Ferguson: The Fallacy of Truth

The enemy of truth is most often man.

In recent months, I have found myself a lot less mystified by the miracle of the human condition. Rather than seeing us as occupying a position of intrinsic privilege, I have come to view us as an updated version of a software that has been many billions of years in the making. That number, billions, is rather hard to wrap one’s mind around and as a result, most folks enjoy the myopia of their 80 or so years on this earth. Within that myopia is usually an associated anthropocentrism — an explicit elevation of the human organism in the panoply of creaturedom.

The average intuitive judgment is rooted deeply in this brand of human-centric understanding: our religions, philosophies, natural and social sciences have revolved around epistemological idiosyncrasies that are intimate to the human form. I mean, what else could we actually come know?

When one takes a moment to settle the tempest of human interrelations and focuses on the grander schemes of life, nature, and the universe proper, one cannot help but see the fallacy in man’s insistence upon himself. While we are indeed a rarified entity, it is shortsighted and even ignorant to relegate all other expressions of life as “dumb” or lesser. This creates an artificial void which no longer views man as an animal, albeit advanced, subject to the same laws of nature that our domestic and wild cohabitants are governed by.

This manner of dethroning of man once led to one of the most intense persecutions in the history of our species, an event we tend to call The Inquisition. As science in the Middle Ages began to see that the universe did not revolve around Earth, Church doctrine was left naked and susceptible. If man was not the center of creation, then what was he?

We have constantly struggled to understand who or what we are and for what purpose our refined faculties for deliberation and judgment serve.

With these concepts in mind, let us turn to the matter at hand, Ferguson.

While at first glance the previous paragraphs may seem to be completely unrelated to anything occurring with the Mike Brown case, a little contemplation puts these concepts in cogent alignment. The real issue between any racial, religious, or political tension is not the content of the sparring parties. The real issue is that we are unsure of what it means to be human, a notion that is seemingly so obvious, but fleeting to the mind one attempting to apprehend it.

The issue of existential status, of legitimacy as a being, is THE driving impetus behind almost all human interaction. We generate florid conceptions of Creator deities and expend the electrochemistry of the glorious modules of human reasoning, all in attempts to organize the world into coherent narratives which explain why we are here or what is the appropriate way to carry ourselves. As neuropsychology has stated over and over, “consciousness” or the state of being conscious, is best considered an exercise in story telling. These narratives are heuristics to sate the angst generated by a self-reflective life within massive indifference of the universe; but instead of being viewed as heuristics, these stories are generally paraded around as dogma or objective truth.

At the foundational level, the purpose of life is to survive long enough to pass one’s genes along to continue the life process. We are but ephemeral vehicles in the drama of the life-universe superstructure; however, when intuition considers the content of day-to-day human existence, the complexities of this existence beg for much more robust explanations. Everything appears so real, everything is so important: bills, sex, God, traveling, contemplating…. It can’t just be about gestation and procreation, right?

The trouble with Ferguson is that none of what I have discussed thus far directly relates to objective “truth” or the factual recounting of occurrence. Instead, I’ve elucidated a fatal flaw in the rational faculties of our species and the especially critical reader will have already reached a tentative conclusion: “truth” has very little to do with life in general.

Our social behavior has been hands down the most effective weapon in the struggle for ecological fitness, but our social behavior is mediated by a Rube Goldberg machine that we call a brain. This brain in no way, shape, or form is in the business of recording objective truth, but instead trades percepts, feelings, emotions, and other strange phenomena for an elevated ability to compare these percepts, feelings, emotions, and phenomena at differing points in time. This allows us greater modulation in the competition to pass our genes along. This brain is not an infallible computing machine: it is susceptible to genetic mutation and environmental factors, but it is still charged with the task of maintaining executive control throughout the life promoting process.

Objective truth, however, being clean, clear, and fabulously understandable, is what we tend to evoke when we communicate, as interaction between two entities must share a collective thread in order to even begin discussion. Two or more people must be on the same “page” in order for any exchange of information to take place. The trouble with this is, as previously mentioned, the narratives we generate rarely have anything to do with objective truth. So while we are claiming objective status in our percepts, feelings, emotions, and psychological life in general, we are most often steeped in exercises of subjective explanation. No such objectivity is available, thus our communication is doomed before we even begin.

Racial tensions are as muddy and turbid as communication can get because from an evolutionary perspective, external expression of genes through physical appearance and observable behavior clearly delineates one set of humans from another. It is reasonable to feel cautious, frightened, superior, or uneasy around someone who looks and behaves drastically different from one’s self. Out of this uneasiness, the history of our species’ interactions has set the stage for where we find ourselves today.

Eurocentricity has dominated Western dogma for generations and the effects of the destruction wrought during its hegemony have scorched our planet in almost indescribable ways. Imperialism saw all other peoples as intrinsically inferior and proceeded to carve the continents up into economic fiefdoms. The skin color and the behaviors of the native people “proved” the Europeans point; they proceeded to generate entire narratives about the inherent feebleness of “non-Europeans” and found exorbitant success in their efforts. They believed in their supremacy, a fallacy known as self-fulfilling prophecy, and used this as their a priori objective truth.

The rest is, as we say, history. Africans are shipped en masse into putrid conditions, stripped of their tribal identities and systematically brainwashed into becoming the engine of the American economic machine. By the time we were freed, generations of brokenness, vile subjectivity touted as objective truth, and belief in the European self-fulfilling prophecy, had caused such bitterness within the children of slaves that rational discussion, the antecedent of epistemological truth, was made even further ungraspable.

Those who want Mr. Wilson’s head on a plate are not concerned about objective truth, rational thought, or any sort of calculated treatment of occurrence, they care only about the vindication of hundreds upon hundreds of years of systematic oppression and the smug exasperation of a cultural oppressor attempting to sidestep its predecessor’s sins.

Man is not a proponent for truth; he is a proponent for survival, and emotional stability is an integral component of this survivability.

But what does this all mean? It sounds superfluous and academic, but what the hell does it actually do for the progression of our species?

Humans, whether they choose to agree or not, are relativists — their interactions with the world are mediated by their genes and their experiences. Certain personalities and dispositions end up flourishing in certain professions, regardless of the social expectations of that profession. This relativity, this intrinsic subjectivity which serves as the fulcrum of human activity, means that our expectations of one another are almost always shortsighted. Instead of understanding the complexity of the human condition, we argue fallow objectivity by calling on our subjective interpretations of that objective concept. In clearer terms: we are rarely worried about “what actually happened” and more concerned about what we believed happened given how we feel about the situation.

Black on white relations are couched precariously between history and opportunity. Our history is marred by such atrocities as slavery, Jim Crow, and ritual lynchings. Generations have been broken and cycles of relative interaction have been fortified in the psyches of millions. Because relativity or subjectivity gives the exact same mental experience as objectivity, the positions that individuals feel take on “truth” status. The brain is not concerned about recording “what happened” because it will continue to react to how it has been formed via genes and occurrence. The brain is an intuitive machine of subjectivity. When this subjectivity is treated as truth, Ferguson and all of its aftermath are the inevitable result.

Conceptual gymnastics aside, my point is that nothing is going to be resolved by the activities currently being undertaken by American whites or American blacks. Ritualistic shaming, “see, look at whites doing this” or “look at blacks doing that”, or insistences on racial difference will do absolutely nothing to move the human organism forward. Nearsighted identities interacting with other nearsighted identities will consistently miss the mark. The argument is existential status, who is more “human” than the other and the result is a precarious stalemate because neither side is actually communicating. There is no objective truth in these arguments; more importantly, there is no search for objective truth in these arguments.

I cannot say that we’ve “lost sight” of what really matters because quite frankly, we as a species have never known.

We have constantly shed blood over fallacies and out of that horrid bloodshed, we have generated subsequent societies whose principles are founded on the vindication of that bloodshed. Cycles are created and perpetuated, touted as “truth”.

While I am sickened every time I see a photo of a black man being lynched or hearing stories of black children been skinned and fed to alligators, I do not indict white people for it. HUMANS are capable of horrendous things. When I think about my forefathers being beaten or castrated, I don’t think about white people being inherently vile. HUMANS are capable of such atrocity that words cannot capture the vitriol. I have an intense disdain for ALL perpetuators of hate and those perpetuators do not all share the same color, creed, or faith.

We humans carry on as if our perception of existential status is the end all. We ignore the nuances of history, the residual effects of occurrence, and the oddities of a brain that reads and reacts, not records and responds. We are driven mad by the vastness of the universe and in our madness, we have fashioned all manners of ideological arsenals, all of which flaunt some truth or another. These truths usually harness the invidious power of evolutionary oversight; we think that West Africans are inferior or WASP’s are fundamentally evil. We craft narratives that are filled with hurt and shame, megalomania and insecurity, pride and sociopathy, and these ideologies create ripples throughout subsequent history.

The relations between a police force steeped in the tradition of systematic oppression and those who have been historically oppressed will consistently reap traumatic results. The police enforce rules that are subjectively slanted and the oppressed will often be jaded by those rules. The ensuing friction is spotlighted almost everyday on television.

How do we solve the crisis in Ferguson? By acknowledging the slippery slope of human existence and realizing the behavior of police officers is anything but objective. They are humans as well, mediated by the same factors I have exhausted throughout this post. The possess idiosyncratic aspects, read and react, and harbor shortsighted narratives just like the rest of us. They do not ascend to some higher existential status because they have a particular job. If anything, they become even more idiosyncratic and susceptible to human error because of that post. From this position, we then cast the spotlight on ourselves and realize how we all carry on is anything but objective. After acknowledging the inconsistencies of our social exchanges, we foster conversations between HUMANS, not the arbitrarily fashioned lines between cultures, professions, collective viewpoints, or whatever fabricated coalitions we are all so found of. If we as individuals can step forward and discuss the lapses in ALL of our judgments and offer something substantive to the HUMAN narrative, cultural, society, and collective interactivity will rightly follow suit.

The flip-flopping of blame in the name of fallacious subjective truth posing as objective truth will do nothing but continue the cycle.

Ersatz

I became adept at allowing you to hide in plain sight.
The amalgamation of all your selves coated in calculation;
Who you are, who you were, who you might be,
Who one might see, is likely, the carefully selected expression of elegance.

I know your mask.
I loved you because even in your indiscretion, you revealed yourself.
I knew your mask.
And I adored you for it.

Those bright eyes hiding things that aren’t for the world to see,
Those things that you go before the Lord to seek,
Those things that cause your soul to sink,
And you feel yourself drifting away into the eternal drink.

But who would I be to unmask you in such a pasquinade?
Who would I be to deny that I carry around a cultivated film,
Drawn tightly over my own flesh,
Praying that the Sun’s rays may never grace.

The dramaturgy of existence is one of deceptive persistence,
And any in insistence otherwise is nonsense,
Gibberish spewed off of lips of those either lying,
Or laying amongst the bones of their own ignorance.

No marrow.

Tomorrow, I may choose to grasp your mask.
Tomorrow I may choose to reveal that Ives always known.
Tomorrow I may step inside your skin and let you know.
Tomorrow I might.

Reimagining the Human Condition

The human condition is a cumbersome beast, one that continually plagues great- and lay-thinkers alike. I have devoted hundreds of blog posts over the last 4 years to picking away the convoluted layers and attempting to make sense of the efforts of my contemporaries and forebears. What’s more, I’ve dedicated my entire life to the excavation of the human experience — everything from my job to my social life revolves around this unearthing our existence’s mysteries.

On this rare, dreary Southern California afternoon, I want to try and link up many of the complexities of humanity and their related expressions, creating a coherent narrative. Not only is this to elucidate some of these quiddities to the readers, but to help put in order my own thoughts as well.

Self

Sitting atop the long list of metaphysical concerns, the notion of self is amongst the most recalcitrant concepts confronting the human explorer. Ostensibly, this is due to the fact that the human is attempting to apprehend his or her own sense of self, a recursive paradox worthy of an Escher piece.

But, why the persistent complexity? Running the risk of committing many of the common errors of countless humano-nauts, I want to put forth the first vital assumption upon which my understanding of this theatre sits: we are structurally who we are through the processes of the brain. This is an extremely vital concept that cannot be overstated. Throughout the procession of human civilization, we have attempted to parse out what exactly constitutes us with a preponderance of interpretation ranging from metaphysical to epiphenomenal ideations. The “seat of the self” has been posited to exist in the heart, in the gut, and in the brain. How exactly these processes have come about is still a widely contested topic.

What we can be more or less sure of, however, is that these processes are localized to the activities of the nervous system, the brain occupying a privileged position in the coterie. How can we be sure of this? Allow me to take a brief aside to address many of the criticisms aimed at contemporary science…

When confronted by a nonscientific critic, one will hear, first and foremost, of the history of failure which has besmirched science’s activities for the last few centuries. It is true that science has fallen short on countless occasions and it has even been used to further ignorance such as the pseudo-science of phrenology. Some will go on to say that science is a doomed pursuit because certain characteristics of the universe will remain beyond the scope of human explanation indefinitely. Many of those who prefer metaphysical means of explanation will invoke the truism that science is only as credible as the questions its practitioners ask, the so-called Heisenberg question.

I will address many of these concerns throughout this post, but I want to make one thing incredibly clear: Science is not a “thing”, it is a process of evaluation in a collective attempt to render clearer and clearer representations of reality. What is more important is that this reinterpretation of “things” as “processes” is a recurring motif I will state over and over again. The delineation between things and processes may seem like semantic hair-splitting at first, but given the nature of the human organism, it is of the highest order of importance that we describe things in increasingly more accurate ways. Therefore, science should never be misconstrued as a static object or conception, it is a dynamic interaction of activities taken by individuals engaged in certain dynamic activities. The domains of metaphysics, epiphenomena, and other explanatorily ambiguous desiderata tend to treat conceptual arenas as things or at the very best as unintelligible phenomena taking place at levels of complexity above our being.

I beg to differ and I beg the question of what science is as my mode of defense.

Here’s how: returning to the conception of the self, many less than evaluable means of explanation treat the self as a unitary entity and this is especially present in many religious traditions. Splits in self are generally seen as causally linked to negative supernatural phenomena such as spirits or demons. However, contemporary neuroscience, neurobiology and neuropsychology to be a little more exacting, have shown time and time again that the brain is based on “competitive” programs buzzing around in its intractable complexity. In other words, the brain is capable of expressing itself as a more or less stable function; however, this is only due to the innumerable functions happening below the liminal threshold.

What is experienced as “self” is really a miracle of the integrative gymnastics the brain is capable. In the same form and fashion that all the sensory modalities, sight, smell, hearing, taste, and the various tactile modalities, come together to become “maps” in the cortex, the self is a synthesis of myriad programs to aid in the survivability of the organism.

The self is not a thing, it is a process comprised of countless processes carried out by the brain. Thus, discourse about what comprises “who we are” especially in conversations about mental health, have had to undergo significant shifts. Terminology changes have followed suit and now “dissociable identities” are usually seen as a lack of integration by the brain giving rise to complex psychical phenomena expressed as salient, socially aberrant, behavioral variations.

But, why is this important? It is of the utmost importance because the brain hinges on few concepts in order to function. Firstly, our evolution as a species is posited to be contingent on our ability to communicate. Thus, words, comprised of phonemes, have frameworks built into our neocortex for the discrimination, analysis, and formation of words for communication, leading to robust social networks. Second, because of these innate structures, words carry impressive value in the formation of personality and perhaps more important, understanding. If someone comes to understand a thing using a certain lexicon, ideology follows, and behavior will align itself naturally. Thus, the modes and methods by which we come to understand ourselves have an extreme influence on how we interact.

By realizing the self is an emergent process of the brain at work and that it is the final oscillations of countless occurrences at more fundamental neural levels, our entire concept of “I”, “you”, and “they” have to be augmented as well.

How do we know that any of the things that I heretofore laid out are in fact “true” and not some cognitive gymnastics by jaded humans? Well, we don’t. The notion of truth is just as much of an ambiguous process as the notions of rationality or integrity. As constructs of social happenstance, these concepts hinge on the same dynamical processes as the brains that create them. Thus, the defense for scientific inquiry and subsequent response, is that we invite any and everyone to challenge our conceptions at any given time. Jaded humans or not, science embraces the complex adaptive nature of human evolution, therefore, rather than proclaim that we know the truth, we welcome others to join in the conversation, constantly altering and improving our understanding of collectively shared phenomena. Which leads me to the next section…

Society

With the appropriate treatment of the self as a complex, emergent process from the activities of the brain (collections of simpler dynamical processes across far-flung neural networks) a consequent re-treatment of society is a logical subsequent.

What the individual brain aids in is homeostasis or the regulation of life processes of the body. The brain’s primary job is communication: communication between organs, communication about organs and complex physiological states, and communication about the outside world in reference to these states. As humans are the most advanced beings on the Earth in terms of rich, knowable, existential states, it follows that the complexity of our experience is made manifest on a number of levels of complexity. At the apex of these levels is social activities.

Here is where I will interpolate consciousness; although ontogenically consciousness precedes self, for the sake of precious clarity I have refrained from mentioning it thus far. I want to place consciousness as a background, a contextual environment, upon with the self processes can be “known” to the individual.

Consciousness, as you may have guessed it, is a complex, emergent phenomena of neural activity. As opposed to saying “what it is” I will refer to “what it does” and that is it permits an organism a certain “workspace” by which the complex, deliberative activities of thought can take place. I have to agree with a select few of my forebears that posit that there is no such thing as a “system Unconscious” in the words of Freud; there is simply a display space where declarative memories can be manipulated via mental images and certain instinctual drives can be inhibited.

Consciousness confers an evolutionary advantage to the organism possessing it: it is able to adapt to complexities of the environment in ways that organisms lacking it don’t possess. Concordantly, self processes, which come about after conscious processes, further extend the biological value of these processes by allowing an organism to discriminate between itself and its environment. Thus, a wider array of evolutionarily fit activities such as complex civilizations can come about.

When one thinks about humans as unitary beings with little to no architectural consideration, one runs the risk of confounding how these things, selves, consciousnesses, and what have you, could’ve come about. Its like seeing couches as the finalized product without taking into consideration how all the parts create the functionality of a couch. “Couch” is intimately tied to the function of sitting. Moreover, if one decides to reorganize the components of the couch, they can create all sorts of other objects. This is because a “couch” is little more than an abstraction; once all the pieces are together, one can refer to it as such drawing on the its function as an object to be sat upon. However, prior to that critical moment, the moment when the couch reaches its highest functional configuration, those pieces can be rearranged into all types of things that upon their respective instances of criticality can be arbitrarily called different things. For example, if you decided to place the cushions along the side and hollow out the inside, the couch could turn into a “fort” for children. The ability to reimagine conventionally understood functions of objects is generally the domain of “artists” but, we can all be cognitive artists by reimagining the function of selves…

Are you still with me? I certainly hope so.

Societies are cobbled together using the exact same principles of nonlinear, dynamical brain activity leading to a menagerie of emergent processes. This self-similarity across levels of complexity is another vital concept in my understanding of humans and the universe we exist within.

Although I don’t work to diminish the importance of social phenomena or the cultural products they produce, I tend to downplay their existence at any given moment. This is because I hold the explicit belief that societies, social conventions, cultural products, etc., are products of human interaction and consequently are susceptible to the fluctuations of the humans that generate them. Thus, I am much more interested in those humans proper. In my eyes, society and culture are arbitrarily produced and subject to all manner of distortion; I would rather work to understand those things that produce the processes and the distortions, rather than be persistently confounded by the ghosts of their making, the emergent configurations we call society and/or culture.

It is no surprise then, that I am rather indifferent to most conversations regarding race and race relations (or other social dynamics for that matter). As it seems, thoughts come from mental representations of environment, mediated by genetic predispositions, which are further organized by stochastic processes of normal distribution in genetic heritability, thus, any array of pattern can come about by scanning global populations. In plain English, genes are scattered more or less evenly across the entire human genome and their resultant expressions cover imaginable expanses of possibility. Humans are complex; in my eyes there isn’t much need for creating arbitrary divisions and treating them as concrete demarcations. Its a classic case of, “if you give enough monkeys typewriters, they will eventually produce Shakespeare.” The macro-human organism is the interesting subject to me. Replete with enough genetic variation to ensure survivability and complex adaptation and susceptibility to the social environments via which it is nested, cultures and regional groups are no doubt external, combinatoric representations of the infinite combinations that human interaction can exhibit.

Conclusion

So what then, bryce? You’ve laid out a compelling story using words that most folks won’t understand and have managed to bore the vast majority of readers who have ventured to your obscure site. What does any of this have to do with anything?

First lets start with functional, communicative changes. From my position, science has not managed to render concepts like “soul” or “spirit” obsolete. This is the primary divergence between myself and some other thinkers that utilize the scientific method. What I have managed to glean from countless literature, scientific and spiritual, is that the words that we use to describe complex phenomena fundamentally shape our behavior and understanding of subsequent phenomena. Thus, in my eyes, there is no need for the word “soul” because they attributes associated with it are the exact same attributes discussed in scientific literature regarding the consciousness and the self. However, conventional treatment of “soul” and “spirit” generally become diverse religious ideals and rituals; this is what I mean by complex, emergent phenomena. One cannot say that the foundations of religion are untenable, however, it is clear that the motions put forth by religion are less than acceptable. This is because the language of religion gave rise to complex social phenomena that flourished in non-empirical settings. This does not necessitate that the feelings or foundational pillars of theological inquiry were unfounded.

Quite contrary, they were simply using the available phraseology and concomitant understanding of the time. What was previously conceived as a ghost in the machine, a soul, has been further elucidated as a complex phenomena of the brain. Does this mean that there is no need for God? Of course, not!

On the subject of religious experience, it has been shown that those who have suffered a lesion the temporal lobe as a result of epilepsy, sometimes experience intense spiritual episodes. Many of them exhibit “hypergraphia” or excessive writing (think biblical texts). Deja vu and other phenomena of significance have been reported. Does this mean that religious experience is a farce and should be done away with? Again, not necessarily. What I am insisting upon is the localization of human experience to the brain. Stimulation, neurological intrusion such as stroke or electrical pulses in experiments, to different parts of the brain cause different behavioral, mood, personality, emotional, and cognitive changes — our world is mediated by the brain!

So regardless of whether anything exists outside the confines and dimensions of our bodies, “knowable” information must pass through the brain. Out of body experiences, past lives, moments of intense significance — any of the phenomena reported by various folks — have their expression in brain activity. Perhaps, intense spiritual or religious feelings have evolutionary advantage or perhaps they are holdovers from some other bifurcation; the ontological status of spirituality is not the discussion here.

All of this should augment how we approach each other, individually and collectively. The organization of concepts tend to “take on minds of their own” and as a result often get expressed in social interactions as “truth”. Thus, it is imperative that we adjust how we approach things. If the soul is reimagined as the self, a composite of brain activity, mental health, for example, is suddenly cast in better light. Many mental disorders are afflictions of the self, intrusions on the functioning of neural activity, and they should be treated as such. Moreover, many other mental “disorders” aren’t disorders at all: they are the manifestations of the complexity of brain architecture, function, and expression. The negative associations of mental health are rampant in cultures around the world, as made evident by the gory history of psychiatry.

A change in the foundation of understanding causes widespread changes in the expressed emergence they give rise to.

Racism, for example, is rife with all sorts of distortions, biases, and perversions of representation. If more human organisms were to see themselves as highly, highly advanced animals with an impressive display of abilities rising from the brain, many social dynamics would be altered in the process. I think that cultural competency would improve because we would be harnessing our innate ability to alter evolutionary courses. Why? Our brains are built to help us survive, much like any other creature in the animal kingdom; therefore, we have all types of Rube Goldberg-esque contraptions that take part in our behavioral expression. With more evolved behavioral expressions, differences in expression perhaps would be more readily understood and embraced, rather than cast into the infamy of prejudice.

In the context of race relations, I want to employ two memory systems, emotional and episodic, along with our sympathetic system. Sympathetic actions, “fight or flight”, mediate in the “friend or foe” processes we must engage in throughout life. That along with early significant relational parameters, parent’s belief systems primarily, and early experiential situations, emotional and episodic memories, directly contribute to the psychological and eventual behavioral schema as they relate to interaction with the world around us.

Thus, racism represents not innate differences among groups of humans, but internal representations that person has developed through complex mentation. The same logic goes for gender dynamics, sexual orientation, and age disparity. Although these made be modulated by different neural substrates, functional networks in the brain, the consequent is the approach the human adapts to the physical phenomena in the external world. As that person expresses the aggregate of self programs constantly being worked on by the various nonconscious processes in the brain, the result is an extraordinarily complex, but impressive exhibition of human possibility.

And this is of the utmost importance because human possibility is nothing more than our ability to adapt to environments — good old natural selection. The impressive array of combinatoric brain activity gives rise to an almost infinite amount of psychological and behavioral schemas, which all but guarantee that humans live on into the indefinite future.

However, if we continue to divide ourselves and support these divisions with stultifying language and ideological configurations, we run the risk of rendering that indefinite future precarious. Every single conflict in history, while reflecting the animalistic insistence of “survival of the fittest”, has hinged upon differences in mental schemas eventually evolving into power struggles. Very few of the ideologies which have caused conflict meant anything in the larger context of the expression of life, rather they were myopic expressions of human variability. Completely valid from the standpoint of rote existentialistic assertions, they all miss the mark in terms of human progression.

If humans want to see what happens next in the narrative of our species, we must stop being proverbial bulls in china cabinets and take time to reflect on who and what we are. Ideology must then follow and conform to these brilliant revelations. Human expression will be allowed to burgeon unencumbered by the anachronisms of yesteryear. Selves will be allowed free reign in terms of expression; all types of better applications will come about via education, legislation, medicine, and any of the other emergent properties endogenous to the human organism.

That is the world I work to create on a daily basis and I invite all of you to join in these increasingly more accurate descriptions of reality because that is the expressed goal of science. More accurate understandings.

bryce