The "process" of "Interpretation"

I just finished reading this paper that my friend back home made me aware of:
"THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE IN THE PERCEPTUAL PROCESSES" by Alfred Korzybski.
I have to say, it was a perfect find. It had a little bit of everything I've been thinking about in it. I took extensive notes and I wanted to share this chart and some ideas from it with everyone. Everything in this color is me, everything in blue is from Korzibski's text.




Essentially, this is the process I believe occurs between what is happening around us and what we experience. I also believe that what we experience shapes what we do, which in turn shapes what we experience, and so on and so on.


Basically:
First,you have your happening, the event (I). Next, is the experiencing of that event on the most basic level- the interpretation of it by the nervous system (sensing- hearing, feeling, etc.(II)). Here the information (of which there is vastly more than the human body/mind can interpret) of the situatuation is edited down to something understandable by the brain by the different senses (the visible spectrum, sounds audiable to the human ear, etc. etc.*). Then, the information from the senses is put into order by the mind (III). This is where quick decisions are made, such as to dodge a falling rock or to stay away from a rabid animal. Finally, things are interpretted on the verbal level (IV) which uses the map of language to create a map of the experience (II and III), itself a "map" or at least an interpreted simplification, of the event.

This last step in the process involved labeling, assigning an identification to, the different aspects of the event. If language is considered in this process than untrue generalizations will occur. This is where traits of individuals get assigned to traits of wholes, like racial stereotypes or the idea of "liberal or conservative"

Koryibski had this to say: Unfortunately, people in general, including many scientists, disregard levels II and III completely, and react as if unconscious that IV "is not" I. In other words, we do not take into account the mechanisms of the human nervous system or "think electro-colloidally" about our reactions. Such a disregard leads to misunderstandings, heated two-valued ("either-or") debates, hostilities, prejudices, bitterness, etc.

If we "think" verbally, we act as biased observers and project onto the silent levels the structure of the language we use, so remaining in our rut of old orientations which make keen, unbiased observations ("perceptions"?) and creative work well-nigh impossible.

Language becomes then a medium through which we eventually talk to ourselves or to others, with its own definite limitations. "The relation between language and experience is often misunderstood," Sapir found (40). "Language is not merely a more or less systematic inventory of the various items of experience which seem relevant to the individual, as is so often naively assumed, but is also a self-contained, creative symbolic organization, which not only refers to experience largely acquired without its help, but actually defines experience for us by reason of its formal completeness and because of our unconscious projection of its implicit expectations into the field of experience" (italics mine [Korzybski's]).


*another major one which requires some time is that of solid matter. According to modern physics, every phyiscal object around us is made of atoms which are more empty space than they are matter. The solidity, as with the color and sound and temperature etc. are all interpretations/reactions/interactions with the nervous system, at least as far as we can prove. It has been said that we should start thinking of physical objects as events since they do not last forever, and are constantly in motion.