Musings

Consciousness is a sort of indexing function of the brain, one more or less present in all mammals and, I suspect, most animals. It is the experience of hunger, just as any creature has it: the smell of food, followed by the desire to eat it; but then followed with a reference to other times of hunger,

(12-1-16) Depends on social systems, how many others of your species you routinely react to, how many of them routinely react to you; how you react to their reactions, and they to yours. And the stakes most of all, food and shelter and reproductive success, that make the ability to plan and predict the most available and controllable element of this system a thing to be coveted.

Ascent

Emotion is the conscious experience of the unconscious mind. Just as reason functions to modify instinct, we are self-aware so that we may self-adjust. The ability to interpret one's own emotions is critical to this process, for it is only when feelings have been put into language that they may contribute to ideas, ideas being the dynamic structures we play with until we can describe them in words that make us feel right.

And one of the most important ideas in the history of mankind, that of the self or ego, exists in this relationship to the biological processes of our bodies, for only the basic neurochemical mechanisms of emotion shared by all mammals are necessary for the rest to have emerged naturally from external selection pressures(as I understand it, the useful complexity of our social systems is thought to be the select-for that has shaped the imagination of primates).

Atrophy

There have always been hot-button issues, always been violence and war and injustice and, if our modern age is distinct in any respect, it is in our unprecedented access to news of these events. It is an interesting mental exercise to shift back and forth between responsible and philosophical perspectives on such issues, to get worked up about things like ISIS and Ferguson or to watch the next episode of Fargo. All just stories as far as the viewer is concerned, after all, but one sort brings with their consideration a sense of increased compassion, a strengthened belief in one's relatedness to others, while the other leaves cool these feelings and let's one reflect dispassionately on the relationships artistically portrayed.

Imagine your feelings, after all, if the racially-motivated execution of an unarmed youth, and subsequent orgy of police-militarization, turned out to be a big performance art piece; everyone broke into smiles, the dead came out from hiding with sheepish grins, and they all took a bow. "Wow, you guys really got into it, didn't you?"

Or imagine that the unlikely tale of a psychopath blundering into a dissatisfied insurance salesman, and all the horribly ironic death that ensued, turned out to be true, told you something real about the world you live in. A lone survivor shows up in the news with a face half-full of scar tissue and no arms to correct some minor point of artistic license, and a cold spot forms in your gut as you try to reconcile your feelings of amusement with all the actual pain and suffering that occurred.

It was a common issue in my youth to debate whether it was the news of a violent reality, or violent fiction, that was more to blame for an increasingly violent youth. I begin to suspect the most salient factor to be, rather, the increased specialization of interest in one or the other; stories of true violence build compassion, stories of false violence grant perspective on conflict in general, and if you have enough access to just one sort of story to fill your entertainment quota for the day, the benefits of the other become atrophied in you.

And so we grow divided: the apathetic addicts to the new Fall lineup, and the self-righteous nationalists living off of the 24-hour news cycle. Still just reading stories, all of us, but growing into different people simply for the assumptions with which we read.

I love being human so much <3 <3 <3

Reality

The thing to remember is, nothing you've ever experienced actually tells you how life, the world, or any other generalized construct is. What you have are bits of evidence, chunks of experience which may only be understood by comparing them with, and fitting them into, known theories. The thing we end up calling(inevitably in arrogance) "reality" is that theory which accounts for the greatest number of our experiences.

It is an important place in the human psyche, the concept of reality, and not one I think we are likely to do without any time soon. It's one of those fundamental assumptions, like the self or right/wrong, which underlies many truly beneficial cognitive processes, like society and decision-making. Reality is our cognitive context, and even if it might seem implausible that our limited, socially-specialized species should have any insight into the basic systems of the natural world, it is nevertheless important that we assume *some* coherence to our experiences in order to function in the same. This is what is meant by sanity, distinct from accuracy or correctness(which none of us actually has).

Taken this way, as the union of our experiences with the creative products of others, we have some control over our concept of reality. We can pick and choose, find an explanation that accounts for everything we've seen So Far, and then shop around for others as we encounter new experiences. This control is reduced, however, when the theories we adopt purport to explain *everything* within a given context, as when a person's behavior is summed-up as having an exclusively psychological, genetic, or physical explanation. This tendency of our theories to have lines around them is related, I think, to the tendency of our stories to have beginnings and endings, artifacts not to be found in the natural world; it might also be related to the selective advantage of memes to exclude the possibility of other memes taking hold.

What is *not* accounted for in any "complete" theory of reality, and what I find gives away the lie in any such notion, is the number of times every one of us has been forced to change our minds in our lives. No supposedly objective belief accounts for the fallibility of the believer, just as no depth of knowledge about human bias relieves one of a biased perspective. This is the strength of humility, for it amounts to characterizing our worldviews as subject to revision.

The irony, and indeed the crux of the problem in my view, is that humility, however powerful in processing the development of our cognitive contexts, is very definitely a weakness in social settings. Our identities, our stories, and everything that derives from their characteristics, all depend on presenting them with confidence. We assert to gain mastery of groups and of ourselves, and indeed this is the only way we may do either; but the world beyond humanity does not notice the assertions or beliefs of humans, is unaffected by our confidence or posturing, and so we are faced again with the problem of using abilities formed for social settings to explain non-social phenomena.

The Problem

The thing you have to understand is, well, the Industrial Revolution was a fluke. It centred around the advent of fossil fuel energy, which was not in any way a reflection of the next stage of the evolution of humankind. It's just something we figured out how to do, and ran with in our genius-for-innovation ways.

Jump forward a couple hundred years, and one of those pesky exponential growth equations is being played out in the form of our entertainment media technology. Entertainment media was inevitable for us, you see, because storytelling is the gift of our race. All the power of our diverse cultural expressions derive from the mechanisms by which we affirm our personal identities in society, identities being stories of ourselves. Entertainment media are a natural extension of this, being the same stories about people through which we've learned about ourselves told back and forth for millennia.

But we've reached a tipping point in the last few decades, a sharp upturn in media saturation and availability, spurned by the exponential growth of processor speeds during the same period. There is a generation of young adults right now which has been enculturized with unprecedented intensity, and the results so far have been fairly well captured by any given television newscast reporting on the lines to buy the new whatever. We are the gadget and show generation, the gamers who are inheriting society, and for the most part we just aren't that interested.

Among the consequences of this development, one has recently come to my attention. It seems reasonable to assume that(if there be a flaw, it be here), if the number of young people interested in participating in society(i.e, politically, socially, idk...productively?) were to decrease, but the number of positions of power remained typical for our government, that those seats would be filled disproportionately by persons primarily concerned with wealth and power. Now, I don't meant to suggest that an honest politician has Ever been the norm in our society, but only that by this effect the number of such idealists would be decreased relative to those who only sought such positions for personal advantage. Beyond some certain tipping point, perhaps when the actual leaders among their number had grown too sparse to keep the greater body of good ol boys and their kids from running the show, the leadership body might begin to resemble a room full of bickering children who casually hold breath-holding competitions with the national budget. This effect might be explained as the actions of a predominance of middle-aged born-rich idiots, using their jobs to build retirement or secure other jobs; who knows, perhaps some portion of the absurdity of our foreign policy in recent decades might be explained as well.

What strikes me about this explanation, though it may yet be missing something, is that no overarching malicious or exploitative intent is necessarily included; no conspiracies, no shadow government, no secret plans. Our current crisis in leadership, and the subsequent mismanagement of our country by a necessarily higher proportion of stupid and selfish people, can be captured as an offshoot of the entertainment revolution, itself an unintended consequence of silicon ships and fossil fuels. What we are seeing is just what the human race would inevitably do if it had all the power in the world: watch the biggest TV in the world and eat way too much.

Immersion(2)

What do we do, when we reflect on the past? Is there a multi-sensory video of our experiences we re-watch, like taking a personal trip back in time? In fact, memory experiences derive from the same pattern-recognition structures we use to see faces and use math; particular events aren't directly retrievable, but are rather derived from our knowledge of what should have happened, given what else we believe about reality and our lives. It is quite possible, for example, to observe a law of nature being broken and, not "block out" the experience, but rather have no place in our opinion of How Things Work from which to retrieve it later.

So what do we do, when we reflect on our experiences? As I recall the wind on my face, do I but indulge in an appropriate fantasy for what people tell me I was doing that day? The answer, I think, is: only mostly. This is the process of memory, the mechanism of it, but not its function or purpose, not what it accomplishes. After all, what is the purpose of remembering things? By far the lion's share of species on this planet make due with sensory-response patterns, never bothering with learned behaviours; if you're the kinda spider that doesn't know how to build a web effectively, you just die, you don't get better at it. The behaviours of most animals are physically-coded response-sets to the environmental contexts in which they evolved; only a few select species have evolved the capacity for revising, or at least complicating, these genetic imperatives.

(an aside for the anthropocentric: most animals on this planet are insects, microscopic, or both, and so this is a fair characterization of the living generally. "Few select species," is a relative designation, meant to include only birds, mammals, and reptiles.)

"Revision" is the key concept here, for this is what I believe to be the primary function of remembering, the achievement that keeps it in the gene pool. We remember, indulge in reflection and nostalgia, as a method of revising those very patterns from which we first derive our memories. I stood at the base of a tree, the wind dancing with my hair, and then a drop of white joins in: a bit of cynicism works its way into my outlook on life, or maybe I learn to expect irony, but unless I have very broadly-associated reasons for believing it would never be so, I come away with the understanding that no scene is so idyllic that a bird can't shit on it.

So what to we do, when we remember? We fiddle with our sense of reality, try to resolve it with our experiences as much as possible. If the experience is too strange for our sense of things to handle(wind in my hair, sun on my face, tree starts talking), we simply discount the validity of the experience. I was out there in the first place because of stress, after all; need more sleep, plus the sun was pretty hot that day, probably got to me is all. This isn't quite lying, just a novel application of the same creative process we engage in every waking moment.

This is the comfort of nostalgia, and the attraction of dwelling on misfortune: the former reinforces our sense of a world were pleasant memories are made, and the latter reflects our need to explain something we didn't expect. The sadness that comes of misfortune, then, amounts to the cognitive dissonance of believing in a world that exists relative to your own ego and trying to explain why it would do something so horrible to You, what You did to deserve this. 

God(!!!)

A man, too long in his own head, will begin to think himself God. Too long in the heads of others, however, and the same man will come to think of God as another person(like Steve, but way better at, like, Everything).

What of the one who spends all his time in the heads of tigers and antelope? Or someone who spends all his thoughts on plants? Do we then think our gods Tigers and Antelope, start calling the dirt our Mother?

Absurdity test: What of someone who spends all their time designing boxes, or shoes, or training horses? Lacking a normalizing community of skeptics, do these people conceive of Universal Boxes, ineffable Tread Designs, & holy Horseshoes?

I think so. I think God is how we frame everything we know but can't remember just now; the great body of knowledge which we cannot comprehend all once, which we only know by instinct, and even then only if we have the faith to trust in it.

This sounds like an explanation for the experience of God to people for whom He does not exist; if that's all that can be taken away from this, so be it. Except people are made up too; the person you think you are is quite as fictional as the diety you use to think. And to Us, stories about storytellers, God is our connection to our greater existence, the greater Truth which we cannot comprehend but which supports us. If we trust in it.

See, if we can think of God like a thought-structure, analogous to a workout plan or a memory-peg, then we can start designing our gods consciously, making dieties which serve our purposes.

Constellations

When I think of prehistoric humans, and how much time they spent studying the sky, I remember what makes me love our species again. Because what they studied was only a random arrangement of lights moving regularly against a black background, but what we've seen there has included both metaphors for human existence and the very dimensions of our physical reality. We are capable of so much with so little because of the way we use patterns to think, the way we build and arrange them in our minds to predict the paths of light against the darkness.

We fall astray, however, when we forget that these patterns are tools of the mind, and instead come to believe that we have learned the "true" pattern to reality, that we have mastered its meaning. For whatever we may come to know in the course of our lives, all knowledge is created by humans, and therefore cut down to dimensions tolerable for a human mind; there is no good reason, however, to imagine that a truly objective reality should be comprehensible to us.

Still, the search will be forever carried on, as our people will never be short of minds incapable of imagining their own limits.

A growth of universes

Facts are much stranger than mysteries, much harder to explain as the province of a growth on a rock in an ocean of nothing. I've always wondered at the ease with which humans, frail and fleeting as we are, assume ourselves capable of knowing Anything.

But I think now I understand how humans in particular, framed as a race of storytellers, should be so prone to arrogance. Because we really Do understand the stories we make, really Do know everything there is to know about the relationships we imagine between things, and because most of our lives are spent moving each other around with these stories, most of our time is spent knowing everything there is to know about our subjects of interest.

Thus do we approach the natural world in the way we typically do each other: we offer it stories, see how it likes them, and wait for it to respond in kind. These are the ridiculous and nonsensical questions of meaning and purpose we'll never solve, being a demand for opinions from inert matter, but because we think in stories most of the time it's really hard to imagine an open-ended reality without beginnings, endings, and an established back-story.

Direction

Friends aren't people who are always there for you; no one's always there for you. Friends aren't people who need you, or care about you, or necessarily even like you. Rather, friends make you like yourself, make your better self come out just by being around. They act as a character springboard for the qualities you prize in yourself, allow you to grow in a direction you covet.

It is only in the subset of such relationships which are stable that this effect is necessarily reciprocated. Friendship, as here described, is a personal experience of someone else, not necessarily a shared opinion or sentiment. One's selection criteria for friends, then, must necessarily be dominated by the search for people who can teach them new things about themselves; the ability to reciprocate such benefits is often useful, and sometimes necessary, but ultimately it counts as an expense and must be weighed as circumstances dictate.

Flexible

The idea of having an ego is, I think, at the root of much human suffering, being an inevitable discontinuity between a lifetime that revolves around a single person and a world that does not. In the nature of ideas, however, individual existence is an assumption necessary to social interaction; there can be no personality without ego, no Other without Self.

Thus is born the idea of a consistent identity: burst forth from the creative fount that is the human mind, hemmed in on all sides by social influence, and finally matured into a story of self that reinforces its own limitations in exchange for the society of others.

This is growing-up, deciding who you are & defending your beliefs. It is the search for love, identity-mixing, among solid and inflexible identities.

Scattered

The thing to remember is that we all start out in pieces; your parents give you a few, your culture gives you a bunch, but most of them will come with the experiences of life. This is the sense in which we both make and discover ourselves, for it is in seeking formative experiences that we find new things about ourselves; we discover tastes, and skills, and fears, and using all these decide where to go next.

And yet with each such decision, we sentence uncountable others we might have been to death by exclusion. What we seek out for ourselves will change as we find more or less than we sought, and rarely are we permitted even a glimpse at how things might have gone otherwise, let alone a visit; your tastes will change, passions will grow muted or cynical, and sooner or later you lose the chance to want badly enough all those great things you once did. If this endgame is to be prepared for, it must be by moderating our decisions, for it is the person we build through them that we will ultimately be, and this isn't necessarily someone who'll enjoy the retirement we're planning for ourselves now; decrepit retirees endup littering beaches because that's where they dreamed of going when they were still young enough to enjoy it.

What is needed then is a metric, a standard according to which we can live our lives creatively and fruitfully without becoming mired in the leftovers of our bad decisions. And indeed, such is an oft-repeated theme in the popular religions: that, through one mechanism or another, our actions will come back to haunt us. That what we do really matters, ultimately and specifically, to ourselves and our own fates.

And yet in eight millennia of accumulated culture, no such metric has gained any popularity without being distorted for other social purposes, made just another tool for interpersonal conflict. Something in humans, something that sings oh-so-sweetly when we conquer a foe or eat fried chicken, keeps us pulling back from these revelations about the importance of our choices.

And perhaps it will, in the end, come to nothing less comical than that a species of primate learned to direct its own evolution through culture, and used this power to accelerate its growth beyond physical limits; that is, to death.

Avatars

Humans are very strongly and uniquely social creatures. Of all the animals on earth, we are yet the only ones found to generate anything like culture. Across everything from generations to weeks, complex relationships among prevailing social attitudes develop within population-level groups of people, existing either as revolutions or traditions in thought. Taken collectively, this phenomenon is what is referred to as our cultural zeitgeist, or those attitudes most prevalent in our population.

What interests me is the remarkable complexity of these cultural norms, the detail and history they accumulate over impressively little time. They evolve like living things, creatures composed fundamentally of memes, which are just trains of thought.

But if, as humans, we should have reason to believe that the majority of our actions are culturally imposed, meaning that they are interactions with society at large; we would then be forced to consider seriously the perspective that we are, for most purposes, much more avatars of culture than we are biological humans. While it is of course true that there is always an interplay of biology with cultural norms, as when fashions in food and sex reflect biological priorities, it is nevertheless the case that a human could be raised to exist without any of the current social standards or attitudes, and that it could even be healthy as long as it was raised with Some social standards and attitudes. Political attitudes, on the other hand, have never been shown to exist without the assistance of primates.

I think that this relationship of humans to their ideas highlights something important in each. That humans, for one, function normally as the intersections of various socially imposed beliefs and habits; but also that this function can be carried out with any sufficiently complex belief system, and humans will in fact present cognitive deficits when raised without some such structure or routine. This view does not cast cognitively-gifted primates as the progenitors of this vast cultural landscape we live in today, but rather as more-or-less passive recipients of value-hierarchies and anecdotes; as symbiotic to the traditions that span their generations, wired with a need to believe as desperate as that of a shark to swim.

While this is a somewhat humbling perspective on the value of our humanity, I think this fact leaves room for a more nuanced view of the nature of our ideas. That if most of our actions are majorly influenced by culture, for one, then it is fair to identify ourselves as functions of society(varied though these functions may be); humanity is the vehicle through which we exist, but the complex values and beliefs with which we identify most are not things that we would have had we been raised differently. Further, if ideas and systems of ideas are our most basic form of existence, it should be expected that challenging our beliefs will be taken more seriously than simply killing us

Pathways

Reason is the means by which we trace a path between what we want and what we can have; to rationalize is to construct for ourselves a way of believing that there is something we think is important which is also attainable.

And yet this fabulous tool can lead us nowhere without a starting point, for reason cannot establish the relevance of any new idea without assuming that of an old one. We only pursue truths we think are important, and so for any pursuit of truth one must first have a sense that something matters, has an intrinsic value which relates to nothing at all but the world we'd like to live in. This I understand as having values, believing in things passionately, and as far as I can tell the character and depth of a person's values say more about their beliefs than any particular interaction they ever have with reality.