Thoughts on my spider

Not that I own a spider, more that there is a spider, in my kitchen. Nothing remarkable there but it has caught my attention this past day or two.

It has been there for a while and I even thought it dead until recently but the day before yesterday it moved its web from being flat against the window to a more diagonal position, seemingly to intercept a greater number of passing flies.

Then when I awoke yesterday it had grown even bolder and was in the process a most impressive construction that would have sectioned off a whole corner of the room.

Sadly this rather grander design also conflicted with my use of the table so I proceeded to carefully replace the arachnid architect on the windowsill, a little disheartened at having spoiled its plans and destroyed its works.

Today it has returned to the original, flat against the window design but opted for the other window.

The reason that I retell this is that it struck me how logical all of these actions appeared.

The original web was safe by the nature of its unobtrusiveness yet that very quality made it slightly ineffectual when it came to trapping insects.

A more aggressive approach was tried and I do not know whether it worked (I didn’t actually spend all day watching the fellow) but it certainly did not become victim to any conflict over kitchen space.

Sadly the third design encroached too far and suffered the consequences, brutal as I am, with our hero reverting to the safest option but apparently aware of the need to relocate from the original, fruitless position.

Now I have no idea how or why spiders end up building their webs where they do, and a quick google suggests that it isn’t common knowledge, but it is unlikely to be through the logical analysis of the way that flies behave and the allocation of room in a human environment that I have attributed to it here.

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human faculties to animals, but do I do this to people too?

I believe so, in fact I’m sure that we all do because it is just filling a lack of communication with an assumption. I attach motivation to other people’s actions just as they do mine, believe that they are doing A in order to achieve B when actually they thought that they were helping me to get to C.

It’s an all too common foible that usually results in minor misunderstandings, maybe.

For I suspect that just because it is usually brought to light when people leave out important and practical details of their plans, whether they are going to B or C, the projection is constant and it fills in the blanks between anything that is not explicitly expressed and sometimes even alters what is.

That isn’t to say that every projection is incorrect, in fact the opposite is usually true or else or we would take more care with our language, but rather that much of what we take from conversation is actually a slightly warped interpretation of what was said and sometimes very different from what was meant.

This can often be seen in messages where we can go back and re-read what had been misconstrued in an earlier one when the latest does not make sense.

Sometimes this is due to the speaker assuming a context that is not stated but it can also be down to certain ideas or words having connotations in the recipient’s mind that don’t exist in the saying of them.

I was having a conversation about eggs and chickens recently and mentioned their evolution, to which someone said, “Oh, I thought you were a Christian”.

It surprised me a little that he thought I am Christian but much more so that he assumed that all Christians are creationists.

Maybe they are, I’ve only met a small sample of the Christians on this planet, but that connection, whilst not obscure is not implicit either. That was his projection.

When not spider-watching I have been reading Samuel Scheffler’s “The Afterlife” lectures over the past couple of days.

These raise the rather fascinating and, I believe, fairly unique line of questioning into how much our motivation, values and way of life depend on the continued survival of the human race beyond the next generation after our natural death.

For Professor Scheffler, an academic, and by his own admission, it is of great motivational import that he is engaged in an ongoing enquiry and the advancement of his field and that this continues into the distant future.

Whilst I love a good debate and spend many hours contemplating such ideas I write here purely from curiosity and in the hope that others will join me. For me all life is a distraction.

So my reaction to the book was initially that he assumes a far greater impact on our state of mind of this impending doom than I do because he is more invested in their being life that extends well beyond his own, a continuation of his work.

But this of course is my projection of my understanding of human thought processes onto him, which may well be entirely unfair, especially given that he is a professor of philosophy and knows far more about it than I do.

In my opinion much of what we absorb is actually a reflection of ourselves; we project our understanding of the world on to everything that we perceive at a level that we are not necessarily conscious of. Certain aspects of an argument jump out at us and others pass us by. New concepts get filtered through our current perspective and we connect some bits and dismiss others.

Naturally this leads to quite varied interpretations of ideas, however well expressed.

I’ve yet to work out what I will be writing on these pages, it won’t all be in this vein and at the moment I am quite absorbed in reading everyone else’s work, but I guess this is the most common thread throughout my thinking; how subjective our beliefs are.

Hopefully you will be there to correct me along the way.