Wars of Meaning

I am a strategist and social scientist at a private neuropsychology clinic. Since my start here, American, Western, and global going’s on have intensified in terms of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, or VUCA for my military personnel out there. Things have gotten confusing in a hurry and its left many of us wondering what to do next.

Let’s first ask a question… Did it really happen “in a hurry”? Is any of this new?

A glance at the history books says no. So why does this narrative persist?

It was about 6 weeks ago that I found myself picking up an old favorite — a descriptive piece written by one of my favorite academicians, physicist David Bohm. Wholeness and The Implicate Order is more of a linguistic piece than Bohm’s other works; however, like many 20th century physical scientists, he discussed the philosophies of language and mind with a certain acuity, something I have come to appreciate in my formative professional years. Wholeness invites people to consider how they think and view the world through the words they use. Bohm rests heavily on the term “fragmentation” that points to the human tendency to categorize the world and treat those categories or fragments as indicative of the world proper.

He goes on to discuss an updated system of lingual structures he calls the rheomode as a means to stitch up man’s ideas about himself and his place in nature and create a wholeness.

Wholeness is a curious concept when considering humankind biologically and temporally.

While history is conspicuously cyclical, the advent of the internet has certainly brought some novelty. Never before have this many humans been able to interact instantaneously; the previously insurmountable obstacles of topography and time have been obliterated by OS, Windows, and Android operating systems. It seems that massive communication capabilities would be fecund ground for wholeness, but this would only be partially true. Technology has certainly narrowed the physical gaps and done work on some ideological gaps, yet we still interact in ways that patently pigheaded.

The chief issue in the history of our species has been who is right and who is wrong. This dichotomy has worn many hats and been adorned in the finest rhetorical regalia. Theological truths separated who was righteous and god fearing from who was doomed to eternal damnation. Geopolitical truths separated those who had from those who did not; those who conquered from those who were to become subjugated; and those whose stories would be passed on from those whose stories would die on the battle field.

To this day, we are constantly at each other’s throats regarding who or what is true and who or what is false.

I have come to supplant the term “true” with “accurate”. In the legacy of Bohm, I have come to the conviction that either-or, all-or-none, and zero-sum statements do more to separate a human from another human, than any sustainable good. Accuracy speaks more to predictability, veracity, and independent verifiability than a stolid structure like “truth”. In a species as dynamic as we, subjection is king and therefore, true-false dualities will fail more often than they succeed. However, if we can agree upon continua of accuracy — the notion that we experience a highly complex series of representations that can be updated and augmented, then the push becomes verifiable accuracy, not philosophical truth.

In addition, I follow the footsteps of my psychological forebears, especially those in the cognitive fields, that have shone floodlights on perception and higher mentation, revealing that the human brain is replete with quirks. These quirks all but obliterate any talk of humans experiencing objective reality: what we experience is our brains’ rendering of stimuli organized in a way to continue living. The brain is in the business of signaling the organism about things happening inside and outside of the body. These signals are necessarily cohesive, cogent and provide adequate explanations but through the vehicle of biological machinery. Our computations are ecological, not abstractly computational.

So, while many phenomena in the universe can tenuously be considered true or false statements, much of what we experience as humans goes far being purely physical phenomena. Our psyche’s render worlds that need to be tested and come up with novel configurations of experienced stimuli. The information stream is a veritable deluge of true, mostly true, probabilistically possible, mostly untrue, and untrue — plus any variation in between —  combinations. This continua can be creating by seeing each idea or statement as a combination of true or false parts — the sort of 1 and 0 binary code computers use — can give rise to all sorts of chimerical approximations to be handled by the raconteur that is the human mind — from this raw data, the brain processes and weaves a story. It isn’t about being “true or false” in the physical sense all the time, but rather the brain tying together its processed contents in a means to continue life.

What I am trying to make evident that this mental fabulist is anything but objective. The means by which stories are concocted — the processes by which brains brain — speak to the lack of credibility we can give to brains staking claim on epistemological infallibility. Brain function is mediated by the interplay between genes and environment. By the time contents reach our conscious mind, they’ve been heavily processed by the non conscious levels beneath. Moreover, we don’t choose early development, which is theorized to do a great deal in terms of fabricating early worldviews, coping mechanisms, and emotional resilience. While an individual may feel incredibly passionate about a subject, this does not make the subject any less subjective. It is a rendering, a representation, of the reality processed through brain structures and these brain structures are passed from our forebears and they are further molded by experience. There is a touch of madness in these considerations. The way you are, the way you feel about how things should be, is anything but your pure, conscious choice. Consciousness certainly plays a role, but this does not exculpate the process from the preloaded functions riddled in our biology.

Again, one can see how true-false dualities become precarious in such lighting…

The human is a social being; it thrives when its stories can be traded against other human stories. It is in the tension between two individual meanings that new meanings (new configurations, really) get created. This makes some people uncomfortable because of its mechanicality, but I’d wager that this is due to a lack of familiarity with the mechanisms of cognition. The idea that mechanisms are only cold and brute comes from the fallacious idea that nature can’t create machines. We are machines: biological machines. Biology has given us emotions, feelings, motivations, executive functions, and sensory experience amongst other functions rather than computer software to make choices. We have biological algorithms and biological apparatuses tuned for biological problem solving.

 

Let me bring this post to a close. The world has been at war since the dawn of recorded history. This war; however, started and continually starts long before weapons are wielded on a battlefield or demagogues step up to podiums. The war has been — always has been — and still is on the nature of meaning. What do things mean. When I discuss meaning, I do not mean the solely philosophical sense because philosophy is a part of the entirety of the human phenomenon. Meaning must encompass all of what a human organism can think and, more pointedly, the mental processes and associations that lead to deliberate and purposeful behavior. Within the ivory towers of personal meditation, the world is represented in a mostly seamless, though sometimes confusing, schema. Upon that schema we couch new information and act upon it. What I would like more people to start doing is realizing how a human processes information and why its silly to debate over most of the things we debate over without accurate renderings of this processing phenomenon.

Racism and prejudice are inaccurate representations of other groups. However, humans tend to act within biases that have been mapped out extensively by psychologists. Racism and prejudice are damn near predictable. Extreme prejudice, xenophobia, accompanies certain personality configurations and certain early experiences. The incredibly complicated consideration here is that when you discuss matters with a racist or bigot or even a person that is unaware that they are behaving in a racist manner, without adequate translation from one schema to theirs, communication is doomed. Take, for instance, white privilege. White privilege is a thing and its also a thing that many benefactors will be legitimately unaware  exists. Why? Its predictable by ways of in-group/out-group dynamics in social psychology. We tend to feel deeper connections with those that look, talk, and operate like the internal representations of ourselves. Given complex interactions and fragmented lingual cues, privilege can be skirted around for those that choose less robust (translation: less accurate) explanations. To the point of unawareness, privilege tends to abound in homogenous locales — places where the privilege is an invisible constant, like being aware of one’s breathing.

Race is evolutionarily salient; it has only been recent that we’ve proven that race is little more than distance from the equator, a minutiae of genetic variation, and isolated socialization. However, this violates certain brain stories, especially those brain stories that don’t care about accuracy. There are differences between racial groups, they will say — and they will be right — progressives and conservatives can both agree on that front. But some of these differences are complex expressions mediated by time, biology, and cultural development. They don’t imply any imperative differences between races. But, but, what about science revealing that certain racial groups have Neanderthal and Denisovan genes. Does this not automatically signal hardwired variegation? Again, I’d wager no. Given that we are still able to procreate with one another and these ancient hominids were, indeed, similar to us in astronomically significant ways, I cannot support the claim that this drives biologically imperative wedges between racial groups.

I covered a melange of topics in this post, but I want to summarize it simply: you do not possess an objective worldview, your push towards fragmentation is biologically valid, but not the necessary route to take, and the brain constructs meaning upon which the body carries out behavior. Divorced from the myth and mysticism of archaic and imprecise  explanations of human nature, we can construct a peaceful society. We should see these old views on a continuum carrying through to rational economic theories, which recent studies have shown aren’t wrong but miss plenty of human nuance, and down to the complex theoretical landscape we find ourselves in today.

All of these contend on the fields of meaning. 

Accuracy is a term that I use frequently because it captures all of the elements in these continua and allows the entire structure to be valid and workable. Accuracy is independent of both time and space; what may be an accurate representation in one instance may be less accurate at some other time, t. 

This is how I believe we will free society from the tyranny of ignorance. Not by decrying some set of ideas as incorrect and some other equally subjective, although causally differentiated set of ideas, as correct. But instead seeing how all of these ideas are patently human and subjective worldviews can be translated.

Thanks for reading. Please leave your comments below.

bryce