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. 

MIRROR EYES

May 21st, 2020

Answer this question:  Where are you?

There is certainly a standard geographical answer.  We can list a continent, a country, a city, a town, a street, and a number and then append it with living room, or bedroom.

But once we’ve exhausted our ability to locate our body in relation to other people, since geographical location is –more than anything- a way that humans structure that data of distance from one another, how is the original question further probed?

Phrased another way, we can sharpen up the question and ask more specifically:

Where in your experience of reality are you?

If you pause for a moment and simply register the sphere of your consciousness, that is, the sounds that are drifting toward you, the sound of the passing car on the street, the family member jabbering away on the phone in the next room, the crackle of CO2 in the tin can of soda water, the light of the room, the shapes and textures of walls and items that light illuminates, the heat, or chilly feel of air, the humidity, the feel of that full stomach or that tinge of bored hunger.  The restless lethargy, or that relaxed calmness.  If you consider all of it, the entire breadth of your present moment and all it’s finer details, where in that experience are you?

We might be tempted to give the rationally seeming answer of: at the center of all those details, of course.

A fair answer, but it must be unpacked.  If there is a center to this experience.  Point at it, and describe what exactly you are pointing at.

Is this description possible?

The mind can certainly produce an answer.  But any answer can be further interrogated.  Try the exercise and then ask if that description is at all just an extension of the prior description of our experience of reality.  We can touch our face and say: this is me.  But that symmetrical feeling of hand on face and face on hand is still just an aspect of our reality at the moment.  It’s like the feeling of the floor under our feet, or that particular geometry of light flung up on the wall.  It’s part of our experience.  And at the extreme end of a spectrum, there are people who have had their face blown off and yet still, there’s someone that remains….there.

So where is there?

Imagine for a moment that the backs of your eyelids had mirrors, and when you closed your eyes, you were suddenly looking back at the origin of what seems to be you.  Now, we could be rather technical and say that the cones and rods that compose the cellular structure of the retina within the eye would suddenly see themselves, but this is far from how we experience the world with our eyes closed.  Not to mention that the lenses in our eyes and those cones and rods themselves don’t have the capacity to resolve the smallness of their own detail.  Rather, regard this question of mirror eyes within the frame of how reality is experienced.

If you suddenly had the capacity to truly look back at yourself, beyond what we see in normal mirrors, what would you see?

Is there anything there?

OPINIONS & INSPIRATION

May 20th, 2020

   The media, all media, whether it be a new station, a newspaper, or a social media platform is at core a method for sharing information.  All of these platforms function because our basic desire to know what’s going on.

The way we interact with these data sources determines the impact of the data far more than what the data actually is.

Meaning: for some people media is like a dungeon of opinion, and for others it’s a fountain of inspiration.

The difference has less to do with the source and content of the actual media and has more to do with how that media lands, what sort of mind it interacts with.

For those who have an emotional makeup that is more likely to be determined by external forces rather than internal regulation, much of media forms an opinion dungeon.  These platforms function as a kind of self torture where people subjugate themselves to influences that create rage and anger, and it seems and feels like non-negotiable fact from such a perspective.  The opinions of those deemed ignorant, wrong or stupid haunt such people, and the constant catastrophe and crisis of life seems like the rational input for creating all this poor opinion in addition to being another, perhaps primary source of anxiety and torture.

On the other hand, a person who has developed powerful mechanisms and strategies for regulating emotion from an internal locus of control does not provide the same fertile soil for reactions of rage, anxiety and depression.

Such regulation might hark of some sort of stoic defense, but the power of such regulation goes one step beyond.

An individual who is sensitive to the workings of their own emotional, internal environment also caters, and crafts their own influences, and this is where an opinion dungeon can be transformed into an inspiration fountain.

In years prior we only had a few news stations from which to choose and which were tinted with their own editorial flavor. 

But now with the rise of social media feeds, some of these come with curation filters, and while this feature can perhaps easily lead to echo chambers becoming more deeply entrenched it also allows for inspirational material to be sorted for.

In either case the usage of media intake gains the ability to become more extreme.  Whether that is for good or bad all comes down to the person, and how they regulate or don’t regulate the information they receive, and ultimately that comes down to they way a person regulates their own emotions.

ENEMY ECHOES

May 19th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to Scott Adams, who recently described an instance when he employed the skills of an excellent communicator with a disagreeing friend.  You can find this description on Twitter here.  And to be sure, this episode was written before discovering Scott Adam’s thread on the topic and Tinkered Thinking makes no claim on the topic upon which he was conversing. 

Our skill as communicators is shown bare when we speak with enemies.  The level of our communication does not rise to the level of those who agree with our message, it falls to the depths of those who disagree.  To simply shrug one’s shoulders and claim that some people just aren’t going to agree misses the point.  Our goal as a communicator engaged with an enemy is not to gain assent, it’s to create respect.

Enemy is perhaps a harsh word that should be clarified.  An enemy harks of a relationship that is irredeemable, one that can only be approached with force and fear.  But the category of ‘enemy’ as a concept says everything about the person who claims to have an enemy.  As a word, it does not communicate anything reliable about the person or the people it claims to identify.  Anyone claiming to have enemies should immediately be regarded with suspicion because of what it implies about the psychology of the person using such a word.  The simplest and most practical reason is because that category could expand and suddenly be levelled to include you.

The point is perhaps better highlighted by a different phrasing:

Who would you rather have as an ally? 

Someone who can identify their enemy? 

or

Someone who finds the idea of an ‘enemy’ too limiting, someone who looks at the wide expanse of human affairs as a dynamic playground that exists outside of such definitions.

Now what exactly does that second option look like?  Do we heed the words of a sandal-clad hippie from a few years ago and look upon everyone as a friend and turn the other cheek when an adversary wishes to land a strike?

Perhaps.  However, a couple thousand years have surely revealed the impracticality of such a perspective.

It is possible to develop a personal level of stoicism that imbues a person with the ability to take an infinite amount of blows and even laugh in the face of death.  And while this philosophy is exceptionally useful, it need not be the only tool on our cognitive Swiss-army knife.  We need to entertain, explore and incorporate a variety of options, in the same way that the friend/enemy dichotomy is too limiting.

The alternative that exists between submitting to an enemy and raising arms against the enemy is a more difficult middle path, one that hinges on our ability to communicate.

Recent technologies have highlighted the default way that disagreeing people communicate.  We seem convinced that if only we shout our point of view loud enough and forcefully enough that it will be convincing.  We somehow also seem aware that this absolutely does not work when employed by the other side, but then we suffer a true instance of cognitive dissonance and fail to see the glaring contradiction in our own method.

Speaking with friends is perhaps too easy.  When we see nods and murmurs of agreement while we describe a point, is it evidence that our description is strong and convincing?  Or do we grow weak in our abilities to communicate by preaching only to the choir? An impressive communicator makes an adversary pause to think.  An impressive communicator helps another consider a different perspective, and this is almost never achieved by some description of a personal opinion.

The best way to achieve this is to first listen, and then ask questions about what you hear.  And to clarify, the sort of question we are talking about is not a cheeky repackaging of our own opinion, like “Have you considered this…?”  The questions that crack open the wall that stands in the way of good communication actually breach that wall and curiously explore the view point of another.

A confident communicator takes this route because the seed for unravelling a poor perspective is already buried within that poor perspective.  This seed is often a small discrepancy in the thinking of our adversary or companion in dialogue.  A discrepancy that they are unaware of, one that often hinges on two contexts that they have never considered together but which are actually related. 

The task of a good communicator is to find that seed by exploring the mind of the adversary with questions, and then once that seed is found, to then nurture it, again with questions, by asking that adversary to resolve the discrepancy in their own thinking.

If we only describe our own opinion, with our own perspective, then we wallpaper the space between people, and in doing so we close them in and close ourselves in.  We build echo chambers, both for ourselves and the people we so desperately wish to convince.  We have to ask: are we helping our enemies build their echo chambers?

Or are we willing to do the more difficult task of finding the right questions that can thread through the enemy’s defenses and burrow deep into the echo chamber in order to let in a little light?

REALMS OF PLAY

May 18th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to Cory Williams who you can connect with on Twitter with the handle @Williamscoryr

Everyone claims to love learning, but this simply isn’t true.  The default state of learning is confusion, and very few people have figured out how to enjoy the dance with this uneasy state.  Once we have actually figured something out, once we’ve actually learned the thing, we are no longer learning.  But it’s this end state, this sense of having some new ability, an increase in agency that everyone thinks of when we claim to love learning.  We do not love the process, and in fact we actively try to avoid it most of the time.  If this weren’t true then no one would watch reruns and we’d all be loaded with a dump truck’s worth of extraneous talents, abilities and skills.  Truth is, we’d all love to have them, but we don’t actually enjoy the process that’s required to acquire them, namely, learning.

The default state of this process, confusion, is uncomfortable because it puts us in direct contact with the things we like the least: uncertainty and the unknown.  We prefer roadmaps, and plans that offer a reliable prediction of what we should expect, but when it comes to raw learning, we have to speak about a place that everyone must go that has no road map.  Certainly teachers and professors plan their lessons, but this is done with faith that the mind of each student will be able to make the leap from concept to concept.  What such lesson plans really do is create a dedicated space for the mind to mingle with something new and confusing.

The mind will find the way if it’s pushed in that direction.  But it can take a little time, along with all the usual accoutrement of questions and investigation, of tinkering and listening to explanations.  These hallmarks of the learning process are but methods that the mind uses to shape itself.  One can nearly imagine neurons in the brain sending out desperate signals in a chaotic new way, trying to strike upon some pattern that will close the loop and finally make sense of the situation.  Regardless of how its achieved on a neuronal level, the mind does eventually shape shift until it’s created a working model of the confusion at hand, and when that model can work and produce predictable outcomes, then the confusion dissolves, and that satisfying sense of agency and ability that we like to associate with learning floods the system.

Though, the important caveat here is that the mind won’t bother to figure it out unless there’s a push to do so.  Without a great enough need we resolve to a degrading homeostasis, content to atrophy in rhythm to studio laughter.

Reality is plump with puzzles and problems that deserve our attention – issues that would most certainly fall in defeat to the gaze of the human mind, but for too many of us, it often requires some crisis to galvanize the mind into a new direction.  This of course extends beyond the lone individual and applies aptly to groups of any size.

It’s worthy to wonder if our discomfort with the unknown is itself learned.  There is of course the well studied phenomenon of learned helplessness, where individuals and even animals can be conditioned to behave powerless, even in situations where they can take action.  Children certainly don’t seem encumbered by much of a need for plans and predictability, as long as they are safe, and much of the time, they make learning look fun.  Or rather, a learning child can be so immersed in the process that it seems as though they shed the sort of identity that would be offended by confusion and frustration, as is the perennial case with adults.

For all of us, it’s possible to look back on our own learning and see that there has always been some worthy treasure beyond the gulf of confusion.  And regardless of how we’ve grown such an easily disturbed sense of comfort, it’s clear that the arduous journey of learning leads to one of life’s few truly fulfilling experiences.

Think back for a moment to those playground days.  What’s the one thing that all kids talk about? 

What they’re going to do when they’re older.

And why is this a topic of discussion?  Because kids are looking at their future as a continuation and expansion of the playground.  We talk about things we’ll do when we’re older because as children such things seem like fun, and chances are, as kids, we were right.

But ability and opportunity does not simply arise with time.  Learning widely and deeply opens up the realms of play.  In ways that we only dreamed of as children.  But of course to traverse from the mundane living of an adult to that expansive playground of life dreamed of as children, the mind must first be pushed in that direction.