“And Spirit. I think that this is where some of these learning models and framings of this complexification becomes really important, because it allows it allows us to make a really meaningful distinction. If you look at the Piagetian, and the post-Piagetian, hierarchical complexity models — that's a model based on assimilation and accommodation.
Brendan Graham Dempsey
One way of understanding some forms of Spirit are basically highly assimilatory interpretations of reality. What I mean by that (by the Epistemology of Piaget) is that when we come into the world it's not a platonic world of knowledge in which we have these perfect forms to which we conform ourselves perfectly.
Nor is this a Kantian world where we can form reality to our minds.
It's sort of both. So by assimilating, by accommodating reality, I can create schemas that I then use to assimilate to new information — and this is the opponent processing that's going back and forth. And as I do that, it's this bootstrapping process.
What's interesting about that is that we come into the world with some very simple assimilatory schemas, like sucking and crying. They're just kind of built in, and from that we work up into abstract thought and philosophy &tc, because we're able to use these schemas that we have in order to make more sense of the world. More of reality gets disclosed to us as we assimilate them into our schemas and then find that they don't fully work. So then we have to accommodate them, and this process goes forward and forward.
You learn “Okay I can't figure out exactly what this thing is if I just keep putting it into my mouth. I've got to do some other things here and and make better sense of the world.”
The basic way this all relates to spirits is that what we show up with in the world is largely subjective. Our ways of of relating to things — our first major experiences are with other human beings and in social environments — are basically our schemas. We are very person-centric. they're very social emotional uh focused
The result is that it it becomes rather difficult, and only with labor do we begin to see that not everything actually is person-like. We have to accommodate more to the world.”
