A LUCILIUS PARABLE: CONCRETE BUTTERFLY

June 2nd, 2019

This episode is dedicated to Charles.

Lucilius was called upon to pay a visit to a troubled young man, who had been cursed with an indelible sadness, resigning himself to his room for months.  To the young man’s parents the boy was sick, but none of their feeble help seemed to do anything.  And so after exhausting their efforts they asked if Lucilius might help.  Lucilius told them he wasn’t sure he could be of any help, but that he would meet with the boy.

“You are here to cure me?” The boy said with exhausted scorn, without hope nor pleasure.

“I don’t claim to cure anything.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I’m not sure yet.  Hopefully to do no harm, and with luck, maybe be some help, but the truth being, I know nothing of the hell within you.”

“Then you know about as much as I do.  I don’t know why I am this way.”

“Is it important to know why?” Lucilius asked.

“If I knew why, then I could fix it, like anything else that is broken.  If you know how it is broken then you know why it doesn’t work, and with that you can begin to fix things.  But I don’t know why, or how.  I just am this way.”

“You assume something is broken.”

“Of course, other people don’t feel this way.”

“Different does not necessarily mean broken.”  Lucilius said.

The boy looked hard at Lucilius.  “Well I feel broken.”

“On the contrary, someone who can withstand the burden of such heavy things must be strong.”

The boy’s hard stare was unchanged, unmoved, perhaps sadder still at the mention of a word and feeling that felt so far away.  He merely looked back to a corner of the room where there seemed to be refuge.  Lucilius looked around the room and saw in the bright split between dark curtain and the edge of a window, a moth slowly flapping its wings on the sill, exhausted and trapped.

“May I open a window a little?” Lucilius asked.  The boy only shrugged his shoulders, so, Lucilius got up and cracked the window.  The small breeze made the moth’s wings tremble a little, and it lifted on the fresh air and fluttered out into the sky.  Lucilius watched it a moment, thinking.

“In a valley between mountains, there was a colony of butterflies,” Lucilius began, “and among them was born a butterfly made of concrete.”

The young man looked over at Lucilius, confused and feeling for once in a long while: curiosity.

“The concrete butterfly emerged from his leathery cocoon and saw all around it butterflies quickly fluttering their delicate wings and lifting easily, gently into the air.  The concrete butterfly tried to do the same, flapping its rigid heavy wings, but he felt no lift.  The other butterflies soon noticed him, so different from all the rest.  And in their ignorance, they grew fearful, and they quelled that fear by making fun of the concrete butterfly.  Their careless loud remarks drifted down from the flickering crowd, and the concrete butterfly looked on his own body and understood their disgust, their hate.  He began to crawl away from the colony of butterflies and soon found a crack in the mountain’s side.  He crawled into the darkness and wept about himself.  And again the next day when he awoke and crawled outside, forgetting his heavy wings and heavy body, the other butterflies, seeing him flapping his wings as though he might fly laughed and jeered at him until he resigned himself back to his cave, where he wept again, but he stopped short with a strange thought.  The grass did not fly, nor the trees nor the flowers nor the pond nor the mountains.  Perhaps he wasn’t a butterfly, he wondered, and suddenly those other butterflies seemed now so different from himself.  But what was he, he wondered?  By this time, he was so tired, exhausted, he decided he didn’t care, and with that final thought he fell into a deep slumber.  From then on he only ventured out for the nectar of young flowers that were not far of the ground, one’s that he could bend down with his heavy arms and drink from, and always keeping far from the colony down in the valley.

He kept to himself in this way, until a fateful day when he woke and heard a crashing sound coming from the mouth of the cave.  He lifted his heavy body and lumbered toward the jagged shape of light that on this day was not bright, but dim and flashed with brilliant light with each crashing sound.  The concrete butterfly emerged to find a great storm raging through the valley, and in the torrent of rain and wind that seemed to rake the trees painfully of their leaves, the concrete butterfly realized that not all were leaves being shorn from the waving branches.  In the mess of the air, the colony of butterflies were helpless on their withered, wet and pelted wings, rolling dangerously in the chaos.

The concrete butterfly watched as the torrent slammed one butterfly from the colony into the rock face, crumpling it’s body, it’s wings in tatters.  In that moment of horror, the concrete butterfly felt something else, something he’d never felt before.  The wind edging beneath his folded wings.  Without thinking, he spread his wings, and the fierce wind caught them, and for the first time the concrete butterfly lifted high into the sky.  His strong, heavy wings balanced against the onslaught of wind and smoothed the pressure it brought like wide knives.  In that moment the concrete butterfly forgot about everything and felt for the first time the sheer pleasure of taking flight.  Intuitively, he started tilting his wings to the different crashing currents of wind, all the while rising higher and higher into the sky.  He felt instantly as though this was not some second-nature, but his first, and knew that he had been living a life in wait for this moment.  But he still had not fully realized just what his life had been in wait for.  The pleasure of that first flight calmed, just enough and he looked down, and saw again, now below him, the violence being done to the great colony of butterflies.  He heard their pain and sorrow as they screamed, helpless in the storm, and the concrete butterfly reacted without thinking:  He tilted himself forward and drew his wings in and dove down towards the colony with tremendous speed.

Just as his strong legs grasped another butterfly as it tumbled through the air, the concrete butterfly spread it’s wings and carried the other, swiftly riding the crazed wind until he was back at his cave.  The colony butterfly was terrified and confused at the sudden calmness of the cave and looked back just in time to see the concrete butterfly spreading it’s wings once more and lifting into the the storm. 

He worked tirelessly, using the great wind of the storm to save the colony from the storm, plucking each of them from the rolling wind and bringing them back to the cave, until the cave was full and the muddle of air and sky was clear of butterflies.  The last of them safely in the cave, the whole colony stared in fear and awe at the concrete butterfly.  He looked at them all once more, deciding that he only cared that they were safe.  Then he turned a lumbered back out of the cave.

The colony watched on as the concrete butterfly spread his wings and lifted into the storm, to play, on  great winds that they could not handle.”

The young man was staring at the floor.  He finally breathed in, deeply, as if to sigh.

“You’re saying some great difficulty - some kind of storm - is headed my way?”

“Maybe.  There’s no telling what might be around the corner for us.  But, it seems you can probably handle whatever comes your way.”

The young man let out a single, doubtful hiccup of laughter, “What makes you say that?” he asked.

“You are still here.”

COGNITIVE SLUMBER

June 1st, 2019

It’s easy to call people sheep, claim that no one thinks for themselves, and that we’re all mindless zombies – there’s plenty of evidence to point at that seems to prove this.  This cognitive slumber, however, is a bit of a paradox.  A small example to illustrate this is the widespread agreement we have about how rare common sense is.  Overlooking the obvious problem regarding the word ‘common’ here, we can ask if this view of other people is simply another example of the cognitive slumber we are trying to pin down.  Do people say that common sense is rare because it is, or simply because it’s common to hold this linguistically infuriating belief? 

In truth, the only thing that is common about common sense is the common belief everyone has that it’s rare.  [As an aside, this whole concept of common sense is easily rectified if we rephrase it as ‘good sense’ which is what everyone means when we talk about common sense.  This is just a linguistic aside, however, and the larger point works just as well, and perhaps even better if we spoke about good sense.]

Much of what we do falls within an analogy with an autopilot.  The formative moments when aspects of our identity came into being were almost never thoughtful, analyzed and weighted decisions.  These moments are forged primarily by the emotional drive of experience.  Nothing is better posed to lend credence to this than the language that surrounds trauma.  The very word is perhaps first and foremost a signal that a person is a certain way because of some awful experience.  We can ask: if a person was incapable of feeling emotion during the trauma, would the effects still carry over into the next day given no damage to the body?  The sensible guess feels like it would be…no.

Cognitive slumber is when the mind does not actively analyze and grade the quality of it’s person’s identity as evidenced by the behaviors and actions the mind sees this person doing.  Or to put it another way, cognitive slumber is when someone functions solely from an autopilot that was formed by whatever emotional experiences kneaded and molded it into that shape.

The end of cognitive slumber is really just a sweet piece of luck.  We cannot really predict the next thought we will have, nor the next sentence in the book we are currently reading, nor what some new acquaintance will say during a conversation.  We move through life compiling the emotional experiences of these unpredictable events, each one pushing new shape into the hardening clay of who we are. 

However, one of these experiences can pierce the mold, crack the identity, and invoke a kind of mindfulness, a circumspection that causes a person to wonder just how they are put together in order to produce the behavior they see themselves doing.

This may be why it’s nearly universally perceived as a good thing to get a wide breadth of experience, because this quantity and variety makes it more likely that we’ll come across an experience that cracks our basic emotion-forged identity, enabling our executive minds to take more active and productive control, and ultimately resulting in a better more thoughtful future.

This episode references Episode 44: Autopilot

QUALITY OF QUANTITY

May 31st, 2019

So goes the old saying: Quantity has a quality all its own.

This concept can manifest in a number of different ways.  Whether it be Ulysses S. Grant pushing towards victory with a higher quantity of soldiers, or a photographer who takes millions of pictures, quantity produces certain qualities that cannot be achieved reliably through any other means.

For Grant, the quality of quantity is simply being able to throw more weight on one side of the equation and keep it that way until the Civil War ended in his favor.

The quality of quantity created by the photographer, on the other hand, is more interesting and important.

Take enough pictures and one is bound to come out well.  While this may at first seem like a slap in the face to the art and practice of photography, it is nonetheless correct.  Given a random distribution of results from a varying application of an action, some of these results are bound to be good if not spectacular given a large enough pool of results to sample. 

Write a million words and there’s bound to be a few sentences that sparkle.  But the point here is that

it’s more likely there will be sparkling sentences in a million words as opposed to just a few thousand words.  The quantity that we produce as creators dictates how much imaginative territory we cover and this furthermore dictates how many chances and opportunities we have to come across real gems of creativity.

This is part of the logic behind Tinkered Thinking’s daily episodes.  While it’s silly think that all episodes would be great, it’s reasonable to operate with the assumption that more good episodes will inevitably arise in the process.

While a creator can toil away, trying to raise the quality of less work, the creator who invokes quantity before quality inevitably – with enough time - gets both, whereas the former creator who concentrates solely on quality without understanding the benefit of quantity is not even guaranteed one these two.

This concentration on quantity also helps when starting things.  Part of understanding the benefits of quantity is that much of it is going to be subpar, like sifting for gold, much of the material moved is just useless slag.  Understanding this decreases any pestering notions of perfection and quickly strips away any fantasies about achieving the ideal result right off the bat.  A creator who knows that a great deal of content is going to be produced can simply get to work instead of perseverating over the perfect way to start.

SHAVE THE DOG

May 30th, 2019

All decisions have a cascade of consequences that arise through time.  The so called ‘first-order consequence’ is the initial effect that our decision or action produces.    A second-order consequence is something that arises from this initial effect, or rather the first-order consequence of our actions then cause second-order consequences to occur, regardless of whether such an effect was intentioned by our initial action.

An example helps illuminates this:  biting the donut creates a first-order consequence of pleasure and elevated blood-sugar levels.

The actual experience of pleasure in this instance actually has a small down-regulating effect on the brain that makes a person less sensitive to that pleasure the next time it comes around.  This down-regulatory effect would be a second-order consequence that’s caused by the tasty pleasure of the donut – the tasty pleasure being the first-order consequence. 

Another second-order consequence is an accumulation of fat as a result of blood over-saturated with sugar.

A potential third-order consequence could be a higher likelihood that we will grab a second donut next time because one donut is no longer satisfying because of the down-regulatory effects that occur as the second-order consequence of eating donuts.

Another example highlights the polar nature of consequences even better.

Hangovers.

Anyone who has had too much to drink can grapple this concept in a sickeningly visceral way.

Alcohol provokes a spike of pleasure that is similar to sugar.  Perhaps unlike sugar, however, as more alcohol is consumed, the desire for even more alcohol rises, this is pretty much always a bad idea, and it’s painfully obvious just how bad of an idea it is to act on this increasing desire. 

The more we act in the short term and drink more alcohol, the worse the hangover is going to be in the morning.

The exact opposite is –thankfully- also true:  the more we abstain from alcohol, the less of a hangover we will experience in the morning.

Hangovers are a second-order consequence.  A first-order consequence of having a drink is that we experience a rise in both pleasure and desire.  Not only do we experience the illusion of artificial happiness, but we crave more via more booze.

But here’s the kicker: what’s the famous cure to a hangover? 

The Hair of the Dog.

More alcohol.  Which then reinitiates the entire cascade of consequences.

The hair of the dog is a basic and potent example of how a vicious cycle simultaneously completes it’s first full cycle and begins it’s next. 

While a good hangover can be an effective reminder of just how fast short term benefit flips into a bad situation once that short term benefit passes, it’s imperative to keep the process from replicating.  Like a virus replicating in the blood stream, a bad pattern repeated can become a habit and bad habits pull us away from more fulfilling goals faster and faster.

Best to never even entertain the hair of the dog, and simply endure.  Preferably with a healthy laugh at one’s own dumb decisions.

This episode references Episode 386: White Diamond, which is all about vicious and virtuous cycles, it’s an episode that is centrally important to the topics of Tinkered Thinking, so if you haven’t checked it out yet, queue that one up.

VERY REAL

May 29th, 2019

Given all our different points of view, the perennial argument about how to be objective arises as a kind of paradox: how can we have an unbiased view of any situation and circumstance if we are bound to experience and view reality through a single, unique and isolated perspective? 

Like many big and much talked-about questions: this is potentially just a bad question.  The constraints seem quite obvious and total. 

We have enough trouble trying to understand a single other person’s perspective on the world, let alone trying to view the world without the bent of any perspective what-so-ever.

We might instead think about this topic on a kind of spectrum.  While true objectivity might be impossible, and frankly, it’s a topic that obnoxious enough and large enough that we’ll gladly admit that it’s beyond the scope of this episode, we can ponder something a little closer to home:

that is, times and instances when our own perspective has cracked, and spilled out into new territory.  When someone poses a question that reframes our thinking, or when someone’s story is so moving that we can’t help but empathize and secretly feel that we have somehow lived their story also, just by listening.  Some might say that this is the stuff of great art: to create bridges between our islands of perspective.

We need only think of comedy to call this kind of event into tight focus.  With a good comedian, all the perspectives of everyone in the audience is guided, and slid across the unexpected rails of lateral thinking to new slants on common subjects.  When an entire audience laughs at the same joke, part of the pleasure is the sense of community that everyone instantly recognizes when our own foibles and strange ways of living are put on blatant and humorous display.

Leaving objectivity to it’s own devices, comedy here shows how we can often willingly test the waters outside our own perspective, and much like a moving story we empathize with, we inhabit, or gain a piece of someone else’s perspective.

While we might not be able to be objective, it’s entirely possible that we have the ability to be less subjective.  This might seem like a complimentary paradox to the original sentiment about objectivity, but it’s much akin to the fact that no matter how good we get at something, we can always get a little bit better.

On the flip side, there’s an important red flag that is often willingly raised and waved around in today’s endless babble.

When a person remarks that something is ‘very real’ for them. 

What in name of catshit sandwiches is that supposed to mean?

To claim that something a person experiences is very real seems to invoke a greater, narrower and more intense flavor of subjectivity.

For anything in the experience of a conscious being to be more real than other things such a person might experience is to claim that other things are less real.

Think about this for a moment.  How can anyone have an experience of something that is less real?

Well mr. tinkered thinker, you might say: what the person is actually trying to say is that something that’s very real is simply of greater importance than other things.

But I call bullshit.  Not because this isn’t true, but because there’s great potential for more than meets the eye, or in this case, the ear.

It simply cannot be overestimated to what degree we influence ourselves by the things we say.

While not necessarily provable, it’s certainly safer to assume that everything we say is programming our idea of who we are, and subsequently dictating who we become and how we act.

Case and point: we all hear people who constantly say they can’t do a certain thing.  How often do they go back on their word and give it a big fat consistent effort anyhow?   For such people the idea that they have some kind of ironclad inability is very real.

Now, how can such a negative thing be so important?  That is if we fit it back into the casual idea that very real is really just a hyperbolic way of giving something importance?

There’s only one mechanism through which we can so bizarrely shoot ourselves in the foot:  that mechanism is identity.

Reflect for a moment on the connection between a person’s identity and their behavior.  Which is more likely to dictate the other?

And yet, identities are built and compiled from stuff that’s somewhat fictional: whether it be a nation state, or a sports team, or even if we talk about someone who identifies as a doormat, these are all things invented by the mind, they were not discovered in the same way water on Mars is discovered.  Water on mars is a fact about reality.  Nation states, sports teams, and many other forms of identity are ideas more than they are facts, but they nonetheless guide and dictate our behavior.  Such ideas are very real for the people who behave in accordance to such identities, and yet, we might do well to ask, how real are these ideas in the first place?

In addition to comedians, another profession that takes a slice of the cake here is teaching.

To be shown how to do something by another person is to step out of one’s own perspective and endeavor to look at the world through the eyes of our teacher.  If we succeed, it’s means we’ve learned something.  We can repeat this process forever and constantly crack our perspective and expand it to include the thoughts, ideas and perspectives that others are willing to share.  To do so is, inevitably, a potential assault to our own identity.  Some people certainly jump from one identity to another after being exposed to the ideas that compose such an identity, but this merely swaps one narrow subjectivity for another, and it often requires a dash of denial to keep the common existence of both identities from implying the obvious fact of an even larger perspective that takes into account both.

To move in the direction of objectivity inevitably involves relaxing the constraints of any one identity, because identity is inherently narrow in focus.  Any identity requires this narrow focus in order to maintain a view of the world that will effectively hold together the logic of behavior that cascades from that identity.

It may seem by this argument that the only way to become less narrow is to give up cherished beliefs and ideas, but this is not necessarily the case.  The kernel here to chew on is the act of adding ideas, to genuinely entertain them.  And while old ideas might fall from a list of priorities, we need not let them fall into disuse, any old perspective should forever inform our current one, just as new ideas will tweak and clarify our idea of what is real.

This episode references Episode 100: Yet, a Way out of the Box and Episode 17: The Identity Danger