Plates of shrimp, social priming, and the wikiality of the superorganism (yet another pseudophilosophical bullshit session)

Facebook says I wrote and posted this on 12th February, 2009. I do not remember it at all.

The following is another brain dump, but it may make more sense since parts of it have already been articulated elsewhere in semiunderstandable terms.

We may not all agree with reality as a fully social construction (solipism is a four letter word to the mathematically disinclined), but I think we all can agree that a certain amount of how we interpret events that are arguably ‘real’ is socially or intellectually influenced. Whether or not there’s something ‘out there’, most of the time we interact primarily with our internal model, which may or may not correspond very well with the external (1:1) model, and we also use our model to make sense of the confusing and altogether super-ambiguous signals we get from our senses.

Now, priming is the term given to the way that our short term memory (especially the bits of it that we can’t directly access) influence the interpretation of new signals often moreso than long term memory. This makes sense. Our long term memory is contextual, since we have so much stuff in there that it would take forever to figure out that the shape on the ground is a poisonous snake if we have to sort through all the images recorded in that time when we flew a kite in the city and bumped our knee first (by the time we get to the category of…