Introduction
In this previous post we introduced the idea that thoughts and emotions form around Primary Words, which are singular, elemental, subliminal words that encapsulate the bedrock principles and core ideas of each individual.
These subliminal Primary Words operate at a fundamental level, anchoring complex emotional landscapes and intricate logical frameworks into compact and powerful cognitive units. Each person possesses their own unique constellation of Primary Words, shaped by their experiences, culture, values, and beliefs.
Constructing the World
Even though we may seem to experience direct reality through the five senses, our brain always decodes the world and analyses “what it means,” before presenting it to us.
For example, gaze around the room you occupy at this very moment.
Light pools across a table, perhaps; distant streetānoise threads through the window; the faint smell of coffee lingers. And yet, astonishingly, none of these raw sensations reaches you as pure fact.Ā Long before they rise to conscious awareness, your nervous system has filtered, labelled and woven them into a private tapestry of meaning.
What you finally experience is not the world itself but a carefully rendered internal representation – a map of the world, with various landmarks, which is built inside your skull.Ā This inner map is extremely useful. It spares us the paralysis of raw dataāoverload and lets us step out the door without asking, every single morning, What is a ādoorā again?
But the same mechanism that grants fluency also hides a curious truth: each of us inhabits a subtly different world-map. My internal landscape may share your mountains and rivers, but still diverge in the meaning of its coastlines and the colour of the sky.
The Architecture of Internal Decoding
At the heart of this meaning-making process lie our Primary Words which function as the essential interpretive keys that unlock the significance of raw sensory data.
When light pools across that table, your nervous system doesn’t simply register photons hitting a surface; instead, it immediately activates a constellation of Primary Words; perhaps “home,” “comfort,” “work,” or “solitude,” that transform mere illumination into a meaningful experience. These Primary Words operate as cognitive filters, determining not just what you notice, but how deeply it resonates, what emotions it evokes, and how it connects to your broader understanding of self and world.
Each individual’s collection of Primary Words forms a unique interpretive dictionary that decodes reality according to deeply held values, fears, desires, and beliefs. This is why two people can witness the same sunset yet inhabit entirely different experiential worlds: one person’s Primary Words might include “beauty,” “transcendence,” and “peace,” while another’s revolve around “endings,” “time,” and “mortality.”
The raw sensory input remains constant, but the Primary Words through which it passes create radically different internal representations, each feeling absolutely real and immediate to its inhabitant. This is why two people can witness identical events yet emerge with fundamentally different “facts,” since each has interpreted reality in a different way.
Building Blocks of Reality
This internal-world-construction process is both selective and creative (or, generative). Primary Words act as filters, determining which aspects of reality deserve precious cognitive real estate. But they also serve as generators, providing the conceptual scaffolding around which experiences crystallize into meaning.
This means that, beyond their role as decoders, our Primary Words function as blueprints, instructing our mental architecture how to assemble the raw materials of sensation into a coherent inner world.Ā In this way, Primary Words function as the fundamental building blocks from which we construct our sense of self and reality. They don’t merely interpret experience, they actively shape it, creating the emotional and conceptual scaffolding upon which all subsequent thoughts, feelings, and perceptions are built.
Primary Words are the architectural elements of consciousness itself, determining not only how we interpret what happens to us, but what kinds of experiences we seek, what relationships we form, and what possibilities we can imagine. In this way, our Primary Words don’t just describe our inner world, they create it, moment by moment, in an ongoing process of interpretation and meaning-construction.
For example, someone whose worldview pivots on “justice” doesn’t just notice unfairness, their mind actively constructs frameworks for understanding power dynamics, historical context, and moral implications that others might never consciously consider.
The Process of Experience
From an overall perspective, Primary Words orchestrate the assembly of our process of experience in three stages:
| Attention | First, our Primary Words direct attention itself. They function as sophisticated filtering systems, determining which elements of the sensory flood warrant processing and which can be safely ignored. |
| Emotional Resonance | Second, Primary Words activate specific emotional circuits before conscious analysis begins. Each word carries its own affective signature – a unique emotional fingerprint that colors incoming information. The person anchored by “adventure” feels a quickening pulse at uncertainty; the one guided by “stability” experiences that same uncertainty as unsettling static. |
| Narrative Construction | Finally, Primary Words provide the underlying structure for the stories we tell ourselves about what we’ve experienced. They supply the implicit values, the unstated premises, the taken-for-granted assumptions that transform a collection of events into a coherent narrative. The same sequence of facts becomes a tale of triumph, tragedy, learning, or warning depending on which Primary Words govern the telling. |
The outcome of this process of analysis and reconstruction is a richly furnished mental world, coherent, felt to be obvious, and persistent.
Disagreement and Discussion
At the heart of every disagreement lies an invisible difference in perception; not necessarily in what happened, but in how it was interpreted. This is because each person lives within their own internal world; a constructed reality shaped not by raw facts alone, but by the meanings those facts acquire as they pass through the unique filter of that individual’s Primary Words.
Take, for example, the following office-disagreement scenario:
| Step 1. Shared Information Arrives | Imagine a project brief drops into Alice’s and Ben’s inboxes. The document itself is neutral ink and pixels. |
| Step 2. Automatic Filtering Kicks In |
Neither chooses this focus; it happens pre-consciously, in a few hundred milliseconds. |
| Step 3. Emotion Hooks On | Because each Primary Word carries a built-in emotional tone, Alice feels rising urgency (“We’re burning time!”), while Ben feels caution (“We’ll ship bugs!”). Different feelings ignite from the same paragraph of text. |
| Step 4. A Micro-Story Forms | Each mind stitches the highlighted bits into a quick internal narrative:
The stories now steer their thinking and will shape everything they say next. |
| Step 5. Positions Go Public | In the meeting Alice pushes for scope cuts to keep the date; Ben pushes for a QA extension. What looks like a disagreement about scheduling is really a clash of Primary Words: efficiency versus thoroughness. |
| Synopsis: Why This Is Hardwired | Primary Words are pre-loaded over years of habit and culture. The filter runs faster than deliberation. By the time you start “thinking it through,” your highlights and emotions have already been set. Narratives self-sealāonce a quick story exists, new facts get bent to fit it (confirmation bias). |
The reconstitution of reality experienced by both Alice and Ben occurs in real-time, and is experienced as reality itself. In order to reach a sensible conclusion, both Alice and Ben must acknowledge the partiality of their assessment and its incompleteness without considering the opposing view.
Neither Alice nor Ben is wrong, but neither is fully right either. Their perspectives are partial by nature, due to the simplification process that occurs when the mind processes reality and reduces it to familiar constructs.
To Agree or to Disagree?
In everyday conversation, we tend to treat disagreement as a binary: either someone agrees with us, or they don’t. But in reality, there’s a whole spectrum between these poles, where any particular exchange lands depends largely on how much overlap exists between the internal worlds of the participants.
- Discussion: At one end lies discussion –Ā where perspectives differ but share enough foundational assumptions to allow for mutual understanding. In this space, people may argue, negotiate, or persuade, but they remain grounded in a shared framework of meaning. Their Primary Words may highlight different aspects of a situation, but theyāre still reading from the same basic interpretive map.
- Fundamental Disagreement: At the other end lies fundamental disagreement – where the internal frameworks themselves are so divergent that communication becomes strained, confusing, or even impossible. Here, words may be the same, but their meanings are not. What one person calls “freedom,” another might label “chaos.” One sees progress; the other, disruption.Ā This kind of deep disagreement often resists resolution, each side is describing entirely different experiences of the world, filtered through different Primary Words and emotional landscapes.
- Preclusive Disagreement: In the most extreme cases, disagreement becomes preclusive –Ā meaning neither side can even imagine how the other could possibly see things that way. This is where conversations break down completely. Not because people refuse to listen, but because their internal maps have become so distinct that the very idea of ālisteningā loses coherence.
This explains why some disagreements feel like people are talking past each other. They often are – inhabiting different worlds constructed from different Primary Words, using the same words to mean fundamentally different things, offering evidence that seems obvious within their own framework yet incomprehensible within the other’s.
AI Analysis of the Walz-Vance Debate
To illustrate how we can analyse the differing Primary Words of two people engaged in debate, let’s take for instance the vice presidential debate between Senator JD Vance and Governor Tim Walz. By examining their speeches closely, we can identify the Primary Words that shape their distinct world views.
| The following analysis of their debate was performed by ChatGPT o3, using this blog-post as the prompt. |
JD Vance Reality-Frame
| Theme | Primary Words | Resulting Picture of the World |
|---|---|---|
| Moral ground-note | Family Ā· American Dream | The good society is one where working-class parents can afford a roof, dinner, day-care and a shot at upward mobility for their kids. |
| Identified threats | Border Ā· Illegal Ā· Fentanyl Affordability Ā· Inflation Censorship |
Why the dream is slipping: millions of unauthorized migrants (flood-gate metaphor) undercut wages, overfill schools and smuggle drugs; āBiden-Harris inflationā and costly energy gut pay checks; techāgovernment censorship stifles free discussion of these very problems. |
| Causal engine | Experts failed / Common-sense ignored | Credentialed elites shipped jobs to China, printed money, denied border realities and silenced sceptics. Their āmodelsā and āstudiesā are less trustworthy than lived experience. |
| Policy fix-set | Security Ā· Deterrence (abroad & at the line) Energy (āDrill, baby, drillā) Tariffs / Reshoring Targeted deportation Paid-leave via growth dividend |
Re-impose Trump border rules, finish the wall, start with criminal-alien deportations; unleash domestic oil, gas & (implicitly) nuclear to slash every input cost; slap tariffs on slave-labour imports and rebuild factories at home; the revenue & growth pay for family-leave credits; restore speech freedom by āending governmentāBig Tech collusion.ā |
| Emotional tone | Family Ā· Kids | āYour kids should be warm, fed and safeācommon sense can get us there if we stop listening to the people who failed you.ā |
Tim Walz Reality-Frame
| Stage of the Story | Primary Words | Resulting Picture of the World |
|---|---|---|
| Moral ground-note | Democracy Ā· Freedom (personal) Middle Class Ā· Fairness |
The good society is one where political power flows from voters, women control their bodies, and economic rules reward work – not wealth alone. |
| Identified threats | January 6 Ā· Election denial Abortion bans Ā· IVF risk Climate disasters Inequity in housing & childcare |
Why self-rule feels fragile: Trump tried to overturn a certified election; new state bans put womenās lives at risk; fossil-fuel warming super-sizes hurricanes; private equity & zoning bottlenecks drive rent through the roof; without help, families canāt afford kids. |
| Causal engine | Chaos vs. Steady Leadership Wealth-tilted rules |
Trumpās fickleness (tweets, trade fights) rattles alliances and markets; GOP tax cuts and deregulation favour the top and starve public goods; ignoring science fuels storms and drought. |
| Policy fix-set | Coalition / Allies (foreign & domestic) Restoration of Roe (Freedom) Climate-jobs investment Child credit Ā· Housing builds ACA drug-price negotiation |
Keep multilateral deterrence in Mideast; codify Roe to guarantee nationwide bodily autonomy; IRA-style spending to āharvest windā and onshore solar; $25 k down-payment aid + 3 M new units; paid family leave & $6 k child credit; Medicare bargaining cuts insulin to $35. Pay-for: ask the wealthy to āchip in their fair share.ā |
| Emotional tone | Optimistic pluralism | āWhen everyone gets a shot and no oneās vote or body is overruled, America grows togetherāand we can do it calmly, without tearing each other apart.ā |
By breaking down their arguments into these elemental words, we reveal the underlying architecture of their differing world views. Each candidate emphasizes certain concepts, positioning them as the causal engines of their narratives, while relegating other concepts to secondary or dependent roles.
The Ideal State of the World
Once we have identified each candidate’s Primary Words, we can then reconstruct the “ideal state of the world”, according to each candidate, from the Primary Words. This “ideal state of the world” represents the internal construction of the world of each candidate.
Again, the following re-construction was performed by ChatGPT 03:
From these identified Primary Words, we can reconstruct each candidate’s ideal state of the world, clearly illustrating the differences in their perspectives:
| Candidate | Ideal World |
| JD Vance | A world where Family and the American Dream flourish, powered by domestic Energy production. Security and stable, enforced Borders eliminate threats to prosperity, restoring Affordability through a pragmatic reliance on Common Sense over elite-driven complexity. His ideal world prioritizes simplicity, stability, and safety, ensuring families can achieve upward mobility. |
| Tim Walz | A world which revolves around a robust Democracy anchored in individual and social Freedom. Economic Fairness empowers a vibrant Middle Class, supported by stable Housing and collaborative Coalitions domestically and internationally. Steady Leadership ensures competent governance, addressing crises through inclusive, equitable solutions. His vision emphasizes cooperation, stability, and comprehensive justice. |
This analysis reveals how Primary Words function as the invisible architecture of political discourse, shaping not just what candidates say, but how they perceive reality itself.
Vance’s world is constructed around concrete, immediate concerns – families struggling with tangible threats like inflation and border security – while Walz’s reality centres on systemic, institutional frameworks that protect democratic processes and individual rights.Ā Neither perspective is complete on its own; each captures essential aspects of human experience while remaining blind to others.
Summary
The practical value of Primary Word analysis extends beyond mere academic understanding. In political discourse, workplace conflicts, personal relationships, and any context where perspectives diverge, identifying Primary Words can illuminate the deeper structure of disagreement. Rather than arguing over surface positions, we can address the foundational assumptions that generate those positions.
Primary Word analysis offers a path toward more meaningful dialogue that recognises the partial nature of our own world view and developing the capacity to temporarily inhabit alternative frameworks of meaning, allowing us to glimpse the coherent world that exists beyond the boundaries of our own constructed reality.
