Human

I have been chipping away at the sediment surrounding the human condition for several years attempting to bring its submerged secrets to light. This elucidation has afforded me many lengthy leaps in understanding, but only through a persistent augmentation of perspective via appropriate questioning. That is, in order to make sense of the answers I sought, I had to first make sense of the questions I was asking.

Complex Adaptation

Humans are fundamentally insane creatures.

We have two competing drives within experience, the need to satisfy one’s own existence and the compulsion to interact with others. The need to satisfy one’s own existence can be loosely thought of as the conglomeration of homeostatic processes and the actions the creature takes to maintain these non-conscious imperatives. Eating, drinking, and procreation all satisfy the demands of the organisms internal environment, but, the things which satisfy these demands all exist external to the body. This sets up the segue into the complex social behavior within which our species engages. In fact, natural language and its correlates in the brain have long been posited as the impetuses that have driven our evolution. As we competed with nature for resources, our reliance upon one another gave our species a particular fitness that allotted us the dominance we experience today.

These same evolutionary mechanisms, borne upon complex language, allowed for the abstract thought and higher cognitive processes endemic to the human organism. The issue has become that higher cognition while virtually identical as far as neural substrates go, is completely isolated from the external world. Thus, subjective experience, the recording of experience by a single human, is his or hers alone; it is only assessable through self-explanation. Our experiences are ours.

This poses a problem for the concurrent human drive: socialization. We are compelled to interact; however, our interaction is limited by our inability to to completely align experience with one another. We will spend a lifetime trying to balance the behemoths of individual expression with social expression, the totality of which can loosely be thought of as social homeostasis.

For the bulk of recorded history, this has been seen as a problem and every approach from religious, spiritual, and professional modes of thought have set up “ideal” versus “incorrect” models of existence. By establishing mainstream trends, macro-compromises across a particular populace, there could be an “objective” reference point that standardized the regulations of interaction. This included etiquette, expectations, and punishment ideals, all of which emphasized cohesion amongst interacting parties.

While this makes intuitive sense, it has fundamentally eroded the foundational basis of life itself: adaptation. Societies found themselves defining adaptation and ignoring variability, when the converse is true. All of the critical shifts in our history have been due to the human organism’s advanced ability to assess and adapt to changing environments, aleatory and calculated.

Societies, as interfaceable abstractions representing social homeostasis, are based upon the creatures generating them. Just as a human being’s “self” is not a “thing” but an emergent phenomena due to dynamic processes, society is an emergent phenomena due to selves engaged in dynamic processes. The brain harnesses the power of self-organization poised on criticality and societies follow suit. Thus, society is not a concrete, rigid structure, but a more or less stable amalgamation of interactive processes.

What does this all mean? I’m glad you asked.

When we interact with one another, we tend to be more or less trapped in one ideological pit or another. We will often invoke social trends or cultural premises as the “empirical” basis for our positions. While this is usually satisfactory in colloquial conversation, it does very little to move the ball forward in a formal assessment of the human condition. Most of us are not aware that society is best thought of as a series of best guesses and approximations which protect us against the wiles of nature. Most of us do not consider our thoughts as emergent processes gleaned from interactions between genetic expression and the environment, thus we engage one another as if concretion is the name of the game.

Every single social issue, racism, gender bias, religious conflict — whatever — has its foundations set deep in the notion of objective truths and absolutions. Instead of realizing that emergent structures operate on the principles of nonlinear dynamics and probabilistic functions, folks often venture into stark contrasts and attempt to organize the world one way or another.

If life operated on either-or premises, organisms would have a 50% chance of survival. Instead, the universe offers innumerable combinations of environmental settings within which the self-organizing algorithm of life works its combinatoric magic. Humans are simply an evolved vessel of this complex adaptive template applied to our particular corner of the universe.

It seems to me that a better way of envisioning one’s self, one’s society, and one’s environment is through explicit embracing of probability and application of normal distribution. Thus, all behaviors, made possible through all the possible configurations of human brains, are viable attempts at the human condition. The fluctuations experienced in society mirror this truth. While some zeitgeist may dominate for a time, eventually the tide turns through exceedingly complicated series of events and the sequelae are new configurations on an old theme, human expression.

By seeing people as little more than adaptive creatures on a vibrant Earth, we set interaction in a completely different context. Different personalities and temperaments have to meet on different common grounds. At the moment, the common grounds stress ideological values and personal preferences. We interact with each other from discrete bubbles of perspective, which is disgustingly hubristic and dismissive. Interpretation abounds and the holistic experience of life is arbitrarily chopped into preferred domains of inquiry.

We start to see each other as different and fundamentally so.

We are different, by virtue of bound, subjective experience, but we are all doing the exact same thing. There is no such thing as equality as we all possess different strengths and weaknesses, but as part of a larger ecosystem of interaction, we all occupy the exact same position. Thus, we are equal in function; the expression only differs.

The philosophy of origin or purpose must be rendered more or less moot; as a species that constantly adapts and revitalizes on the path to ecological fitness, our actions in toto shed light on what we are all doing here. We are responding to our environments; we shape it and it shapes us ad infinitum.

My conclusion at this moment follows this same trajectory of logic: if we embrace the idea that we are constantly adapting, we aid positively to that adaptive process. Instead of attempting to erect “stable” interpretations of anything, it is better to respect the flux of dynamical activity and contribute to the accelerated robustness of self processes and social processes.

In order to be better at adapting, we wholeheartedly accept adaptation. Rigid concepts of self, rigid concepts of socialization, and rigid concepts of life become untenable as more and more phenomena step outside these bounds. For millennia we have attempted to set up these rules and for millennia we have watched civilizations outgrow these parameters in dramatic fashion.

I think its time we accepted the dominate theme of life on this Earth. I am not a proponent for anything new, I am a proponent for the oldest process in the universe: adaptation.

bryce

Both

I’ve always wondered if time travel was possible,
If we, bound organisms, could defy the laws of theory;
But what are laws? Yesterday’s beliefs,
Only to give way to tomorrow’s release.

If up was down, would anyone ever notice?
If there were only direction, would anyone ever care?
If there was nothing, would it ever play a difference?
If movement were stillness, would anything be there?

If brains paint the pictures, is the picture just the brain?
Does it matter if water or the rain?
Does it matter if one to get hit by a train,
If his eyes were always focused on the cars in the terrain?

Chasing Understanding: What Career Path Should I Choose?

Deconstruct society

When I first stumbled on neurodynamics, I was quite conflicted in my modeling of the world around me. The garden of the everyday thinker generally consists of soils reaping completely untestable fruit like religion or mysticism or vapid, unimaginative, and consequently fallow grounds of conventional social exchange. The bulk of my life has certainly been rooted in the former; as a child on through to adulthood, the Christian tradition has been the greatest influence on my depiction of the world around me. As a thinker, I grounded my bases in many scriptural contexts and my outward display of behavior stemmed from inward internalization of these sacred texts.

However, more often than I cared to admit, I was nagged by the anemia that many religious explanations offered. Tepid and highly biased, I found myself always longing for more substantive responses to the in-depth questions my brain was constantly pushing up to my awareness. Religion is arbitrary, selective, and riddled with contradiction.

Neurodynamics seemed to offer respite from that. By choosing the brain to be the modus of intelligent inquiry, one could generate a more or less universal foundation on which the entire human populace could be understood.

Or so I thought.

What occurred was something completely unexpected: the same shortcomings ascribable to religion are more than prevalent in sciences of the brain. It seems at every turn, interpretations about what the evidence is implying are as numerable as the personalities explaining them. While one team of scientists are convinced that the brain is a hierarchy of functionally modular units, another team yells that we should shift this a bit and see it as a complex heterarchy. One set of academics say that everything can be reduced to its smallest unit, while another says that we should be comfortable with life producing epiphenomenal structures that emerge from increasing levels of complexity.

So on and so forth.

While I may find myself more sympathetic to science’s methods of inquiry than to theology’s, the dominant motif is that humans are the continuously study, not the concepts we exchange in conversation. There is no science, no neurobiology, no Christianity in the conventional sense; there is only us attempting to apprehend the substrate we have found ourselves bound in three spatial dimensions and one time dimension to.

The complexity of this revelation cannot be understated: we are an animal who has transcended the automatic responsiveness of instinctual inclination by developing an extremely elegant method of inhibition. To inhibit, the domain of the prefrontal cortex, is to express a sort of “check and balance” between what is animal and what is the contrivance of what we consider human.

But, from this standpoint, what exactly does it mean to be human? This is the question that has nagged me for several years now and it is the prime impetus behind my open-arm acceptance of neuroscience. Neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and anthropology (different approaches to the same concept) all tenuously agree that our evolution has been borne on our advanced language faculties. It may not be uniquely human to think, or meta-cogitate, contrary to popular belief. Stated another way, dominant common thought sees our human ability to deliberately plan and think in abstractions as leading to complex language, but it may be the complex and natural language demands that permitted us the abilities to think the way we do.

These revelations have come to the larger body of science through the work of neuropsychology and neurology, along with neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and even psychodynamics, although psychoanalytic theories tend to err on the side of human-centricity, which I am positing is a direct contributor to the inefficiency of daily social exchange.

Human interaction is a marvel; it is a multidimensional phenomena as complex as the internal structure that permits it, the brain, replete with functional modularity and hierarchical topography rendering linear explanations of it of limited use.

To a everyday citizen of Metropolis A, one goes to college for a series of everyday reasons. The prosaic explanations indelibly include, “to make more money”, “to become a more well-rounded thinker”, “to gain access to a particular body of knowledge (and consequently make more money)” and so on. These answers are perfectly acceptable, but they lead to ambiguity. My generational cohort, the middle-Millennials, are now entering into our mid- and late- twenties with barely any idea of what our future selves want to be doing. However, “going to college” was embedded in our psyches as the only way to achieve success.

As a result, many of us jumped headfirst in to college believing that we would “find ourselves,” only to be crossing stages 4 or 5 years later with the same exhalations of relief we released on the graduation stages of high school. Perspicuity has not become the byproduct of college training; debt has. A bachelors degree 15 years ago opened the world to a recent graduate; nowadays that same degree grants one an entry level job into an industry one probably didn’t even get the degree in.

But, but college was supposed to be the answer! That exasperated response is the very same I squealed when neurodynamics yielded its shifting sand explanations.

I love thinking in complex dialectical frameworks where A and B, discrete variables, continuously modify each other. Most individuals think that when A happens, B is altered and therefore the system moves on to the next set of variables. However, what occurs is infinitely more complicated and thusly, infinitely more wondrous. When A modifies B, B turns around and modifies A!

Thus, “college” has never been THE answer to success in society, because success in society will turn around and modify the process of collegiate training (it modifies ALL the processes that converge on what is considered “success,” not just college). More importantly, these are mere abstractions — variations on human interaction — that have very little presence outside of the minds of humans.

We create these structures because of how we as organisms respond to the growing demands of society. You catch that? Society interacts with itself to create society. Its like a photon passing through two slits in the classic interference experiment in physics. A single photon passing through two slits interferes with itself to produce the wave pattern. This duality, that a single photon can be a wave and a particle, is the basis of quantum mechanics.

While we may not be quantum entities, we certainly create many phenomena that behave in novel ways. I’ve laid out the traps of looking at college in a conventional way and I’ve intentionally left much vagary to inspire you as a thinker to fill in the blanks. The most salient ambiguity is, “WHAT IS THE ANSWER TO SUCCESS, THEN?”

The answer is mostly wrapped up in the illusion of success. Success is not a thing, it is a process, much like its forebear, cognition. Success is process that is founded on what it means to be a human; that is, it is a process that pivots on social interaction. To be successful is to identify a particular social arena one enjoys and to integrate their evolutionarily advanced faculties into that arena. It has nothing to do with money, fame, or fortune: these are only behavioral modulations. When asked, “what is money?” I am fond of responding that money is the social regulation of value: it is the agreement that sets up social behavior in regards to objects and their exchange.

Money is an illusion because it is an abstraction. Deep within our brains are the structures that set up biological value, sex, food, drink, and so forth, but since ALL of us need these things found external to our bounded organism, value must be agreed upon between individuals.

If you are scratching your head in confusion, good, this is the first step.

My honest imploration is that you continually stop your intuitive thinking long enough to allow this information to modulate it. I say modulate and not “change” for a reason: there is no right “way” of doing things and there will constantly be interpretation from one person to the next; however, modulation is about fine tuning the state of a thing. That is, you alter the operational background, so that the concepts in the foreground are left to grow on fecund soil.

What one should take away from this post is that biological frameworks are the only concrete aspect of the human condition. Morals are made possible through the disgust response found in the insular cortex; however, this does not create a moral framework! Having a detector of morality does not state what is moral! Thus, through genetic and environmental interaction, what I find to be moral and what you find to be moral may be two different things. Thus, what comprises the bulk of our lives are the social abstractions made possible through perceptive images, which we exchange with one another as a highly evolved mechanism of protecting the life force endemic to the human species.

This mindset puts one in a completely different mode of inquiry and interaction. No longer is one caught up with what is intrinsically “right” or “wrong”, but instead devotes their time and mentation to simply what is.

And thats powerful. That’s liberating.

What does it mean to be human? It means to be an advanced vessel of the universal life force whose ability to precariously balance between instinctual, unconscious response and inhibitive, deliberate metacognition made possible through episodic memory, permits them a unique status during their years of awareness.

Thus, trying to create rigid concepts of behavioral activity is fatuous; society is inherently unstable as it is the amalgam of individual interpretation based on universal biological value. It has this dual nature because it promotes the survivability of its components.

bryce

Life is worth living

The purest desideratum,
Is the relentless wish to survive.

The other day, my best friend sent me the picture I’ve used as the image for this post and she asked, “is this what the Creator looks like?”

Although my views on God and origin have shifted a bit over the last few years, I found myself staring deeply into the image, lost in the unspeakable magnitude of the framework we call the cosmos. The response was visceral.

Life is an extraordinarily difficult process; I think we all can attest to that. From the simplest bacterium to we complex humans, the force that animates us does not come with a whole lot in terms of explicit instructions. Although our genetic code does imbue us with some basic survival programs, these programs very quickly enter into anfractuous relationships with our surroundings and our sensory percepts; things very quickly degrade into confusion.

Confusion is the hallmark of our species without a shadow of a doubt, but this makes sense given how things are set up and how they’ve unfolded. We went from an arboreal species, advanced monkeys, to hyper-minded creatures with the ability to make deliberate plans and communicate them through natural, highly complex language. As our brains grew to accommodate the increased cognitive demand necessary for complex language, we developed all the metacognitive (thinking about thinking) and abstract abilities that have come to be seen as more or less uniquely human.

In addition, humans are an extremely social species; however, we are paradoxically driven to express our own individuality as contribution to the overall collective and the result is generally a cacophony of ideology and conflicts of self.

Through our history, we have mostly let our minds languish in relative ignominy given that we did not understand them. The mind has usually been seen as a ward of the spirit or soul or a black box of the brain; we have only recently seen the “cognitive revolution” which inspired critical thought about the emergent processes occurring deep within our neural tissue.

So many people have been ill-equipped at understanding the complexities of their own biological and psychical architecture: for millennia, we have persecuted those with mild or severe mental afflictions as weak-willed or demon possessed respectively.

From a top-down and a lateral network view, we have expected those in our populous to gain control over their psychological life and act accordingly.

It has never been that simple.

From genetic abnormalities to pernicious childhood environments, humans face extremely stout obstacles along their journey through life (much like any animal). Nature proper has always been seen as the grounds of random chance and primal interactions, whereas we, being minded creatures, would be able to circumvent the trachles of existence through conscious thought. This makes intuitive sense, but of course, leaves much of the story untold.

As things would have it, humans are just as much animal as any other creature roving our semi-aquatic planet. What we possess is an elegant form of inhibition that allows us to overrule some unconscious drives through learned experiences. Looking at ourselves as advanced animals and our systems of perceptual monitoring as evolved survival structures, it should come as no surprise that they are not without flaw. Our brains do not come fully equipped to do everything necessary to flourish through life. More to the point, we are not fully equipped to even know what those things are. Normal distribution, the “bell curve” most of us are familiar with, again sees to it that different folks have different strengths and weaknesses — genetic diversity in the pool as it were. Therefore, it is not about some stock set of characteristics that a human MUST develop in order to be successful, but that we all possess a mishmash of traits that can be expressed. Our advanced status is still only a phase in the evolutionary tale of the Universe.

So, the perception of life is not as cut and dry as common sense would make it. Life is an extremely simple process: continue to live and express genes for as long as possible then pass on those successful genes to subsequent generations. However, the expression of life, especially for creatures as complex as humans is anything but simple.

I have never battled clinical depression, but I have entertained thoughts of suicide in the last couple years. Extreme stress and few solutions led me to think through myriad ends. So, I can empathize with those that struggle with chronically depressed mood, dysthymia, or endure a major depressive episode. When I have discussed depression with those who fight through it, many of them compare it to having an outrageous weight on their chest. Neuroscience would say their state of consciousness, the very background on which they view both the outer and inner worlds, is pathologically altered.

All manner of personality, mood, and behavioral disorder have been subjectively described by clinical patients and recorded fastidiously in the annuls of medicine and they all reflect a common theme:

Shit is complicated in our brains. Shit is complicated in humans.

With the passing of Robin Williams and fellow schoolmate of mine, Simone Battle — by their own hands — I want to remind you readers the severity of the states of consciousness, the states of monitoring that we all delicately balance on a daily basis. For most of us, this is only rarely a problem, but for others, just getting up in the morning is a Herculean task. To actively engage is barely bearable.

I want to take this opportunity to think about life, human and nonhuman, as a means of describing the overarching narrative of existence.

This distal arm that we coast across the universe on is hundreds of thousands of lightyears away from the center of our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of hundreds of billions in the known universe — the implication being that the unknown or unseeable universe could stretch for trillions of more fathoms. Imbued in the properties of very special types of matter is the propensity to self-organize and increase in complexity, eventually producing things which can independently respond to stimuli. These organisms continue to replicate and evolve, eventually producing beings so wildly complex that they can even be swayed against fundamental survival instinct.

Humans are the only beings that have to be convinced that life is worth living.

To say that life is a miracle is an affront to the life process. Life is beyond implausible. There may be millions of other “Earths” in the universe, however, there are innumerable locations in the cosmos. Places that permit life are the dramatic minority.

Absurdist philosophy, made popular by individuals like Albert Camus, says that the existential crisis that arises in all humans stems from the realization that there is a gap between one’s personal experience of a purposeful existence and the infinitely apathetic, purposeless universe.

What grips me, de profundis, is that within every single vantage point, every single zoom level in any of the 3 spatial dimensions, exists infinitude within finitude. That is, every single fiber down the hypothetical strings at the Planck length possess an infinite amount of complexity and self similarity. A pure, abstract fractal design that is both sequential and parallel; hierarchical and communal.

The human form is not meant to be a form that comes equipped to be birthed, live, then die; instead, we are equipped to experience as many of these vantage points as possible on our journey throughout this ephemeral animation. To see that the infinite cosmos all the way down to the subatomic levels, expresses the same ineffable concepts and that they are both intimately involved in supporting our very existences.

Life is worth living because life has no intrinsic purpose. The liberation in nihilism should not be seen as destructive; instead, it should be seen as an invitation to generate your own explorative, adaptive process. Brains come into this world without innate instructions because an organism must adapt to the world around it; rigid structures are inflexible and flexibility is premium with regards to survival.

One must embrace the amorphous nature of the entire superstructure and wonder at its modularity throughout the respective vantages. One must wonder at how individual bodies undergo homeostasis to maintain life but that individual humans engage in social homeostasis to maintain the life of the species and consequently, Life proper.

I know that it is easy for me to embrace the purview that such a position is entitled to; there are those who become anxious in the face of such structurelessness. My piece to you is to continue to march forward and break down those walls. You must learn to no longer fear the vastness of life and accept the invitation to explore the entire construct, mentally and physically. Some will elect to follow methods laid out before them, other like myself, will choose to blaze new expressible paths. The infinitude of life beckons you and you possess the fortitude to take control of your human experience. It is not easy; it is not clean; it is not an overnight flight, but I promise — I PROMISE…

Life is worth living.

Frivolous

Like ants they mill about;
Shuffling to and fro —
What exactly is their hurry,
I’m sure even they don’t know.

Undulating masses,
Vibrating with such fitful purpose;
Strange ether the medium,
Connected by latent fallacies.

I sit and observe,
But I know I will have to rise and join,
The throng of moving bodies,
Pretending to step assuredly.