CONCEPTUAL NETWORK

July 11th, 2020

One reason to write, and to write often and on a wide variety of topics is for the creation of a conceptual network.  All of us who can read or understand this already have a conceptual network that we can specifically point at, that is, language.  Each word is a concept and we network these words together in order to create meaning.  There is, of course, the troubling fact that many and most don’t take the time to do any substantial investigation of those words being used.  People are left speaking with a predominately emotional shape, one that can even be disconnected from their own best interests.  Taking the time to turn these words over, each in turn, and then to go beyond that and investigate larger clusters of concepts, through writing, creates a network that isn’t just robust, but also memorable.

For example, in response to a question, several Tinkered Thinking episodes were offered as a kind of collaged answer.  Two benefits of writing arise in this little example.  Not only are these episodes still useful and memorable after years, but they are also remixed and juxtaposed in ways that add to their individual utility.  Just reflect a little further on this, and ask whether you can remember what you were thinking 430 days ago.  Virtually no one can answer this question, but with writing, the value of what was thought 430 days ago can still have a lasting impact on the present.  Not only do we develop the thought, but the record of it makes it a bit more memorable, and if the entire subject can collapse into a single unit, like the Title of the writing, then it becomes accessible, mentally, in a kind of indexed fashion. 

Think of it this way: imagine you can ping your position with a device, say your cell phone, and this ping would put a tiny dot on a map.  Now let’s say your task is to make a map of the interstate highway system in the United States, and this ability to ping your location and a vehicle are your only tools.  As you drive along, you ping your position.  Now run two simulations of this insane tedium:  in the first simulation, you ping your location once every 3 days while driving 24 hours a day.  How good would your map look?  We might get a vague idea of how far spread the interstate system is across the continent, but would we be able to use this map to get around?  Probably not.  Now run the second simulation, same exercise, but you ping your location once a second while driving.  This map would inevitably be far more useful.  Note though, both maps have the same accuracy, one is just more detailed, and the map drawn in this way only because really useful after a certain threshold of density is achieved. 

We might be able to say something similar about the mind and the concepts we run on our wetware. 

How many people are lost in a hazy sea of concepts that they use, but to poor avail?  Is it all that difficult to imagine that one’s own thinking might improve if some effort was made to increase the detail and resolution of the mental maps that we use to navigate the world?  How else is this accomplished without being able to confront them in some tangible form, that is, how can you confront what you think without first recording it?  We barely remember the last half minute worth of conversation.  Is it really safe to have faith that our internal monologue is really tracking all the important parts of the issue as we try to navigate toward a best option?

Currently, writing seems to be our only technology that allows us to track thought in a way that we can engage with constructively.  But once the mental map is on the page, it’s invisible ability to run our life is rendered susceptible to editing.  It’s an unguarded secret of writers that we can edit thought by simply editing the writing that results from that thought.  We in essence edit the code of our thought by editing the writing our thought produces.  This evolutionary process of tinkering, if carried out long enough, creates that conceptual network, one with enough interconnection and resolution to help us navigate forward more effectively.

This episode references Episode 758: Title

WORD SALAD

July 10th, 2020

Word salad is confused nonsense.  The actual definition renders it as total blabber, but in common conversation word salad seems to have a bit more deception:  it’s often used to pin down some language that sounds like it’s getting at something deep or complicated or very intelligent, but is in essence just a bunch of buzzwords strung together with convoluted balderdash. 

It must be plainly admitted that a non-zero percentage of Tinkered Thinking might touch this loathsome territory.  Not every episode is a nail-on-the-head success.  And certainly some episodes are written when the mind is a bit too frayed at the end of a long day, and alas, at the mercy of poor planning.  But there is absolutely no regret nor shame in these subpar episodes.  If it weren’t for these limp episodes, the best of Tinkered Thinking wouldn’t exist.  The reason, of course, is because this is a daily practice, and when something is done everyday, there are going to be off-days, uninspired days, and plain old bad days.

There’s also something to be said for the nature of writing.  Is every episode planned before the writing is begun?  Not at all.  That does not reflect one of the core benefits of writing.  As a tool, writing is perhaps most effectively used as an exploration tool.  We explore thought with the written word, discovering its contours, the depth and breadth of it’s tendrils, and inevitably, we learn far more about our own opinion and perspective on a given topic than can ever be achieved by mere musing alone.  Exploring the unknown in this way is, of course, going to lead into occasional garbled thinking, as the linguistic whims and shape of sentences lead the text off the scent of strong thought and into wordy garbage.  Hence, word salad.  But again, this is not necessarily a bad thing.  Composing excellent word salad, is in itself an exercise that isn’t without value.  Even in garbage we can discover discarded treasure, and even within the folds of wordy nonsense, a clean and clear sentence can suddenly emerge and become a seed for more worthwhile pondering.

After all, salad is generally a healthy meal, though perhaps not the most satisfying. 

NAVIGATING THE LANDSCAPE

July 9th, 2020

The landscape of emotion that we move through is not one we generally navigate in a straightforward way.  We develop a faulty patchwork of hacks and tricks, some work, while others even undermine our aims.  Nowhere is this attempt to self-manipulate more clear than with the artificial hardships we fling ourselves at.

We put ourselves through artificial hardship all the time.  Whether it be a course for school, or a training routine at the gym.  Many of these hardships, perhaps nearly a majority in modern times aren’t strictly necessary.  And yet we endure, ideally willingly, these artificial hardships in order to achieve some sort of delayed gain.  The process for most of this is first and foremost an emotional puzzle.  We attempt to set ourselves up with levels of obligation to ensure we’ll actually follow through.  We take out the loan, and pay for the course, we buy a year membership at the gym, and then we moan and groan every time we need to get up for school or the gym.

We try to trick ourselves in this way, never really addressing the issue at core: how to navigate and influence the shape of emotion in the moment. 

Do you know how to turn anger into peace,

embarrassment into joy,

sadness into gratitude?

Every day gives us a near constant stream of opportunities to meet these emotions with new strategies.  Be it a lack of motivation, anger, sadness, sudden disappointment or embarrassment.  It is possible to meet these colors of existence with an equanimity that deflates their power and makes room for a mindful choice, an emotional pivot that changes the terrain by successfully navigating it.

We often just stumble forward through these landscapes, instead of pausing, assessing the obstacle and then deciding whether to scale it or find some alternate route around.

The skill starts by clearly recognizing what that landscape looks like in the moment.  We need only notice, and when we fail to notice the emotion, we often get drunk with it and move on blindly as though blindfolded,  stumbling into obstacle after obstacle.

Navigation starts not with movement, but with pause, by assessing the surroundings and the entire landscape.  It’s only with a lay of the land in mind that it becomes possible to move in meaningful directions.

USEFUL DUD

July 8th, 2020

This episode somehow just doesn’t want to get written.  It’s taken a few failed paragraphs, all deleted to realize just how appropriate it is to fail the attempt to write an episode entitled useful dud.

Comedic self-castigation aside…

How do we usually react when our effort fail to take off?  When our hope is greeted by the silence of a dud that forever keeps the other shoe from dropping.  If it’s in the presence of others, it’s likely we can expect embarrassment.  Perhaps some negative self-talk creeps in.  Perhaps just the sadness of crushed hopes.

There is a miss opportunity with such stereotypical reactions.  We can do a better job of navigating this corner of the emotional landscape.  For one, a dud is better than no attempt at all.  Sure it can be demoralizing to release a project to the sound of crickets, but realize how insidious it is to avoid that embarrassment and shame by not trying at all in the first place?  It is possible to avoid a lot of difficult emotions by simply never trying in the first place.  But such a stance admits that there’s no value in difficult emotions, that they are wholly bad, and can’t be better navigated, transmuted, and even, appreciated.  Those who never try in the first place rob themselves of possible success certainly, but also the enormous benefit that can come from enjoying failure.

Be proud to send up a dud every once in a while.  That invisible spectacle is for no one other than yourself.  It’s proof, that you can handle it happening.  It’s training so that when something you’ve inadvertently put a lot of hope behind – fails - you don’t crumble and dissolve into disappointment. 

You smile for your ability to gracefully entertain embarrassment, even in the face of those who clearly feel it for you.

If you can enjoy failure, then you can learn anything, because we don’t learn through success, we learn by falsifying our ideas with failed experiments.  Duds turn out to be useful in two ways.  Not only are we challenged with a way to deal with such emotions, but such duds tell us what doesn’t work.

THIS

July 7th, 2020

For just a moment, pay attention to this.  Not just these words, whether you’re listening to them, or reading them, but to the context in which they exist.  Of course, this larger context is available to only you.  It’s where you are, what temperature it is, what the quality of light is, whether muted from clouds or bright with sun.  It’s the sensations of the body either at rest or at work with whatever you’re doing in addition to the experience defined by just these words.  That ask is mainly for you to pay attention to your experience of being alive at this moment.  This is your life right now. . . apparently.

From a technical perspective, we create our life as we live it.  As one particularly infamous movie phrased, life as we experience it is just electrical signals interpreted by your brain. 

Our idea of color, shape, sound, even temperature and pressure, all of these things are methods of interpretation evolved by the brain so that our consciousness has a coherent picture of reality in a way that allows us to have an effect on it. 

There are, for example, other slices of the light spectrum that we cannot see.  Pigeons apparently don’t look so bland to other pigeons because their feathers reflect ultraviolet light and so their wings light up in ways that are totally unavailable to humans.  But even this radiant fluorescence that we can imagine pigeons seeing is again a method of interpretation.  There’s no way to tell what reality looks like without a certain built in perspective, as in eyes, ears, taste buds and the like.

Two questions illuminate the issue:

 Does the color blue look like blue to everyone or do some people have a different blue?

Or we can wonder:

Does blue even exist without a way to see it?

This later question is of course a mutation of that question about the sound a falling tree makes in the absence of anyone to hear it.  We can expand infinitely outward and wonder:  Does the universe exist if there’s no one to experience it?

There’s no way to know because of this.  That is, what you are experiencing right now.  It’s simultaneously in the way of our exposure to un-interpreted reality and also our only bridge to get any sense of what it may be.

The range of reaction we can draw from this oddly wide.  It can be disturbing that we’re only ever seeing an interpretation of reality.  At the same time, it can seem infinitely empowering to have created your own interpretation of reality.  It hints at the possibility that it can be remade, recreated and tinkered with in order to change your circumstance for better and better.  Of course the converse is true, and all of this harks of a line from John Milton’s Paradise Lost:

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..

We can take this a step further and reflect on the quaint fact that we are all made of start dust, or some other less appetizing detritus spewed from the belly of dying star.  Fact is, each and every one of us isn’t separate from the universe living in the universe, we are each just a little formation of the universe. 

When we speak to one another, reality is having a conversation with itself.

It’s rather tremendous to meditate on the amount of influence we have on the nature and course of that conversation.  We have each entrusted one another with this wide fun experiment we call living.  It’s perhaps wise we do our best by it because in the end, all we have is this.