MEMORY FASTING

May 23rd, 2020

While reading or listening to these words, how is it that we are able to make sense of each and every one?  Memory.  We have some sort of prior experience with each word.  It may be that we’ve never come across this particular combination of words, but our memory of each one individually allows us to connect them in fluid ways.

In a very real sense, this sentence is reorganizing your current thoughts by means of plugging into your memory of each word and threading those memories together in a new way in order for you to have a novel experience in the present.

But this extends far beyond words.

We can identify a chair that we’ve never seen as a chair because we are referencing our memory of chairs.  But beyond this, we are doing it with all categories at all times.  In some sense, our experience of the present is a constant reorganization of past memories.  We are constantly identifying the objects of the present in terms of previously formed categories.

It seems as though we are ineluctably tied to the past as a means of making sense of the present.  Our utter dependency on memory to make sense of anything makes it natural and perhaps obvious that the past can be so difficult to let go of.  Not only does it feel as though the past defines who we are, the past is how we define everything else.  A subtle catch-22 seems to arise: how do you escape from the only life-raft you have?

How does one become present in the moment without making sense of it with aide from the past?

As with anything, with practice.

We can take a page from the way the body operates, and apply it to the mind to great effect.  There is a long standing scientific consensus that fasting, that is, not eating, is very healthy for the body.  In recent years a large amount of literature has emerged on the subject and seems to indicate that many of the body’s most incredible superpowers are unlocked by the absence of food.  One example is autophagy.  Given no food, the body starts trolling itself to find poorly made proteins and cells that aren’t doing their job.  It then rips those defunct actors down to their most basic building blocks and then it rebuilds needed parts with a lot more care and attention.  This is just one of the operations that turns on while fasting.

Now let’s take this and apply it as a loose analogy to the mind.

While meditating, at least in the vipassana tradition, one of the main exercises is to simply dwell in the present moment by focusing on what’s actually going on, the breath entering and exiting the body, the sounds that drift in, the feeling of temperature, and the body’s own weight.  Inevitably this attention is disrupted by some memory of a thing you need to do.  Or a fantasy and dream about the future butts in.  Minutes pass until we snap back to the present and realize we’re far off track of the exercise.

But what happens in the total absence of this exercise and without any innate talent or drive to reside peacefully in the present?  Our minds are a sea of memory and hope, swirling with anxieties and desire.

How useful are all these desires and worries?

A few of them are certainly worth some attention.  But all of them?  Many of the thoughts, memories and desires that plague our experience are like those broken cells and poorly made proteins, roaming the body, spewing toxins and causing trouble and bringing the whole operation down a little.  Many of our thoughts, memories, desires, worries are just as useless, and worse, they bring the whole mind down a little.

Meditation is an attempt to have a memory fast.  That is, to let go of the past, and the future alike, and to dwell squarely in the present.  And without that perpetual aid and information of the past, the present moment can take on a surreal aspect, as though everything is again for the first time, and blazingly new.

Otherwise, we are essentially force-fed with memories of our ability or inability to make the best of the present.

Meditation is a past fast.

NETWORK OF CATEGORIES

May 22nd, 2020

This episode is dedicated to “Till’s Journal” which presumably is someone named Till who operates the Twitter handle @tillsjournal

What’s the difference between a trade school and a degree at a university?  We might say that one is more practical, or one is more of a “blue collar” training.  But if we dig down into the divide, where does the difference really land?

Trade schools generally instruct a person on the ins and outs of some sort of physical system.  Like electrical wiring, or refrigeration repair, things that often require your hands, and usually some sort of physical manipulation.

A university on the other hand is more concerned with abstract concept.  Whether that be physics or what was going through Joyce’s head when he wrote Ulysses.

One way to define this difference between university and trade school is that one deals in physical systems and the other deals in conceptual systems.

The operation of nearly all university and most degrees can be simplified into a single task:  nearly all degrees are just huge vocabulary lessons.

Each field has its own particular jargon.  The medical field is great for this.  As we explore the body and it’s workings with more detail, new names crop up to describe hitherto unknown regions.  As our resolution increasing in brain imaging, sub regions of sub regions of sub regions emerge with hypothesized functions.  A similar ballooning of jargon can be found in a field as seemingly different as literature.  New terms are constantly being invented, for better or worse to try and describe new ways of looking at things.

As we discover nuance between and across categories, we end up creating more categories to demarcate these spaces, giving birth to new words.  This process might not have an end as our attention focuses in on smaller and smaller slivers of nuance between categories that we’ve already created.  More importantly though, we can look backward and see how human thought has grown from a simpler form of conceiving of the world. 

Take for instance how we teach language to children.  We start with the biggest, starkest and most obvious categories. 

Dark, light. 

Up, down.

Left, right. 

Good, bad. 

Yes, no. 

As should be obvious, a lot of these categories come in a pair and form a dichotomy.  It’s only later on that we begin to explore the space between these categories.  The dichotomy of yes/no ends up being ineffective, so we invent a hazily nuanced set of categories that exit between yes and no.

Maybe

Probably

Sort of

Suddenly a network with just two diametrically opposed nodes grows in complexity and has a string of nodes connecting the ends, creating a spectrum.

Language grows to consume the space within the spectrum it defines. 

Especially with a voracious, cannibalistic language like English which ingested huge portions of a variety of languages and continues to innovate with it’s own schema.

The trade off, of course is complexity.  While language gains the ability to describe every little crevice of experience and knowledge, it also balloons past what individual humans are capable of remembering.  There’s a fairly good chance that Shakespeare actually knew most if not all of the words in the English language.  But that task is effectively impossible today since English is actually quite a bit bigger than it used to be.  There are now entire volumes of medical text books stuffed with words that did not exist a century ago.  And this is multiplied across a number of fields of study that have likewise expanded.

Notice also the degree of definition within a single category.  Take for example the word Laryngectomy.  It simply means ‘removal of the larynx’.  But a full definition of the word would be a step by step understanding of the entire process, which would inevitably require knowing a huge amount of technical knowledge that surrounds the process and governs the underlying principles that lead to a successful procedure.  The word laryngectomy is part of a huge network that requires a medical degree to properly explore.

What’s all this categorization and sub categorization for?  Why does the term high heels not suffice?  Why do we also talk of Mary Janes and Louboutin’s?

The entire vast project of language, of categorization is simply an attempt to figure out and track what is going on.

It’s worth pointing out that the word ‘existence’ might have the largest definition of all.  While we can define it simply, as we did with laryngectomy, to define ‘existence’ in a truly exhaustive way would require a definition of all the categories that exist, which in effect would be…

everything.