Yeah. Probably the reason why e.g. the experience of a raw sound and the interpretation of that sound are fused together by default, is that normally it’s only the interpretation we care about, and we need to be able to react to it quickly if it carries any urgent information. I made a similar observation in the essay that Abram is referencing:
Cognitive fusion isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you suddenly notice a car driving towards you at a high speed, you don’t want to get stuck pondering about how the feeling of danger is actually a mental construct produced by your brain. You want to get out of the way as fast as possible, with minimal mental clutter interfering with your actions. Likewise, if you are doing programming or math, you want to become at least partially fused together with your understanding of the domain, taking its axioms as objective facts so that you can focus on figuring out how to work with those axioms and get your desired results. [...]
Cognitive fusion trades flexibility for focus. You will be strongly driven and capable of focusing on just the thing that’s your in mind, at the cost of being less likely to notice when that thing is actually wrong.
Yeah. Probably the reason why e.g. the experience of a raw sound and the interpretation of that sound are fused together by default, is that normally it’s only the interpretation we care about, and we need to be able to react to it quickly if it carries any urgent information. I made a similar observation in the essay that Abram is referencing: