Other minds as alter egos intensify complexity, requiring language to reduce it

Evidence

When we discover that there are several cultures instead of just one and consequently at the time when we acknowledge the end of a sort of cultural monopoly, be it illusory or real, we are threatened with the destruction of our own discovery. Suddenly it becomes possible that there are just others, that we ourselves are an ‘other’ among others. All meaning and every goal having disappeared, it becomes possible to wander through civilisations as if through vestiges and ruins. — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 14 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Trust reduces the complexity of a free alter ego’s unpredictability — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 247; Luhmann’s systems are not naturalistic people-networks but self-referential communicative processes; Encountering another culture can dissolve one’s own sense of meaning — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 14 (+5 more)

Related

• Encountering another as free alter ego shatters the taken-for-granted world (similarity 0.91)
• Encountering another culture can dissolve one’s own sense of meaning (similarity 0.88)
• Everyday interaction rests on unproblematic, taken-for-granted world-certainty (similarity 0.87)
• Other people as alter egos multiply world complexity and demand reduction mechanisms (similarity 0.83)
• Familiarity reduces experienced world complexity until another self disrupts it (similarity 0.81)
• Estrangement from one’s own culture enables genuine judgment of it and others (similarity 0.79)
• Discourses of civilization and modernity relied on repressing the non-Western Other (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Encountering another culture can dissolve one’s own sense of meaning #exemplifies (0.50) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 14