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.

Reimagining the Human Condition

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

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

Self

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you still with me? I certainly hope so.

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

bryce

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

Science and Religion

“All is vanity.” Ecclesiastes 1:2

Among my few and far between heroes David Bohm has stood apart. I first stumbled on his literature late last year and since then I have found myself pouring over his work. A physicist by trade and a philosopher by proxy, his views of holism and social evolution never cease to be an inspiration for me.

In the three years since I graduated my life has been obscenely philosophically based and rightfully so: philosophy merely requires an inquisitive mind; the particular details of any craft can be grafted in via formal education at a later point. My flavor of philosophy has somewhat undulated, but for the most part I have stuck with a small set of notions, while spending the rest of my time probing for what I could actually believe.

It has been in these moments of suspension, that is, the suspension of all other notions, that I have come to understand the world in my present state; the discipline it takes to forego conclusions comes with due reward: glimpses of universal understanding. Granted, my definition of understanding may differ than the traditional sense, I tend to speak more of abstractions than concrete truths, but nevertheless, these understandings are nascent. When one exercises a will to stop imposing their will on everything, one finds a certain pervasive brand of understanding.

Scientists and religious figures are one and the same to me and this is because science and religion are mediums by which humans attempt to explain their worlds and the worlds around them. Now, of course, the methods they employ in this excursion for understanding are dramatically different, a point I will address in a moment, but for now I wish to offer a unique tableau; one which supports a holistic world view not unlike Bohm’s.

Without trudging into the technicals of brain function or launching into a monologue about philosophy of mind, let me take a moment to discuss how a human apprehends reality. Science has painstakingly shown that the human brain does not “see” “reality” as it is. Our eyes are only tuned to a portion of the light spectrum, our ears are only tuned to certain frequencies, and we can only feel so many vibrations. The brain and its peripheral sensory system can only process so much information. The mitigating factor in this process in has been Evolution itself; most of what we are and what we sense was developed into us to achieve maximum survivability, ala Darwinian natural selection. Our brain is the product of evolution. Therefore, as we attempt to ascertain what is “real” and what isn’t, it is important that we bear in mind that we do not possess all the apparatuses necessary to achieve that end.

Science has embraced that, religion has turned to wielding disproportionate power in the name of gossamer progress.

However, science is not free from the taint of human fallibility; we are constantly having to go back and update what our antecedents proffered as concrete truth. Even in a hard science like physics we have gone from Newtonian rigidity, to Einsteinian relativity, to quantum uncertainty, and we are bound to discover even more. Science as a concept is not in the business of proving anything, especially not a subjective “truth,” although you would be hard-pressed to convince certain groups of its practitioners that this was so.

The tableau, the elegant scene, I am attempting to paint is one through the lens of the human condition. David Bohm and I share a belief that there is an intrinsic wholeness in all things, man and nature, yet, many have become disillusioned to this notion through quotidian circumstance. Our day to day lives, our attention focused on our preferred time intervals, and our evolutionary ability to recognize and respond to changes and differences have upheld these arbitrarily forged barriers between concepts. It is easier to see the pursuits of empirics and spirits as fundamentally different, not the trickier notion that they are merely domain-specific.

Man, through this evolutionarily received apparatus, is relegated to see the universe through his humanness. This humanness is presently inescapable. Science with its materialists and reductionists cannot escape it and religion with this faithful zealots and prayerful wishes cannot either. They wish for the same thing, yet, given the focus on their domain differences and the proclivity of man to hold his ground for the fear of losing his sense of self, we persist as slaves to our homo designation.

I am the consummate scientist; I am enraptured by what I can see, feel, and touch. However, I am also a deep spiritual adherent; I am inspired by what I can intuit, sense, and reflect in my moments of silence. While the components of my body may give rise to this thing known as sentience, my sentience is given permissible autonomy to inquire about additional ways of being. Though I is bound by the very materials I am constructed by, I am given infinite possibility by the quantum nature of my cognition. I am the result of superimposed brain states, not the automata that so many hardliners wish to see. I do not have to overly spiritualize or overly quantize or I can choose to spiritualize or overly quantize, the results will be much the same.

A sprawling, vibrant panoply of life. A horn of wealth that is free for anyone willing to consider without subsequent judgment.

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

Prism

There exists many contradictions when working one’s way through the experience of consciousness as a human. Complexity of thought is further compounded when one attempts to reconcile the differences between individuals and individual experience; it is natural to make generalizations as a heuristic, yet this becomes untenable as one understands the myriad of inconsistencies between people. What arises is a plastic understanding of the mind and a need for a new model, one that can bring together these vast, sometimes dissociative concepts into some cogent framework.

The mind is a prism.

In optics a prism is a medium, usually a piece of glass, which when light travels through it is bent through a process known as refraction. White light passes through one side and a rainbow emerges from the other. The mind operates much the same way.

In my school of thought, there exist some persistent truth, a singular concept that is refracted as it passes through the mind of an individual. The configuration of its component bands are determined by the dimensions of the mind it has passed through; thus, a person’s mind “reflects” its version of reality per those dimensions. What appears as the “rainbow” is not truth, but reality as that person has come to view it.

Many times I struggle to explain these abstruse concepts of real and unreal because they fundamentally exist on the fringe of consciousness. We are all aware that life is somehow virtual, but the persistent delusions of reality consistently pull us back to ration and reason, which are tenably regarded as truth. This truth becomes self evident and our mind-prism denies the theoretical “white light” and associates with its own rainbow.

Life is very simple, humans are complex.

We have been given the gift of abstract reasoning and creativity, which means from birth we are building an interactive explanation of what the world is. We will then contend that our understanding of that world is fundamentally real, drawing upon the endless mental resources, or schemata, which emerge from our development. Schemata are patterns of thought through which we process information; the more we think in a particular way, the stronger that schema becomes. As we identify with that pattern it becomes more and more real and our ability to reason is subjugated to that process.

Many people are aware of this; we all understand that we have cognitive biases. The complexity emerges when one views their mind in contrast to someone else. Just as the commands on a computer must be written in a larger computational “language”, the commands on thought should be more or less universal. But they are not. Quite the contrary, we are like the citizens trying to build the Tower of Babel; our language is not consistent and our thoughts are highly individualized with very few persistent commonalities and even less deeper associations.

In other words, no two versions of reality, no two mind-prisms, are the same. But lets make this even deeper: no two mind prisms are even remotely the same.

Again, the profundity of these statements is for the most part lost in the ubiquity of this reality. We all know that two people are fundamentally different, however, the problem arises in how we choose to reconcile those interpretations. This is why I contend that it is not what we think that has such gravity on reality, but how we think about it.

If we have fundamentally different ways of viewing this experience on consciousness, how can we ever expect to have a society that exists in harmony? If our ways of thinking are subjective, can we actually create an objectivity that is meaningful? That’s one set of questions. However these aren’t questions that render and useful answers to me, these are still derivatives that lead to quarrelsome debates and interpretations ad infinitum.

Everything that is pervades out of one singular concept which is virtually inaccessible via standard cognition. I hold on to the ideal that all humans exist as complex systems of probability, simultaneously in all possible outcomes, which become one or another observable “reality” through the isolation of the strongest set of emotional or mental factors, Quantum Superposition. In laymen’s terms, people are simultaneously happy, sad, strong, weak, angry, amenable — all oppositional pairs — and it isn’t until some isolating experience occurs that some “mood” or “reality” comes forth.

The body with all of its sensory and extrasensory faculties, is the computer through which we experience life. As it develops, we develop. However, the self, the seat of consciousness, the soul — whatever you choose to call it — exists separate from this body, although few come to realize this. In my philosophy, the soul is comprised of the conscious and the heart, both of which are directly affected by the nascent developments from the gross, physical body. Thus, people come to identify with their physical expressions of reality and the soul is rendered a ward to the grossness. The mind-prism now exists in supreme turbidity, clouded by the virtual world appearing as reality. No longer do they see themselves as existing in all possible realities, as quantum superposition posits, but relegated to the whims of this physical delusion.

Cognition is then diminished to the perceived limits a person’s reality, thus subjection overwhelms the hard-to-reach tendrils of objectivity and the individuals perceptions are stunted.

This is why I believe our world is in the condition that it is in. Communication, the hallowed process of interaction, is seen as a positive, yet, communication is an eventuality of the cognitive evolutionary process. It is only as strong as the species using it. Thus, communication has its fair share inconsistencies and pitfalls as it mimics the shortcomings of its progenitor, human thought.

I have touched on many esoteric concepts in this post, as I believe much of the ancient arcana understood these principles long before modern science caught up. For those that read this blog consistently, I do not subscribe completely to science or spirituality as I believe that both are marred by the same biases and systematic errors that confound humanity; after all they have both been passed down through human thought and human communication. Science attempts to shed flaw through the rules of empiricism and spirituality attempts to shed flaw through the rules of divinity, yet both, when taken as human experiences are still subjected to the rules of human error.

I expend much energy when I write posts like these and I am painfully aware that I myself am a offender using the the same cognitive biases, the same limited schemata, the same subjective mind-prisms that I try to expose. I can only pray that my willingness to transcend the limits of standard thought can place me on some higher experiential dimension, a strange proposition, I’m aware.

I hope to reconcile more and more these intractable contradictions and complex experiences.

bryce

What Does It Mean To Be Human?

Several weeks ago, while on site at one of the high schools I teach where I hold a contract, I began asking students in the career center a question that stopped most of them in their tracks. The looks of vexation were entertaining, but given the nature of the question also supremely disconcerting. The question, “what does it mean to be a human”, on the surface seems like it should be a very straightforward inquiry, but as the faces contorted in abstract contemplation, it was clear that this was anything but the truth.

At school, everyone understands what it means to be a student, therefore, rules, guidelines, and expectations can be laid out accordingly. A student is someone who attends an institution for the sake of learning.

At the office, people’s job are clearly (for the most part) understood so that, again, rules, guidelines, and expectations can be established and everyone in that environment can exist more or less in harmony.

However, when the lens is zoomed out all the way to achieve a macro view of being human, these clear delineations blur indefinitely and discourse on the topic breaks off into abstractions.

It seems to me that much of the drama in the world boils down to this problem, people have no earthly idea of what it means to be human. They can stab in the dark at it, sew together some tenuous struggle-logic, or hit you with one of those “man, you know what I mean” statements, but the generation of a cohesive statement about the nature of being really falls outside of most people’s thought cycles.

So what then? Are we doomed to a world of semi-conscious beings whose endless diversity and vapid sense of “hereness” fundamentally oppose any semblance of harmony? Hardly.

When one continues to toggle the objective lens further and further back, a curious trend does begin to form. I heard this morning a sound byte by Sheryl Sanberg, Facebook’s COO, about how society should encourage more women to be in leadership roles and how calling young girls ‘bossy’ was unacceptable. I then turned to the TV where pundits were discussing, with varying levels of exuberance, how wage inequality was monstrous and corporations should be held more responsible. I turned to my phone, accessed my Twitter feed and scrolled through articles upon articles about various topics: economic crises, opportunities in emerging markets, and what celebrity was what. On Facebook, my friends all explaining various feelings and convictions in their lives, posting ups and downs. Then the mysterious friend who never posts anything, pops up out of virtual obscurity to be warmly embraced by all of those who missed their presence.

On my various professional contracts, I plot and scheme how to get my initiatives to take root and produce profits. I engage and I cajole, hoping that this next meeting, this next client, will be something that puts zeros after integers in my bank account.

At home, I field a variety of personalities and conflicts, constantly making sure that the various pieces of my life don’t bleed over and create any additional or unnecessary conflict.

I stress over what I stress over, believe wholeheartedly in what I believe in, and beg repentance for any errors I’ve committed.

And thats when it hit me, a certain perspicuity washed over me…

Being human is about creating meaning.

This higher ordered mind we’ve been blessed with, all of our religions, philosophies, and contemplations about the cosmos outer and inner; all of our sciences, hard and soft, from medicine and physics to psychology and sociology; all of our creative expressions, music, visual art, and movements of our bodies; every single conviction, belief, epiphany, propensity, penchant, habit, addiction, preferences…

This is why we as a species combat each other so. Being human is about the ability to conceive, monitor, and adjust YOUR own meaning. This puts the microscope lens so far back that most individuals can barely even conceptualize it, instead sticking to more comfortable arenas such as religious or ethical stipulations. But those are encapsulated in a person’s ability to create meaning. If you are intensely pious, the meaning you have created is one steeped in your conception of God and His relation to you. Through all of the processes that brought you to this moment, your development, your genetic information, your experiences, you have arrived at a meaning that means the world to you…

But does not mean a damn thing to anyone else.

Man will never be unified, except through unnatural circumstances. Man can only work to be in harmony with those around him, but understanding that although his created meaning is of the utmost importance to his own person, it is a breathe in the wind of the collective organism around him.

Only from there can a man ever truly be happy, for happiness is having your created meaning be in harmony with all of the created meanings around you. My business partner puts it this way, happiness is expressing yourself authentically, while remaining in harmony with your environment.

Most folks are unhappy because they cannot express themselves harmonically and I’d wager to say that the reason is because they don’t understand how to be human. They have not created their own meaning of life, instead they are tossed back and forth in the winds of social normalcy, conformism, or some developmental anomaly they have never faced.

When one lets go of the corrosive propensities to see things only through themselves, the meanings they begin to create fall closer and closer to the Truth of objectivity. Unhappy people are those whose minds have atrophied (or never grown in the first place), who are solely concerned about the way they feel or experience life. Thus, the ignoble way to view being a human is through the self: a egotistic romp through a cosmos fashioned by unseen forces. This complete obsequence to subjective factors perfectly captures why our world is constantly at arms with one another. We cannot create any semblance of peace when any detraction from our view whats what burgeons in plain sight.

I see disheartening things everyday, think disheartening things myself, and I can’t help but chuckle at man’s inability to zoom back out to this ability to create one’s own meaning.

To be a human is to be a free moral agent capable of fashion his own view of the world; BUT, to create a flourishing society we must each set our minds on the discovery of those things that lie outside the self. We must seek out disappointment (success through failure) and interact with people who are absolutely different from us. One of the worst things that can happen to a young person is them finding success early; those early victories delude them into believing their way is “right”. When one seeks out failure through experimentation they open themselves to all new ways of viewing the world, pushing them closer and closer to the supreme truths that pervade outside of our limited consciousnesses.

bryce

Sheep and Wolves

Why don’t sheep ever know that they are sheep?

You and I can clearly identify other people we believe are sheep; they are as obvious to us as night is from the day. They believe the things they see on TV; they religiously listen to the radio; relentlessly sucking up all the things they hear from their friends and neighbors.

One of my ex-girlfriends used to call them ‘drones’ & ‘droids’…

But there’s an oddity about all of this ‘identification’: when one calls another a sheep or follower, they are indirectly stating that they themselves are not cut from the same cloth; yet, there is undoubtedly someone who considers them exactly that.

A sheep. A follower. A brainless cog in a societal machine.

Now, I am consumed with winning, hence why I started a business in strategy; I pour over Sun Tzu and Clausewitz and drive to understand the labyrinthine mind that was Napoleon’s. As such, I have charged myself with the task of understanding the world to best of human abilities for the sake of taking that knowledge to battle. Therefore, these peculiarities in human interaction are paramount to me; they supply many channels for a strategist to exploit, while simultaneously requiring that he or she systematically review themselves to see if they are falling prey to these pervasive existential maladies.

Perspective is preceded by vantage point.

I talk a lot about perception, perspective, and how those two affect the complexity of individual and aggregate human behavior; however, I have in recent weeks began much of my meditation not on perspective, but on its progenitor, vantage. Vantage is the literal AND mental ‘location’ where we process information. Vantage precedes perspective because a person tends to perceive the world based on their surroundings. In other words, the environment in which a person is processing sensory data have a direct effect on their subsequent conclusions and related actions.

The greatest salesmen understand this and successful marketing is literally about infiltrating the sanctum sanctora of our cognitive faculties, so that we take their brands and products to all vantage points. If we are bombarded by certain images then they consume us and our vantage points are skewed ever so slightly. Back in the ’50s, salesmen would walk up to your door for the purpose of “getting their foot in the door”. Under any other circumstances, a woman would not let a stranger, a strange man at that, into her household. Yet, under the aegis of “conducting business”, the vantage points changed, strangers were welcomed in and commerce as we knew it changed yet again.

Vantage is the fulcrum on which judgments are passed; identical information will provide divergent results in different environments

If the situation happens in a church, a person will say that another is being “indoctrinated” by the fallacies of organized religion. Perhaps the conversation is politics, which an individual with a penchant for conspiracy calls a conventional citizen a ‘sheep’ because he or she still believes that America is bipartisan. Perhaps you get called a sheep by an entrepreneur because you are fully engaged in the corporate “rat race”. In all of these situations, the locale changed, providing different basis points (vantages) for one observer to view something. The tricky part is that we are all engaged in many, many locations in our lifetimes, some of them overlapping in the process. The feelings associated with each of these is different, so even if the basic information remains the same, the perception of the observer changes. As the cognitive environment, a derivative of a physical or social environment, changes, so often does the responses from an observer..

Information readily available to the mind is so often related to particular sensory phenomena: think about how the scent of a particular cologne makes you think of a ex-flame or how the sound of police sirens remind you of the neighborhood you grew up in; these simple examples provide the basic framework for how we view and interpret the world.

As these simple constructs grow and evolve into complex social metropolises, the linear agreements also grow and evolve, providing a cacophony of different vantage points for humans to utilize. In a later blog, I will break down the differences between linear agreements with fixed, variable, and hybrid being the main variations, but in essence, these variations create extremely complex cognitive systems which are presented as bias, hypocrisy, bigotry, and prejudice, all of which are forms of ignorance…

So the question remains, why doesn’t a sheep realize that it is a sheep?

Because, the information that we use to weigh the decisions of the others, the vantage points that we are viewing from are not the same that we use to understand our own. The classic ‘ignorant’ person is one that does not realize that he is identical to the subject of his prejudice (“look at the teapot calling the kettle black”). The average person understands, intimately might I add, the cascade of logic they employ for their own purposes, yet they do not have a clue about the logic used by others. Thus, the triggers unique to one person in a particular environment are not identical to another, allowing them to view an external entity as X without seeing that they are just as much as X as the former.

The fact of the matter is that reality is best described as a series of extraordinarily complex best guesses, with each contributor’s guess coming from their discreet analysis of vantage and subsequent perceptive processes. As we are all ensconced in this deeply ambiguous guessing game, the differences between yours and another’s decisions create friction and this friction is the root of all judgment (especially judgments out of ignorance).

Every single holy tradition states that the easiest path to God or any elevated consciousness is to remove themselves from masses of people. Why? Because no longer are you subjected to the abject guesswork of any particular community; your senses become attuned to the frequencies of God, nature, or whatever connection to the universe you are trying to forge.

I, unfortunately, can not live an ascetic’s life at this time; it is implausible and impractical for where I find myself at this stage of my life. So how do I defeat this natural tendency to be blind to one’s own circumstances, how can I find a vantage which exposes myself to my own biased conscious? How can I definitely guard myself against the eventual onslaught of ill will that labels me this way or that? How can I win in an argument of ambivalent information?

How can I stave off abject ignorance in the form of hypocrisy or bias?

One achieves this by carefully combing through every single thought they have, running their decisions and actions through a matrix that stresses objectivity over “wants or wills”, and by constantly locating one’s self in real time. You must know where you are, as opposed to stressing over where you were, where you would like to be, or most destructively, where you think you are. All of the people that I have passed unfriendly judgments against are the victims of their own mental ineptitudes, their focus is not consistent with their expression, they spew confusion in every direction, or they are diminishing ‘reality’ by deluding themselves about the reality of others (hypocrisy).

I am a strong proponent for the notion that ‘reality’ is unreal, however, my assertion is not based in concretion; I am not saying that these things are not occuring as they are, but instead I am illuminating the fluidity of consciousness. Although things are occurring, we are processing them differently, providing kindling for all sorts of emergent potentialities in the next moment. I am, in effect, breaking down the idea that there is one way to do things, one inexorable life-track; I am pushing towards the preternatural by highlighting the ability to alter things instantaneously.

Because things change, especially one’s usage of cognitive vantage points, there are no sheep and we are all sheep to something. Because we can affect massive, instantaneous change in a world in flux, we are no things and all things simultaneously, especially as certain people exert influence over other people and things. All of us are followers of something, effectively rendering all of us sheep ready for existential slaughter.

If you give your life over to any mode of thinking, you are a follower, for few of us have the ability to spontaneously create something we have not learned yet. All thoughts have already been thought, I believe by a Supreme Creator, so any spontaneous knowledge, STILL renders you a slave to causality.

You are a sheep AND you are a wolf, at the same damn time. The best thing for you to do now is figure out when is it best to be either.

Quantum Superposition Principle at its final.

The Present & Its Melodrama

This year has been a “learning experience” on steroids. Perhaps its because I primed my mind for the last few years for immense advances in wisdom but regardless of the particulars, I have been in a torrent of growth, pain, and discomfort. As is evident in many of my recent posts, I have struggled recently with the notions of time, reality, and purpose, finding them all to be illusory and up for interpretation. This past week I may a huge leap in my inquiry into the nature of being.

Humans spend almost all of their time in hypothetical spaces. We are either going over past experiences (not purely hypothetical as they have already, but in the sense that many of us will replay the past through “what if’s”) or we are prepping for some future event. The realization I came to was simple: humans are unable to deal with the present.

Now, that isn’t that profound, many cultural idioms such as “live for today” and “carpe diem” urge us to focus our attentions on the present. We know that we should respect the past and be ready to embrace the future, but since you cannot control either, you must deal with what you can control….

Now.

However, how many of us actually control “the now”? How many of us, at this present moment in time can make a thing happen or not happen? Sure, many of us can make some things happen, but how many of us are in total control? For you especially recalcitrant minds, how does one measure some? A poor man can make food appear on a table, while a powerful man can make an entire country starve….

Many of us are in transition, life has thrown curve balls (that fell outside of our control) and now we are measured by our responses to such events (things we can control). The human condition (what I call the phenomenon of being alive) is about controlling one’s response to occurrences, because the preponderance of occurrences exist outside of our control. The only way for one to have a guiding hand in their future dealings is to curtail their present responses.

Once again none of this is new or profound.

Here’s what I’m driving at: I believe in a Supreme Intelligence, namely God, whose infinite omniscience understands every single variable at play in the present. The human condition exists as a complex probabilistic equation in which we cannot be concerned with concrete events, but the balancing of possibilities. Given the complex nature of a single human being, when looking at an aggregate, or society, one can see how that complexity is multiplied one billion fold. Thus, the convolution of life stops existing along a timeline and instead exists on a spectrum of possibility which can be measured by time.

This may seem like a silly philosophical contrivance to some, but for those that look at life through metaphysical or higher ordered lenses, this becomes a critical tool for understanding their life.

Living in the “now” generally becomes a discourse on fate versus choice, whether or not the decisions we make are governed by superior strata or whether we are forging our own destiny. However, given the fact that people die “before their time”, “defy the odds” and achieve some success, and all manner of existentially anomalous events, there must exist a better way of organizing one’s thoughts about how to live and make decisions.

No human being is in control of anything beyond their own responses to the world around them, we all share authorship of this world alongside the intangible and lesser understood forces that also govern existence. Therefore, to live in the present as a productive, moral free agent one would have to have a clear cut understanding of all the variables at play. There are hundreds of trillions of variables exercising their force on individual human conditions every moment, therefore the present is the quintessence of uncertainty, no matter how much planning or how many precautions one takes. It is this uncertainty, this probability wave, that allows for human evolution, because if there were a deployable system of activities which one could know and hedge against negative occurences, we would all ascend to a higher plane of existence.

Think about where you were three years ago. Fast forward to one year ago. Now fast forward to now. Did you see what I saw when I went through this exercise? Each selected timeframe gave way to many changes as I scrolled to the next timeframe, yet at the time I was making decision, I absolutely thought I was doing things the right way.

That is the human condition, one making the best decisions they can, even though they will inevitably change and evolve into superior choices as one gathers more and more resources.

Thus there is never a point in one’s life when they are “wasting time”. Goal setting is the anemic way we think about growing into the future; we set arbitrary time frames, usually based upon cultural normalities, and we go full bore into that idea until some future significant fork in the road. The notion that one can waste time or waste life is usually attributed to an unhealthy understanding of time, that illusional devil so many of us are attached to. The best goals in life need no time.

They only need understanding.

Understanding organizes time to fit one’s own narrative, it divorces the self from abject connections to “things”, and sets the mind at an equanimous level for all decisions to be made.

That is why strategists are so damn important to society. They see the present as a massive set of data, that may or may not be significant, with a clear purpose in mind, but with ample room for change.

The present is fluid. It is. When the present is organized through the lens of mental (or spiritual) understanding, all decisions made are growth choices: they will be uncertain, they will have many unknowable aspects, yet they will be profitable.

Take home: do not concern yourself with knowing every bit, you will not succeed. Do not conform to social convention which tells you to do this or that, unless you see profitability in it. The present cannot be understood, because it is a probabilistic equation spread across 7 billion people, which equates to supreme uncertainty. The way to reduce risk in such an environment is to only focus on your responses to your condition, take no concern about the “what-if’s”, focus only on what you believe to be your best response to what has occurred. Then, in the same mental track, realize that what you believe may not be correct; be comfortable with potentially being wrong and seeking out a better response. If you are spiritual, pray to God, who understands every passing moment with unmatched acuity. If you are not spiritual, keep your mind free of frivolity, search for clusters of unusual acitivity, and spend a lot of time in silence, thinking introspectively about the nascent possibilities of the world around you.

Listen to the voices that you cannot physically hear, much wisdom is locked away in your subconscious. Take note of the precarious balance between the visible and invisible worlds, take note of the vast interpretive differences from one human to another, and be thankful that little to none of this world is real. It is an immense theater, held together by the minds of its authors, and in this performance you can choose to be entranced by the imaginary drama or you can sidestep the pain and enjoy the entertainment for what it is.

bryce