Brief notes about ideas I am going to forget

[I get ideas from time to time. Some are even good ones.]

Here are some thoughts related to my current writing project about human nature that I will want to think more about later. I'm saving them here for now and inviting people to think about them and share their thoughts if they wish.

1. Many emotions measure the distance between preference/expectation and perception.

Regret is how things were versus how they could have been. Disappointment is how things were/are versus how they should have been. Satisfaction is how things were matching how things should have been. Anticipation is how things might be matching how thing should be. Dread is how things should be versus how they could be. And so on.

2. Human sociality is largely based upon our own perception of our social image in our subjective sense of reality.

In other words, people construct a sense of reality based on their experiences and choices and assume that it is reality itself. There may be an acknowledgement of subjectivity on ones own part as well as that of others, and certainly because we share experiences through direct exposure and through language we have something of an inter-subjective sense of how things are. Yet our own inner sense of how things are is still unique and what we rely upon most, sometimes accepting and sometimes rejecting new perspectives offered by others.

When it comes to the essential need to be a social being, we may have different preferences that are culturally and individually informed about certain details of our social image, but core needs remain in terms of being acknowledged and accepted as part of a larger sense of social validation. Yet, since we see the world at larger, including its social dimension, from a personally subjective point of view, we still see ourselves, including how we think others see us, based on our own sense of things.

This is similar to Charles Horton Cooley's conception of a looking glass self, wherein we shape our sense of who we are as well as how we act based upon how we think others will see us. But I'm saying that as we do this our idea of how we think others will perceive and judge us is to a significant degree our own projection. Surely informed by social interaction, but nonetheless strongly personal.

I was thinking of this in terms of social media like Facebook and Twitter. On one level, we post things for others to see and react to and are mindful of what people may think. Thus we shape and craft an image we think sends the right message about who we are to our audience. A good example of the looking glass self idea. Yet we also seem to want or need to validate and approve of our own sense of self even if we aren't sure if anyone is actually paying attention.

3.  ...