Worlds of concepts

Worlds of concepts

Your personal-conceptual-world is the collection of all your thoughts and ideas. Every thinking entity has its own world of concepts. The size of this personal thought collection can be said to correspond with the amount of thinking that could, in theory, be done by the owner of the collection. A worm for instance can be safely said to have a very small personal conceptual world. The personal conceptual world of, say, a cat, will be considerably larger, and that of a human even more so. Indeed, humans probably have the largest personal conceptual worlds of all known living species, though it is hard and maybe even impossible to test that hypothesis.

The exact composition of one’s personal conceptual world differs per individual. Everyone has his own unique thought collection, as it gets shaped by experience. Individuals that share many experiences will differ less from each other than those who haven’t got any shared experiences at all. But there is another way in which personal conceptual worlds can become more congruent and in tune with each other. That is by communication.

Communication allows us synchronize our thoughts. It allows us to have what we can call the shared- or inter-conceptual world. Again Homo Sapiens is not at all the only species that makes use of communication to share parts of their personal thought collection, although the extent to which we do it is probably unique to our kind. By making use of language we are able to exchange an almost limitless amount of information to other members of our species. Furthermore, ever since the invention of scripture, the information doesn’t need to be actively transferred a short moment before the time at which the information is received. It can be stored, read and duplicated.

The arrival of the computer, and with it the internet, has had and is still having the effect of synchronizing our personal conceptual worlds even more, resulting in an inter-conceptual world that grows, and grows quicker every moment. The ways in which we communicate are getting more and more elaborate.