The Purpose of Life

Life has no purpose.

What is purpose in the first place? I have discussed at length in this blog the notion of “conflation” or taking multiple concepts together as one when describing some perceptual or intuitive phenomenon. In the years since I left undergrad, I have evolved from a vehement idealist, to a stoic materialist with fuzzy edges. Regardless, with my new found respect for the physical world, it has donned on me relentlessly that our views of the world are constructed and a great deal of that construction is lingual.

Words are the sine qua non of the human condition, at least in our present understanding of it. This is an important distinction because realizing that there is a time component to our understanding fortifies the notion that reality is a series of representations — representations that are exchanged predominantly through words.

Words are our way of describing sensory, mental, and cognitive phenomenon; however, one must take a step back to really appreciate what this means. I am an ardent supporter of innateness — that is the theory that we are born with certain mental architecture “built-in” — therefore, I subscribe to the notion that our human reality is bounded by biological limits. However, drawing upon mathematical postulates, I believe that social construction in tandem with these bare biological programs creates infinite permutations in terms of individual mentation, even though the themes represented will be very similar from person to person.

In my conception, the functions of humanness are innate, while the content, expressed through emotionality, attitudes, mood, drive, cognition, and eventual behavior, are heavily influenced by socialization. 

This allows a great deal of reality to be mediated by words and words in turn instantiate more and more architecture. Thus belief systems become real in the sense that they become causal because the words one uses to describe their reality permits it.

As far as I’m concerned, there is no great divide between mind and matter — they are one in the same. The confusion has been due to the lack of investigative resources at the time of Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, or Descartes. With the advent of technology, the questions we pose to nature have necessarily become more sophisticated. The question that plagued Descartes’ duality was how does the mental or psychical causally act upon the physical? However, when you realize that how we are even aware of the mental is through the mediation of language functioning, then the mystery of mind is somewhat elucidated. How the brain creates the mind, why minds are even a thing, and how much of mind is innate are all questions that the neurosciences pick away at everyday.

My only comment is that there doesn’t need to be dual substances when the fodder of one is the description of the other. 

This brings me to tonight’s seminal question, what is the purpose of life?

This is a nonsensical question. Its a great party starter, but it is so rife with a priori assumption that it is functionally impossible. First off, what is purpose? From an evolutionary standpoint, it is simply intentionality that promotes one’s life or the lives of organism’s close to them. However, the “standpoints” frond out in fantastical fashion given one’s conception of the universe up until the moment. This, dear reader, is my ultimate point: in a world where descriptions and representations of phenomena are the essence of reality, arbitrary impositions must be placed on information in order for purposeful activity to be acted out. The words that we use must render frameworks that promote life-giving well-being. 

Purpose is a concept that has no real ontological status in the universe. It describes a series of processes that can be augmented and implemented to invoke even more specialized behaviors. Processes are verbs, ruthlessly verbs, and as such, act as forces on the agent apprehending life. Thus, life can have no purpose outside of the forces one feels the most comfortable with and that comfort level is mediated by genetic information and experience, which come to be described in words. 

The biological machinery gifted to you at birth set bounds within which empires could be erected. However, one of the most important mechanisms in our evolved organism is mental architecture that is self-sustaining. In order to sustain, it must process information and in order to process information, significance must be assigned to all of the phenomena passing through it. Thusly, we have an incredibly complex melange of functions operating as an intertwined algorithm requiring the tension of belief and observation, experience and biology, in order to hierarchically order and act upon stimuli.

Bryce

I Love Humans, But I Hate People

“I hate everyone” – me

Information is abundant in the universe. Some, myself included, actually consider the universe to be a recursive information processor, with information being worked on at the various orders of magnitude. 

Thus, at any given moment, a deluge of abstract bytes are being translated and transcribed into other configurations of byte clusters; energy is transformed into matter and matter pulverized into energy. All transformations obey the rigid, but copious laws of physics such as the law of conservation of energy. 

Its spectacular fun.

Now, at our level of awareness –the order that we can consider daily reality– information is understand through the activities of our nervous systems. While there are a great deal of my contemporaries that advocate for other worldly or paranormal (or supernatural) faculties constituting the bare essentials of the human condition, it takes only a glance at psychological or neuroscientific literature to see that this is little more than wishful thinking. Even if dimensions or realities do exist on planes that supersede our perceptual faculties, this information would have to be broken down at the level of basic or daily human reality in order for it to be intelligible and consciously accessible. Moreover, our brains are capable of absorbing a great deal of information that occurs outside of conscious awareness and it is clear that some individual’s clearly have a capacity for performing purposeful behavior based upon “hunches” or inclinations that were instantiated outside of consciousness, phenomena that more often than not gets ascribed to lofty metaphysical heights.

I digress. 

Humans are incontrovertibly delusional because our modes and means of thinking and communicating permit a great deal of cognitive and affective configurations. While much research has been done on “reality testing” –especially in my field of neuropsychology– the notion of reality is incredibly hard to describe using natural human language.  Reality becomes a hodgepodge of shared biological structures whose potentialities create a likelihood spectrum. In other words, given that our DNA is virtually identical to one another, it is consistent that being human is confined by the very structures that define it. But even within these clear biological parameters, variation abounds! Humans are the beneficiaries of richly diverse mentational configurations, which pose a great evolutionary advantage. With such diversity, survival of our species is improved. The verdict is still out on the precise mechanisms involved in our rapid evolution, but it is generally agreed that language functioning and cognitive functioning have expanded one another.

I am now getting to the pith of my argument, my admiration of our species sitting atop of my great disdain for our acts.

I embrace science wholeheartedly because science done correctly is not dogmatic. However, humans cannot do any concept correctly. Correctly, in actuality, is not a real thing. It isn’t even possible because as an abstraction, it exists at the other side of the human limit. In my early writings I compared humans to asymptotes, mathematical representations used in algebra that get infinitely close to a particular value without ever reaching it. For example, a particular equation might generate solutions like .09, .0009, .0000009 and never actually reach 0. It gets infinitely (or arbitrarily) close to a value but it never breaks through. This is how I’ve come to view the human condition and more specifically, its usage of language to describe phenomena.

In the opening of this post, I stated that the universe is comprised of an unfathomable amount of information. Information is neutral, it means nothing until a particular system uses it in some way. For the human system, information is charged through emotion, which leads us to better make purposeful choices that lead to greater fitness. So meaning must be unique to the system processing it. Thus meaning is a function of biology and not the other way around.

What does any of this mean? Humans tend to operate on premises that intelligible things exist outside of their bound person. My contention isn’t that this isn’t true, its that its an impossible consideration. If information must pass through your biological faculties, your biological machinery, in order for it to “mean” something, then information outside of that system is neutral. It has no meaning — more specifically — it has infinite meaning depending on who or what is processing it. 

Thus, everything is nothing and nothing is everything until a system comes along and must do something purposeful with it. Purposeful in this instance points directly to taking an action with an expected result. To label something conceptually is to create a meaning unique to that individual system, not to instantiate it as such universally.

Meanings are idiosyncratic and intrinsic to the individual system.

What I am saying, in laymen’s terms, is that it is trivial to argue about who is right or wrong in virtually every instance because two systems that don’t agree are equally right and wrong. The only time definitive “rights” appear is when the two systems agree upon a set of principles that are supposed to govern behavior. At that point, right and wrong, again, are not functions of universally true precepts, but arbitrarily agreed upon social structures that aid in promoting life-preserving behavior. It isn’t hard to see how maddening this becomes. How does one decide upon the “right” set of rules to govern whats “right”? 

This is my point! Many of my peers (within and without academia) contend, then, that the answer to good ethical conduct lies in the fleeting, but powerful emotions. These packets of intense experience must instantiate something, right?! Some of my friends will go as far as to say that emotions are the truth of the moment. I completely disagree and contend that instead, emotions are, again, mechanisms that a human system will use in attempting to make life-preserving choices. In one instance, a man jumps out of the way in fear of a car thats lost control. Is his fear a truthful assessment of the situation? Yes. However, what about the white woman that unconsciously grips her purse when a young black man shares the same sidewalk as her? Is this a prudent assessment? Is her life or well-being in danger? We now enter the realm of second-ordered concepts and their probabilistic functions. But we can say, no for the sake of this post.

Humans bother me because we are so quick to believe what our powerful, but faulty psychological worlds tell us. We mix and match concepts without robust analytical structures and we give way to cognitive biases that mistake potentialities for strict eventualities. An overwhelming amount of the phenomena we experience in our lives are the result of self-fulfilling prophecies and dynamic luck.

But, its much, much more fun (and valid might I add) to entertain thoughts of moral supremacy, divine blessing, and special ability. Especially since we must still compete, influence, persuade, submit to, dominate, convince, engage, solicit to, make war with, and make peace with so many other humans. A handy mental framework that decreases the cognitive burden of significant choices by setting those values to theology, philosophy, or some other dogma makes the world a better place.

Here’s to you Donald Trump!

bryce

  

Dead Gestures

It starts with the flickering of an emotion,
Promptly amplified as my amorous heart takes hold
Of that which it has always craved, but lacked the currency to obtain,
But what good is honesty, when deceit can bring you the same?

Every day I would sing her sweet praises,
Every night I would work us into a drunken frenzy,
My words filled every crevasse, I spoke light where there was none.
Into my own hands we went and I rested not until the job was done.

I wrang us. I pushed us until all was left was marrow,
Sometimes swift sorrow, but always with eyes on tomorrow,
Always with eyes like sparrows,
Always with my fingers on the gallows.

Haha. I never saw myself as shallow,
I figured that it was the ground that was fallow,
Not I; I simply wanted what we all did,
I beautiful bride and an untamed id,
Whose deep cravings would be satisfied by enamored flesh.

So I spoke and I did and I acted and I bid,
And I cried and I laughed and I danced and I smashed,
My fists against walls as I watched things crash,
I screamed why oh why while I knew exactly the answer.

I was a corpse looking for Life.
I found nothing but other dead figures whom I could temporally animate.
But what is dead is dead and you cannot turn clocks,
So when ours struck night it was time to return to our rocks,

To our soil, to our worms, and to our rot.
I stumbled through the grave wondering if it were all for nought;
But lo and behold, look what the good Lord done wrought,
I lithe figure with temperature hot…

The Other Side of The Tracks

”The rioters in St. Louis are thugs…”

”Not all police officers are racist…”

“If you don’t love this country, then just leave…”

I have spent my entire professional life fighting against individual and systematic racism. Whether my work in the local school systems or my current position within behavioral health, my understanding of the world around me has lead me to believe that it is my duty to disseminate information that leads the unwittingly blind out of their sepulchers of anachronistic thinking.

I try not to dabble to much in polemics, but if there is one thing I can say with confidence, it is that I am tired of stupidity masquerading as anything besides what it is. I am tired of jingo patriots thinking that anything outside of ‘Murican flag toting, endless warmongering, and Christian ideals is somehow unAmerican. I am tired of people who have no idea what life is like on the other side of the tracks casting their opinions about the folks that populate the area. I am tired of fatuous, poorly crafted opinion being touted as facts. I am tired of those same ignoble “facts” never being subjected to independent review. I am tired of special interests, ulterior motives, and subversive power tactics poorly paraded around as ideology.

This is a verbal lashing of white, blacks, Latinos, Chinese, conservatives, Muslims, Christians, Jews, corporations, grassroots, vegans, NRA members, and gangbangers.

I am resolutely tired of everyone.

I write admittedly long, abstruse posts about the human condition, the universe, and knowledge. I am aware that the vast majority of my interests are inaccessible given the confusing language I am apt to use. But, nevertheless, it strikes me as peculiar that so few other people understand the positions of others with differing views than them. It bothers me that one almost never reads an article or a timeline where someone discusses the identical functions that opposing belief systems provide the human…

It is truly mind-boggling to me that we spend SO much time attacking other human expressions as if we don’t have the exact same systems within ourselves that get manifest in different ways…

One of my favorite drunken activities is to ask people about their religious beliefs and then compare them to the religious belief that traditionally is at odds with it. The blustering, the noticeable change in vocal tone… There is such attachment to the content that the person completely misses the purpose that religions serve a brain at work. A stable narrative, a self-sustaining mental architecture, that allows morals, ethics, and experiences to operate in consistent, (usually) life-promoting ways.

We find ourselves in a time not unlike 1992, the drug war 1980s, or the Civil Rights 1960s where people are being gunned down in the streets under spurious circumstances. Instead of asking some very basic questions, all I see is, “fuck the police,” or “stop acting like a thug.”

Fuck The Police – I will be the first to say that as a black man, I am terrified to see a police officer in my rear view mirror. I drive a very nice car and work in an affluent community and I am always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Is this healthy? No! Is this “right”? Hello no! But here is the truly unnerving part, hating the police isn’t actually the issue. The “police” don’t exist in any true form, which is why statements like “all cops aren’t bad” is an extremely accurate and valid claim. Of course not all cops aren’t bad, all cops are fundamentally different human organisms whose pathways and methods vary considerably.

Stop Being Thugs – “Thug” is the modern day “nigger”. It isn’t en vogue to use overt racism in our high-strung, overly PC, social media laden society. Anything that gets muttered, even in a fit of emotion, can and will ruin your personal and professional life. So euphemisms like “thug” have surfaced to assuage the need to resort to ad hominem criticism without jeopardizing one’s social status. The problem is that being a “thug” isn’t the issue. Being a human in a network of humans prone to subjective biases is. The problem is that we have never resolved the deep set issues we face as a social species and attempt to smooth over these phenomena with weak words and even weaker actions.

The issue is that no one, NO ONE, has shut the fuck up and actually listened to the other side of the tracks.

The types of people that use words like “thug” have never willingly gone into a community of so-called thugs and tried to understand. The types of people that wantonly yell, “fuck the police” are the very same that through a sick case of self-fulfilling prophecy, will incite the types of aggressive behavior that antisocial police officers live for. It becomes a domino effect. The more incensed a community becomes, the more tangential events stir a heterogenous pot, the more these self-fulfilling effects become evident.

Black kids angry at a system become the very same thugs that the system decries them to be. Police officers then have, probabilistically speaking, more reason to be afraid. Its a vicious cycle.

To add insult to injury, peripheral responses to social phenomena multiply like wild fire. Suddenly there are White Nationalists, Black Nationalists, Mexican Nationalists, gangs of all affiliations, political action committees, corporations, and all matter of community organization, that bind together and increase the grip of certain paradigms on the minds of those they interact with.

Political careers rise and fall, celebrities come and go, and so forth…

All at the behest of a bunch of humans creating meaning out of dead content. No one has stopped to consider the functions of humanity.

Few whites understand the plight of the black man and if they do, they resort to “pick yourself up by the boot straps” rhetoric that has traditionally been outside of the opportunities allotted to any marginalized group in this country. Few blacks from poor neighborhoods understand the ingenuity of those who flip imaginary numbers on Wall Street or direct and redirect electrical impulses in Silicon Valley.

All they have is their faulty, woefully myopic vantage point and their anemic apparatuses they use to navigate these structures.

What I have personally come to love is that “validity” generally boils down to how many people agree with someone else and how berserk they’re willing to get to prove that validity. Most often, right and wrong, moral and ethical considerations, are little more than “I just feel this way” arguments, which comment back on everything I’ve written thus far.

A few truly delusional folks will think their methods are scientific, but when asked whats scientific about it, they out themselves as ignorant in what rigorous empirical verification actually is. Science is not a body of knowledge, it is a methodology that can yield a full spectrum of results which often times directly oppose each other. Science is a method of inquiry and asking the wrong questions, in the wrong terms, will always yield the wrong results. 

How do we solve the plight of the world around us? By openly acknowledging that NONE of us know what we are doing and most of what happens around us is a function of sheer statistical chance conflated with fluctuations instantiated by personality nuances. What makes you respond emotionally is not “right” or “wrong” objectively, it is simply something that you have a response to. Those responses are functions of genetic coding and experience. The end.

We are not equal. None of us are equal. I have a skill set that no one else can completely replicate. My better, more beautiful half has a skill set that I cannot replicate. We are not equals in function. But we are equals in that we are both humans. We have feelings, cognitive abilities, and reflective self-consciousness that can interpret novel stimuli. We should treat everyone as equals because that is the way we get the truest freedom to make our mark on the world.

I don’t look at every police officer as an antisocial bully who is righting the wrongs of inflicted on him in his or her childhood, even though there are plenty that probably fit that bill. I don’t treat every Latino I see as a potential gang member who is looking to stab me for my money. I don’t see every middle aged white man as a corrupt megalomaniac who will do anything to take my money and keep me from “breeding” his daughter.

I take my time to get to know people and judge my willingness to continue conversation or not based solely on how they interact with me. If I choose not to continue conversation, it doesn’t make them a bad person. If they do things I don’t agree with, it has no significant bearing on their status in the universe.

I can no longer delude myself into believing that I am an arbiter of what is, isn’t, or should be in this lifetime. If two gay people want to get married, why the fuck should I care? What business is that of mine? Are they contributors to society? Are they kind to those that can’t take care of themselves?

Why do we need to police the goddamn world when, here, in this country, our affairs are out of order? Because God said so? I’ve been a Christian for my entire life and I cannot make God sit down in this office with me and you and get Him to verify that that is what we’re supposed to do. Moreover, those who love employing religious morals, also love taking apart their holy books to obviate the less popular aspects of their belief system at any time. I think its absolutely brilliant that individual interpretations of intensely personal interactions with stabilizing factors (faith) can evolve, but let larger social trends breach that individual’s interpretation and suddenly the world will end.

Science, nor religion, nor philosophy can do anything that we ourselves are not willing to address head the fuck on. We take vitriolic categories that are *sometimes* true and craft overarching social structures that make us feel efficacious. We take that feeling to represent some timeless, cosmic truth. It means nothing except to you. If you believe that bombing the crap out of Muslims is God’s way of doling judgment, please don’t get offended when basic human function says to bomb the crap out of you in the name of their God.

Please don’t refer to people as certain pusillanimous names such as “thug” then try to make specious comparisons to some other group that didn’t have the same results. Did you take the time to consider all of the variables that led to each groups actions? Or did you, as we are so inclined to do, find shallow similarities in situations then try to make deep comparisons?

It takes bravery to ingest and digest the opinions of other humans with whom you disagree. It takes a certain level of gusto to stare at opposition with a willing heart and mind.

You want to fix the world around you? Stop obsessing over how different what people do or create is and start paying attention to what function these things serve. You will come to realize that we are all doing the exact, I mean exact, same thing.

Out of love and respect,
bryce

Simulacra

Every once in a while, I will get the urge to write about something that the regular person not stuck in the infinitude of philosophical query can relate to.

This post is partially such.

All around this great country, black men are being murdered. Our economy has already been hijacked. An openly bigoted, toupee touting, multibillionaire is a frontrunner for one of the two political parties that have legitimate power in this nation. A new juggernaut has topped the hip-hop world; however, he is the quintessence of the opposite of what hip-hop supposedly has stood for since its inception.

Fake is real. Real is hidden. Absurdity is fact. Fact is interpretation. What is hidden is fodder for all manner of conversation, erudite and idiotic…

I have begun rereading Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation and his prescience is striking. While his style of writing can be maddeningly complicated — sometimes necessarily so, the circularity of his prose is part of the mystery of the human condition — his notional position that signs and symbols replaced what was once real hits a very relevant chord.

Western society is an almost entirely pure simulation.

Guys, I struggle with a lot of concepts on a daily basis (the major reason my writing output has dropped drastically) and even at this moment, I feel my head swimming in a less than uniform soup; the complexity of this life is far more than my mishmash of neurons can grapple with before collapsing under the weight of their own perceived self-importance.

But let me try my damnedest to make sense of what I’m attempting to make sense of. Simulation, in this context, points to the mind-contorting non reality that is most easily illustrated by phenomena like “reality” TV, which isn’t real at all. The Kardashian’s are famous for the reason of being famous. In a simulation of this nature, or hyperreality ala Baudrillard, there does not need to be any real claim to profundity; things simply exist through the fact that they exist. Once a concept is lodged into the collective psyche and instantiated through words that imitate concretion, those things miraculously exist.

Through the circularity of speech, certain concepts are born…

Poof.

But why do we have simulation in the first place? If we are living in a reality, then why aren’t things just real in the simplistic sense?

Here I have to call upon my favorite psychologist, Julian Jaynes, and his theory of bicameralism in the brain. Jaynes’ theory is that earlier anatomically modern humans (AMH) probably hallucinated authoritative voices given the wiring of their brains at that point in evolution. In order to “conjure” up the voices towers, ziggurats, and idols were kept in major public areas and houses. On the towers one could find writing that would be a constant proclamation of what the citizens of a city or village should be doing. The idols themselves, often times figurines of past kings or heads of households, may have also caused powerful authoritative hallucinations that laid the foundation for social control mechanisms. These triggers ensured that the hallucinations would persist and maintain social control. 

(I urge you to read the theory in the fullness, as I am only skimming and leaving a lot of detail out.)

As bicameralism gave way to subjective consciousness, making decisions no longer required the authoritarian hallucinations often ascribed to God or gods, but now remained solely the domain of consciousness. Jaynes’ contends that the slow process of breaking down is poignantly illustrated in the often morose laments in the Psalms, where God does not ”speak” and seems to have abandoned man altogether.

Our mentalities — better yet, the mechanisms underlying mentation — changed.

However, in a culture, social control must still be maintained. While we may now be privy to these richly subjective, inner lives we must still be able to form communities where some cohesion is established.

In my working hypothesis, this is exactly what has occurred through the increased sophistication of signs and symbols.

When contemplating how the brain gives rise to purposeful behavior, information streaming in from the senses is not simply taken in and turned into some mental framework. Instead, these streams are seamlessly integrated and various functions at all levels of neuronal activity contribute to processing the information. Emotionality is a huge part of this process as emotions help us “weigh” one set of data against another. From here, its a very small gap to a conversation about interpretation, which is the fertile ground where signs and symbols plants their seeds.

In a system where interpretation is possible, weights can be assigned to different streams of information and many different responses are possible. The organism capable of this wide spectrum of interaction improves its chances of survival as it can better handle novel stimuli and adapt to environments with speed and efficiency.

Humans are a social species and our exchanges occur through communicative strategies, verbal and nonverbal. The brain is constantly updating its version of reality and every single impulse that reaches the nervous system causes a miniature change that hopefully improves survival at some later point in time. The brain renders representations of reality and predicts what behaviors might bring about positive or negative results based on that model.

With models being our means of mentation, it should come as no surprise that signs and symbols hold such sway over us. A sign can represent a myriad of meanings which can then be additional worked upon by individuals or collectives. The brain, using representations, takes an additional representation — a secondary representation, as it were — where even more purposeful information can be applied.

What does this mean? From an argument of social control mechanisms, this allows additional structures — authority and hope, for example — to be projected and acted upon.

An illustration is in order.

Drake has recently ascended the Mount Olympus of urban entertainment. This would a feat in and of itself if I was’t Drake we were discussing. In a culture that values authenticity, machismo, and a willingness to do whatever it takes, Drake falls short on virtually every scale. He was accused of not writing some of his own content, allegations he never disputed; he has become the banner holder for every emotional suburbanite the nation wide; and his willingness to conquer the game has been more through pusillanimous skirmishes and TMZ articles than any sort of nipping in the bud typed behavior reminiscent of prior scions of rap.

So how has this happened?

The first thing to consider is that hip hop might have been founded upon these precepts, but that in no way, shape, or form made them the only symbols of authority in the game. The almighty dollar, the mother of all social controls, has played a serious part in the evolution of the culture. Drake is more of a brand than a rapper and he appeals to a wider a wider audience, giving them the hardcore images of hip hop’s roots with a juvenile emotionality that accompanies the ennui of suburban America. 

What I am driving at is that while a select set of people honor the value of what hip hop used to be, these symbols have already been operated upon and replaced by more powerful symbols in a social setting. This is the power of symbols over actual physical contents: they can replace each other, even mean the same thing without much effort.

Drake allows many more minds to integrate the images associated with hip hop without the unsightly side effects of its perceived anger. He gets to be the emotionally down trodden mobster wannabe on a mission to liberate unappreciated women.

Its brilliant.

Drake, Disneyland, reality TV, fiat currency — they have no real value and thus, their value is astronomical. It is conjured out of thin air by the powers that be. With enough persistence and awareness, even the most egregious affront can be accepted with open arms.

Here is the dirty truth, though…

The human condition, its mental representations, its reliance on interpretational vehicles driving purposeful behavior — all of it — thrive exclusively on signs and symbols. Nothing that the human intuits is actually real in the sense that it is immutable. The very idea that most of our knowledge is interpretation of a few basic physical principles underlies the issues at hand.

We deal exclusively in signs and symbols and we always have. It is how we have evolved to this point! With more complicated societies, the mechanisms for maintaining social order have multiplied as well. From the beginning we created stories, envisioned archetypal roles, and created concepts that helped us explain the reality our mental faculties supplied our conscious (or pre-conscious) minds. It is facile to believe that we ever dealt with “real”.

That is the most frustrating part of this entire charade, is it not? Real is exactly what it is, right!? As I said earlier, real is real… Right?!

With words, gestures, and physical contact, every concept has a universe full of meaning that can be operated upon ad infinitum within a particular culture. So while I agree with Baudrillard, I don’t think we have ever dealt with anything besides simulations. The moment a word or gesture had to represent a term, we were thrust along a trajectory of representation that supports far more complex structures than the physical environment can.

That is the point to communicating! Its what makes our language robust! The ability to communicate a universe of meaning through one word, symbol, or image. So while the Kardashians may not do anything “real”, their plastic life can easily be projected upon as millions of women wish for the fortune, clothes, and life of luxury to be their said reality. They allow for a representation, a series of symbols or images, to take hold in the nervous systems of others!

The simulation has simply grown more complex!

One last bit… The insidious side of symbols, especially those being discussed from within the organisms apprehending and acting upon them, is that where they begin and end poses a headache for any researcher, clinician, or philosophaster. Thus, conflation becomes a huge problem. Conflation, the mixing of symbols, makes conversations about causation and predicted effects virtually impossible. If one person’s representation of reality takes certain streams of information and weighs them heavily, they will have a hard time communicating with someone who weighs other streams heavily. Impossibility of Multilaterality is a fancy term meaning it is impossible to understand another’s position if you cannot achieve common ground. This doesn’t mean that the conversation won’t be efficacious, but that the effect of that conversation will more than likely harm others. Take any political conversation — the result of ideological differences leads to total government shut down, loss of programs, or defamations of character.

There is beauty in this post and I hope you recognize it. To see your mental life as “real” is the first step to absorbing signs and symbols willy nilly and fall into conflationary traps. Instead, one should welcome all images as probabilistic representations, valid in their construction and potentially avenues to follow for some result, but not the end-all, be-all. While the meanings of things, like those referenced with Drake or Kardashian family, may seem like distasteful infarcts against pure concept, there is no such thing as pure concept although some might come arbitrarily close in the eyes of someone else.

That is the majesty of the human condition!

bryce