I did shopping this month. I almost never buy any clothes for myself; my clothes come to me.
In Iran, my mom bought me almost all of my garment or occassionally, I received them as gifts. I was wearing whatever I had in Germany for the past three years but now was the time to learn how to shop. Counting this time, it's been three times (or four) that I have actively shopped for myself. However, this post is not about that, it is about this rain coat that I wanted to return when this thought happened in a DHL shop.
There were two guys in this kioks, one senior and one man in his 40s or around that. It was apparant that the senior guy was new and he was learning. I handed them the coat and he guided him on how to pack when he caused the paper package to slightly tear and the teacher took it away passive aggressively and finished the packing himself. Then, the senior guy tried to scan the QR-code and it didn't work, the other guy followed the exact same steps, and it just worked. The last thing was the printing when he started shouting at the senior person that he has to read what is on the screen. He handed me the label with no eye contact. I hated to witness this.
reality/reason 1
I was thinking that it always goes wrong with the tools when you don't want them to. The sequence probably is like this: the setting is full of pressure, you don't perform well, tearing the paper, or not keeping the scanner on the right angel or not reading the screen. It is a bad combination of a shitty person, a time restriction and performance and maybe other things causing him to have to work at this age under these circustances.
reality/reason 2
When I first moved here and it was my turn to choose a paper for the journal club, I chose the paper I work on for my thesis. It has cognition in the title of the paper, but it doesn't touch the cognition itself. Given the text, you figure that he means memory and learning as cognition. I wanted to be more specific about it, so I asked people what is cognition to them. I genuinely wanted to know their opinions as people and scientists, I respect them and I liked to know what is going inside their brains. I didn't get so many answers but I had one:
Anything with an (intrinsic, given or acquired) if-then logic, has some sort of cognition.
L mentioned that with my defintion, even this magazine has cognition. It was a microbiology magazine on the desk. To me, it doesn't have it, but I am guessing that she meant there are obvious examples that can be disregarded as cognizing beings.
I was thinking that low cognizing beings choose not to work properly when you are unsure and lack confidence. You see the paradox in my sentence? if they are on the lower part of the spectrum, then there is no decision making, but I attribute them the capability. For that, my presumption is wrong but I still stand with the statement. The scanner had some form of cognition, however "low", the computer showing the message, the yelling party, the senior, all of them had cognition but in different ways.
And I, the observer, cognize all this in my own unique way.