On classifications in the brain

Classifying people, objects and phenomena of the world is the way of our brain to simplify data for quicker processing. This is required in all our everyday situations. The brain gives attributes to the groups and it is assumed that an entity belonging to a group does have the attributes of the group.

There are two ways to live with each of these groupings: a static one of enforcing or indifference, and a dynamic one that is open for changes. We choose our approach by putting our emphasis on the group or the entity that belongs to it, and our interests in life affect each of these decisions.

When interacting with people, we should always give them room for improvement, not letting our thoughts or subconscious decide what is our wholesome behavior in respect to another being; our gestures, tones of voice and general behavior give us away all the time, easily enforcing our static grouping related to the other person - and also the grouping of the other person in respect to us. So if we need to choose, it's always better to prefer indifference over enforcing - and it does require conscious work.

Life with the groupings especially related to humanity is a matter of continuous improvement for us all. What helps us is to build and make our group "human beings" have as many logical positive attributes as possible. We should understand that it is not this group that should have the negative attributes "trying to use me", "greedy", and so on; these attributes belong to the groups "people who don't believe in life" and "people who have bad experiences interacting with me or other people in the past". What we should combine with "human beings" is "looking for happiness".

It is also worth noting that the groupings of the brain are adaptive in both barriers and their core; when we live our life, our experiences change the hierarchies and networks of the groups, supporting continuous learning, development, and growth.

(And yes, if you're wondering, I'm a programmer.)

(2010-06-12, edited)