Addicted to Belief

“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin- scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” – Orwell, 1984.

In Decision Theory, there is an exercise, a game, called The Dictator Game. In this situation, Person A, known as the Proposer, and Person B, known as the Responder, are allocating a certain amount of money. However, in this game the money is not decided by both parties, it is decided by the Proposer. What makes the Dictator game so interesting is that the reason the money is allocated by the Proposer is because he or she did something to earn that right; i.e. they performed some task such as finishing in the top 25% of their class on an assignment. From there, they are given the autonomy to decide “splits;’ although in quotidian interaction, reciprocity says to split the money 50/50 (much as its done in a similar game in which no meritocracy is imposed), the game rarely plays out that way. The Proposer may give the Responder some but very rarely is a half doled out.

Belief systems are as old as the human condition itself. They span myriad cognitive domains and they envelope every single facet of human behavior. You would be hard-pressed to find a human action that was not intimately tied to an arbiter’s belief system. The spurious aspect of belief systems is the not wholly true notion that we are in complete control of what we think, feel, or believe. Modern science has had much to say on that front.

Over the last century, materialist doctrines such as behaviorism, eliminative materialism, and physicalism have all emerged  to ascribe primacy to the physical structures of the brain. Most scientists that subscribe to these systems point out the obvious effect that brain structures have on our notion of the “mind”: you damage or stimulate a region of the brain and it will have serious affects on a person’s mental experience. Thus, it is a rather tenuous claim that someone possess the requisite dexterity to alter the physical functioning of the brain, especially those structures which fall outside of conscious control such as the brain stem and midbrain regions.

It is precarious, many argue, to say that one’s mind, one’s conscious experience as a bounded being, causes serious influence on the core of his being. Rather they contend that man operates as much more a machine than some free flowing expression of will.

Evolutionarily speaking, both the dictator game and brain function make complete and utter sense. It is for this reason that those who achieve higher status in life such as advanced degrees, better paying jobs, or fruitful relationships, especially after hard work, are so quick to silence someone who has not accomplished these things. There is a very tightly correlated value system between one’s personal progression and one’s hegemony over “relevant” or “requisite” knowledge. Whereas now dictator systems tend to mirror pure merit, that is someone achieving something, those dictator systems in the past were prepossessed by the bigotry of racism and sexism; but still, the facts ring true.

The human condition, with very, very few instances spared, is one that I have had to radically rethink since I began my journey into brain science. Prior to, I was inclined to believe in my own agency, my own ability to choose, however, while I have not totally abandoned will, I have come to grips that many of our reactions to life — many of our experiences in life — are woven into our brain structures. Our brain structures still possess a preponderance of the information passed on since the beginning of life — that is, we still hold onto many of those evolutionary characteristics endemic to the animal kingdom.

When you look at Dictator Bias, it makes intuitive sense. Because you have put in the work, you have a more relevant, more informed opinion than someone who does not. However, the curious component of the Dictator Game is that the reward and the merited activity are not intrinsically linked; why should you command a greater share of money for doing better in a class? It is my personal conviction that this arbitrary arrangement of effort and reward is a cardinal culprit in the sociocultural tensions our species seemed intractably involved in. Whether its the 99% versus the 1%, black versus white, or any variation of this mono-thematic status war, it is this arbitrariness that poses a problem.

Now, moving outside this particular theme and in to the larger picture that is simple effort and reward, again, the Dictator Bias makes sense. In this regard, the reward is not money but what the money represents, power. There is nothing more evolutionary valuable than power. Power places in an organisms hand the keys to the kingdom; the kingdom of reproduction. Alphas get to mate with the cream of the crop and therefore, competition boiled down to who could strut their fitness the best. Intrinsically built into the Dictator Game is the expression of fitness, that the Proposer had to perform at a certain level in order to gain the power.

Although it is easily to point to the Dictators in our lives — our bosses, professors, police officers, neighbors — too few of us take the time to see if we are Dictators in someone else’s life. The rules of social engagement tend to blur the lines for self-reflection because the duties that we are given are generally set in stone. For instance, a police officer is trained to be suspicious of everyone. Why? Because his job is to spot the cheat. But doesn’t that lead to profiling? Of course it does, it must lead to profiling because of how we normalize socialization. It leads to profiling because we have a norm in the first place. Police Officers, motivated by duty, motivated by a belief system which is more than likely reified by some hyper-vigilant circuit in his brain that he or she may or may not be aware of, will be on the lookout for those things which 1) don’t fit the norm 2) have historically been deviations from the norm. Urban, especially black males, fit that bill like no one’s business. Why? Because systematic oppression for a couple centuries will cause an entire subgroup to resent and teach that resent to their progeny: it is an exquisite model of the oscillatory aftermath of a well played out Dictator Game. Power shifts because human behavior is stable yet dynamic; as things shift and events occur, those dynamic changes spawn their own reactive narratives and so forth.

We then, again, come back to the evolution of the human and its brain. No longer are we just discussing socioculture or social dynamics; now we’re discussing proto-culture, that which culture is built upon. 

Culture is not built upon the ethereal conscious; it is not built upon “free choice.” It is built upon the disproportionately unconscious processes which help form and mold the conscious processes. Thus, a flawed foundation almost always leads to a flawed fore-structure. Can one change their behavior? To an extent.

We as a species have become addicted to the improper ways of viewing our brains and our subsequent behavior. We have all become primed to talk about our decisions when many of our decisions are primed by what is going on underneath the surface. Am I advocating that we are all robots, a materialist position? No, I believe that things can be changed, but they cannot be altered until people know what is going on. The first step is realizing that your belief systems are as much outside of your conscious as they are integral to that conscious; therefore, one should relentlessly challenge what they think they believe. This is the indirect way that one can reteach their unconscious processing systems. As George Winston in 1984 came to realize, even the most rooted conviction can be altered: he can to love Big Brother. Brainwashing is the cheater’s way of doing things; I am an advocate for facing facts:

1) Much of our behavior is out of ignorance, we reinforce our ignorance by faithfully subscribing to the belief systems we build atop our ignorance;

2) The brain is more than capable of being the progenitor of our mind. The mind gives way to consciousness, ala Damasio, and you suddenly have a sapient being.

3) We have not fully shed our evolutionary roots and rightfully so, evolution gave us many great characteristics, like, you know, the continued will to live. However, this means as latent animals we must become conscious of our proclivity to tribalize, remain ignorant (see number 1), and judge based upon these tribalizations and ignorant modes of inquiry.

4) The brain is amazing, but it is not an apparatus of pure reality. As has been shown in more experiments than I can think of, the brain shows one what is pertinent to survival. Thus, the eyes have evolved to only let in visible light, the various structures of the nervous system work to remain within a certain homeostatic range, and we process information based on the evolutionary principle of approach or retreat. Advanced cognition integrates and complexifies, but really thats what the brain does.

5) Brain science does not have all the answers. Quite contrary. We are only scratching the surface; but, remember, as one continues to go through life: great claims require great evidence. If you are going to extrapolate about what the mind does or how it regulates behavior, be prepared to answer the tough questions. When a scientist says to you that what is happening in Ferguson is a classic case of evolutionary fitness, do not react with stupidity, consider the facts and think through their argument. 

What I hope to inspire in this post is a general understanding that our behavior is not as spooky as we would like. It is highly, highly, extremely complex, but it is only so because so much of it has been hidden from light by the lack of technology. However, extremely complex things can be understood through measured inquiry, the kind of inquiry that sees that many of the reported spiritual phenomena come through activity in the temporal lobe. Does that mean God doesn’t exist? Of course not, but you would be mindful to address that as you come up with your theories as to why ecstatic experiences occur.

Beliefs are like drugs. They comfort us. They keep us composed when the situations we so often find ourselves in no longer make sense. They give us a sense of order; karma ensures that cosmic justice is served. But beliefs are skewed by the very systems which create them, it is dangerous to see your beliefs as objectively pure or untainted. Moreover, it is foolish to believe your belief system is “right.” A good scientist rarely says he or she is right; they simply point to their results and say their position is likely. Whereas something as fleeting as karma involves a lot of natural probability. 

Be mindful of yourself; its a blessing to be able to do so, but also be aware that your self can just as easily be described as chemical reactions and electrophysiology. Its a very, very fine line between the physical-as-is and the sense of self as-experienced.  

Depression and Fractured Reality

Let me start out with a disgustingly obvious truism: reality is much, much more complicated than it seems.

I have discussed at length the nature of the human condition and how that corresponds to reality, but, as I continue my journey, much more is forthcoming. For those of you that know me personally, the recent trajectory of my journey has brought me into a specialized field of clinical psychology known as neuropsychology. Neuropsychology is the study of the relationships between physical structures in the brain and their corresponding cognitive capabilities and behaviors. In the clinic where I intern, we see many patients on the autistic spectrum, others who suffer from personality disorders such as bipolar and borderline disorders, as well as mood illnesses such as depression and anxiety.

Neuropsych is a relatively new science and as such sits on the frontier of innovation and interpretation. Many of the discussions between our practicing neuropsychologist and myself involve the unique ways in which the brain gives rise to the various behaviors and capabilities that so many of us come to take for granted or just simply don’t understand.

Yesterday the world lost an icon, Robin Williams. Those in my age group know him as an incomparably hilarious staple of our youth, gifting us with so many characters that are now forever idealized in our minds. From Genie in Aladdin to Mrs. Doubtfire, Mr. Williams was nothing short of a laugh a minute; however, as is now apparent, deep beneath the veneer of his humor was a deeply broken man.

The battle of ideology still rages about the relationship between the brain and the mind, but this much is true: they affect each other. For professionals in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and certain brain sciences, the notion that one can “will” themselves to be happy is a gigantic misnomer. Nor is the idea that “talking to someone” is panacea either. The truth of the matter is how the brain interacts with its environment is still much of a mystery to us.

Although much philosophy and many personal ideas are cast around about how one suffering from a neurological illness should carry themselves, the hard truth is that nothing in the human condition is ever simple. Since we are constantly having to piece together the fragments of existence and decide what questions to put to nature during the process, science progresses usually at an erratic pace through piecemeal activities. New Age and other popular trends attempt to streamline and rest upon conclusions, calling on mystical or alternative means, however, these too, are not without their applicative shortcomings.

Reality is not linear because as the beings apprehending it, we are not linear.

Finding biological correlates to depression has been tough; however, many researchers have honed in on a group of neurotransmitters, monoamines such as dopamine and seratonin, and have hypothesized that greater amounts of these in the synaptic clefts, that is those gaps between neurons, may help to counteract this destructive disease. But, as is far too common, the drugs created based on these theories do not work the same in every individual; humans are as diverse physiologically as we are mentally.

Psychotherapy is the clinical practice of counseling, generally done by a licensed psychologist or social worker. These situations call upon the professional stability and wealth of knowledge by the clinician, but again, the psyche of humans is just as diverse as their physiologies.

The tragedy of Robin Williams perfectly captures this point. Over the years Williams suffered from both cocaine and alcohol addictions, as well as battling the aforementioned depression, which could have been onset by the relapse into alcohol. For an addict, the guilt and shame of relapse is often enough to drive them into depression and often expressing comorbidity, which is the development of additional simultaneous illnesses suchas anxiety.

As I intend for this blog to be highly informal, I invite all of you to do your own research and not just consider the diseases themselves, but the overarching schema of the brain and how it generates both self-awareness (consciousness) and opinions about reality. Too much of our daily interaction is shrouded in the ignorance of under-informed opinion and thus, misnomers continue to propagate. Suicide, the unfortunate result of many of these disorders, has been villainized, feared, and railed against since the dawn of time. Religion, philosophy, and even legislation have condemned those who succumb, a truly disheartening practice. Since most humans are fully operable within the confines of natural selection, the idea of ending one’s own life is resolutely unconscionable. Moreover, many have come to see suicide as selfish, self-centered, and flat-out “wrong.” I will refrain from offering my opinion, but I invite those of you who are mature enough, to consider this.

Life is not and has never been about the primacy of any individual species and this may come as a surprise to those who have never thought about it this way. Humans, although advanced, must remember that they are carriers of this life “program,” this biological force which separates the inanimate from the animate, just like any other animal. Although our brains have been highly modified to organize reality into “human” or anthropological terms, this only exists within the collective psyche of humans. It does not designate reality for what it is.

Albert Camus famously wrote that suicide was an escape out of the absurdity of life; however, this didn’t actually resolve the absurdity of it. If I were to let my feelings about these subjects leak just out a little, I would say that I connect with this idea. For those that suffer from chronic mental illnesses, the absurdity of life and the insurmountable nature of it all, leads to feelings of futility, generally through the expressions of guilt, despair, or low self-worth. The realities that their brains are generating do not possess the capabilities of continually carrying the life program and it is not as simple as them “getting over it” or “remembering whats important in life.”

Imagine yelling at your computer whose motherboard is faulty and telling it to “get over it,” to “remember that its purpose is to compute and discover the beauty of computation.” It simply does not possess the requisite capabilities any longer and sometimes it cannot be fixed. Although psychiatric drugs, psychotherapy, and an overall refocusing of mental effort can work for some cases, they will not always be sufficient, especially in those whose hardware has inexorably failed.

To philosophize about the ethics and morals of suicide and any of its preceding illnesses is absolutely ridiculous. To tell a person that they are wrong for wanting to kill themselves is absolutely ridiculous. Superimposing your beliefs on the subject is absolutely ridiculous. Many people will say, “well I have been there, I have been suicidal,” but again, this is shortsighted. Our individual makeups are wildly divergent from one another; just because you were able to pick yourself up and talk yourself (or got talked) off the cliff does not mean you “understand” what drives someone to actually step off the edge. Perhaps your brain structures were reparable; perhaps the concatenate neurological activity that forms the physical foundation of your reality was slightly different. Trillions of synaptic connections in the brain leads to an unfathomable preponderance of possibilities.

This, for me, is the crux of the problem of being human. We possess the seemingly unique ability in the animal kingdom to be aware of the mental states of others. Our evolution has brought us to a place where we are no longer governed exclusively by instinctual or evolutionary primitive demands. However, few of us understand how to evaluate the states of others. Few of us understand how to interact with one another. We hide behind beliefs and theories, usually unfounded and based on personal experience, or we ascribe to some set of beliefs that have been taught to us. We don’t know how to think, we just do, ad nauseum. The result is a fractured reality, much exposed by David Bohm, and we continually conjecture and posit from the fragmented positions.

For instance, Robin Williams dies and suddenly those in the African American community are up in arms about society “forgetting” Michael Brown, the unarmed man who was gunned down by police over the weekend.

It is this state of fracture which continually inhibits not just the Black community, but our entire species. We don’t understand how to evaluate the course of events or the course of our interactions, so we lead ourselves further and further into the schizophrenic reality of fractured societies. The irony is, the more fractured we think, the more like the primitive animal kingdom we become. Instead of willingly pushing forward as a species through this gifted faculty of advanced self-awareness and awareness of others, we elect to stew in the filth of the ignorance fracture allows.

In 2014 alone, planes have disappeared and been shot out the sky, more unarmed Black men have been murdered by police (who probably also suffer mental illnesses, various complexes to be certain), and the Middle East continues to wage ideological war. To me, it is all related. It is the very nature of how humans, in our current state, create reality, fractured reality. Robin Williams could not face his reality, Israel and Hamas continually force each others’ realities upon one another, and racist police generate a reality of paralyzing prejudice and monstrously end the realities of others.

The brain is a wild, wild place. It puts the most hardcore Siberian frontier to shame because not only have we not even begun to get close to exploring its mysteries, most of us don’t even know how undertake that process. So the derivatives, the social, ethnic, and ideological arenas are weaponized and are brought to the fore, instead of dealing with the common denominator in all of those, the correlated brain states, the mind.

If I could give all humans one admonition, it would be to stop taking the most familiar thing, one’s conscious experience for granted. Stop believing that what you think is “just how things are” or even worse, “right.” Your own prejudices, which you have no doubt justified, your own beliefs, which you have no doubt idealized, and your own actions, which you have no doubt made excuses for, are a complex conglomeration of neurological determinism (that is you are who you are because that is who you are), your environment (which triggers certain aspects of brain activity, lending back to the determinism), and the quasi-indeterminism created by the fact that we cannot trace the origins of every single action or belief by an individual. In addition, reality being so much bigger than individual humans, than Earth’s entire biosphere for that matter, it should be fastidiously considered. Your own ideas, beliefs, and actions should be meticulously raked in contemplation about your own self and doubly so as you consider the collectivity of humans. Before you go off on rants and tangents about anything — suicide, mental illness, or ideological preferences included — take the time to understand what it is you’re talking about and compare that back to the wholeness of life and the universe.

Although we are the latest model of the vehicle of life on this planet, this does not denote an existential primacy, as mentioned earlier. This means we should be even more relentless in our questioning of the very essence of ourselves and how we apprehend the environments around us. Instead of drawing conclusions, we should never stop drawing on bits of information, liked or unliked. Treat every moment as an opportunity to test hypotheses, not “reach” final states of belief. The purest hubris is the idea that anything can be known in finality.

Rest in peace, Mr. Williams. I know that I could never understand your battles and I wish that something could’ve occurred which pointed you back to the beauty of the inquiry of life. I wish that you could’ve found a kernel of faith in something which kept you tethered to our plane of reality, but sometimes the demons of our psyche pull far too hard. I don’t find you selfish, nor will I villainize you unfairly; you fought but you found yourself overwhelmed. I wish you felt the happiness you brought all of us. I hope that wherever you are now, you are free from the pain.

bryce

One

Sweet reverie, rhapsodical memory;
The elegant beauty of the one nearest to me.
She, dearest to me; she, peerless to me;
Truly, one of one.

Lambent tresses, hair messes as we lay out in lay sun
Sanguine caresses, lip presses these days out with my one
My Queen, our Kingdoms one,
Elegance in motion, my Queen has come.

This deed is done; with the touch of her hand
My greed is done, my need is one,
Namely her, countless stars yet all I need is one;
The brightest, clearest lumen; She and We are One.

The Swinging Pendulum: (Mis)Appropriation of Culture

For the most part I have tried to avoid these types of topics due to their innately invidious nature; everyone seems to have an opinion on culture, race, and social currency and very few of us actually have anything positive to contribute to the conversation. Most folks seem to enjoy seem to enjoy only the labors of their own point of view and are all too litigious in their invocation of them.

Conversations on race and culture are a thoroughly beaten, thoroughly dead horse.

However, with mainstream (white) America “twerking,” Disney channel sponsoring children of all colors (mostly white) to rap, and the meteoric rise of the gorgeous but controversial Iggy Azalea, one has to take a moment to methodically consider the shift in the cultural climate. Tack on some of the other oddities such as the increased non-black usage of the epithet/urban identifier “nigga,” predominantly white communities “discovering” box and plat braids, and the hip-hopification of some of white America’s most famous starlets (here’s your cue J.Bieber) and the picture is quite peculiar.

Let me start by saying that this “analysis” is not going to be your typical thrashing of white America or repudiation of hip-hop. In my typical, Bohmian, holistic style, I want to paint a picture of the human animal sans cultural context and allow this cascade of human activity to fill in the crevasses. Amongst my ever growing litany of complaints, one of my chief concerns is how people allow their thoughts to form. I have often talked about the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of conscious processing and again, I want to stress how important it is that one question the process of their thoughts and not just the content.

The first thing one must consider is what is a human? Is it something sacred, consecrated of God, already perfected yet still ignorant to its true form? Or is it an animal with immense cognitive abilities? The first of these definitions elicits the type of hubristic feeling common to those who deify culture in one way or another, while the the latter makes room for us to have error.

The second, ostensibly: what is culture? Is it something that is as sacred and ineffable as the human form or is it merely the conglomeration of behaviors, norms, interactivities, and expectations which codifies the actions within a particular social group? Much the same, the first attempts apotheosis, the latter does not.

Black America remembers all too well mainstream America’s overt racism which was upheld in virtually every corner of our nation. In our not too distant past, such media juggernauts such as MTV would not play Michael Jackson’s music and completely blacklisted rap and hip-hop as unsavory, ignoble atrocities from the “undesirable” element. Mind you, this was only a few decades ago…

However, with time, social evolution took its course and very gradually, then with startling alacrity, “urban suburbia” became the hot ticket.

My niece and nephew really like the show Austin and Ally on Disney channel and we as a family have come to watch it religiously. In typical awkward fashion, they try very hard to keep the racial conversation out of the mix and diversity well represented. However, when your main character is a blond haired white kid doing the Dougie, one can’t help but raise an eyebrow at the irony of it all. I can recall a time when a white kid couldn’t recite a Jay-Z bar, now brushing one’s shoulder off is a staple of the “good job” gesticulations.

How is this so? How can such an alarming shift happen right beneath our noses?

Simple, because we are animals.

Humans are animals and we would be better off if we remembered that. We are absolutely, undeniably advanced animals whose capacity for self-awareness is unmatched, but we are still governed by the same processes that we witness in the animal kingdom — hell, we are still governed by the same processes that are explicitly stated in physics. Thus, our evolution is multitiered that it involves billions of beings internalizing and externalizing thus rendering it inordinately complex, but that complexity does not change the reality that we are animals.

With such striations, ordered behavior that spans many different cognitive domains and brain regions (instinctive, emotional, rational), is very difficult to organize. Moreover, each discrete individual represents a method of thinking, replete with traps and tunnels, which in turn edifies or detracts from the society around it. Thus, society is never truly a stable structure; it is always in a state of flux and it is always ready to surrender to a new, hopefully more stable form.

Blacks in America, at least those blacks whose genes were passed on from the abomination of slavery were resilient; to endure many generations of backbreaking work and atrocities that would make sociopaths cringe is no easy feat. Trudging on as a community through the turn of the 20th century, fighting our way through Jim Crow and other overt campaigns to diminish us to less than, we perpetually found a way not just to survive, but to flourish. This is the hallmark not just of the Black community, but of many communities, the Jews for example, who found ways to fight to a place of successful survival in the faces the manmade mechanisms made to be their downfalls. As we flourished, we came to define new eras of cool, — Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool and many of his contemporaries — pushed the envelope of arbitrarily contrived social conventions with unmatched sophistication, talent, and intelligence to boot.

Our niche represented an additional way of being, one that could no longer be justly identified as “lower.” In addition, such great men as Martin Luther King, Jr. and other grassroots personalities of remarkable ability caused the hegemony of mainstream America to react by having to act. See, much of the racism propagated through the annals of our great country was through apathy and inaction. Although there were many more aggressive racists, most people were content to just have things remain as they were; they didn’t like Blacks, Latinos, or Asians, but they didn’t necessary have a problem with them either. They were simply fine with the status quo.

However, life is innately dynamic; as Blacks pushed forward, the younger generations embraced the words of MLK. They believed that white kids and black kids should be able to play together without one believing themselves superior to the other. They understood that racism was learned in the home — there was no quantitative difference between brown skin and white skin, human was human.

Enter, again, the complex dynamical system consisting of several parts: the older generations, bigoted and still controlling the power; younger, still impressionable generations, rebelling in predictable ways; other young folks hoping to gain access to the power of their progenitors, thus preparing to continue the status quo; multitudes of others, consisting of complex combinations of these sorts.

Hip-hop has had a long history of trying to prove itself as little more than an intense expression and not just the violent gun-play proffered in gangsta rap. As an art form, it was meant to be an outlet to millions of impoverished youths oppressed by the struggles of the anything-goes type of community confronted in urban areas. However, art is nothing but a concept and concepts cannot be contained, preserved, or reserved; it was inevitable that hip-hop, like all art forms, would be appropriated by adjacent cultures, especially with the grandiosity of the lyrics, the machismo of the personas, and the inherent danger of the represented milieus.

One cannot see their culture — their identity of any kind — as an unassailable, sacred reserve. This is arrogance of the worst kind.

The Iggy Azalea phenomenon has brought a lot of attention to the appropriation of cultural capital. As a lily white, Australian bombshell with a fake “urban” articulation in her music, she has become both caricature and flagship of the newest version of America. When you ask people why is she so appealing, you’ll hear everything from, “she’s the face that white America can bear,” to “I don’t know, my nigga, but she’s bomb as fuck.”

She’s both.

She’s all of the above.

There are no rules when we are talking about life. There are no guidelines, no regulations — nothing at all. Every single culture, every single belief system, every single codified rubric of expectation is arbitrarily constructed by the groups within which they were created. However, this does not mena that they won’t appeal to the senses of others. Music is nothing more than pressurized waves which vibrate within the cells. Art forms are lightwaves bouncing off of objects. The senses are subjective experiences, but they are subjective experiences based on the exact same phenomenon. One cannot expect their remix on these physical constants to no reverberate through the entirety of their species; we are all still intimately connected — whether one believes that is through evolution, the implicate order, or God is irrelevant.

The errors of the Black community, expressed above, revolve around the ridiculous notion that hip-hop is “ours” because we made it. I’m not arguing that hip-hop isn’t a genuinely Black expression, I’m arguing that life is substantially bigger than this myopic point of view. The sheer immensity of the universe and the staggering history of life on this planet and one still deludes themselves into believing they can somehow “hold” onto something while trying to make it in a larger setting? Its narrow minded, in my opinion. The entirety of the Universe and this is what we focus on?

Humans are vastly equipped to create unique, subjective experiences that we can then turn into collective, shared experiences. It is upon this binary, subjective to collective, that social evolution is borne. There is no true difference between any of us, yet, should one choose to create one, its effect will be evident. We are just as responsive to our creations.

Culture is created. Culture is the things that are taught, the things that are expressed through language and actions, it is the tradition and convention of a set of people. Although it is a sophisticated style of arbitrariness, it is still absolutely contrived. Humans have been abstracting about the world around us since the dawn of our sentience and we have organized highly complex renderings of it. Complexity, as fascinating as it may be, does not denote any sort of durative objectivity.

Imagine if elephants started ideological wars over which group revered the African cherry tree first? Imagine how idiotic it would seem if dolphins in the Atlantic disparaged dolphins in the Pacific because the Atlantic dolphins perfected the backflip first.

Cultural exchange is part of the narrative of human history — it is an instrumental method by which we progress as a species. We have, as discrete groups, created renderings and abstracted notions amongst ourselves, but in order to enjoy the fruits of fuller lives, would it not makes sense to continue to trade ideas?

It is absolutely maniacal the way we carry on as if there is some quantitative difference between us and it shines through when we get into these types of hot button topics. Yes, it bothers me when I see a white kid sagging his pants and throwing up the West Side because I remember vividly a time where any such actions were met with anger and fear. But, then I remind myself that humans are far from perfect and to consider ourselves such is a great disservice to the universe at large.

When Miley Cyrus “discovered” twerking, the city I live in, Inglewood, first started to see its early onset of gentrification. Now, Queen Street, a former bastion of Blood gang sets and crackheads, is home to several, barefoot, dog-walking, Birkenstock wearing white couples. The gas station behind my house sees more European tourists on foot than ever before. The Roscoe’s right next to it? Well, lets just say that on Sunday afternoons, you wouldn’t know if you were in Chili’s or the Rib Shack if someone just dropped you inside.

The human condition is one of complex, dynamical activity, not of rigid rules and point specific instances in time. The minute one gets locked into rigid ideologies about how “things should be” or how “they feel” about anything, is the moment they become lost in their own hubris. One must always accept humanity as a whole and see themselves as a part of it. The “appropriation” of cultural currency is something that should happen freely; we are all creating and offering bits of ourselves to one another, we should be honored and blessed when someone accepts. That being said, it is imperative that those who have benefited from the historical domination of this country should be aware of their predecessors habits of devaluing, then impishly taking. A free exchange of ideas is no longer a liberating journey of creation when one set of people judges, obscures, and takes at will the positions of others.

I hope the world continues to mix so that we can all look back at all cultures and see all of our forebears as majestic people. I hope that we get to a place where we celebrate and honor all the cultures represented on earth, from the Native people’s of our continents, to the implanted peoples, such as the Blacks, who had to fight to be where they are.

Until then, be aware of the flow of your country’s cultural capital. You will sometimes be surprised by where it ends up.

bryce

Misunderstood: Quantum Confusion

To experience something is fundamentally different that merely processing information about it. This is the crux of the so called “hard problem of consciousness” posited by David Chalmers almost two decades ago. Strict computations and even their subsequent integration and storage are easily tackled by brain physiology. Its the subjective, experiential component that seems to elude all understanding.

From where does such a phenomena arise and for what possible purpose?

Although our brain is not a quantum computer as many pop mystics love leading folks to believe, it does seem to possess the important qualities which harness all the weirdness of the quantum realm. For those unaware of the mind boggling things occurring at the smallest levels, allow me to briefly introduce the ultramicroscopic world.

If you can recall your high school science classes, you can retrieve a vivid picture of an electron as this yellow ball which occupies various orbits around a nucleus, comprised of protons and neutrons, red or blue and white balls, respectively. It behooves you to immediately let go of this delusion. The electron is not a “particle” per se; more accurately, the electron is both a wave and a particle, it possesses a hybrid of characteristics in which it acts like both in different situations. Furthermore, prior to measurements — that is prior to “observation” — the electron is not “anywhere” per se, it is represented probabilistically as being somewhere, but until certain events occur it is in a superposition, or all available states at once. That means it is on any number of paths, from here to the Sombrero galaxy, represented by a probability function. The mathematics surrounding this are gnarly, but rest assured that the scientific community, after rejecting the implications, tested these findings with relentless ferocity, only to find that these conclusions are unassailable.

It gets weirder…

Quantum behavior is beyond perplexing and some of the fundamental mechanisms have no known cause. Now, for those, again, that haven’t spent much time in the scientific community, the prevailing wisdom in the hard sciences is that the universe is purely mechanistic, that is, it can be wholly described in terms of cause and effect. To that point, ‘man is a machine’ in that he can be fully understood as the sum of his parts and as such he is a completely determined entity. Let a traditional scientist tell you, you are a little more than a highly complex, organic robot. Nothing is that mysterious, everything is predetermined. Well, the eery world of the quantum has done a number to render those theories spurious. Quantum particles seem to “choose” based on purely indeterministic standards and can therefore be understood as agents of absolute random chance. Electrons disappear and reappear; they tunnel through barriers; they ‘exist’ everywhere in the universe all at once. Moreover, nothing in this universe seems to govern or “cause” these behaviors.

Spooky stuff.

But what does any of this have to do with human beings?

Conventional scientific theory, again, has posited that quantum effects, these strange capabilities in the microscopic realm, are averaged out as a system gets bigger. By the time you get to the order of magnitude of everyday reality, brains, humans, social groups, etc, quantum effects are “smeared” into classical mechanics, the realms of Einstein and Newton’s elegant equations, relativity and classical laws of motion, respectively. But, this may not be the whole truth. When talking about living creatures, those encoded with the mysterious animated program we call life, quantum effects may still rear their uniquely maddening heads.

A few months ago, I became obsessed with fractal dimensions and self similarity because it seemed to represent a sort of continuum in a topologically spherical sense. That is, one could see similar systems [universe, galactic neighborhood, galaxy, solar system, planet, continent, region, area, location] or [universe (macrocosm) —> man (microcosm)] being replicated in virtually every direction one could observe. This held some value for me since it linked the largest of orders to the smallest.

Societies are compromised of community. Communities are comprised of groups. Groups are comprised of individual humans. Humans compute via the brain. The brain is comprised of neural networks which process information in parallel; neural networks are comprised of individual neurons which compute in parallel; neurons are comprised of a proteins which compute… and so forth down to quantum particles. The unique thing about proteins processing information is that they are on the order which possesses quantum characteristics. Proteins as quantum computing machines are exorbitantly capable at solving some of the the most complex orientation problems in the blink of an eye by using quantum annealing, tunneling, and all sorts of crazy computational methods. But, as these types of systems are iterative, that is that compute back upon themselves as well as other systems nearby (hence parallel), their final state serves as the initial state for the next higher order of processing (orders here are descending from societies to proteins). In other words, the final configuration of the proteins serves as the starting point for the processing of a neuron. The final state of the neurons, the initial state for the network and so forth.

Humans are then, possible, quantum amplifers, in that we may not be purely quantum computing machines, but we are surely a vehicle for some of their effects. It is from this position that free will may be mathematically proven to be a possibility, that we are not just automata acting out predisposed, although highly complex, instructions embedded in our DNA.

From this standpoint, we return to the troubles with consciousness. I may ascribe a great deal of importance to the physical structures of the brain, but I in no way could consider myself a reductionistic materialist. I do not believe the matter in the brain is all there is. I do believe that matter that is encoded with life, that is matter that is affected by quantum effects, could somehow be quantitatively capable of self-organization to the point of self-awareness, this strange phenomena we call experience. It is for this reason I have ventured into the world of neuropsychology and psychotherapy; that perhaps, this unique experience we call experience, with some scientific rigor and fanciful math to boot, will relinquish its secrets to one so enamored by its ontological status.

One of the main calling cards of experience, of consciousness, is the will — no the veritable obsession — to codify another unique phenomena, meaning. I have found it more novelly amusing that so many people believe that things happen for a reason, only to continually complicate that reason as more and more things fall outside of its expected bounds. Moreover, most people believe that things happen for a reason almost exclusively for their own benefit! They believe that life is stacked in their favor, that any hardships experienced are valuable lessons.

Of the lessons, I have no doubts; it is this grand scheme of beneficial blueprints from which I maintain a dubious distance.

Just as I believe that many different religions possess many different shards of the “truth,” I believe that many different philosophies have tapped, or abstracted if I may, some pervasive truths. As a result, I am a whole lot less concerned with things having some global, beneficial reasons that affect the trivialities of my existence and I look more so to edify the whole of the existential stock of mankind. I prefer to keep grandiose plans at bay out of respect of the billions that die or suffer in infamy, neglect, abuse, or otherwise. It is a great disservice to one’s own sanity to dismiss these as negligible to a universal schematic and it is an even greater disservice to merely count them as sins of man.

Notwithstanding, that consciousness defines one’s delusion of meaning is doubtless. It makes perfect intuitive sense, however, it is the very intuition of man I am calling into question. My foray into quantum amplification wasn’t merely a bedraggled amateur display of intellectual ability, its purpose was to reveal the hidden mechanisms behind the things we hold so dear. Too many of us have lived lives without the gainful insight of information dragged through the skeptical processing centers of empirical studies. Instead, we have reveled in the fields of what “feels” and this is among the deepest problems of what it means to be human.

The “feels,” the experiential qualities, are, as aforementioned, the least understood aspects of the human condition, but are traded as if they are somehow the rightful unquestionables. Through the possibility of quantum effects at meso- and macro levels, we have possibly opened the doors back to testable studies of free will and constrained chance, but the idea that purely subjective experiences govern the bulk of our behaviors is a scary thought.

Every maniacal dictator, every prejudiced bigot — every “closed-minded fundamentalist” has “what they feel” or “what they’ve personally experienced” to go off of in decision making. More corruption has come about through purely intended actions than skeptical reasoning, even though they are both human endeavors.

Meaning and purpose are the motors we utilize the most throughout our cognition and subsequent actions; we organize our data through our highly evolved processing faculties and upon deriving a hierarchy we embody ideology. These are the realities to us, but they are far from the reality in toto. Meaning and purpose are vital operators in this emergent conscious experience, but all three of these are being tweaked and tuned throughout the human experience. It is unlikely that we will find a way to objective poke and prod them in our lifetimes, therefore, we must be individually diligent about the contents of our cognitive processes.

Be more inclined to question your own preferences and deepest beliefs as many are founded on shoddy, but comfortable grounds. Take the time to audit a variety of different modes of thinking and try even more to resist the notion that you are a socially and genetically programmed automated device, as, unbeknownst to many, they carry on like. It is the highest order of human elegance to enjoy the conscious experience, but make it a duty to question this experience and its concomitant impulses with rapt veracity. It is the only way we will make a better world for those who come to occupy this place long after we are gone.

bryce