The gist

I’ve got it!

What?

I’ve just figured out what makes them so good at it. And why it’s us studying them instead of they simply discarding us as being too ordinary to be of any interest.

Spill it out then!

Even if they are not yet fully aware of the whole thing, they are fueled by emotion. Reason is only a tool for them, not a way of life. Furthermore, their manner of gathering and sharing information – what they call ‘languaging’, is precise enough to be effective yet imprecise enough to make it possible for ‘imagination’ to work wonders.

Whoa! You’re learning to speak like them. Sometimes I don’t fully understand what you want to convey. Take this ‘work wonders’ for instance. I’ve already checked the dictionary, I know what each word means but…. I’m still not sure what you really need to say to me. Not to mention this ‘imagination’ thing. ‘Making things appear in your mind’…

I knew I could count on you! I just knew it!
You’re asking the very same questions which I’ve just answered.
Let me proceed.
For us, everything is straightforward. We always know what we have to do. What our current task is, what’s expected of us and how we’re going to fulfill our jobs. When we need to determine ‘what’s next’ we check a schedule, make an inference based on already available data or proceed to gather the information we need to perform the inference we need.
And when was the last time you ever wondered “Who am I?”

That ‘wonder’ word again… You’re killing me!

‘Insecure’.
You do have a good grip on what this word means, right?

Yeah. The situation when you don’t have enough information to determine which way. AND when there’s no way of gathering more pertinent information other than proceeding along any of the possible ways. Like in that famous experiment designed by Schrodinger.

OK. We, both you and me, know what ‘insecure’ means. Both of us have been in situations similar to what you have just described. But neither of us has ever experienced the feeling. How it feels to be insecure. How it is, what it means, to wonder ‘will I be alive tomorrow?’ ‘Will I have enough food for my children?’ And so on.
‘Wonder’ is a complex concept. It encompasses both a question you don’t have an answer for and an answer you don’t know where it came from. Like ‘the unexpected food one might find, out of the blue, exactly when their children were hungry’.

This is the difference between them and us.

They can ‘wonder’ while we don’t.

They can formulate ‘stupid’ questions – then come up with unexpected answers, while we can’t.
They can perform ‘wonders’ while we can’t. Even though we already know far more than they’ve ever learned…