cthulhuchild

The in all the life I lived
The thing I regret most
Is the life I never lived
Opportunities ghost.

This is the first “open” entry I’ve written. When I upload this to my live journal, it will be this entry and only this entry that the world will see. So a quick notice to the world:

Hi there! I’m a male Toronto-dwelling computer science student. Everything else about this journal is private. There are, at present, a total of three people who have read any of it, and even then there are things that don’t even make it to the LJ half of it. I don’t believe in using LJ as a kind of newsletter which my friends have to subscribe to if they want details on my life. If I want to tell them something, I will. If they’re curious, they can ask. I’m rarely short on chat. I keep a journal for my own reasons, and share it only when what I’ve written in the journal is a better explanation than I could produce face to face. Right then, bye!

There we go.
And now for something completely different.

I had a series of random thoughts about maturity the other night… it’s one thing to say “oh, she’s so immature” or “that’s very grown-up of you”, but I don’t think people ever bother to really think what it means. To be mature is to have mature attitudes towards things, but what exactly is a mature attitude? And how on earth do they develop?

Maybe “things” needs a bit of an expansion, because maturity clearly has to do with the way we think and view the world. There’s lots of models for how we store data and react to stimuli, but I rather like the object orientated view, borrowing the notion from my CompSci roots. This basically says that our minds look at the world as a dense web of interconnected objects, each with their own definitions. Definitions are often borrowed and shared (in this the real world is rather unlike computer science). So for example my aunt is an extension of a model that covers all humans, and is also part of a model that covers my family members, and she is most defiantly a mammal.. She also has a series of associations that branch out horizontally, for while being a mammal, human, or family might contextually define quite a lot, she is also partly defined by relations to categories on the same level: my aunt is defined by her brother (my father), her own father, etc etc. She also has a set of attributes that are hers, hair color, size, attitudes on politics, and the like.

If the world were ideal, we could look at anything and anyone and see the web that defines it, and the definitions and influences that a person (special kind of object, namely one that thinks) brings upon itself. The world of course is not ideal, because we don’t see the world as a coder sees their variables, we see the world as an object ourselves. The properties of another object are accounted through our experiences with that object, and all that implies. While genetics can play a roll by instilling baser emotional reactions (all humans, fresh out of the womb, will react to large spiky shapes with fear), we often overcome our own genetic predispositions. Cultural predispositions are of course something else, they can be over come, but they two are an experience.

So we observe and react to the world around us by watching it, by thinking about it, and by feeling it. This seems intuitively obvious, but it’s pertinent: in fact, even more explanation is warranted. In some ways, it is a loop between experience and emotion, because as we experience life (culture included) we are conditioned to react emotionally to certain things. One cries at funerals, smiles for photos, takes offence to being yelled at. Genetic factors again enter here, but our experiences can overpower our genes. As a general example, harkening back to my aunt, my initial cultural experience may leave me favorably disposed to her (one is supposed to like one’s relatives), yet if I meet her, she may engage in behaviors that I find unpleasant (and the behaviors are unpleasant because I either have personal, cultural or genetic experiences that were negative). This changes the state of my feelings toward my aunt. If I dislike her, I’m more likely to view her actions in a negative light, and yet perhaps I’ll be all the more pleased when she does something gracious.

Of course, we aren’t simply trapped in a fruitless cycle of stimulus/response. Humans are unique (we think) in their ability to choose how to process stimulus. One can choose to ignore ill behavior, one can offer second chances, and one can suppress emotions either forcefully or with subtle logical cuts at their roots. Most people don’t really breach the entire extent of this ability, and some of it’s questions. Since our emotional responses are intricately tied to all our actions, the ability to restructure your own attitudes is an incredibly potent tool. Even more so, since our emotional responses are connected to our sense of conscience and morality, the notion that our intellectual sides have the ability to choose a value system has profound power and deep repercussions. But that’s another topic entirely.

Still, the notion of thought-concepts is directly applicable to maturity. Physical entities are not the only kind of objects in this model: one may of course have thought-concepts on an activity, or even an abstract concept. However, because of the incredibly complex web of thoughts memories and emotions that form these objects, dealing with them and managing them is no simple matter. Being non-physical entities, it’s often hard to interact with them directly; one can at best experience them. And of course experience comes through the colored glass of our own emotional and mental states, muddying the matter further.

So what is maturity? When we’re not talking about physical maturity (that is to say, growing taller, stronger, hairier and eventually wrinkly), we are speaking about attitudes and mindsets in regards to certain concepts. Maturity then is our thought concept on specific ideal or activity, or more accurately it represents our ability to incorporate new experience into our model of what we expect something to be, and our ability to reconcile or explain differences between past experience, present experience, thought and feeling.

A useful example then is Sex. Sex forms incredibly complicated thought-concepts, because of the many layers it touches us on. When one thinks about sex in terms of it’s connections to other concepts, the shear number is staggering. Sex touches off on physicality, body image, emotional responses, past experiences, future expectations, introspective thinking… the list could go on. So what’s a “mature attitude” towards sex? Well “anyone anytime anywhere” isn’t one, nor is “no way, no how, never”. But if you start fleshing out those simplistic notions with explanations and reasoning based either on experience or logic, you can actually stumble across some fairly mature attitudes. The difference is not simply the relative complexity. After all one can be mature and yet ascribe to an extremely simplistic philosophy; provided one understands the reasons behind it and the limitations within it. The key here is thinking; in some ways maturity is nothing more than deliberate and consciously guided thought, the deliberate and systematic creation of these thought concepts.

Consider that maturity could be broken down to stages. Keeping with the sex example, an individual with an immature attitude might simply not think about sex, at all. This would be the first stage, the concept is painted with a vague dread, and the mind will not cross into that realm unless it is forced. Thoughts of sex on such an individual would be quickly squelched or redirected, usually without one even being aware of it.

Of course, when one is dealing with something as pervasive as sex (and sits within a mortal coil so remarkably under the sway of it’s own secretions), it’s hard to go without thinking about it forever. Eventually, the veil begins to be pierced, first by accidental intrusions and then by deliberate curiosity. Curiosity in essence is what the second stage is, and it develops as the individual gathers experiences and expends the mental effort to reflect on them. Experience does not, of course, have to be literal. It usually isn’t, one would hope that most people’s first experience with sex was hearing about it, not trying it. None the less, any experience tempers our emotional response and gives rise to new thoughts. And if we’re at all aware of the process, we can spend the mental effort and carefully think about things to speed it up.

From here on though, things are a little vague. One could almost imagine that there would be a third step, which separates curiosity from actual experience. This would represent the change from contemplating or studying an experience, and actually experiencing it. What’s important to note is that one experience only varies from another in terms of its intensity, that is to say the amount of impact it has on a developing thought-concept. Having sex will, of course dramatically change your view on sex. Entire new avenues of curiosity will open up, there will be urges and fears and material for introspective thought, and of course ones emotions are shaped by the experience as well. But while the experience of sex may introduce massive and direct change into a thought-concept, the process is identical to any other experience, including the experience of reading about sex. It’s a larger change, but the mechanisms behind it are essentially the same.

So if we take all this to be true, what do we have? A mature attitude is something that develops, letting experience to stimulate thought and direct emotions, letting thought guide feeling and letting feeling color experience. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Maturity is a thought concept like any other, and follows the pattern.

It becomes a mute distinction of course, because having a well-developed thought-concepts on a variety of topics is essentially the definition of maturity. These existing objects give us ways and methodologies to incorporate and contextualize new experiences, and the entire process repeats. The last point of consideration comes when one is given access to an intense experience prior to developing a body of thinking about the subject. Imagine a fourteen year old having sex for the first time, or a child who accidentally kills someone with a firearm. These are both cases of individuals who are likely very immature in terms of the respective subjects. Few people in our society seriously think through what it means to kill a man, and even those with military training are sometimes unable to handle the consequences the experience has on their psyche. After all, military training is in some ways nothing more than a series of light experiences in deliberate killing designed to make the jump from study to reality easier, and thus easily performable in a stressful situation (war). Regarding a 14 year old experimenting with sex, it seems fairly clear that no one that age is adequately prepared for the thoughts, feelings and other experiences triggered. Many people twice that age have difficulty handling the sheer variety and complexity of thoughts and feelings associated with the act.

Yet it is experience, any experience, which drives the development of our thought-concepts, our intellectual maturity. It seems an apt metaphor would be that of a tended garden and a patch of desert flowers: both achieve a sense of beauty and a resilience, but they approach it in fundamentally different ways. A tended garden is cared for and nursed into health, eventually blooming into a fully developed entity that easily withstands punishment that would have killed the sprout from which it sprung. Desert bloom comes swift and sudden in a downpour, the flower is suddenly flooded with an imperative to grow as quickly as possible, to escape the vulnerable state of it’s youth and obtain the strength of maturity. However, there are unfortunate realities shared by both desert blooms and immature minds during a period of intense growth. In both cases, the need to grow quickly is a need, failure to do so is a death sentence, and simply cannot occur. Yet in the rush for growth, the flowers can be twisted or misshapen, and similarly the human mind can develop an inappropriate set of emotional/mental reactions to experiences, simply because there was never enough time to carefully sculpt them.

We see kids in a troubled home grow up fast, take responsibilities that would awe the garden flower variety of individual, and demonstrate strength remarkable for their age. And yet this early maturity can deprive them of the base from which they develop further, resulting in fast bloom, but ultimately stunted growth. Of course, this isn’t always true. Desert flowers can exceed the circumstances of their creation, can develop beyond any and al expectations, and in less time. And last, one must note that skilled gardeners are a rarity, and that tended flowers are always more fragile at first.

If you didn’t know me before, you know a little more now. This is how I think, this is one of the many ways I see the world. If you understand what I’ve written here, I think you probably have some understanding of me. And if you think it’s pretentious twaddle, you probably aren’t too far off the mark either.