Fallacy of Comparison

We create beautiful structures on differing foundations,
Yet, how can we truly compare,
Any architecture, when no similarity is truly there?

For the basis of my constructs,
Are mined from the quarries of my mind,
And yours are not so, so what shall we find?

Perhaps empiricism or close study shall prevail,
But the evolution of thought seems to constantly prevail,
For thoughts, actions, and actions reality.

And this reality is but shifting sand,
For my supposition and your supposition are but sleights of hand,
Your hypothesis grand, yet I fail to agree.

I pose that comparison is resolutely fallacy.

Narratives and Interplay

From the moment you took your first breath, the narrative of your life began to relentless unfurl. Unlike the books and movies which capture inspiring or entertaining moments within the safe, coherent rules of the author’s mind, life follows a set of rules established by a Mind much, much more sophisticated than ours. Throughout your story you are forced to make judgment calls, go through triumphs and heart breaks, learn lessons, and gain wisdom; all around you people are doing the same. Thus, humanity treks forward in 7 billion inscrutable directions.

It is my nature to be both analytical and critical. It is my nature to search for more and more information until this mosaic’s subtler truths are revealed. My makeup is chimeric; I am dominated by a proclivity for empiricism, yet, I am wholly convinced that Truth exists beyond our traditional senses.

I am a practitioner of reconciliation or the act of taking large data sets and fastidiously analyzing them in order to bring together large themes and meanings. Over the years I have likened life to a book, a game, a mathematical equation, a probabilistic function and so forth as efforts to suture the gaping maws in most people’s perception of this existence. I hope I have shed light and inspired introspection which revealed the subtleties of yourselves.

This post deals with life as a book composed of characters who are fundamentally independent of one another, yet hopeless intertwined. As I have stated before, if man is nothing else, he is a classic paradox, dominated by two antithetical drives: his basic inclination to create his own reality (subjectivity) and his need to create social structures (objectivity). Ergo, our narratives are propelled by us creating our story and they are affected by the interplay of other’s narratives interacting with ours.

This may seem mundane on the surface, this is an obvious observation, however, what few fail to grasp is just how pervasive this is.

There are things that you are acting upon right now, decisions that you are making, rules you are breaking, rules to which you are adhering and so forth which indelibly affect someone else’s existence. Although you are making decisions as a free moral agent, everything that you think somehow affects and is affected by everything around you. This interplay fosters both harmony and friction which are the focal points for most human communication.

Take a moment to think about what is going on in the world, current events and things of that nature. Now consider how these current events came to happen. A terrorist cell in Palestine, a missing plane in the Far East, political dissension in East Europe, and criminal behaviors on Wall Street. All of those have elicited emotional responses from you, you have probably talked about these events with friends and family members. Your thoughts are probably passionate and filled with beliefs you hold to be true. Perhaps you blame governments or malicious spirits or just an overall lack of moral uprightness in the world these days.

You have beliefs about a myriad of things that you hold to be undeniably true. In the same vein, other people hold on to beliefs they hold to be undeniably true and no matter how much you may disagree with them, no matter how heinous their convictions are, their existence is just as valid as your own.

Interplay sets the stage for those who will succeed and those who will fail. It sets the parameters for those who will be wise and those who will choose ignorance.

I want you to think very deeply for a moment about the things that you hold to be invariably true. Perhaps its your belief in God or a heavy association with a political party. Now, take a moment to think about how those beliefs affect your life. What decisions have they caused you to make? How many people have you helped? How many have you hurt? See, a strong belief in something tends to ration that as long as you helped then the collateral damage is justified. The ends justify the means. But just how you could not see life any other way than you do, there are people who your belief systems have damaged, who in turn create belief systems that affect others who in turn create belief systems and so on.

As your narrative is going, you tend to justify your positions — even those very same positions that “oppose” the world — and in turn you create additional structures in the world.

Everyday, I see and interact with people whose ignorance is alarming. The scarier part is that their ignorance is well intended, is highly informed, and highly plausible. It may even be helpful in the short term, but one can infer the eventual damage.

The only way that humans will ever make it out of this situation we are doubly creating is a complete removal of ego. However, ego is one of the fundamental drivers of this planet, most people do not know how to live without some vested self interest. We don’t know how to be subordinate to certain rules or what rules to even create. We immediately see the planet for what it is, a cold, hard place where you eat or become dinner. This cutthroat reality is anything but innocuous, its facilitates interplay that is intrinsically destructive.

Everything in the world revolves around man’s interactions. We can choose peace but we will not because someone will always feel marginalized. Someone, somewhere will close his eyes and think about what he or she believes and their contemplations will become actions. Those actions, if done with enough passion, will become a reality and others will join that cause, ignorant to the underlying truth…

The conditions change, but the nature does not.

The world has been here before. When people become upset or overjoyed or jaded — whatever — they sink into the emotional vacuum of the self, the ego, and fail to see how the narrative their weaving is yet another reflection of the all pervasive Material governing our universe. The body blocks the mind and causes one to drink the bitter waters of their own making.

Everything and I do mean everything is governed by man’s willingness to arise out of his banal nature and see the truth of things. If he or she does not, then that narrative creates interplays that are destructive. If you are convinced of your version of God or your version of education or your version of this or that, you are a cancer to the world around you. You’re a cancer to the environment, a virus that has every right to be here but will cause damage, usually unseen.

Perhaps its time to think about how you think about the world. Maybe your best intentions are still destructive. This is a subtle, subtle concept to grasp and I don’t expect many to understand it; its taken me 6 very long years to be released from my “beliefs” which generated much damage as I acted through my selfish ego.

bryce

The Principles of Dogma

Dogma, as defined by Webster, is an official system of principles on tenets concerning faith, morals, behavior etc. While dogma is generally ascribed to large institutions such as churches or governmental organizations, I see these entities as nothing more than aggregations of humans and they are thus eventualities of human interaction. Dogma is a curious phenomena that arises when humans begin to congregate, as individual interpretations of life begin to compete for legislative space, over acts of “standardization” are enacted as attempts to streamline and keep peace.

Isolative cognition (IC) is a term I have come to use for the areas of cognition we access when making decisions within a cognitive bias. IC is a term that for many may be hard to conceptualize, one would have to be familiar with cognitive bias and additionally be able to pinpoint their biases in order to have any deep understanding of them. To merely see the blind spots in another’s thought process is hardly educational, it isn’t until the same scrutiny is applied to the individual that any substantive progress is made.

A society is more than just the sum of its parts, humans, because human interplay creates additional phenomena that are shared by one another. Things begin to emerge which are not related to any particular part, but as a nascent eventuality of interaction as a whole. These emergences are many, laws, rules, normative behaviors, ethics, and so forth. From these emergences come standardized rules of engagement, education, and principles of contributive behavior which try to facilitate an individual’s healthy integration into the whole of the body of society.

The problem is, humans, as explicitly stated ad nauseum on this site, are free moral agents and complex systems of probabilistic functions, thus one understanding of rules and principles may not be shared by the rest. However, in order to establish a cogent, sustainable society there must be normalities in place to govern interaction. Thus, dogma is born.

However, this complex interplay of human activities does not end there; just as man is governed by his or her need for structure, he is simultaneously governed by the cosmic forces of balance. If structure is emergent and instability must also come to the fore; one cannot exist without the other, this is the nature of being human.

Thus, IC becomes problematic as people identify with one set of rules or the other without taking account the essential antithetical principles of human nature. We MUST have balance, if there is evil then good will abound; if there is good than evil will abound.

Dogma, especially in larger, and by nature more complex societies, is rarely a cooperative process. In order to offset the cumbersome structure of a large populace, such intermediaries such as representative democracies and electoral processes begin to emerge. Dogma the evolves into a game of political intrigues, with a representative sometimes operative on behalf of his constituents, sometimes on behalf of his wealthy donors, sometimes on behalf of his own self interest, and usually in a complex admixture of all three. Factor in psychological warfare, conceptually related topics of psychological warfare and class oppression, in tandem with nationalism and a cadre of other -ism’s and one can see just how complex this dogmatic process can become.

Isolative cognition is the most destructive when a relatively informed person begins to sit atop their soapbox. Armed with a large amount of information, but exposed by anemic analytical processes, they skew such concepts like “dogma” as evil, unnatural, or unnecessary. They fail to view their own systematic beliefs of what is and isn’t, their own wishes for clarity, their own dreams of uniformity as forms of dogma. In their bias, they see with such vivacity a clear and concise version of what is, they often times supplement these positions with fervor and passion, mistake their ability to garner respect and persuade as self-evident truths of their moral uprightness, and mislead themselves to think that they are different from the society they hail from.

One must understand, to be informed does not mean to know; unless one is questioning the principles of knowledge — if one can ever know anything — their thought processes are exercises in insanity: repeating a dead process over and over again expecting different results.

How does one overcome IC, cognitive biases, or “philosophical suicide”, if I may borrow the phrase from Albert Camus, you ask? Is it by doggedly sticking to some theoretical objective truth and denying your impulses? Hardly. As discussed, that would contradict man’s existence as a paradox. Although we should actively seek objectivity, the only way life can make any cogent sense is through the eyes of individual experience; to deny that would be deny the human experience, a highly unlikely and virtually impossible process when dealing with a large society.

Instead, people should take their subjective opinions and test them to the hilt. They should understand their particular mental frameworks or schemata and actively seek to undo them. How? One method is to find your oppositional stance and do everything you can to agree with them. My preferred method is to zoom as far out as I can, philosophically speaking, and try to see the connections that I couldn’t from my limited mental vantage point. Another is to see the world as unreal and detach yourself from it, allowing the world to play out as a drama which you passively observe.

You can see why few people achieve philosophical freedom. All of these practices require an admission that the self is unimportant, that your views on life, God, death, humans — everything — are quite frankly useless and you must do everything you can to reconnect to some experience that you cannot readily explain.

So although I may disagree with much of the dogma of this world, I understand it and I understand the necessary, the naturalness of it. It is an organic process to keep things more or less in peace, to keep people with dispositions against investigative thought in a state of relevance, and to allow the globe to keep turning.

bryce

Prism

There exists many contradictions when working one’s way through the experience of consciousness as a human. Complexity of thought is further compounded when one attempts to reconcile the differences between individuals and individual experience; it is natural to make generalizations as a heuristic, yet this becomes untenable as one understands the myriad of inconsistencies between people. What arises is a plastic understanding of the mind and a need for a new model, one that can bring together these vast, sometimes dissociative concepts into some cogent framework.

The mind is a prism.

In optics a prism is a medium, usually a piece of glass, which when light travels through it is bent through a process known as refraction. White light passes through one side and a rainbow emerges from the other. The mind operates much the same way.

In my school of thought, there exist some persistent truth, a singular concept that is refracted as it passes through the mind of an individual. The configuration of its component bands are determined by the dimensions of the mind it has passed through; thus, a person’s mind “reflects” its version of reality per those dimensions. What appears as the “rainbow” is not truth, but reality as that person has come to view it.

Many times I struggle to explain these abstruse concepts of real and unreal because they fundamentally exist on the fringe of consciousness. We are all aware that life is somehow virtual, but the persistent delusions of reality consistently pull us back to ration and reason, which are tenably regarded as truth. This truth becomes self evident and our mind-prism denies the theoretical “white light” and associates with its own rainbow.

Life is very simple, humans are complex.

We have been given the gift of abstract reasoning and creativity, which means from birth we are building an interactive explanation of what the world is. We will then contend that our understanding of that world is fundamentally real, drawing upon the endless mental resources, or schemata, which emerge from our development. Schemata are patterns of thought through which we process information; the more we think in a particular way, the stronger that schema becomes. As we identify with that pattern it becomes more and more real and our ability to reason is subjugated to that process.

Many people are aware of this; we all understand that we have cognitive biases. The complexity emerges when one views their mind in contrast to someone else. Just as the commands on a computer must be written in a larger computational “language”, the commands on thought should be more or less universal. But they are not. Quite the contrary, we are like the citizens trying to build the Tower of Babel; our language is not consistent and our thoughts are highly individualized with very few persistent commonalities and even less deeper associations.

In other words, no two versions of reality, no two mind-prisms, are the same. But lets make this even deeper: no two mind prisms are even remotely the same.

Again, the profundity of these statements is for the most part lost in the ubiquity of this reality. We all know that two people are fundamentally different, however, the problem arises in how we choose to reconcile those interpretations. This is why I contend that it is not what we think that has such gravity on reality, but how we think about it.

If we have fundamentally different ways of viewing this experience on consciousness, how can we ever expect to have a society that exists in harmony? If our ways of thinking are subjective, can we actually create an objectivity that is meaningful? That’s one set of questions. However these aren’t questions that render and useful answers to me, these are still derivatives that lead to quarrelsome debates and interpretations ad infinitum.

Everything that is pervades out of one singular concept which is virtually inaccessible via standard cognition. I hold on to the ideal that all humans exist as complex systems of probability, simultaneously in all possible outcomes, which become one or another observable “reality” through the isolation of the strongest set of emotional or mental factors, Quantum Superposition. In laymen’s terms, people are simultaneously happy, sad, strong, weak, angry, amenable — all oppositional pairs — and it isn’t until some isolating experience occurs that some “mood” or “reality” comes forth.

The body with all of its sensory and extrasensory faculties, is the computer through which we experience life. As it develops, we develop. However, the self, the seat of consciousness, the soul — whatever you choose to call it — exists separate from this body, although few come to realize this. In my philosophy, the soul is comprised of the conscious and the heart, both of which are directly affected by the nascent developments from the gross, physical body. Thus, people come to identify with their physical expressions of reality and the soul is rendered a ward to the grossness. The mind-prism now exists in supreme turbidity, clouded by the virtual world appearing as reality. No longer do they see themselves as existing in all possible realities, as quantum superposition posits, but relegated to the whims of this physical delusion.

Cognition is then diminished to the perceived limits a person’s reality, thus subjection overwhelms the hard-to-reach tendrils of objectivity and the individuals perceptions are stunted.

This is why I believe our world is in the condition that it is in. Communication, the hallowed process of interaction, is seen as a positive, yet, communication is an eventuality of the cognitive evolutionary process. It is only as strong as the species using it. Thus, communication has its fair share inconsistencies and pitfalls as it mimics the shortcomings of its progenitor, human thought.

I have touched on many esoteric concepts in this post, as I believe much of the ancient arcana understood these principles long before modern science caught up. For those that read this blog consistently, I do not subscribe completely to science or spirituality as I believe that both are marred by the same biases and systematic errors that confound humanity; after all they have both been passed down through human thought and human communication. Science attempts to shed flaw through the rules of empiricism and spirituality attempts to shed flaw through the rules of divinity, yet both, when taken as human experiences are still subjected to the rules of human error.

I expend much energy when I write posts like these and I am painfully aware that I myself am a offender using the the same cognitive biases, the same limited schemata, the same subjective mind-prisms that I try to expose. I can only pray that my willingness to transcend the limits of standard thought can place me on some higher experiential dimension, a strange proposition, I’m aware.

I hope to reconcile more and more these intractable contradictions and complex experiences.

bryce

On My Road Here

On my road here, I learned several lessons.
I challenged Fate to a duel and wielded Choice.
I failed.

On my road here, I burned several bridges.
Set alight by brazen acts of bravado,
I was only trying to get across.

On my road here, I aged many years.
Wisdom burned into my DNA,
I see what I know.

On my road here, I overcame many obstacles.
Through the surfeit of circumstance,
I turned survival into success.

I am still on the road.
I am still on the road.

The Secret Admiration

I wish to drink you in more and more,
Although I may see you, I soulfully seek you,
Sometimes I feel that if I speak you,
Your existence may somehow become persistent;

A silly synthesis, I know,
But the ephemeral, temporal, nominal dalliances,
Intensify my longing for you,
How I’m longing for you.

That I may catch your eyes and drink deeply,
That the intoxication of your essence’s ambrosia may free me,
I freely need thee, I frequently see thee,
In my mind’s eye I crave thee with a force so greedy,

I abscond sagacity, chase you in my dreams with tenacity,
No longer tethered to veracity for my fantasies harass me,
So when I pass thee, understand that I’m yours,
If you ever invited me I’d gladly sprint through your doors.

Embracing Your Struggle

In your youth struggle is your job.

It is your occupation and you should very well give the entirety of your effort to it.

The gripe a preceding generation always has with its successor is that they are too headstrong; the kids think they know better because they have calculated and adjusted for the errors of their parents. One of the prevailing mantras of parenthood is to raise your kids to be better than yourself; a mantra that like so many idiosyncrasies in verbal communication veils some difficult truths to swallow.

There are many problems endemic to human interaction but it is my belief that chief among them — and I’m not using that with creative license, I do indeed mean chief — is our persistent belief that life is linear. We spend a significant portion of our time trying to creative predictable results with education, legislature, religion, politics and the like, that we start to put our independent beliefs above the veritable panoply of interpretation that exists adjacent and opposite to us.

In order to gain peace with the world we must learn to get over ourselves. A task much easier said than done.

Our generation has experienced things that no other group on earth ever has and as much as we herald that in our communicative channels, I do not believe many understand the gravity of that. We are a more informed cohort, but we are not necessarily any more advanced than those before us. We may have more opportunities than those before us, but that doesn’t mean that those opportunities come without a fight. The conditions of human experience have changed, but the nature, as always, remains aberrantly persistent.

We believe that wisdom can be bought or expedited because we have learned from those who toiled in the decades before we were even thought of. This precludes us from ever truly understanding what youth is about. To add consternation to chaos, our parents do not have clear understandings either; they may possess a tacit, learned understanding, but to translate that into meaningful terms is lost on many people.

So young people go through these early years trying to forge their way into a system, only to be indelibly whittled down by inevitability.

You MUST struggle now. That is your job.

You cannot look to particular conditions, those are meaningless in the eyes of objective reality. You cannot say, “I’m going to change corporate America by starting my own business”, that is a clear contradiction. It is not until you struggle and learn why corporate America is fucked that you stand even a shadow of a chance of any meaningful reform.

The struggle of learning is the constant because it reflects the nature of humanity. No one can deny that the specifics of our culture and ancient Egypt were different, however, an adept eye can see that the generalities, the larger scope of human expression is unyielding. If we focus only on the micro then we remain in our delusion, fighting wars of ego and redundancy while swearing we are making changes.

The worst thing that can happen to a young person is that they find success early. They will self destruct because it is a commonplace tendency for humans to grow complacent and rigid when they think their system of operations works. They will more than likely create even more egregious errors than their predecessors; they’re actions will be identical, however the ever increasingly scrutiny by society mixed with the greater abundance of information will amplify their ignobility.

You must sit in your struggle and confront it daily. You must soak in its astringent acids everyday for it will burn completely the useless necrotic tissue of youthful ignorance. The skin will rejuvenate and instead of coming back as it was or simply coming back thicker, it will be tailor made for the life you have chosen. You won’t just be tougher because certain situations don’t call for ubiquitous toughness; you will be dynamic.

The dynamism is the calling card of the elite thinker, the knower that traverses the land as adroit observer.

What you think you know, what I think I know is of no consequence to the life force that animates us. What you feel or what convicts you is a fly to a whale; not only is it inconsequential, it exists in a completely different medium. The dimension of wisdom and the dimension of opinion do not exist on the same plane; you must divorce yourself from yourself.

In your struggle, you must employ all of your wit, all of your faith, and all of your deepest stratagems to unlock the secrets of your own existence. Whether you call upon a higher power or not, there are secrets that are only revealed after one has suffered to gain them. That suffering is your sacrifice, it is your toll to a realm that moves superior to our own.

Do not pray for your struggle to end; pray for you to outmatch your struggle. Pray for the skill to outwit your obstacles and outperform your rivals. Match that skill against all the things you have learned falling down and getting back up and then, only then, will you taste the delicacy of wisdom.

We all believe that the opposite side of struggle is some earthly success. That my struggle ends when I get paid or my struggle ends when I get married to the person of my dreams. But those will be ripped from your hands if you have not filled yourself with the thoughts of wisdom. Proverbs 8:11 says it best

“For wisdom is better than rubies and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared unto it.

It goes on to say in verses 17-18:

“I love them that love me: and those that seek me early shall find me.
Riches and honor are with me; yea, durable riches and righteousness.

Wisdom is the opposite of struggle, not some expression of success. Wisdom is success. Some people say wisdom is knowing what to do with the information you receive; I don’t care how one defines it, I just know that when they get there they act differently. Many people believe they are wise, yet, their actions are foolish. That is not to say that wise people don’t make mistakes, but their actions taken as a whole will be different.

In closing, Balthasar Gracian famously said in his Art of Worldly Wisdom that one should, “think with the few and speak with the many.” What one should see is that, yes, there will be those that are incapable of wisdom, but the more invidious aspect is that even those that are “wise” will find themselves at odds with one another. Wisdom, especially that of this world, is an infinite a realm of consideration as that of folly, to engage others is dangerous to your own progression.

Thus, the conditions change, but the nature of man remains the same; tribalized, divided, and perennially conquerable.

But all that matter is conquering one’s struggle.

bryce