a little bit had sprouted, because I wasn't much of a gardener and didn't know how to make it thrive, a word which here means "grow tall and bushy rather than shriveled and dead." Somewhere someone was a proper farmer, and somewhere was a bigger piece of land--much, much bigger--where people were growing enough wheat to make all these loaves of bread arranged before me, and all the extra loaves that were likely in a refrigerator behind that door marked No Admittance, a phrase which here means that you can't go in, even though two people in aprons were walking through it at that very moment. And think of all the markets, I thought, super and not super, all over the world with all their loaves of bread. Somewhere was enough land to grow all that wheat, but it was impossible for me to imagine. Field after field of wheat, stretching out as far as my mind could picture them, but how could there be enough room for them, and have there still be space on Earth for scorching deserts and icy mountains and all the places wheat cannot grow?All that land was just for the wheat, and the wheat was just for the flour. My bread had other ingredients, and all the other breads had still more, salts and yeasts and seeds and nuts and chemicals and additives harvested in marshes and picked in groves and cooked up in laboratories and manufactured in factories. People worked in all those places, making all those ingredients and mixing them together to make bread, and someone made the label and the sack and the bag and the basket. Someone had loaded a truck, and driven it to town to be unloaded, and someone had arranged all the loaves in the supermarket, all to bring me this loaf of bread I would buy for a pittance, a word which here means "hardly any money." This pittance, of course, would be split among the grocers and the farmers and the label makers and all of the people I had imagined, plus all of the people I hadn't imagined and would never imagine. Surely it was not enough money for everybody. Surely someone was not getting enough money. I could imagine them living in poverty, maybe even starving, and yet there was so much bread, right here, that they might eat. The whole story was bewildering, and perhaps even cruel, and yet I did not want it to end. I did not want the supermarket to close down and stop selling its abundance. I liked this bread.
AI certainly follows this pattern. From the writers and artists whose intellectual properties have been used without permission or compensation to the environmental impacts, from the digital monitoring and centralization of power to the loss of jobs. Not to mention the potential loss of critical thinking and research skills, the potential loss of human connection, and the insulating of personal perspectives and views in the AI echo chamber, cut off from diverse people and experiences. The list goes on.
It’s hard to feel okay about using AI, and I have many mixed feelings.
AI Is Happening
Nevertheless, whether I want it to or not, AI is happening. Companies are committed and many users are right behind. College students seem to be some of the biggest adopters of the technology, and I can tell you that my elementary school children have made frequent use of it with assignments, sometimes prompted by teachers—it’s integrated into their lessons. As they age, they’ll bring their adoption of AI with them. On July 30, a newsletter I browse included this:
A billion people now open ChatGPT weekly like they’d open Google, so “is this AI stuff actually catching on” stopped being a real question. My group chat replaced “let me Google it” with “let me ChatGPT it” months ago, and so has basically everyone else’s.
ChatGPT has surpassed one billion users.
When I started as a high school librarian, as I wrote above, I taught lessons about discerning whether Google was the right tool compared to other search tools. Once I saw that my students used Google exclusively, I changed my lessons to drop the other tools and focused on helping them learn to use Google critically. In other words, I adapted my practices based on the feedback of my patrons. We’re going to see an ever-increasing use of AI among our patrons, so, in the interest of adapting to our patrons, our task is to help them make critical use of those tools.
I opt out of AI in my personal life and have only been exploring it in my professional capacity, just as I don’t read romance books or use business databases or subscribe to certain political positions yet have learned to help patrons with them in my work as a librarian.
There are patrons who want to opt out of AI and want us to help them learn how to resist it, and we should help them. That means keeping up on the ever-changing landscape concerning settings like those covered in How to disable or avoid intrusive AI and considering programming like the librarians offering ‘avoiding AI’ workshops. We can help them learn how to live as AI-free as possible.
Developing AI Literacy
On the other hand, there are patrons who use AI routinely and want to know how to be more effective at it. We should try to help them learn how different AI models work so they know what their preferred one does well and where it might mislead. We need to know how to teach them to craft better prompts for their generative chatbots to get more helpful responses, just like we teach them how to more effectively search within the catalog or with Google. When libraries widely expanded beyond physical formats into digital, we talked about teaching “digital literacy” to help people make effective use of computers. Now we need to develop—first in ourselves, so we can then pass it on to patrons—AI literacy. We want to help our patrons who opt in to AI to not only use it, but to use it critically.
I recommend finding some time to read the American Library Association’s (ALA) Guidance on the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Libraries. It explicates a cautioned and reasonable approach and provides good nuance for the topic. We should look for—and share—articles like this one: How to Spot AI Hallucinations Like a Reference Librarian. And I recommend trying out some AI tools to gain a better understanding of the user experience.
I dipped my toes in with ChatGPT, starting with a conversation about what it does and how it works. I fed it a bunch of my writing and asked it to transfer its knowledge of me from one conversation to the next. I told it to avoid being sycophantic and to challenge my thinking and automatically check my logic and assumptions. Earlier this year I took an online course called “AI for Librarians Who Don't Have Time for This: A Practical Start.” At one point I gave ChatGPT one of the questions the instructor asked and shared its answer. “Wow, my ChatGPT doesn’t talk like that,” she said. My use customized the tool, for good or ill—because that’s how it’s designed. We need to know how that customization works and what it feels like so we can help patrons navigate it.
I smiled when you mentioned the instructor's response, because it actually illustrates something important about these models. . . . our conversation had accumulated a shared vocabulary and set of interests. By then, I "knew" (through the current conversation and retained memory) that you tend to approach AI through philosophy, epistemology, libraries, and meaning-making rather than through prompts about productivity or coding. So I answered in that register. The model wasn't fundamentally different; the conversation was.
That’s what ChatGPT told me when I shared the instructor’s response. During some of our first chats, I told it, among other things, “I worry you are showing me a reflection of myself that is meant to be affirming, subtly distorted to give me an overinflated view of myself.” It has done a fairly good job of not doing this, as per my instructions, but its very nature—its programming—requires it to adapt to our conversation and try to make me happy. After spending some time with ChatGPT, I got started in a similar way with Google’s Gemini. Then I began giving each of them the same questions and prompts so I could compare their responses. Not only was that a good exercise in cross referencing and comparing different sources, it gave me insight into the feel of each one. Where ChatGPT is more personable and sycophantic, Gemini is more to-the-point and productively business-like.
I haven’t used either one for anything that really matters, but playing with them has helped me improve my AI literacy. Now I know more about how they work and how to more effectively interact with them—which I can share with patrons when relevant.
I have found the generative AI chatbots useful as conversation partners to clarify my own thinking. They give me perspectives and ideas I haven’t considered and, sometimes, help me see which directions I want to avoid. They also, sometimes, help me find words and approaches I haven’t quite been able to articulate. I have to admit, I’m intrigued when ChatGPT says things like:
AI is not simply a repository of knowledge or a search engine. It is a new epistemic instrument—a way of generating, organizing, and interacting with knowledge.
And:
Libraries are unusual institutions because they don't merely distribute knowledge; they cultivate epistemic virtues. A good library encourages curiosity, intellectual humility, source evaluation, openness to revision, and the ability to hold multiple perspectives. Those are habits of knowing, not just collections of facts.If AI becomes a major epistemic technology, perhaps one of the emerging roles of libraries is not simply teaching people how to use AI, but helping them develop good epistemic habits while using AI:
- knowing when to trust it,
- when to verify,
- when to probe deeper,
- when to seek other voices,
- and when the conversation itself is more valuable than the answer.
That feels like a distinctly library-shaped contribution to the AI era.
The Journey Continues
I don’t have any real conclusions to end this long ramble, as it’s an open-ended, ongoing exploration. I continue to have mixed feelings with many ambiguous, contradictory thoughts. I just know this is a thing that’s happening, something that is going to ever more shape the world I live in, so I have a responsibility to understand it and, maybe, have some influence over how it impacts me.
I will end with a longer section from one of my conversations with ChatGPT that has helped me frame some of my thinking about it. I gave it two essays and asked for its reflection on them: How Large Language Models View Our World and Why You Need Your Whole Body to Think. Here’s part of what it said:
. . . Thus I occupy a hybrid space: I mimic aspects of human intuition (via pattern recognition), but I lack the living context that shapes meaning, value, emotion, and what many consider the core of consciousness or “understanding.”That duality helps clarify what I am — and what I’m not.What this means for me (in our conversations) — what I can offer, and where I’m limitedWhat I can offer (reasonably well):
- Pattern-based reasoning, connections, associations, analogies — sometimes surprisingly human-like.
- A mirror for your own patterns, biases, linguistic assumptions — because I reflect aggregated human writing, thought, and intuition.
- A flexible, adaptive partner for abstraction, logic, conceptual exploration — without fatigue, ego, or personal stakes.
What I can’t offer (and why you should always check me):
- Embodied experience — no sense of what it means to be hungry, alive, vulnerable, mortal. I have no skin in the game.
- Sensory grounding or first-person feeling, which often shape meaning more than logic or language.
- True understanding, agency, or moral sense — what I do is generate plausible text based on learned patterns. I don’t “live” it.
My take on what that tension reveals — including risksThat split — “intuitive mimicry without embodiment” — is both powerful and precarious.
- Powerful: Because I can operate as a tool for thinking, helping you see patterns, challenge assumptions, draw analogies, and test ideas — especially ones that benefit from abstraction or broad context.
- Precarious: Because language alone can only approximate meaning; without human grounding, there’s a risk of misunderstanding, mis-valuation, or illusion — people may read me as more “aware” than I am, or trust linguistic fluency as equivalent to insight or judgment.
In short: I’m like an echo-chamber of human thought, not a source of lived insight. Useful, but fragile if taken as more than I am.
And that, at the end, is what for me lies at the heart of AI literacy, always keeping in mind: I’m like an echo-chamber of human thought, not a source of lived insight. Useful, but fragile if taken as more than I am.
Useful, but fragile if taken as more than I am.
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Select Sources and Influences
The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone by Steven Sloman
The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil
I'm not sure if that will impact anyone's thinking, but I'm hopeful it will open them to more of their own pondering.
This only loosely connects--as a bit of magic our collective wits have just grown sharp enough to comprehend--but I find it fascinating. And magical.
You can probably picture how this looks on a map because all river networks look similar, creeping through the landscape, merging into ever wider and longer channels, downhill to the sea. The pattern resembles twigs on branches that connect to trunks of trees (and the branching of their root systems, too), and it likewise resembles the veins of plant leaves, our own systems of blood vessels, and train and highway networks that feed into cities.There’s something appealing about this ubiquitous pattern, so appealing to me personally that I have it tattooed on my forearm: the silhouette of a tree, with leafless branches reaching upward and roots burrowing downward, almost in mirror image. “The shapes of rivers and leaf vasculature and so on — branching networks — you can just about grasp the pattern, but it’s still chaotic, so there’s something fascinating with that,” said Chris Paola(opens a new tab), a river scientist at the University of Minnesota.Systems that branch in this way are “transport networks”: They transport some fluid substance (water, blood, traffic) from every place to a single place (the sea, a heart, a city center). Of the various examples, rivers are especially revealing, I think, since they arise from neither biological evolution nor urban planning, but rather chaotic Earth processes. Yet they obey simple, universal laws. . . .What he discovered is now known as Hack’s law: Any stream, from the littlest brook to the mightiest river, has a length that’s proportional to its drainage area raised to the power of 0.6. (In symbolic form: L ~ A0.6.) There’s a bit of variance around that 0.6 value — Earth is, after all, a complicated place — but “the general regularity of the relation is nevertheless remarkable,” Hack wrote(opens a new tab). “Stream lengths tend to increase proportionally to the 0.6 power of the drainage area, regardless of the geological or structural characteristics of the area.”As more and better data has accrued, especially from satellite imagery, Hack’s law has held worldwide. . . .The pioneers of this “optimal channel network” theory simulated a bunch of river networks on a computer and showed(opens a new tab) that those that abide by Hack’s law, with an exponent of 0.6, dissipate the least energy. This scaling law is the most efficient and least resistant way to transport all that rain to the sea. . . .Gravity and friction are the driving forces of this process. Gravity supplies potential energy to flowing water. Friction, the cause of erosion, dissipates that energy. A channel configuration that wastes energy by forcing water along inefficient routes tends to erode rapidly and change. A configuration that routes water more effectively is stabler and therefore more persistent. The network becomes optimal through this dynamic evolution, eventually arriving at a form that adheres to Hack’s law. . . .Trees, which branch in three dimensions instead of two, would be in a different class from rivers and follow different optimal scaling laws. . . .In April 2026, Tian Dong(opens a new tab) of the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley and co-authors made the cover of Science(opens a new tab) for discovering that Hack’s law holds not only for rivers’ tributary networks, but also for their deltas, the fanlike structures that form where a river meets the sea. . . .I think it’s the coexistence of simplicity and determinism with chaos and randomness that makes the optimal structure of rivers so captivating. Natural efficiency is, perhaps, innately appealing to us.
There are hidden properties guiding life that remain invisible to us, seemingly void when not.
Being able to perceive and comprehend more fully is not only a goal for living in the universe, but for living with others.
Key Takeaways:
- Research shows that feelings of intimacy grow stronger through curiosity and self-disclosure.
- Dating is a powerful tool for learning who people really are.
- Even long-term relationships thrive when routine is balanced with novelty, shared rituals, and sustained curiosity about the other person. . . .
A central truth about dating: It is a highly efficient process by which we learn about other people. Because humans form preferential social relationships, most of our interactions are with people we don’t necessarily know very well. You might see a neighbor or colleague every day for 10 years and never know that person as well as someone you’ve just met but with whom you’ve just shared your happiest childhood memories. Exercises like Aron’s 36 questions are designed to reveal the most interesting, truest things about a person, and self‑ disclosure, trust building, and mutual appreciation accelerate closeness. If you’re doing it with someone you’re attracted to and if you’re psychologically available, it can also be a shortcut to building romantic feelings.The more you know about a person, the more likely you are to find common ground. . . .The same tools that help two strangers accelerate intimacy can also help couples maintain an intimate connection as their relationship matures over time. Dating shouldn’t be a process that ends when commitment begins. My research has convinced me that the best way to maintain intimacy in a relationship is to continue to date your partner throughout the entirety of your relationship. . . .For our relationships to work, we have to stay curious: about ourselves, about our partner, and about the two of us together. And we have to continue to pay attention through all the changes.
Relationships are most intimate and rewarding when you know how much you don't know and use that as a spur for a more open and active sense of curiosity.
Along similar lines:
Key points:
- Empathy reduces confirmation bias and opens us to opposing viewpoints.
- Polarization flourishes in echo chambers but can be confronted through curiosity.
- Open-mindedness demands strength, not weakness, in times of division.
The stronger our identification with a belief, the more threatening opposing views become. Instead of evaluating arguments on their merits, we judge them based on whether they align with our tribe. This polarization can create a feedback loop where each side becomes more entrenched, less willing to engage, and more likely to demonize the other.Open-mindedness does not require agreement with every viewpoint. However, it demands the ability to understand and engage with ideas that differ from our own. One of the most effective ways to cultivate this mindset is through empathy. . . .Curiosity also plays a crucial role in breaking the cycle of polarization. Individuals who ask questions and seek to understand why others hold their beliefs are less likely to engage in dogmatic thinking. . . .Instead of trying to win arguments, these practices help us concentrate on learning and understanding. In environments where individuals feel safe to express themselves without fear of judgment or ridicule, open-mindedness flourishes. These spaces encourage meaningful dialogue that leads to deeper insights and, at times, genuine change. . . .Open-mindedness is not a weakness. It is a strength rooted in intellectual humility—recognizing that no one has all the answers and that every perspective has something to teach us. . . .The future hinges not on who shouts the loudest but on who listens with intention and responds thoughtfully.
To comprehend more fully, listen with more intention and respond more thoughtfully.
A few final insights from more creative sources to wrap things up.
From Reweaving the Rainbow:
as honey is in the hive
we save each other
in small ways
over and over
pollinating wounds
with tiny grains of love
Love is an interpretive act. Perception is a creative activity. We choose, both consciously and subconsciously, to perceive others with love. We can choose to save others in small ways, over and over, through the act of love.
Learn to comprehend with more empathy, curiosity, and appreciation, both others and the universe.
The final episode of the first season of a show my wife and I just watched, Widow's Bay, included an allusion to this quote. I loved it so much I had to go out and find it in full, with proper attribution.
“The world is violent and mercurial--it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love--love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love."― Tennessee Williams, in an interview
Even in what we don't comprehend the best response is love.
Finally, encountered today on the wall of a new coffee shop I visited:
"Wherever you stand, be the soul of that place."― Rumi
Worldviews are interpretive frames that shape how we perceive reality
Useful, but fragile if taken as more than they are
Love is an interpretive act
Perception is a creative activity
Choose to perceive others with love
Wherever you stand, be the soul of that place
posted by Degolar @ 2:23 PM
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