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
Friday, August 15, 2014
Friday, August 8, 2014
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.
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.
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