Unmasking The Matrix

What if things weren’t as they appeared? What if the history we were told, the ideas that we were taught, and the norms we were instructed to follow were mere distortions? What if society was no more than a cleverly concocted scheme used to pull the wool over our “true” eyes?

Well, all of these are true.

Things are not as they appear; history and social norms are distortions, and society is a cleverly concocted scheme. However, there doesn’t need to be a shadow elite or a corrupt government to facilitate these skew.

One has to look no further than their own brain.

Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale’s School of Medicine offered a quote that summarizes the workings of the brain beautifully:

When someone looks at me and earnestly says, “I know what I saw,” I am fond of saying, “No you don’t.”

You have a distorted and constructed memory of a distorted and constructed perception, both of which are subservient to whatever narrative your brain is operating under.

Ouch.

In Dr. Louis Cozolino’s book, The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy, he talks about the widely misunderstood phenomena of how the brain actually becomes conscious of information. Most of us know that there is a wealth of information that exists beneath the consciousness, that is information that one isn’t aware of; however, that there are processes beneath the conscious escape most. That is, all of the information that eventually reaches your conscious mind, that part of the brain that you know and are well aware of, has already been processed and treated by the processes preceding conscious thought.

Thusly, you do operate under distortions; namely, your own.

Your reality is not the reality; it is consistently skewed towards the narrative that you are operating under. That narrative is your underlying beliefs, preferences, and hidden feelings operating on an unconscious level.

Now, society, as I have proclaimed over and over on this blog, is little more than a dyadic relationship between individual and collective. Society is a summation of interactions with culture coming about as an emergent property. The nature vs. nurture debate has long since been deemed a superficial argument since it is clear that both are involved in a human being’s development. Thus, as humans form societies as a means of evolutionary resilience, societies form humans in a process of necessary cohesion. In order for societies to remain together, a common set of rules must be established so that behavior is graded against an impersonal and impartial rubric…

However, human sociality is anything but impersonal and impartial and this leads to the distorted notion that it negatively brainwashes.

Let me be very, very clear: brainwashing is real and there have been plenty of documented attempts at system wide influences by the government. However, much of the rationale behind brainwashing is evolutionarily consistent with maximized social cohesion and moral interpretation. Morality is actually hardwired into us through the insular cortex amongst other regions (nature); however, it is society, mainly culture, that modulates what one group of people find acceptable or morally reprehensible.

The conversation of free will, much like the nature vs. nurture debate, has become rather anachronistic in modern scientific circles as well. Although we are hardwired in ways that create the substrate for our behavior, we all vary as to what is necessary to stimulate certain responses. Moreover, as one develops, one’s experiences shape them one way or another and learning can cause variations on schemata. Thus, one is bound by their brain physiology and propensity given brain circuitry, however, there exist many degrees of freedom within that framework allowing for myriad behaviors.

Everything that is is the result of life as an algorithm and its mode of transfer and transcription, DNA. Your genes have built you in a particular way and you will behave in a particular way. Additionally, the life algorithm has one goal: to continue to live and out of this process it is likely the brains came to develop. Brains were able to better modulate homeostatic optimality and conscious brains increased this process all the more. One interpretation sees our jump in evolution as being facilitated by language. Language not only allowed us to grow as a social species, but instigated the brain to become even more complex and able to generate inner images and reflect on these modalities.

The “matrix” is not an external imposition, but instead a physical reality of one’s own brain processes. However, Darwinism is still about survival of the fittest and you can damn well be sure there are those that operate to gain a disproportionate amount of power and influence. We are all very aware of these people and they are the closest thing to a secret society as one can imagine.

It is imperative then, that one, once cognizant of these described processes act in a manner which promotes life. Instead of seeing the ignorance of many misguided religions, political regimes, and social agendas and responding with further divisive ignorance, one must get in the habit of realizing these structures are as natural as language. They are supported by our physical morphology; to grant them some external agency, some mystery, “evil” connotation is a sin of ignorance. Ignorance can be cured. To persist in ignorance is stupidity. Stupidity is much more resilient.

The way to usher in a society that harmonizes all of the naturally occurring brain structures and is aligned with life on this planet is to, as objectively as possible, audit the stimuli entering one’s conscious mind, keeping in mind that this information has already been tainted by one’s disposition, beliefs, and preferences. With this in mind, one can begin to alter how their un- and non-conscious apparatus judge information. Racism can be reversed, but only after one opens themselves to processing information different. This is a long and difficult journey.

Our conscious apparatus is an evolutionary gift that allows us to vastly accelerate the course of evolutionary progression. Although our genes give us certain allotted abilities and interests, we can take those batons and run with them unlike any other species on this Earth.

Instead of wasting one’s time fighting external ghosts and blaming “systems” for one’s plight, perhaps its time to turn inward and reflect then turn outward and reflect on the totality of humanity and in turn, life. The system is only as good as its constituents and if you are playing the blame game, you are perpetuating the same bigotry, asymmetry, and division as those you which to overturn.

Speak the language of universality or you will simply be contributing to the problem.

bryce

Depression and Fractured Reality

Let me start out with a disgustingly obvious truism: reality is much, much more complicated than it seems.

I have discussed at length the nature of the human condition and how that corresponds to reality, but, as I continue my journey, much more is forthcoming. For those of you that know me personally, the recent trajectory of my journey has brought me into a specialized field of clinical psychology known as neuropsychology. Neuropsychology is the study of the relationships between physical structures in the brain and their corresponding cognitive capabilities and behaviors. In the clinic where I intern, we see many patients on the autistic spectrum, others who suffer from personality disorders such as bipolar and borderline disorders, as well as mood illnesses such as depression and anxiety.

Neuropsych is a relatively new science and as such sits on the frontier of innovation and interpretation. Many of the discussions between our practicing neuropsychologist and myself involve the unique ways in which the brain gives rise to the various behaviors and capabilities that so many of us come to take for granted or just simply don’t understand.

Yesterday the world lost an icon, Robin Williams. Those in my age group know him as an incomparably hilarious staple of our youth, gifting us with so many characters that are now forever idealized in our minds. From Genie in Aladdin to Mrs. Doubtfire, Mr. Williams was nothing short of a laugh a minute; however, as is now apparent, deep beneath the veneer of his humor was a deeply broken man.

The battle of ideology still rages about the relationship between the brain and the mind, but this much is true: they affect each other. For professionals in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and certain brain sciences, the notion that one can “will” themselves to be happy is a gigantic misnomer. Nor is the idea that “talking to someone” is panacea either. The truth of the matter is how the brain interacts with its environment is still much of a mystery to us.

Although much philosophy and many personal ideas are cast around about how one suffering from a neurological illness should carry themselves, the hard truth is that nothing in the human condition is ever simple. Since we are constantly having to piece together the fragments of existence and decide what questions to put to nature during the process, science progresses usually at an erratic pace through piecemeal activities. New Age and other popular trends attempt to streamline and rest upon conclusions, calling on mystical or alternative means, however, these too, are not without their applicative shortcomings.

Reality is not linear because as the beings apprehending it, we are not linear.

Finding biological correlates to depression has been tough; however, many researchers have honed in on a group of neurotransmitters, monoamines such as dopamine and seratonin, and have hypothesized that greater amounts of these in the synaptic clefts, that is those gaps between neurons, may help to counteract this destructive disease. But, as is far too common, the drugs created based on these theories do not work the same in every individual; humans are as diverse physiologically as we are mentally.

Psychotherapy is the clinical practice of counseling, generally done by a licensed psychologist or social worker. These situations call upon the professional stability and wealth of knowledge by the clinician, but again, the psyche of humans is just as diverse as their physiologies.

The tragedy of Robin Williams perfectly captures this point. Over the years Williams suffered from both cocaine and alcohol addictions, as well as battling the aforementioned depression, which could have been onset by the relapse into alcohol. For an addict, the guilt and shame of relapse is often enough to drive them into depression and often expressing comorbidity, which is the development of additional simultaneous illnesses suchas anxiety.

As I intend for this blog to be highly informal, I invite all of you to do your own research and not just consider the diseases themselves, but the overarching schema of the brain and how it generates both self-awareness (consciousness) and opinions about reality. Too much of our daily interaction is shrouded in the ignorance of under-informed opinion and thus, misnomers continue to propagate. Suicide, the unfortunate result of many of these disorders, has been villainized, feared, and railed against since the dawn of time. Religion, philosophy, and even legislation have condemned those who succumb, a truly disheartening practice. Since most humans are fully operable within the confines of natural selection, the idea of ending one’s own life is resolutely unconscionable. Moreover, many have come to see suicide as selfish, self-centered, and flat-out “wrong.” I will refrain from offering my opinion, but I invite those of you who are mature enough, to consider this.

Life is not and has never been about the primacy of any individual species and this may come as a surprise to those who have never thought about it this way. Humans, although advanced, must remember that they are carriers of this life “program,” this biological force which separates the inanimate from the animate, just like any other animal. Although our brains have been highly modified to organize reality into “human” or anthropological terms, this only exists within the collective psyche of humans. It does not designate reality for what it is.

Albert Camus famously wrote that suicide was an escape out of the absurdity of life; however, this didn’t actually resolve the absurdity of it. If I were to let my feelings about these subjects leak just out a little, I would say that I connect with this idea. For those that suffer from chronic mental illnesses, the absurdity of life and the insurmountable nature of it all, leads to feelings of futility, generally through the expressions of guilt, despair, or low self-worth. The realities that their brains are generating do not possess the capabilities of continually carrying the life program and it is not as simple as them “getting over it” or “remembering whats important in life.”

Imagine yelling at your computer whose motherboard is faulty and telling it to “get over it,” to “remember that its purpose is to compute and discover the beauty of computation.” It simply does not possess the requisite capabilities any longer and sometimes it cannot be fixed. Although psychiatric drugs, psychotherapy, and an overall refocusing of mental effort can work for some cases, they will not always be sufficient, especially in those whose hardware has inexorably failed.

To philosophize about the ethics and morals of suicide and any of its preceding illnesses is absolutely ridiculous. To tell a person that they are wrong for wanting to kill themselves is absolutely ridiculous. Superimposing your beliefs on the subject is absolutely ridiculous. Many people will say, “well I have been there, I have been suicidal,” but again, this is shortsighted. Our individual makeups are wildly divergent from one another; just because you were able to pick yourself up and talk yourself (or got talked) off the cliff does not mean you “understand” what drives someone to actually step off the edge. Perhaps your brain structures were reparable; perhaps the concatenate neurological activity that forms the physical foundation of your reality was slightly different. Trillions of synaptic connections in the brain leads to an unfathomable preponderance of possibilities.

This, for me, is the crux of the problem of being human. We possess the seemingly unique ability in the animal kingdom to be aware of the mental states of others. Our evolution has brought us to a place where we are no longer governed exclusively by instinctual or evolutionary primitive demands. However, few of us understand how to evaluate the states of others. Few of us understand how to interact with one another. We hide behind beliefs and theories, usually unfounded and based on personal experience, or we ascribe to some set of beliefs that have been taught to us. We don’t know how to think, we just do, ad nauseum. The result is a fractured reality, much exposed by David Bohm, and we continually conjecture and posit from the fragmented positions.

For instance, Robin Williams dies and suddenly those in the African American community are up in arms about society “forgetting” Michael Brown, the unarmed man who was gunned down by police over the weekend.

It is this state of fracture which continually inhibits not just the Black community, but our entire species. We don’t understand how to evaluate the course of events or the course of our interactions, so we lead ourselves further and further into the schizophrenic reality of fractured societies. The irony is, the more fractured we think, the more like the primitive animal kingdom we become. Instead of willingly pushing forward as a species through this gifted faculty of advanced self-awareness and awareness of others, we elect to stew in the filth of the ignorance fracture allows.

In 2014 alone, planes have disappeared and been shot out the sky, more unarmed Black men have been murdered by police (who probably also suffer mental illnesses, various complexes to be certain), and the Middle East continues to wage ideological war. To me, it is all related. It is the very nature of how humans, in our current state, create reality, fractured reality. Robin Williams could not face his reality, Israel and Hamas continually force each others’ realities upon one another, and racist police generate a reality of paralyzing prejudice and monstrously end the realities of others.

The brain is a wild, wild place. It puts the most hardcore Siberian frontier to shame because not only have we not even begun to get close to exploring its mysteries, most of us don’t even know how undertake that process. So the derivatives, the social, ethnic, and ideological arenas are weaponized and are brought to the fore, instead of dealing with the common denominator in all of those, the correlated brain states, the mind.

If I could give all humans one admonition, it would be to stop taking the most familiar thing, one’s conscious experience for granted. Stop believing that what you think is “just how things are” or even worse, “right.” Your own prejudices, which you have no doubt justified, your own beliefs, which you have no doubt idealized, and your own actions, which you have no doubt made excuses for, are a complex conglomeration of neurological determinism (that is you are who you are because that is who you are), your environment (which triggers certain aspects of brain activity, lending back to the determinism), and the quasi-indeterminism created by the fact that we cannot trace the origins of every single action or belief by an individual. In addition, reality being so much bigger than individual humans, than Earth’s entire biosphere for that matter, it should be fastidiously considered. Your own ideas, beliefs, and actions should be meticulously raked in contemplation about your own self and doubly so as you consider the collectivity of humans. Before you go off on rants and tangents about anything — suicide, mental illness, or ideological preferences included — take the time to understand what it is you’re talking about and compare that back to the wholeness of life and the universe.

Although we are the latest model of the vehicle of life on this planet, this does not denote an existential primacy, as mentioned earlier. This means we should be even more relentless in our questioning of the very essence of ourselves and how we apprehend the environments around us. Instead of drawing conclusions, we should never stop drawing on bits of information, liked or unliked. Treat every moment as an opportunity to test hypotheses, not “reach” final states of belief. The purest hubris is the idea that anything can be known in finality.

Rest in peace, Mr. Williams. I know that I could never understand your battles and I wish that something could’ve occurred which pointed you back to the beauty of the inquiry of life. I wish that you could’ve found a kernel of faith in something which kept you tethered to our plane of reality, but sometimes the demons of our psyche pull far too hard. I don’t find you selfish, nor will I villainize you unfairly; you fought but you found yourself overwhelmed. I wish you felt the happiness you brought all of us. I hope that wherever you are now, you are free from the pain.

bryce

Is Social Media “Real” ?

Taking a brief break from the atmospheric realms of abstract thought, I turn my attention to some unsettling notions brewing on the timelines of my various online presences. The notion at first glance seems tenable, “social media isn’t real.” I mean this follows, right? Social media is remote and, by that account distant, phenomena which really has no true force on one’s life, right? Right?

This is a problem that can be approached from a couple different ways, but lets first take a moment to question what constitutes real. What is reality? A few posts ago I discussed this very subject and its something that continues to drive me in my private meditations. For the sake of conversation, lets consider reality, “receiving, interpreting, and organizing stimuli.” The process of living in a reality is taking the sensory and extrasensory (if you believe in such things) stimuli and organizing them in a way which creates stability. The brain processes stimuli and through its complex processes a mental state is derived.

This places social media square in the realm of “real.” Why? Because social media presences are nothing more than the virtual manifestation of someone’s thoughts. Whether parody or genuine expression, the processes that bring one to type out a message and send it to the public realm are incarnations of will.

The argument against social media is that it is all entertainment, much like a movie or a TV show. This, again, is myopic. Entertainment, even those things which are acted out, are still “real.” The scenarios may be artificial drama, but they still interact with the audience in a very real sensory way. In the domain of day to day reality, much of what one sees is not artificial drama, but actual interaction between two people.

Moreover, by the account of social-media-as-real naysayers, none of what one sees in life is actually real. Or more precisely, everything is real and unreal simultaneously. This is because one cannot know for sure the intentions or motivations of others, but this does not preclude them from experiencing very real physiological or psychical effects. One cannot say for sure what is dramatized and what is “true,” but these domains overlap one another.

What is real to one person may be unreal to another. Who is right and who is wrong?

Social media is another means of communication; therefore, one should account all the going’s on in their text messages as unreal. Last I checked, people were expressing genuine emotions and mental content, even if that content was somewhat shrouded in the ambiguous haze of intentionality. But intentionality, well, complex multi-intetionality, if I may, could be ascribed to one’s own household. There are many interactions within one’s own house where the complexity of behavior boils down to the complexity of intention; does one then relegate the actions taken by their mother as unreal?

So, is social media real? Of course it is and of course it is not. It causes real psychical responses and transitively, real physiological responses. It isn’t strictly the pursuit of fabricated drama; although, as aforementioned, complex multi-intentionality does play a role. It is a variation of the innumerable abstractions humans manipulate in order to express the complexity of their existence. Thus, it is neither real nor unreal and it is both simultaneously. For those dissatisfied with this ambiguous answer, a more precise response would be that there is no need for “real” or “unreal.” These are merely abstract concepts with no consistent validity outside the realms of one’s own mind; but this is the stumbling block of humanness.

We are unable to receive, integrate, and organize data in a way that is consistent between individuals. We may have some superficial relevancies, but as we probe deeper and deeper into the nature of expression, the interpretations become more and more disparate. Physiologically speaking, our brains may be very similar, but they have many dissimilarities which lay the physical foundation for our mental differences.

Much of our objective “reality,” the shared day to day experience we call society, is driven by things ignorant discarded as “unreal.” The better question to ask one’s self is what can truly be understood and what is doomed to be the fodder of interpretation.

bryce

Life is Life

Perhaps its a preconscious motivation or something even more fleeting, but there is without a doubt an overwhelming proposensity for man to describe things. Seemingly, and certainly scientifically, the only way we can consciously go about doing this is a complex system of comparison; we take a new stimulus and attempt to understand against a stimulus we already know.

In my philosophy, this is the reason why there is no cogent explanation of what ‘life’ is. There is nothing to compare it to; it encapsulates anything that one could even try to compare it to. It is the source of all things that are extant. You can make extrapolations about a thing by looking at its derivations, but even those are mere guesswork.

Life is life.

It is the quintessence of infinitude; whereas man can be seen as both finite and infinite, life is stolidly infinite. It is concomitant with the universe, seemgingly its self-evidentiary, discretely animate version of this dyad. The universe is the skeleton, life is, tenuously speaking, its muscle.

See? Even I cannot resist the insatiable urge to specify and cleanly define what life is.

It aggravates the mind like a wanton string on the face of one desperately looking for sleep. It is so pervasive, so interactive, that it seems ludicrous to not be able to explain it in concise terms. Yet, life is anything but concise. It is the perennial “other” existing ever distal from the core of the conscious mind.

Thus, life is not easy, no hard, no short, nor lonf. Life simply is. It is meant to be enjoyed and contemplated, but seems hellbent on never truly being understood. As it persists fractally, all of the persistent “zooms” one can place on it yield the same motifs over and over again, like some maddening Mendelbrot set. You can attack it from every angle and derive precious information from it, but that information only seems to lead to more questions. We may discover applications that serve some social use like vaccines, consumer technology, or weaponry, but the ultimate vantage point of life seems to elude us.

Thus, one can see how the infinite mutability of a man’s persona is possible; he is a derivation of this force of infinite expressability. He is an expression of infinite expressability and possesses the same ability of extant genesis as this ever persistent force.

Life is responsive, adaptive, like some multidimension gyroscope; it can be rigid and unyielding or pliable and ambiguous per the parameters of its incipient expression. It encompasses both the religious zealot and the lukewarm liberal; it establishes them, it nurtures them. They are allowed to create that reality by the very nature it. It welcomes them to their interpretative largesse; however, it constantly beckons those who pursue it to delve deeper.

The infinitude of life knows no right or wrong, no morals or ethics, no normatives or regulations; those are all man’s creation. It knws no rich, no poor, no tortured, no peaceful; those are man’s institutions.

This unyielding force cares absolutely nothing about bills or responsibilities or obligations or fears or anxieties; those are the eventualities of a creature who must make sense of its existence. It creates its typifications, its objectivations, the very framework of its fitness, all as cognitively distant homages to the all pervasive force which it is imbued.

Man must create its arbitrary hierarchal nature; life arranges itself according to the natures of its expression. Under extreme circumstances only certain phenotypes are allow to persist, but under others it is a panoply of existential gallantry. The famous man, the infamous man, and the unknown man must all reliquinsh their earthly vehicles at their appointed demise. Life, at least in this interfaceable dimension, is an allotted gift with no respecter of personage.

It isn’t fair or unfair; life is a reality of chance and balance. Just as lightning is forged out of the imbalance of ions in the atmosphere, life continually balances itself out in the expression of humanity. One born mentally fit but physically vulnerable juxtaposed against the mentally vulnerable and physically fit; the difference between lightning and ions are the dimensions on which life must balance itself are resolutely endless. A man may decry his challenges understanding biology, but possesses a prodigious mind in linguistic arts. Some may fail at academics altogether and excel at raising a family.

Life is peculiar in that respect.

Your life is a gift and you are the result of life being expressed in all those you have come in contact with since your inception. Thus, you are not “Mary” or “Stephen”, you are the continuation of life’s expression; you are the vehicle by which life travels.

So, what will you choose to do? Live conservatively, which you are entitled to do, or push the very limits on yourself as an expression of multidimensional power?

Challenge life to a duration of discovery; you’ll be glad you did it.

The Mutable Reality

My current pursuits, both theoretically and experimentally, involve untangling the enigma that is ‘reality’. I am a firm believer in the primacy of the social environment as the actuator of thoughts, therefore, I have come to grips that much of my obsession over what is and what isn’t stems from my conservative Christian background. My parents were never the Bible thumping, closed-minded sort, however, I was socialized into believing a very rigid framework of physical life; although our explicit belief in the supernatural added a metaphysical dynamism that is still extant today.

When asking, “what is reality?”, it captures perfectly the essence of cognitive dissonance. Dissonance is best described as ‘friction’ that arises when two thoughts are in opposition to one another. For instance, many married couples experience extreme dissonance when the wishes of their mother or father go against the wishes of their spouse. To hold these oppositional cognitions in the mind causes discomfort which naturally leads a person to think or do something in response as a means to reduce this discomfort. Such actions may be to shut down completely, become emotional or even detached, and eventually try their hardest to avoid the topic altogether.

To ponder reality is to test the precipices of sanity. The principles of relativity tell us that spacetime is the substrate in which we all sit within depressions caused by the massive objects around us such as the earth, sun, moon and so forth. This substrate, the fabric of reality, seems so diaphonous, so thin, yet, it is obstreperous to the point of statistical impossibility. On a mental level, to consider what consists of reality is to contemplate factors that have affected us at every point and these constant stimuli are the hardest to consciously detect; they’ve been hardwired into us as “real”. On a physical level, intense scrutiny of this fabric at microscopic levels yields a world of ‘quantum foam’ or intractable probability. Its almost as if the fabric itself works to keep us from truly understanding it.

I personally believe that much of the problems trying to find truth is that so many of us hold on to the idea that there is an interfaceable, absolute truth somewhere deep beneath the folds of existence. While this may or may not be true, another question comes to the surface. If there is some all-pervasive truth, how would we be able to find it in the first place? We interface life through our conscious projection of ourselves. This conscious awareness is purely abstract, taking the abstractions of life and processing them into some cogent application. This implies a very subtle understanding of limit, a true paradox that seems to be a cardinal underpinning of reality. Although abstractions are infinitely malleable, they are usually limited by the faculty perceiving them. In layman’s terms, although the mind my be able to conceive and create an incalculable degree of input information, the output information is still limited to that mind’s specifications.

Thus, reality does become the progeny of the mind; perception does indeed become reality from this vantage point. However, given that cognition is merely the computation of computations, an infinitely recurring sequence of recursions, one can say that perception is not reality either. If a mind is capable of infinite creation then its finite emanation does not constitute the whole of its abilities. Your perception is the finite expression of what you believe is, but that is not the end all for a faculty that possesses outsized ability.

Nothing must be, yet everything is.

What can be said, then? George Orwell introduced a concept in his famous book 1984 that revolutionized the way that many think. It is a concept I have discussed on this blog, doublethink. Doublethink is the ability to hold two opposing concepts in one’s mind and believe them both. For those acute readers, you should be thinking back on the cognitive dissonance described earlier in this article. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort and most people do things to resolve this discomfort. I, as well as former theoretical physicist, David Bohm, and current dean of Rotman Business School at University of Toronto, Roger Martin, believe that the answer to the struggles between cognitive finitude and infinitude lie in one’s ability to thrive in that dissonance. That is, you take no sides, you favor no opinions, and you consider as much of the information available with equal curiousity.

Nothing must be, implies that in and of themselves, nothing on this earth must be anything. Nature and the cosmos thrived for billions of years before us and will thrive for billions more years after. The only intrinsic concept in the entire universe of existence is the fabric itself that gives rise to all phenomena; beyond that, everything is a derivation, an arbitrary meaning, created by the conscious being observing it. Yet everything is, implies that as conscious beings, we will create these meanings and this process of understanding is critical to the fitness of our species.

However, the truly perceptive minds will not try to make an absolute meaning; they are aware of the universal paradox besetting their mind. The Lemniscate Theory, a philosophical axiom, states that we are infinite beings living within the confines of the finite. We exist asymptotically to life, death, and certain physical constants (which may or may not change as we evolve). Thus, one must accept and embrace the tendency to become rigid, along with the necessity to be flexible. One must be willing to adopt the principles of doublethink, to accept and reject, to no accept and not reject, any and everything, including one’s own experience and concept of self. The reason that most of us have a hard time understanding the subtleties of reality is because we have grown fond of our own minds, we’ve fallen in love with our own experiential data, disregarding the phenomena of others.

There are epistemological and ontological questions abounding endlessly, of course; however, these imply a sense of absolution, something that may or may not actually be interfaceable with our current conscious set up. This sets up a perfect explanation for our species; a sort of fractal explosion of expression… As this system proliferates, we exist as discrete identities sharing relevancies on various levels which could, in theory, be mapped out and analyzed. But even that analysis would be subject to analysis and so on, ad infinitum.

To contemplate the conception of reality is a beautiful process of growth. A common misnomer is that dialogue directly means communication between two people. Actually, the root words are, dia, which is “through”, and logos, the word. In other words, dialogue is discovering a meaning through the words. A dialogue can occur within one’s self or within a larger group. Many of these ideas were made clear to me through David Bohm’s, On Dialogue, however, I had begun developing a proto-understanding throughout the last few years.

Reality is about seeing one’s self in all dynamics and contexts; an individual and a collective; subjective and objective; linear and nonlinear. By contemplating these oppositional pairs as dyads, one begins to see just how reality is constructed; more pointedly, one begins to see why the world is the way that it is.

Pondering reality brings one to the edge of current conscious understanding and it chomps at the bit for whatever is next, if there is. An articulated journey into one’s construction of reality begins to fashion together a coherent framework, even if one is aware that the way they think effects it. Getting an accurate read on reality is not unlike Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, where one can only get a partial measurement of a quantum system. If you accurately measure position, you cannot accurately measure velocity and vice versa. One cannot accurately ponder reality without affecting one or more variables; this may be frustrating to some, but my admonition is to consider why that is frustrating. By questioning the processes by which you react and respond to this expression of life, you come to understand this whole thing just a little bit better.

Life, reality, is an infinitely variating construct. Not unlike the descriptions of God within religious groups, life is both infinitely complex and infinitely simple. Thus, it can and will mutate. Its derivations can be mutated; they should be mutated. People should play with the expression of life as whimsically as sport or art; its meant to be stretched and contracted, probed and scrutinized. However, one should not consider it abstract or absolute; it is a fractal, a fractional dimension, which perfectly occupies both. It becomes self-evident then collapses into pure theory only to reemerge at some other point as concrete again.

Let your reality be free.

bryce

Chaos: What Is Reality?

I do not treat this blog as an academic source nor do I claim it to be rigorous in an academic sense; however, I do intend for it to be intellectually rigorous by the virtue of the content discussed.

The beginning of understanding is to create the frameworks to attract understanding.

As von Foerster pointed out decades ago, cognition can be thought of as a computation of computations. Although the layman may deeply contemplate ‘what’ he thinks an advanced method of introspection to consider ‘how’ one thinks and to subsequently realize that ‘thinking’ is actually ‘thinking about thinking’. This recursion is a bit difficult to understand outright, but with heavy consideration it eventually begins to make sense.

Another way of explaining it is as a dialectical process between ‘how’ and ‘what’. Its easy to understand that how you think about something sets up what you come to think. If someone asks you how to win a basketball game and your answer is “to score more points”, then you will probably approach the game of basketball as an offensive minded coach or player. The recursion begins when you consider that an offensive minded player feels that he must score more points to win a game. Now the ‘what’, being offensive minded, gives way to the ‘how’, scoring more points. If that player begins to achieve success through this process, he will go on to create a philosophy or way of thinking that continually uses these two premises as complements.

When discussing what constitutes reality responses both sophisticated and naive abound endlessly. As someone with more of a penchant for the social sciences I tend to set up a game theoretical perspective which places myself as an observer on a higher level. Here’s why. The discussion of reality is, in my opinion, not unlike the propositions in absurdism: to find a meaning in life is pointless given the sheer preponderance of information.

To find a rational answer is not a matter of objective possibility, but rather one of current human possibility; humans cannot transcend this invisible boundary of subjectivity and are thus relegated to the parameters of their own subjectively experienced realities.

Ergo, I tend to study “what is reality” by studying what others perceive to be reality, rendering myself a higher order player in any game theoretical system. I am observing the observations of others, creating a concurrent recursion which hopes to entangle the recursions intrinsic to other’s thought processes.

My issue with humans are that we are driven by processes that we are aware of and processes that we are not aware of. Even the most rigorous logician or theoretician is driven by anomalous processes deep within his or her own psyche; we come together to create a larger body of knowledge through such “wisdom of the crowd” processes as peer-reviews and research symposiums, but time and time again history has shown us that we can still be wrong. We are still governed by a myriad of social, developmental, and unknown factors which cause us to think in particular recursive patterns. 60 years ago we believed that neurons were coded one for one with sensory neurons leading to some higher-ordered grandmother neuron. This was widely accepted as fact until it was discovered that there were simply not enough neurons to accept this theory.

Much of our cognition is intuitional; we cannot fully explain through available linguistic methods what we truly believe, yet, we act out our lives according to these beliefs. Arbitrary worlds become institutional opposites as the principles of intuitional thought come against empirical thought and human cognition rushes to fulfill the intrigues of that system. To make matters even more complicated, we are all partially straddling various worlds or institutions; we believe in the rigor or academic pursuit, yet, cling to the notions of a Supreme Being. We cannot fully enumerate why we believe in soul mates; however, we stick close to our beliefs in constitutional processes.

Just a few examples.

When you break down and talk to individuals their beliefs are so real to them; their considerations about reality are so real to them. Even if they do acknowledge some uncertain about the veracity of their opinions, there is always the facile, “thats just the way I see things” clause; a statement that is anathema to the pursuit of empirical truth.

In my higher ordered vantage point, I try my hardest to hold on to as many views about reality as possible. I do not place primacy on intuitional or empirical methods because both are equally necessary. This creates considerable dissonance, obviously, and this dissonance has driven me to cognitive places that I can only precariously explain. Even when I believe that I am on to something it only takes a brief conversation or a cursory experiment to render a theory only partially effective.

It seems to me that life is much like the strange attractors discovered by mathematician Edward Lorenz discussed in chaos theory. The “butterfly effect” describes a nonlinear dynamical system which never fully repeats itself; this effect looks graphically like the wings of a butterfly. Life is neither deterministic nor is it indeterministic, but is simply a confluence of both. However, the overwhelmingly complicated aspect of it is that society, the social construct of reality, is created, legitimized, and maintained by billions of humans which are in and of themselves nonlinear beings.

Much of the world’s confusion is displayed by simply comparing two humans. Only partial agreements, partial agreements, ambiguous goals, many biases, salient and hidden motivators… The list goes on.

As all of us work through our individual confusion (creating “real-life” effects in the process), we set up the emergent structures of the societies around us. Reality becomes a partially natural, partially human superstructure with infinite malleability and infinite dimension, but an individual only has minimal control over that at any given moment (unless they move socially upward and garner more power).

Thus, reality is a self-evident, self-sustaining, self-motivating “program” of sorts; its basic rules are constituted by certain physical and biological probabilities and any higher ordered rules are arbitrations put forth by any being able to contemplate himself or herself (cognition = computation of computations).

This doesn’t seem applicable to everyday reality at first and thats exactly my point. Everyday reality is the confluence of everyone’s individualized, subjective understanding of “reality’, to break those rules requires an ingenuity and a persistence that requires a particular kind of mental recursion to do. One must deconstruct their notion of what is and isn’t in order to reconstruct what they would like it to be. Certain structures of society are simply insurmountable, others are treacherous due to the social rules around them, but, this illuminates not cosmic mandates or supernatural commandments, but simply the continued interaction of human, biological, and physical factors.

When I stand back at this higher-ordered game theoretical perspective, this whole process of life is a veritable madhouse of cognition. He thinks this and she thinks that; I feel that this and they feel that that. The opportunity to create any study is available to any conscious being at any moment and the opportunity to create any meaning about anything is also made available.

bryce

The Secret: Accessing the Hyperreal

Cruising at about 30 miles per hour on a metal contraption high above Northwestern Long Beach, a highly theoretical and amorphous conversation ensues between two young philosophers. The subject, cognition and super-cognition in multivariable hyperspace, draws both speakers’ deepest thoughts about discrete creation of existence, how individuals become authors and coauthors of what we have come to term as life. The setting is unusual, both men draw curious stares from other passengers as the enthralling discourse weaves and tumbles through all manner of hypothetical thought. All the while, the young thinkers trek on, hoping to tap a mysterious power, known only to few humans throughout recorded history.

The last 3 months of my life have been absolutely surreal; no other word can really describe it. Surreality is not good or bad, it is indeed both, an admixture that feels like one is living in an extremely vivid dream. In this timeframe, my failures have led to threats of lawsuits, many an uneasy email/text message exchange, and other moments of unwavering discomfort. My successes have led to great nights on the town with friends, extraordinary progress as a business owner & consultant, and opportunities that are so tantalizing I sometimes forget that only months ago I was operating on a dollar and a dream (minus the dollar).

What changed? My prayer life.

I don’t pray like a traditional Christian; I am not a traditional Christian. I meditate on deep considerations of the Universe, I contemplate a Creator who could make that all possible. I ponder the true makeup of my religion’s interdimensional liaison, the man we have come to call Christ. When I open my lips to make praise or utter supplication, I do it from a place of extreme humility, and extreme non-humanity. My foundation is not to make utterance to Christ as a man, but as a spirit who has also has a physical emanation.

Extant expression is ubiquitous in this world, as all of us are alive. Being alive, being able to express life, is comprised of several factors that can be lumped into two arenas that I have spent many blog posts enumerating: linearity and nonlinearity. Linearity is an agreement between two or more people in an effort to produce predictable outcomes, whereas nonlinearity is the individualized state of man which produces no predictable or only partially predictable results. Most of the physical realm, what we have come to term as reality, are attempts at creating linearity. We as individuals in larger social structures must come to agree with one another in order to coexist harmoniously; yet, the components of those linear attempts are nonlinear bodies, humans, whose overly complex nature creates the ambiguous, ever-changing world that we are all doing our best to navigate.

As my business partner and I engaged each other in one of our philosophical discourses, the effects of my meditative practices became readily apparent. We, two nonlinear beings, began experiencing each other from a true platform of expression, a place where no agreement was necessary because it superseded the very consciousnesses that perceive and analyze information. Thus, our nonlinearity simply melted into this higher ordered thought and we became aligned with what I can only call energies that occurred in this exotic place.

Linearity is only as pure, strong, or capable as the nonlinear components that comprise it’s ability to construct.

Where my friend and I got to needed no construction, its pillars were more mathematically perfect than the greatest Palladian structures and its ground was fertile for true extant thought.

I had been entering — perhaps a better word would be foraying — into this world, what I call hyperreality, more and more as of recent. I can only describe it as being a place of intense focus, where the very world around you seems converge on a single point, a potent thought, that permeates one’s entire being. With a thought that potent, the conscious and subconscious, mind and spirit, become attuned and a single person can create a multo-entity agreement within themselves.

Fuck.

Thats some heavy stuff, no?

See, the world is consumed with figuring out the “secrets” and “shortcuts” to this and that. We want to know what is the “secret” to success, what is the “fastest way” to wealth, and what is the “secret” to happiness. We are looking to creating a linear system which has no flaws! That, unfortunately, is impossible; remember, a linear agreement is only as effective or good as the nonlinear components agreeing upon it and since no human is perfect in his physical or even conscious expression, any linearity we create will be inexorably flawed. The secondary reason that no “system” can be created, no secret uttered, no shortcut fabricated, is because as nonlinear beings interacting with one another, there are infinity plus infinity variables interacting at any given moment, which leads to more and more unpredictable outcomes, the very essence of nonlinearity. In other words, what works for you may not work for me, and vice versa. There can be no cohesive, universal, “secret” process or application.

THERE IS NO SECRET

So how, then, does one create the necessary traction to accomplish anything? How do we “win” at this game called life.

While there is no secret, there is a way that one can maximize their time here on this physical plane. Creating an agreement with one’s self. This was the lesson that was revealed to me by my friend during our conversation. Most of us are at war with ourselves; our mind wants on thing, our heart wants another, and our spirit is all but muted during a typical day. Reality, or at least our perception of what is occurring around us, poses the greatest threat to success. Reality is mundane and its prosaicness becomes rarely sensed as being important or of any particular value. Reality will drive you quickly into mediocrity as it is comprised as an average of linearities around you. Therefore, reality is blah. It comes and goes. Its unpredictable, yet you are taught from birth strategies to mitigate risk and capitalize on opportunity. Go to college, get a job, get married, pay your bills by working hard.

All of those taken become the very basis for losing at life.

Humans are unique. We are amalgams of spirit and flesh. How is it that we think we can create systems and all thrive within them? How is it that we think we can all agree and all will flourish? How is it that we make incongruous projections about the future without understanding what is currently going on or even worse, how humans tends to react to things?

College, marriage, working hard are not inherently wrong nor are they inherently right, is it up to the person to agree mentally, spiritually, and physically as to whether they are right for them!

How does one discern what is right or wrong? When one actively seeks out the supermundane, the ‘higher realm’, they are in fact setting themselves up for alignment. There is no systematic way to “getting there”, as every person will find themselves traversing a slightly different road to this manner of enlightenment. My tip is to meditate by sitting in absolute silence while thinking one thought. That thought can be anything from considering the magnitude of the universe to pondering that you yourself are a universe. The depth and complexity of your inner world is a wellspring of fuel for enlightenment.

As you ponder the implicit and explicit complexities of the universe(s), you will naturally begin to see yourself as a citizen of all known and unknown realities, infinitely large and infinitesimally small; you will be a formless, dimensionless being which has a subordinated expression in the physical world. You will see the unreality of the physical world and be drawn to the pervasive “real” framework of the invisible dimensions. This will create the beginnings of “inner linearity”.

Inner agreement.

Inner peace.

One might say, “bryce, are you not laying out a secret? What you’re proposing, is this not a system of thought that leads to predictable results?” I have no response to that because to validate or invalidate that statement would be to breathe life into that belief. Accessing the hyperreal has one frustrating aspect to it, the hyperreal has no concept of time. Some people will die before they experience a full immersion. Some will never make it. Some will try to make it work so that they can pay a bill on Tuesday and will cast it down as too imprecise, too ineffectual if that bill is not paid. Hyperreality is not about creating a system to win in a consciously perceived world, but instead having the consciously perceived world be subordinated to the hyperreal. Its about discovering true dimensionless thought, not turning that dimensionless thought into profit. The profits will come, but how those profits will manifest physically is not for me to say.

You will begin seeing this world with different eyes, my friend. Eyes that actually see, not passively view. No longer will it be “go to college to be successful”, but you will understand that college is a cultural agreement and with it comes rewards, but those rewards are not automatic as the extent of this agreement cannot accommodate supply and demand nor the intrinsic confusion of 18-22 year olds. College is set up as a catapult into professionalism, yet professionalism is a linear agreement with a series of components. These types of greater understandings increase the value of your time and efforts in college or in the work force; they increase your influence over your surroundings and the people in it.

It opens the universe to you and opens you to the universe.

Meditation 7

A man starves by the hands of his obstinate ambition,
He is parched by cleaving to his dreams,
For the goal of the Whole is quiet assimilation,
Guesswork perpetuated by undulating aggregation.

How honorable is culture,
In its complication,
Elation is made through affirmation of beliefs,
Ideas borne on wings of agreement.

Discord is sowed steadily,
For the basis of culture is instability,
A man’s ability to pinpoint what needs fixing,
The quickening of pulse met by the sickening blow of reality,

Man wants no thing to change lest he personally profit,
So the Prophet aloft on revelatory prognostication,
Is decried as bohemian scoundrel,
His counsel avoided, his work all but voided.

A man starves by the work of his own hands,
He fights against false evidences appearing real,
Yet, his imaginations are no less illusory,
He is bound to perpetuate broken cycles,

How delightful, the non linearity of earthy man,
He can feast as an impotent or perish as a visionary,
In both he endures unholy torment,
The foment of man’s delusion.

You Too, Can Be Awesome

I recently made the decision that graduate school — business school — is the next major hurdle for me. Having scaled the Kilimanjaro that is private undergraduate schooling and currently scaling the Everest that is entrepreneurship, I am ready to attack the Mount Whitney that is B-School. Given that I am a bit of an elitist and a perennial perfectionist, I’ve set my sights on Harvard and its 10% acceptance rate.

Yippee.

However, I am rather stress-free while thinking about this Herculean task, not because I am a wunderkind but because I tend to look at life much, much, much differently than the average person.

There is nothing that I want to do that I cannot. As in there is nothing on this planet that I cannot accomplish once I set my mind to it. Peering at the world from the inside out, I am a sheer force of nature and I have every intention of completing all of my dream tasks. Ivy League business school included.

Why do I have such dauntless confidence?

Is it because I was born this way? Fuck no.

I was a scrawny (still kinda am) kid with nappy hair and big ass glasses. I didn’t think I was shit except for the second or third name on a list that was organized in alphabetical order.

What changed was my senior year in high school. I literally did everything I wanted to do and I never looked back. I chose one school: Loyola Marymount. Got accepted. I chose one girl: started dating her. The following summer I needed a new car and a bunch of other things: secured them. I needed a new job: got hired during the interview. The following summer I wanted to play college ball without having touched an organized game since middle school: got a scholarship to play D2 ball.

I willed my way through college tuition fiascos. I willed my way through a major a hated. I willed my way into the seed money I needed to start my first business. When my car broke down 2 months before graduation I walked 3 miles to and 3 miles home from school everyday. I crossed the graduation stage and came into my first high net worth client. I willed my way into a Marina Del Rey penthouse. I willed my way into my contract with the Long Beach Unified school district. I concocted creative strategies to get myself and my business partner in front of C-Suite executives. I willed myself through 12 months of absolute nightmare professional and personal circumstances. And I’m willing myself through the process of picking up the pieces…

Is all of this because I’m just an awesome person? Fuck no.

I see my life like a movie. Not any old kind of move. Fast and the Furious. Rambo. James Bond. Unrealistic suspense and action movies. I look at life as one enormous stage through which one has a million and one chances to prove themselves and do over until the moment they pass on to the next world. I live and I live very fucking hard. Pure, unbridled, relentless living.

At the end of the day, the world is what you make of it. Cliche saying if there ever was one. But I sincerely pose this statement as a mantra for you to live be. Your life is what you make of it. If you choose to exist on the existential sidelines, watching the Mark Zuckerberg’s of the world succeed, saying, “man I wish I had a mind like his”, you are doing yourself a great, great disservice. If you are afraid of failing to the point of paralysis, you are doing yourself a great disservice.

Life is about living, my friends. Living abundantly. Not everyone is going to go to Harvard. Not everyone is going to build a billion dollar company. Hell I have fantasies that I know will probably never come true but they are because I have my priorities lying elsewhere.

When you start to really put your mind to this crazy little hooker we call living, you’ll be surprised how much you can achieve. How “elite” you can be. There are so many “elite” posts in the world, you are bound to become one of few at something. So go ahead, put on your black tuxedo or your little black dress and prepare to zip line out a 44th floor window on some James Bond 007 tip.

bryce

Reality, Be True

It’s really real,
It’s really happening — no it’s not.
It’s really important,
It risks a shattering — no it doesn’t.
Flattering how time & space
Perceived through the eyes of dual natured creatures,
Gives rise to absolute features,
Yet absolution is as fleeting as the complexity it tries to unravel,
How unnatural the illusion of “real”.
Real is what you make of it,
Illusion for the sake of it.
Fulfillment what you take from it.