Norms and Low resolution

Norms and Low resolution

 

What are Piaget's norms? "Where do norms for behavior come from?" You have norms. When they're violated, it annoys you. And it doesn't mean that you know what your norms are, but you do kind of get a sense of what they are when they get violated. That really upsets me. What does that mean? You don't really know. You might have to think about that for like six months why you got so upset about that. But you can notice that you got upset. And that means that you do have expectations and norms, let's say. But you don't know where they came from. Now obviously in part they came from your intrinsic structure, but also they're a consequence of your learning, but even more importantly they're our consequence of your learning in a social environment. So all of those phenomena which exceed your comprehension determine the nature of your norms. So often you only detect them when they're violated. So why bother paying attention to something that works? You just don't. No one does. They take it for granted. It's almost the definition of something working. Let's say you're driving a car to school and you think you're in a car, but you're really not in a car. You're in a thing that gets you from home to school. So you might think I'm in, it's kind of weird example, this object with objective qualities that you call a car. But that isn't exactly how you actually perceive or act towards it. What happens is that as long as it's doing what it's supposed to do, which means that its function is intact, not what it is, but its function. Then you can use a really low resolution representation of the thing. The car is just what gets you from point A to point B. The fact that you don't understand the damn thing at all is completely invisible to you. But it isn't as soon as it quits it becomes a 'car', it's like 'bang!', 'car', oh my god, I don't understand this thing at all, now what do I do? You panic a little bit, right? Because what do you know about your car? Nothing at all. And worse than that, now the car has become an intersection between you and whoever's going to fix your car. So, that introduces a whole bunch of human elements into it. It's like, are they going to figure out what's wrong with it? Are they going to rip you off? Is your car ever going to work again? Are you going to get to work? What's going to happen tonight? So all of a sudden, the thing that you were in, that was a car, turns into this massive complex, unbelievably complicated thing. And that's actually what it is. Your initial representation of it is really low resolution. It's like one bit, and then, bang! It breaks down. And then complexity. Complexity everywhere. And that complexity, that's what the world is made out.

 

 

---

* Reference

2017 Personality 06: Jean Piaget & Constructivism - YouTube

(30:55)