untitled 2/4/2020

To observe, not absorb —
Follow, but not engage;
These are the actions of those Who
Wish to know.

Understanding. A fantastical word.
Spotlighting they that wish to grow
And sow seeds of good fortune
Like tantras of good portend

A walk with Objectivity obeys neutrality.
O, what a reality the principalities
Of my mind’s domains, remains of broken promises,
Hurts, memories, lessons, pressings

They press me to express these truths
In presence of Other subjectivities.
How do I withhold, when Fate favors the bold,
Or the passions of my highest heart burst forth?

Observe, not absorb. Follow, but do not engage.
For even the mind is a vessel.
Filled with rare treasures and measures
Of blessings with dressings even it cannot fathom.

But it is a structure, a form of forms.
Know thyself — the separation of norms.

The Twins

How curious these two;
Similar in so many ways,
Yet different as nights are from days.
But they were bonded.

Sister and brother; fraternal by all means —
Four years separated them, but the twinship lived on.
The kindship lived on,
The friendship lived on

Openness, trust, transparency, and loyalty.
Ride or die shit a blood pact like two convicts,
Trapped in a box but trusted to survive,
The love of the other kept the other so alive.

When he met success he promised she would thrive
Even if he had to sacrifice a chapter of his life
That is promise that he carried deep inside
And knew the type of power he could tap just through this pride.

Connected, through blood and air
They recognized each other.
Needs and wants etched as clearly as digital fonts
They protected one another.

Truth

The best Way to get to the Truth
Is indirectly;
Because in the light of Day,
All men stand to earn a reward.

Ego Ideal

When a man realizes he is not the center of the physical universe,
He dies to this world.
When a man realizes he is not the center of his personal universe,
He dies to himself.

– B

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

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

Faith Beats Logic

I started on a journey the summer before my junior year of college. That was the year I started asking God for wisdom. 

My junior year I transferred to a different university on a basketball scholarship. Within 72 hours of arriving, I was doing two-a-day’s in an unfamiliar place with complete strangers. The only bonds I had were with my best friend who would leave to get back with her abusive ex boyfriend two weeks later and my teammate who had thrown me an alley oop during my recruitment trip.

I had started praying for wisdom about three weeks before.

In my backpack I carried a book by Mike Murdock The Wisdom Commentary, which I read vociferously. I studied that text as closely as I could, often times reading a passage at 5:47AM before heading to a grueling practice. 

During that year, I would learn things about my resiliency that I didn’t think possible. I struggled. I suffered. I conned and stole to feed myself. I was on a grind that I couldn’t fathom.

I fondly referred to it as my “incubation” year. In Christian mysticism, especially esoterica that references the Prophets of the Old Testament, one can find references about places that God would take these holy men to in order to consecrate them for a life of service to His wisdom. They were generally caves. Incubation sites were places where God would speak to men in visions and the necessarily rugged terrain and paltry circumstances forced them to act upon faith.

I was inspired. 

My journey to wisdom, however, had only just begun.

Upon my return to my original university, I was faced with a predicament. I was no longer on scholarship, but required to saddle on astronomical amounts of debt to fund my education. I had little more than faith to go off of.

I prayed even more. 

Graduation represented a curious junction. While I knew implicitly that I was shit out of luck, I found myself sitting on the couch of a former associate and eventual business partner and best friend, planning a business that would revolutionze the stultified American corporate system.

More prayer. 

As my work waned, bills soared, and mistakes tripled, I found myself next to desolation facing threatened law suits involving failed business projects, Sallie Mae blowing up my phone, and the only place to lay my head being my parent’s couch that wasn’t long enough to found my entire six foot five frame. 

I prayed several times a day. 

I have always had an unrelenting curiosity regarding the human condition. I found most matters of business — interaction in general — trivial unless it specifically addressed the concerns and dynamics involving two humans. I found myself asking people, “what does it mean to be human,” and being more interested in how they physiologically and emotionally responded to the problem, rather than the answer itself. More and more I probed the minds of my students, their intentions, their schema — there construction of the world in toto until I couldn’t stand the lack of veracity in my actions.

There had to be answers. My prayers abruptly changed. 

In July of 2014, I took a Commuter Express bus to the psychology offices of Michelle K. Conover begging for a chance to learn about the emergent structures of brain activity. I had spent the prior seven months studying physics concepts like relativity and quantum theory, neuroscience, and mathematical formulations. I would sit on the same couch I woke up and fell asleep upon for 10 or more hours, getting up only to use the restroom, get a snack, or go to Long Beach to teach young men about the material I was ingesting. When I met Dr. Conover, my world changed.

More prayer. Mostly to not get sued for my temerity during my years of entrepreneurship.

The more I consumed the information in the hallowed tomes I had access to in the clinic, the less my mind was focused on faith and its legitimacy. I found my lexicon changing ever so slightly from the nebulous constructs of destiny and purpose to the concrete concepts of executive functioning and verbal fluency. Science was representing the end-all be-all to my questions of existence…

By February of this year, I was at odds at most of the ideas I had held dear since childhood. Gone were the days of ambiguity — my focus was squarely on the activity of the nervous system. 

The more efficient I became in the process of scientific inquiry, the more I began to recognize the idiosyncrasies of life as Homo sapiens — curiosity mounted exponentially. 

My curiosity led me to a vista that I can never turn back from:

The constancy of life.

Science is, singularly, the most misunderstood concept in contemporary society. Unlike religion or religio-philosophic frameworks, science answers very few questions. The goal of science is not to elucidate objecctive phenomena in the universe, but to extricate itself from the bounds set on it by being bound by the limits of humanity. 

Science, taken in its entirety, is much more a verb than it is a subject. It is action oriented — thus it is only as powerful as the parameters set on it by the agents of inquiry.

The peculiar nature of science and humans is that science elucidates the mechanisms by which science is set by said humans. It is the purest form of regressive recursion because it requires that the agent, the human, frame a question in the nature of its own framing. The science of science and humans requires subject matter and subsequent actions to be formed from the same wellspring: that of the mind.

Those who argue that Faith is greater than Logic have tapped into a fallacy that is only half right. More apropos would be the conjecture that faith exculpates one from the tyranny of validation and verification making decision making a hugely more efficient cognitive process. Rather than being bogged down by the particulars of logicial consistency, predictive accuracy, and indepedent verity, faith leverages the power of biological resilience to render an internal narrative that favors survival.

This is huge.

Notice that I have not denounced nor decried faith. This is because rather than attacking it as being ontologically invalid, I have instead seen this mental phenomena as an evolutionary marvel.

I am a semantic nihilist meaning that I do not believe in “meaning” outside of the mental architecture unique to every person. The rich psychological worlds we existe within are instantiated in development as words, phrases, and everntually ideas. Stated plainly: meaning means nothing without the words we use in our inner mental lifes. 

Words are the mind’s currency for purchasing and leveraging the deluge of information pouring in from the senses. Meaning, and rightly so, emerges from the unique interaction between innate structure (neural networks orchestrated by proteins) and the environment that a human finds themselves within.

The immediate precipitate of these premises is that the mind will create a story in which its survival is a probabilistically raised.

This is neither right nor wrong. Right and wrong, also being relative structures, must be couched within the context of the mind of the individual doing the discerning. The processes by which we decide right and wrong are mentalistic ones; that is, they are result of the exact same brain attempting to construct a narrrative based upon the physiological responses, emotions and feelings, that shoot up into conscious awareness as conviction.

Faith and empirical study are two sides of the exact same coin. They are mediated by significantly different neural substrates, undoubtedly, but they can be treated as siblings. 

Your nervous system is not just that which you are aware of. It is a compositional miracle of nonconscious  and conscious program buzzing about predicting, testing, and learning about the environments it finds itself immerse in. Further more, it is communicating with itself about the internal world of the being it animates and informs. 

Science is not in the business of causing anyone to believe anything. Science is a process of creating compelling evidence upon which the thinking agent experiences feelings.

Faith is not superior to logic. They serve two different purposes for the exact same goal: survival. Again, this does nothing to the structure of faith. Faith serves a purpose — especially when that faith is being questioned via the processes of science.

For those that trumpet that faith trumps logic, my question is, “what is your definition of logic?” More often than not, the worm on the end of the line begins to squirm as they answer the question using faulty logic. Humans creat their own version of realitythat exists as a subsystem within a syestem. There are no avenues that lead a human to functioning intrinsically outside of the capacities of a human.

What most people delude themselves into thinking is that they possess an objective rendering of the universe, when they actually have is a mental, word-laden world within which the narrative creaties its own internal consistency. 

People create worlds that answer themselves by invoking themselves. 

Rather than saying that faith supersedes logic, the words most people are grasping at, but lack the technical ability to explain, is that their definition of faith is anemic and they are willing to let the universe do its thing. There is no shame in that. Probabilistically speaking, chances are good. 

When humans begin to acknowledge and embrace the processes and limitations of human ability, then turn their modes of inquiry into that limitation, they will appreciate the semantic construction of reality AND the humans within it. The semantic construction of reality does nothing to invalidate the robustness of personal conviction, but instead explains it in terms that speak to the functionality of the individual themselves. 

Moreover, cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics have done a great deal to show that our word structures are associated with many other word structures. This is where the danger lies because as one is contructing their inner narrative, the words they choose to instantiate their reality might be attached to other implicit associations, rendering a reality that replete with ignorance, bigotry, and inaccuracy. 

Taking your rendering of reality and seeing it as an absolute is the first step to ignorance. Faith, like that I had my junior year, has valid, protective purpose.

I simply implore you to research the difference.

  

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

Why I Chose Neuropsychology

I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious. – Einstein

On a daily basis I am confronted by all manner of paradox, especially those that underlie the form and function of the universe. The best that most of us can do is make a priori assumptions that work well with our current conceptions of being and build up from there. The problem with this methodology is as old as humanity: once one runs up against another human with an equally presumptuous, yet equally valid conception, tension arises.

In an effort to circumvent this intractable issue, I began studying brain function to see what mysteries the neurosciences could unravel. My reason for doing this was easy to follow: a human can posit a great number of things based on subjective experience, if I could find a pursuit that could inject some semblance of objectivity into this experience then I would bypass the personal construction of said experience.

When one peruses the florid machinations of history’s most advanced and influential philosophers, one cannot help but notice the internal consistency between even the most wildly divergent constructions. All schools of thought follow very basic, very human laws of reasoning. Moreover, philosophies always have a taint of the eras where they came into being. If these brilliant minds were illustrating the universe in toto and coming up with accurate conceptions of it, then why were they tinted by the cultures and current events of the times?

What I kept seeing were humans — very brilliant humans — being human. Each conception was an exercise in the ingenuity of a biological machine, not the precision of an unbiased mechanical one. Human beings were not cameras idly capturing the essence of concrete reality, but a node, an information processor, processing the elements of a stream of data that would emerge as one’s reality.

The differences are deceptively subtle and rather trivial in everyday conceptions of “reality”. There are a great many crafty minds that can and will disagree with this presentation of things “as they are” but therein lies the beauty of the human at work.

I wanted to understand the human at work then see how that commented on what could be considered reality. Instead of casting my lot on processes that theoretically exist outside of humanity, I have placed my bets on studying the functional units that must process all information, since any bit of data that can be known must be integrated and translated into something a human can know.

A quick illustration is this: lets say Computer A has inputs that can process all Information A units in a system comprised of Information A, Information B, and Information C units. To Computer A, Information A and Information B units do not exist; it has no means of detecting their existence!

Even if that information could infer that other types of Information are out there, say through some mathematical formulation, it must develop the inputs before it can deal with that information.

The reason I am bringing all of this up is to make a point about positing about “reality”. It is quite accepted that the universe possesses a great deal of information that we have no inputs for and thus all we are ever doing is describing those elements we do have access to. It is for this reason, that I prefer to say that we all deal in representations of reality, rather than saying that we are privy to reality proper.

A problem we face as a society is that many of us incorrectly figure that we are arbiters of a true reality and thus the conceptions that are the form and function of our mental lives possess an air of righteousness. We mistake our emotions, percepts, and cognitions as exemplars of truth and fashion ideology based on the “correctness” of it all.

However, there is nothing intrinsically correct (or incorrect) about anything. We don’t have access to enough information and the information we do have access to is allowed to pivot along many degrees of freedom. If there were rigid ways of looking at things, there would be no room for interpretation.

What I am saying is that instead of seeing philosophical constructions as right or true, I see them as exemplars of human ingenuity. So, how then can I study human conceptions of reality? By studying the structures which permit this seemingly infinite capacity.

Brain function.

Research suggests that brain function is mediated by genetics and experience. Brain function mediates thought content and the results of those thoughts become behavior. Thus, the state of the brain, the interaction between its great number of networks and modules, gives rise to the thoughts that we all cherish so dearly. There is nothing intrinsically true about something so personal to each organism. We have no special access to realms sacrosanct. We are the products of miraculous biological processes.

Now, I am not relegating humans to soulless automata, I am saying that while you may revel in the content of your thoughts, your thoughts are only partially controlled by you. You may feel a strong pull towards libertarianism or Buddhism, but the feelings that arise in those schools of thought have more to do with your biological and social construction than with any direct access to rightness. If you had a troubled childhood, those frameworks which stress inclusion (or exclusion depending on the additional content of your mental life) will appeal to you strongly.

The sum total of your genetic proclivities and your experiential knowledge commixed in extraordinarily complex ways will give rise to your conception of reality. While there are those that lend credence (or believe vehemently in) other means of informational attainment (extrasensory experience, OBE, past lives, communication with God), they too, can be said to call on certain brain functions which permit belief. Belief, after all, is all some require in order to actually experience something. Magicians, confidence artists, and sociopaths know and exploit these biases with considerable adroitness.

So, from the position of neuropsychology (and other neurosciences), studying brain function rather than studying thought content is more efficacious in understanding humans. While we may generate complex frameworks about the universe at large, we cannot know things we cannot know. Hopefully I am not inadvertently creating a conceptual Charybdis, but the internal structure of this argument remains ostensibly true.

The purview that brain function permits is not one of “how things are” or even “how things should be” because these two concepts are only casually linked to the status of being human. We don’t know “how things are” except for the universe’s radical indifference and we don’t know “how things should be” because each of our ideas about such are subjectively constructed by our brains. Thus, what brain function allows for is understanding how each of us constructs our views of life so that we can teach and be more tolerant of one another.

Consciousness and unconsciousness are another minefield when talking in public. I have commingled these liberally in this post on purpose. To see the unconscious as the “machine behind the scenes” is not really a viable illustration. To talk about willful or consciously willed behaviors differing from unconscious drives, is also deeply flawed. We are organisms comprised of a great many structures; these are two of them.

The goal is survival, not righteousness. Consciousness conferred on us a heightened ability to recognize novel stimuli (if one chooses to follow the wealth of scientific research on the topic).

I do not share Einstein’s cognitive abilities, but I share his deep fascination with everything. I, too, am passionately curious.

In conclusion, I cannot make great sweeping remarks about the nature of ontology, what is, but I can make cursory statements about what can be known and how we can trade that knowledge. By taking us as information processors with unique variations on our processing styles, we can hopefully generate more robust dialogue. This enriched dialogue sets a different milieu for our children and children’s children.

Our brain functions are our information processing, our mental life is the “screen”, and our behavior is the resultant of what the screen suggests.

Within the field of neuropsychology, I get to study these idiosyncrasies in great detail and I am very grateful. The confluence of subjective experiences points to an overarching organization within which interpretation can abound. The paradoxes generated are due to our inability to reason outside of what we can know first and what we know second.

Thus, neuropsychology has deepened my proclivity for nihilism, haha. Meaning only means what one perceives something to mean. It is in and of itself an illusion mediated by — you guessed it — brain function.

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

Black Male Feminist

Let us be clear from the beginning, women and men are not created equal. Lets take it one step further, no one is created equal.

By believing that everyone is equal, we create a society of expectations and power vacuums where legitimate differences lie. We set the stage for the brand of social polity which sweeps complex issues under the rug in the name of political correctness.

Guess what? I can’t draw to save my life. My primary emotional setting is biased towards negative expressions such as anger and irritation. I am extraordinarily athletic. I have a certain style of charisma. Certain bits of information I process quickly, others take, days, weeks, or even years. I struggle with calculus but I really enjoy. I’m a good public speaker. My mind races sometimes and its really hard to focus. I’m terribly afraid of rejection.

There is no one else who experiences life exactly the way I do. There are those that do things significantly better than me and those that I do I things significantly better than. Then there are those that just do different things than me…

This is the nature of the life force: it does not imbue us all with the same gifts or shortcomings, interests or disinterests.

Thus, we are not created equal.

However, we can create equality. Why? Because if you were to take a macroscopic cross-section of the human species, you would see that many of our talents and weaknesses complement each other. We are all variations on the exact same theme and any attempt to dismiss this reality is a denial of humanity, something I cannot bring myself to do.

Intuition, the beautiful conscious experience of unconscious processing, has been the major vehicle for the development of human society for some thousands of years now. It hinges upon subjective, practical experience, with sensory information shaping the salience and products of the hidden brain. For many, intuition seems like something otherwordly; it is a positively inexplicable phenomenon which often gets promoted to paranormal or supernatural status. Intuition, from my perspective and those that share my views, displays the majesty of our brain structures. We are not computers, but something much more brilliant: we are the latest update of the vehicles that carry life.

Intuition is the easiest mental experience to capture; it happens spontaneously and is rarely accompanied by conscious control. The result is a feeling that this information must be true or at the very least, valuable, and from their behavior generally ensues.

It is my belief that intuitive reasoning has been the primary modus for the propagation of discrimination of any kind. As intuition is an unconscious process and unconsciousness is modulated both by genes and by environmental stimuli, the brain is drafting conclusions via certain frameworks and resulting biases without the individual being aware they are happening.

Thus, intuitively, women are weaker than men. They are more emotional and ergo, less rational, with ration being a substitute for intelligent. Their status as nurturer permanently marries them to remaining in the house, rearing children and preparing meals. Upon this anachronistic mindset, many a culture and society have been built.

It does not require a neuroscientist to see that this is utter nonsense.

But, most “scientists” are those that forsake intuition just long enough to forge testable hypotheses, opting for a shade of objectivity rather than woefully shortsighted subjectivity. As the individual thinks in empirical modes, his subjectivity is continually altered, allowing him or her to generate more mature intuitions.

I suppose this is the moment that I offer the pathetic speech about all the wonderful females I know. This is where I say, my boss, a clinical and forensic neuropsychologist, is one of the youngest and most successful practitioners in the region. Or maybe, my best friend, a female, is arguably the most brilliant person I’ve ever met. Or perhaps I engage in a lengthy diatribe about how men and women have different qualities for good reasons and those should be respected.

While this is all true, it masks my point with political correctness.

I have long since had to relinquish beliefs in many of the teleological beliefs that lurk in the ideologies so popular in modern society. Teleogy, for those unaware, is any belief that argues that we are moving to some final destination, some grand finality in which things either blow up (like Armageddon) or things reach maximum harmony. I don’t really care for either and I don’t spend much time wondering which is true.

What I do believe is that life is much like an infinitely complex algorithm that continually plays combinatorial games with all its expressions. Thus, from the first single celled organism to us, the most complex creature in the known universe, life finds more and more ways to deal with its innate problem: homeostatic balance or the maintenance of itself. Life wishes to live and it looks for more optimized ways to do so.

Optimized implies final state, optimality, right? Not necessarily and even if it did, it isn’t something we could even begin to understand. We ourselves are still evolving and the phenomenon of consciousness has saw to it that we accelerate the process nicely.

Life surges through all of us equally and that is where our equality lies. It isn’t that we were “created” equal but that we have been given equal chance to pursue all of our goals through the human condition.

Women provide a wealth of information because women, last time I checked, are humans. They brains with mind numbing complexity and they express a myriad behaviors just like any other human.

This goes for all manner of social identifier, gender, age, creed, sexual orientation — whatever.

Now, here’s the catch, intuitive readers have been thinking, “yes bryce, but these are social phenomena. While it may be true that equality and access to the life force are freely permitted, the identifiers entire into different waters, socialization.”

This is 100% fact and this is where all our problems as a species lie. Intuition leads one to this place and keeps plotting along as a biased, unwieldy beast.

Allow me to offer an opinion: humans are a social species; evidence suggests that our evolution has been borne upon the wings of our ability to communicate and form complex societies, all of which helped us adapt against our competition in nature. Language, abstract thought, and deliberative planning — all hallmarks of humanity — are the direct reasons why we have flourished how we have.

Deep within all of us, presumably etched into our genetic information, are the exact same fighter and Darwinian champion instructions our ancestors passed along to us; however, with the advent of consciousness came reflective thought and reflective thought creates very interesting precipitates. As vessels of life, we are hardwired to want to live, however, life in its emergent complexity augmented its automaticity. We went from nonconscious, with no awareness and no control, to conscious, with a type of control. The dimensions of this control are far beyond the scopes of this post, but they involve the dialectical relationship between organism and environment. Consciousness permits a step in the direction of free will, but it is not entirely free.

So while certain concepts are ingrained deep below the levels of consciousness, our awareness, or the things we direct our conscious phenomena toward, assigns special value to the streaming information. This causes a type of modulation, a change, in the very anatomy and operation of the brain.

This process is by no means easy, but it is the basis for psychoanalysis and the entire field of clinical psychology.

What does this mean for society? It means that for most of us, we are quick to identify and classify others as this or that, a quirk of the life program, but we don’t have to assign negative or positive qualities to these categorizations. With enough practice a person is able to see the entire world around them for what it is: a massive playground for existential exploration.

The exploration of life.

As previously stated, we are all humans. Black, white, Chinese, Mexican, Persian, French, Moldovan, El Salvadorean, Spanish. Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Jain. Tall, short, fat, skinny. Heterosexual, homosexual. Cisgender and transgender.

While our complex wet-ware (brains) will attempt to structure these things and assign values to them, it is possible to reorient the entire way one sees them.

Why would anyone actually want to do these things? Because they’re right? Because they’re ethical? Because they’re moral?

No.

Because its life. We should value the differences between one another because thats how our brains make decisions. David Eagleman calls the workings of the inner self the “competition among rivals,” meaning that even within ourselves various programs are running and competing for conscious and behavioral expression. It is from this intrinsic makeup that we humans created democracy or the “competition among rivals” socially speaking.

With difference comes the inbuilt quality of life: the ability to recombine over and over again to produce increasingly more efficient results. Women come built in ways different than men not because of some ontological status, but because it enriches the process of life.

Therefore, I am a feminist. I believe that women possess just as much right to pursue happiness in our societies as myself. I believe EVERYONE should have a right pursue happiness.

We all come built in different ways because it promotes an extraordinarily robust existence. We have been blessed with the ability to help that process along.

Thanks Life for conscious awareness.