NEGATIVE SURPRISE

June 16th, 2020

What is a surprise?  Be it positive or negative, it’s our reaction to something unexpected - it is a violation of expectation.  The nature of surprise, it’s character and valence has almost nothing to do with what actually unfolds.  It has everything to do with what happens beforehand, how we imagine the future, why we imagine it in such a way: we set ourselves up for the way we react to the future, be it a surprise or not.

This imagined future grows from two different roots, and also from both.  The kernel of our vision for the future can be emotional, and it can also spring from a thoughtful place, or naturally some combination.  It’s most probably always a combination. 

But how well integrated is that combination?

When surprise does come our way, is our reaction characterized by emotion or by a thoughtful updating of our ideas regarding what’s going on and how things work?

What does it mean when we experience deep disappointment about the way something has turned out but at the same time the situation makes sense, as though the result is typical.  This can be shrugged off as cynicism, but it also illuminates an important decoupling between what we think about a situation and how we feel about it.  Hard truths are often so because our emotions are not aligned with what we know – the collision and the discrepancy that we experience within is the difficult part.

Another cynical truism that arises around these concepts is that in order to avoid disappointment, the key is to have low expectations, or none at all.  The implication is always that hope is foolish, and dashed expectations are always born of this hope.  This combination is asymmetrical in a way that does not benefit us in anyway: we are set up to simultaneously experience dashed hopes and a reinforcement of our cynical understanding of how things work.  With such views, we are constantly set up for negative surprise.

But what about the inverse?  What about outcomes that make sense but don’t disappoint because they make sense, and are therefore predictable, and outcomes that present pleasant surprises because the result diverges from our expectations – the way we understand the world.  A first question might be: is such a view based on negative expectations?  Isn’t this a cynical view of the world?  Perhaps, but the surprise is that if the cynic were to actually take their own advice, then the asymmetry inverts, and we are left with only upside: either our understanding of the world is further supported, or we are pleasantly surprised with something good.  The cynic masquerades as a sort of masochistic, hopeless romantic, pretending to bet perpetually on the underdog odds.  But such a cynic and wannabe romantic never actually inhabits the role of that underdog.  The underdog is sober about the chances, but endeavors forward regardless….

and why?

because the real underdog realizes the possibility of being

delightfully wrong.

BIRTH OF A QUESTION

June 15th, 2020

Where do questions come from?

It’s without a doubt that the very notion of a question arises very early in our development, as evidenced by the interminable string of why’s, what’s, and how’s that come from children.  Many of these questions are more requests for information from adults.  Why does the sun rise?  How old is Grammy?  What is an accountant?  Children realize very quickly that there is a whole universe of information that adults have, a universe that they wish to learn and understand.

What’s fascinating is that animals don’t pose questions.  Certainly a dog or a cat can notify you of their hunger, and animals can likewise be unsure about whether someone or something is a friend or a foe, but other than these instances that might be like pre-questions, there is only one instance where an animal has ever asked a question.  It was bird, a parrot named Alex.  Apes have been taught sign language, but even though such primates are perfectly capable of answering questions that they have an answer for, they never use the capacity to seek more information from a human.  The parrot named Alex, however, apparently looked in a mirror and asked the question “what color?”.  The parrot was told the color “grey” 6 times in a row, and apparently learned that the color of its own plumage was grey.

Other than this one solitary instance of curiosity, there is no record of query among animals.

Returning to the notion of a pre-question, we’ve all been party to the instance when an animal is unsure about another creature, for example when we try to coax a timid animal to eat from our hand.  The squirrel may approach and then skitter away, and then come closer and closer.  We must wonder: is this a question about safety being asked over and over, or is the animal responding to fluctuating levels of comfort, hunger and a sense of danger, all of which are being toggled by cues in the environment.

Dogs also seem to have an ability to tilt their head to the side, so as to convey confusion.  Perhaps there is the kernel of question buried in this gesture, or perhaps it is an evolutionary adaptation, one used to provoke a change in the human who is witnessing the gesture.  Hard to say.

What’s clear is that human curiosity is orders of magnitude beyond what animals exhibit.  Our use of the question, from the very start as infants extends far beyond the realms of hunger, safety and danger.  Our brains spend a tremendous amount of energy investigating things that are of no obvious nor immediate relation to our needs.

What’s perhaps most fascinating here is how indeterminate that answer to the original question is: where do questions come from?

The resolution here is not at all obvious, and answers like curiosity, or wonder are fairly unsatisfying.  They are just proxies: where does curiosity come from?  Or wonder?

Does it have something to do with the size of our imagination?  And our ability to imagine the presence of something we don’t know?  How do we as a species look at the world and somehow implicitly suspect that there’s something more to it than immediately meets the eye?

This episode draws heavily from Episode 390: Question about the Question

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: OMPHALOS

June 14th, 2020

The air seemed suffused with the light of the sun.  It was hot, and even in the shade it felt as though it pushed into the skin.  Lucilius put forearm to forehead to wipe the sweat away from his stinging eyes.  He tilted his head toward each shoulder, stretching against the strain of backpack straps that had burrowed into his skin beneath the thin shirt he wore.  The next town couldn’t be much farther, he knew, remembering again the short distance he’d seen on the map some miles back.  He pushed on, trying to keep in the shade of trees on the shoulder of the path.  He watched the way unbend to the slow loping rhythm of his pace, until it finally pierced with more light and came to an end opening up upon a meticulous grassy lawn.

He barely noticed the ornate stone building buffeted by the lawn as he looked out from the high ground upon the beautiful town below.  And there, in the middle of the lawn was a fountain, a small pool in stone, adorned in the center with an island from which arose a statue of a symbol Lucilius had often seen.  He was still new to the country and had yet to really learn the ways of it’s people.  But in that moment, he was simply hot, and thirsty. 

He tramped over to the fountain and painfully eased the heavy backpack from his shoulders and set it down.  Then he knelt and cupped water from the fountain and brought it to his face and drank deeply.  He brought water to his lips again and again, and when he finally breathed a sigh of relief, he bent down and splashed water on his face, bringing the water up to his sore neck, and letting it run through his hair until he had cooled.

He sat back, feeling like himself again, and looked out over the beautiful town.  He slipped his feet from their flip-flops and swung them out, realizing it was a perfect reach across the little bit of water to the stone sculpture in the center.  He crossed his feet and rested a heel in a nook of the symbol and laid back on the grass, and within moments he was asleep.

He awoke with a start to the sound of yelling.  He blinked the bleary view from his eyes and looked to find a man in long dark robes bustling towards him, an angry man shouting in a language Lucilius could not understand.  The man’s eyes were wide with fury as he descended upon Lucilius.

“What?” Lucilius tried to ask.  But the man only shouted more.  “What?”  Lucilius asked again, flustered with the man’s alarm.

The robed man paused a moment, struck with the word Lucilius had said, hearing the language Lucilius spoke.

“How dare you,” the man said.

“What? what’s wrong?”  Lucilius said.

The man gestured at Lucilius’ feet still hitched up on the statue.  Lucilius followed his gesture, but slowly shook his head, confused. 

“What’s the matter?” Lucilius asked again.

“This statue is holy!  And you, you have your filthy feet all over it.  Move them at once.”

Lucilius looked at his feet, and the statue where they rested.  Then he looked around at the surrounding grass, the wide lawn, bordered by forest and on the other side where it ran to the temple.  He looked back at the disturbed man.

“Where is a place that I might put them that isn’t holy?”  Lucilius asked.

The holy man’s eye’s widened, mistaking Lucilius’ question for insolence.

“How dare you!” the holy man said, and with the words he leaned over the water, grabbed Lucilius’ dirty feet and yanked them away from the statue.  But as he crouched to place them in the grass, the holy man suddenly noticed a small beetle crawling up a blade of grass.  It’s shell radiated a brilliant blue like polished metal, and the holy man stood up again, not wanting to crush the beetle with Lucilius’ feet since the creature was deemed holy in his tradition.  He moved them further on, but now the holy man could see the individual blades of grass, the clear blood beaded at the clipped tips, freshly trimmed, their rich color soaking in the sun and the deadened pieces mingling down into the soil, to dry and rot and again through that sacred process of death transforming life, become again dirt and holy ground. 

Finally the holy man looked at the feet that he held in his own hands.  The holy man could see how sore the feet he held were, how far they must have come, in sacred duty to this young man, honoring his travel, and now how dirty they were.

Slowly, the holy man knelt down on both knees, placing Lucilius’ feet just upon the stone edge of the fountain.  And then the holy man cupped some water and brought it up and poured it over Lucilius’ feet.  He brought more water from the fountain, and rinsed the dirt away, and then he took a cloth folded in his rope belt, a cloth that was retained for holy service, and with it he wiped Lucilius’ feet dry.

UNBURDENED SEARCH

June 13th, 2020

What is the obstacle when trying to figure something out?  Is it different each time?  Does it depend on the context?  Or is there something subtle and pervasive that unifies all of these situations?

Much of what it means to be human has to do with figuring out how to get out of our own way.  So much progress is working through frustration with the self, but what exactly is the obstacle here?

Neuroscience would suggest that it has to do with the default mode network.  This is a set of regions in the brain that are always on except for unusual circumstances.  This network is the neurological basis for the self in terms of autobiographical information, self reference and one’s emotions.  In addition it handles the operation when we think of others and the past and any future plans.

Indeed, it seems to handle quite a lot, but all of this can be roughly grouped.  It all has to do with memory to some degree.  Everything it handles is based on what we’ve learned or experienced in the past.  Plans about the future even fit into this category, since such plans are primarily remembered plans.  Surely these statements about the DMN are pretty general, but it’s clear that the Default Mode Network is missing a huge component of our experience, and that is, the experience itself: the present moment.

What’s even more interesting is that when people are in a ‘flow’ state, the default mode network isn’t as activated as it usually is.  It’s influence is markedly less.  In addition to this, there are factions, primarily the military that have been developing techniques for deep brain stimulation that help a person enter a flow state on command.  Such cranial stimulation also decreases the activation of the default mode network.  Psychedelic drugs, meditation, and even exercise also toggle the activation of the default mode network, pulling back its influence on our experience.

While our understanding of the neurology here is still in its infancy, it seems that we experience the present moment with a bit more clarity, fluidity and effectiveness when the default mode network plays less of a role – when it’s out of our way.

Returning to those moments when there is an obstacle in our way while trying to figure something out, we can wonder if it isn’t something like this default mode network. 

We can phrase the conundrum a bit differently to get at it.

Let’s say that you’ve been trying to solve one particular problem for a few hours.  You’ve tried dozens of ideas that you’ve come up with along the way, but none of them have worked.  How does a person generally feel after this sort of slog?  Many people would be ready to call it quits, exhausted by the ordeal.  But why?  Where does the exhaustion come from?

What if we were able to remove the memory of those attempts?  Dozens of failures suddenly erased from the mind.  How would we look at the problem still at hand?  How would we feel about it?  Would we still feel the same mental exhaustion if we couldn’t actually remember the frustrating slog that’s gone nowhere?

It might be that the default mode network, or which ever part of the brain it may be, is bogging us down with such memory.

How much of our life is clogged up from moving forward, not because of some ever present inability, but merely because of memories that weigh us down and keep us tethered like anchors lodged in the past?

Wonder now for a moment about children, and how quickly they can learn.  Certainly their brains are functioning quite differently compared to an adult because of it’s development, but could another aspect of their learning be aided by the fact that they simply don’t have much memory of failure?

Could it be that the present moment, in terms of stimulation and sheer information still outweighs the influence of memory?

What if you could forget all sense of frustration, hardship and failure?  Would your ability to move forward increase?  Our ability to figure something out, to learn, this is the skill of discovery.  It rides on our ability to wander through the landscape of a problem, reimagining it over and over, and by doing so forgetting how we were thinking of it yesterday or the day before.  To look at something with fresh eyes requires an ability to forget how we used to see it.

Play is discovery unburdened by memory.

THRESHOLD OF CONVERSATION

June 12th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to an anonymous writer who operates the Twitter handle @D_InActivist, who was kind to send in some writing on the topic at hand.  Several questions that appear here were posed by this person.

Violence begins when conversation ends.  They are both tools we use with those with whom we disagree, and for those with the available strength, violence is far easier to use than conversation.  When conversation is cut off by the induction of violence, a critical threshold is passed, one which radically changes the context.  Violence and conversation are not tools that exist in the same toolkit, they are methods that exist in wholly different universes.

We think conquering an enemy is an act of brute force, of domination.  And this can seem to work in the short term.  But all it does is create more of an enemy, with more of a cause, more fuel, more reason, and more drive.  If you want to conquer an enemy once and for all, the only two choices are represented by conversation and violence taken to an extreme: either we make a friend of an enemy or we entertain the twisted logic of total annihilation.

This later option of annihilation, which has been foolishly attempted many times throughout human history boils down to a self-immolation.  The differences that have been stated and used to separate ourselves have been superficial to the point of being boring.  We are, at the end of the day, a living permutation of matter that is capable of talking, of forming conversation that captures facets of existence.  Even the most laughably wrong perspective is still more valuable than no perspectives, and perspectives are made most valuable in concert with other perspectives.  To labor for the annihilation of perspectives is to make war against conversation itself – the one superpower humans have achieved, and so far as we know, this is the only instance in existence where such a thing has occurred.  The annihilation of anyone is a mark against the entire endeavor that it seems we’ve been lucky enough to embark upon.

On the other hand, we are presented with the option of continuing the conversation, expanding it, and quite literally getting into the mind of our enemy.  Persuasion is not something that happens in our own mind, it is something that occurs in the mind of our companion in dialogue, and the only way to make such a thing happen is to first get familiar with the territory.

Lately, however, the tools of conversation have veered into strange and fragile territory.  The qualifications for what designates enmity have expanded, and the trend seems to be yearning towards violence itself, manifesting as the ease with which people get offended.

A person’s ability to be offended is not the basis for a sound argument.  It never should be, and in fact, we are best served by regarding our own sense of offense with deep suspicion and pause.  Who doesn’t have countless memories from their past that detail just how poorly emotions can steer our actions when those emotions are running hot?  Is this not the greatest and deepest source of regret?  We rarely if ever regret an action that we considered deeply and thoughtfully before taking.  It’s almost always the rash action, undertaken while intoxicated with some emotion that we think back on with embarrassment.

And what else is taking offense if not an emotional reaction?  The word offense has a troubling set of roots.  It comes from the Latin offensus meaning merely ‘annoyance’, but it also based on another Latin word, offendere, which means ‘strike against’.  These two roots contain a critical difference.  They might as well exist in different dimensions.  Being annoyed is worlds away from physical violence.  And yet, for whatever fragile reason, our culture has sought to close the gap between these two concepts.  For many, taking offense to something is expressed with such vehemence, you’d think the person had been physically harmed.  Doubtless there are those who would take offense even to that statement.  But a question emerges for such offended people:

 Do not such easily bruised sensibilities usurp importance from instances of true harm?

And further, what does it say about a person if they are rendered frenetic and hyperemotional at the slightest conceptual discomfort?  That’s all it is - before things leap into the dimension of violence - it’s just conceptual discomfort.  We are being asked to engage with a concept that doesn’t fit too well into how we prefer to make sense of the world.  It’s an abstract discomfort.  In some sense, we can argue that it’s not even real, because both our way of making sense of the world, and the uncomfortable concept we’ve encountered – both of these might be totally inaccurate when placed against the true nature of reality.

If the stoics have one comment to add to society, it would be that almost all of our pain and discomfort is imagined, and ultimately something we make a choice to entertain.  Regardless of how conscious or unconscious we are during that choice.

It takes very little reading of history to realize that one of our truly greatest accomplishments is to hand over a monopoly on violence to the state.  This by no means implies that monopoly on violence is maintained with any kind of perfection – that’s simply impossible, but it’s a spectacular improvement when the alternative is to entertain the possibility of living without conversation, in a place and time when words cease to have meaning, and order is determined not by good ideas and the pursuit of better outcomes, but by a brutal set of physical facts regarding strength that is no longer tempered by thoughtful consideration.

Here is a truly fascinating question:

Could friction be reduced in society by directing people to collectively and consciously raise their bar for what signifies ‘enmity’?

The answer is absolutely.  Our bar for what signifies enmity has drifted ever downward, conflating imagined conceptual discomfort with that other dimension of harm initiated by violence.

The fact is everything right up to the first instance of violence is a conversation.  But many of us treat and receive words as though they are grenades.  The leap to violence occurs when a person no longer sees language as an effective resource.  Now does this say more about the resource or the person who doesn’t know how to use it effectively?

As Isaac Asimov once wrote:

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

The main incompetency to which this refers is language.  What little violence accomplishes, language accomplishes quit literally, everything else.

Another valid question which arises is the issue of violence presented by something that is simply not capable of conversation, be it an animal or a rare pathology among people.

Now arises the issue of how to use force?  Is violence a blanket concept with no gradations of nuance?  Perhaps, but strength, and the use of force certainly is susceptible to the knife of nuance.  The state monopoly on violence and force is an example of this.  The average experience of physical violence is drastically different when it is centralized in this way.  Violent crime has been trending downwards for decades, and certainly centuries and millenia, despite what recent events might inspire us to think.  Surely there are those who wish to live in a world that is totally devoid of physical force and even the possibility of it, but this is a fantasy irreconcilable with reality.  The question emerges, as it has always waited: exactly how are we going to choose to live with the ever present possibility of physical force?  The monopoly of violence as centralized with the state presents one possibility which certainly seems superior to much of our history.

Another comes from the Bible.  In the Gospel of Mathew it is stated:

Blessed are the meek,

for they shall inherit the earth.

At first reading this quote seems somewhat, well, pathetic.  The word ‘meek’ evokes an image of frail cowardliness.  But the English word ‘meek’ is a very poor translation.  A theologian by the name James Strong analyzed this word.  It is translated from the Greek word praus (πραεῖς) which has no easy equivalent in English.  James Strong explained the meaning for the word as “strength under control”.  We might imagine the powerful jaws of a lion lightly clasping it’s cub to move it.  The lion’s act of moving it’s cub here would be an instance of being ‘meek’ as it was originally intended.

The beatitude from the Gospel of Mark implies what Asimov later identifies: true strength is exhibited not upon others, but over one’s self, especially when it comes to those capable of great harm, but equally versed in this self control.  This dual strength is asymmetric.  It is like the warrior who prefers to garden as opposed to the gardener who suddenly finds themselves in a war and totally unprepared. 

Being strong enough not to use one’s strength is the key to our future.