Alfred Korzybski Series #11
To summarize from the last Neurons article in this series: if you semantically react to some trigger and let it “push your buttons,” you are reacting like an animal and copying animals in the way they use their neurology. Further, this way of using your neurology will actually undermine your sanity (make you un-sane), create limitations, and works viciously to undermine your full potentials. Sounds serious! And it is, you are confusing an external trigger with your meaning about it, the territory out there with you map about it. And you are not using the higher levels of your brain to develop semantic responses instead of semantic reactions.
So what is the solution that will enable you to transcend semantic reactions? How do you learn to regulate your semantic reactions so that they are those that you choose and that supports you rather than undermines your effectiveness?
First, and most important, recognize the mechanism of semantic reactions and disturbances, namely, “identification.” Whenever you or I identify one thing with another and confuse the orders of abstracting, we confuse the things, operate from non-existing “sameness,” and thereby confuse map and territory. It is identity of sameness (identification) that creates the semantic reaction. So the ultimate solution is “consciousness of abstraction” (Science and Sanity, p. 276).
This big thick phrase “consciousness of abstraction” refers to you being aware of how you abstract from the information that impacts you in the world “out there,” and create your internal maps. And when you are aware, when you are mindful, when you are conscious of what’s happening— you have choice. Without such awareness, it just happens and you just experience what’s happening and you will have the sense that you play no part of it. Then you will have emotional reactions and think that others or “the world” is making you have those experiences. Without such mindfulness, you think and feel and act as if you’re a victim and not part of the system.
Becoming mindful empowers you to see and feel how you are part of the system, how your abstracting (generalizing, deleting, distorting, and creating your internal maps) creates the frames that govern your responses. Now you have choice. Now you can change things. Now you are empowered and no longer a victim.
“Any affect only gains meanings when it is conscious ... The semantic reactions of a given individual would be under full control and capable of being educated, influenced, transformed quickly and efficiently” (Science and Sanity, p. 27)
The bottom line is—There is no sameness. No two things are “the same.” There’s thousands of differences of every product that comes off an assembly line. At the gross macro-level, two cars or two ipods or two anything may look “the same.” And they will be similar. But they are not and cannot be “the same.” Take a microscope and look at it closely and there’s a world of difference. And if you took an electronic microscope and peaked in at the sub-atomic level, you would not see things at all, you would see “a dance of electrons.” You would see a world of movement and moment by moment change. And that’s why even the same thing is not “the same” over time. It is always changing.
So all identification indicates a false mapping of things. Which brings us back to Korzybski’s basic epistemology: “The map is not the territory.” So as you learn to keep distinguishing and discriminating your maps about the territory and recognize the differences you create about things at different levels of abstracting, you train yourself in non-identity. And Korzbyski says that this in itself will create the tremendously important semantic distinction (Ibid., p. 417).
Second, what now follows from the first step is your ability to extensionalize. For Korzybski there are two ways to orient yourself to the world when you use language to create your internal maps. You can use language in intensionally and you can use it in extensionally. These are very different ways to use language. The intensional orientation style is the old, primitive Aristotelian way of naming things and defining things and then use your names, labels, and definitions unthinkingly as your map for navigating and moving around in the territory. Of course, if you do that you are going to be in for many semantic shocks!
The shocks will come because your names, labels and definitions (your maps) are not the experiences, events, and interactions “out there.” Just because you call something by a particular name, or create a definition about something, doesn’t change the territory out there. However you define a “wife” or a “husband” or a “lover” or a “friend” or a “partner,” when you go out and have your experiences with a particular person, your definition is just that—your definition. So if you get disappointed or angry with someone and then say, “You’re not a good wife, husband, friend, etc.” you have just used your map as if it were equal to, the same thing as, and identified with the territory. That’s intensional orientation (not to be confused with the word, intention.)
Extensional orientation refers to extending out the details of whatever it is that you are talking about and referring to. To extensionally detail out your wife or husband, you mention Debra or Don and the facts of Debra’s looks, actions, words, behaviors, etc. You extend out more and more facts about Debra, indexing where, when, how, and so on of her expressions.
Extensionalizing means enumerating the details of a collection, whereas definition by intension gives a defining 'property.' The extensional attitude is the only one that's in accordance with the survival order and nervous structure (Science and Sanity, p. 173).
When people become maladjusted, they do so by orienting themselves by intension. They make evaluations by their over-definitions which limited verbalisms they believe and trust in. They also then do not evaluate things by their extensional facts. If they did, they would be better adjusted. So the guy who marries a “wife” has his ideas about he means by “wife,” but what does he include in that definition? Has he included and detailed out the ways that the particular woman he plans to marry will behave? Or will he later be shocked by the things he did not include in his map.
Korzybski applied this extensional orientation to what makes science effective:
"In science, we have to use an actional, 'behaviouristic', 'functional', 'operational' language, in which we do not say that this and this 'is' so and so, but where we describe extensionally what happens in certain order. We describe how something behaves, what something does, what we do in our research work..." (Science and Sanity, p. 639)
So no wonder then that he thought of General Semantics as an educational approach to semantic reactions and that just reading this work will begin to re-train a person’s semantic reactions:
“The present work leads to new semantic reactions which are beneficial to every one of us and fundamental for sanity.” (Science and Sanity, p. 26)
Now you know why in Neuro-Semantics, we use the Meta-States Model to step back from a semantic reaction, transcend that experiential state by going to a higher state—one of observation, acceptance, curiosity and learning. Then, knowing that you are more than your semantic reactions, you have choice about how to respond. How do you want to respond? What would be the very best response in that context? And how you can respond in ways that will support you actualizing your highest and best.
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