When we ask why or what, we are invoking certain aspects of narrative consciousness whose actual functions and character we tend to remain largely ignorant of. Let me be clear: the narratological mind is tyrannically self-interested, it conflates (from tokenized markers resulting from our experience) whatever convenient truth will best obscure its actual activities and character. These aspects of consciousness are thought to reside primarily in the hemisphere that is only aware that the right half of the body exists, resists the very existence of its relatively quiet partner hemisphere, and is profoundly concerned about being discovered and/or ejected… either of which it functionally equates with death.

Now, within appropriate contexts its activity offers definitive benefit. But we must be made aware of the real implications of invoking the narratological (story-making) aspects of our minds. We should recognize that questions about -why- invite us to create a story. And questions about -what- require us to ascribe identities. We generally take the results of these questions rather seriously, and often we actually use these results to -see- with; as lenses with which to discern, for example, other reasons and identities. This entire activity is founded in the strangest and most self-conflicting cognitive behavior, and we are doing the equivalent of asking a politician profound questions relating to metaphysics. At the same time, we take the answers with incredible seriousness upon which many of our most crucial thoughts and decisions depend.

These aspects of language-fascinated consciousness conflate whatever collection of variables is most aggrandizing into plausible falsehoods with ever greater sophistication as we acquire skill and these habits of thought acquire dominance. This is not unlike the ‘backfilling’ capacity in a dream, where we ask a question and the dream suggests some vaguely plausible plotline that represents the appropriate ‘history’. Of course, when examined with the waking mind these backfills are often implausible or absurd, and are often completely invented. These aspects of consciousness lie effusively in a desperate effort to obscure the fact that they are largely making it up as they go along, out of habit, language, familiar identities, and paradigms for weaving them into forms we will acknowledge, authorize, and, effectively, obey. We are trained from childhood to recognize and authorize these activities. Yet we are not trained to detect their dangers or use them skillfully, a process that must involve a deep understanding of their common function and character.

This doesn’t mean our linguistic intelligence is useless. But if we are not aware of these matters at all I suspect we are vastly inclined to overcredential it, and this turns out to be rather catastrophic emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, and spiritually. We act on the results of these cognitive streams within us. Stories about who and what drive our innermost dramas and dreams.

I find it fascinating to observe that that these two specific questions — who and what — are intimately involved in the production of much of our emotional sense of circumstance and… and our senses and projections of our -own- identity. And I find it compelling to work to discover new ways to employ these potentials which take the dangers into account and provide us with more dependable forms of answer… and ways of understanding and working with the divide between formalizations such as language and storying… and human thought and experience.