On Sat, 01 Oct 2005 15:41:35 +0200, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel@comcast.net> wrote:

>
> "Enrique Perez-Terron" <enrio@online.no> wrote in message
> newsp.sxx3whccnxtvbs@apeiron.home.lan...
>>
>> Peter, are you aware that your style of response tend to hurt most
>> people's feelings? I will try to tell what effect the writings below
>> have on me, and what they make me think.
>
> Enrique, you've been giving good answers and helpful, thoughtful responses.
> Peter, I'm afraid, is a hopeless case who gets his jollies by snarking at
> the new posters and pretending that his allegedly infinite knowledge and
> handwaving answers are somehow helpful.

I have seen that. He appears to be sufficiently different that
most presumptions you normally do about people, may not apply.
The only presumption worth making, I think, is that his mental
processes are subject to the Laws of Nature like ours and the rest
of the universe.

I don't even take it for granted that he has a normally
functioning reflection of his own feelings or motives into his
own consciousness. So, he might not be aware of what he is doing.
Or he might have a perception that, from our perspective, is rather
distorted. But I also observe that most people react in natural
ways, including with anger and hate. That may actually be quite
inappropriate and counterproductive.

People who fail to behave normally in some ways may still have
normal needs, including the need to experience a social position.

We tend to presume that people do what they need to do to satisfy
their needs, and then conclude that the unfriendly one does not
need friendship. But someone whose innate behaviors brings him at
odds with the surroundings may well lead a rather sorry life, and
acquire secondary behaviors that are perhaps as maladptive as their
initial ones, but are responses to the responses they receive, and
aim at saving some rest of dignity, or even substitute whatever
seems available, like the dignity of not giving in to other's
demands, for the real thing.

Now we are talking about him, making him in a sense an object, not
a subject. That is often another consequence. But I have the
impression that it is possible to talk to him directly, not
necessarily to obtain something we want, but to get meaningfull
answers that reflect some realities of that person who is bound
to live inside all this mishap. (If it is "mishap".)

I am aware that he may be reading this, and would like to repeat
it all in second person, I am really talking to Peter too, telling
him how I see him, reflecting to him the image his has given me
of himself - however I distort it or not.

But to Nico, consider it as an experiment, to map the regions where
normal exchanges are possible, and find the borders of the region
of deviating behaviors.

What we see from anyone, normal or not, is never a pure reflection
of their innate nature, but rather the result of a mutual adaptation,
the subject's and the surrounding's, like a system seeking a fixed
point. We are ourselves as much part of that system. Change our
contribution and we get a system with other fixpoints.

(I am using the mathematical notion of a fixed point in a recursive
process, where a system's state at point n is a function of the state
at point n-1, s(n) = f(s(n-1)). Such systems reach a fixed point when
for some value of n, s(n+1) = s(n). This can only happen if for some
value s, f(s) = s, i.e., f has a fixed point.)

I believe that in way too many cases, ranging from ordinary marriages
and friendships to ... we reach undesirable fixpoints because we shut
down the more honest forms of communcation. We make assumptions about
the others actually wanting what they achieve, and therefore assume
further communication is useless. It might be, but we take it for
granted without foundation.

By "more honest forms" i mean forms where e.g., questions are really
requests for information we want to take to our hearts, not just
rethorical means of hitting the other.

When our assumptions answer our questions, we don't need to ask,
do we?

Regards,
Enrique