TRIGGERED

April 1st, 2019

Good songs can quickly gain a sour edge when a relationship dissolves that was associated with the discovery of such a good song.  When once the song functioned like a kind of anthem for good times, the reminder of such good times can evoke a barrage of sadness and perhaps anger.  Music in this case is perhaps the easiest and most ubiquitous example of this phenomenon, but in recent years, more and more people seem to be similarly triggered by far less than the melodies and lyrics of a bygone phase of life.

Single words can trigger people.  While there are classic perennial examples of such words, mostly in the form of slurs, many individuals seem to have adopted a similar reaction to a greater variety of words.

A more approachable example of this exists in the Harry Potter books.  He-who-must-not-be-named is a euphemism for Voldemort, the name which the protagonist has no problem saying, and for good reason.

We alone as a species give words their power.  And because of this, we alone can take that power away.  If a word exists more in the imagination than in practical use, than it’s associations remain static.  It has no chance to evolve because it is not used, and because of this, powerful, rarely spoken words retain their power.  We can see this occurring on the level of society and on the level of the individual.

The only way to dismantle the power of such words is to reclaim them in new contexts. 

The paradox in doing so is that attempting to use such words in new contexts is bound to trigger people who are unaware of the effort.  It’s uncomfortable because strangers have no quick way of deducing the intentions of each other if actions and behavior are counter-intuitively matched to intentions.

Groups of friends, however, will adopt all manner of impolite speech for inside-jokes and bonding in general.  Such groups are exploring taboos in the same way children are always pushing the envelope: in order to find and know the true limits of a given situation.

When it comes to the good song soured, it’s fairly easy to simply listen to it, over and over, until it’s washed of any negative emotion.  In essence, by pulling the trigger on such emotional ammunition, we exhaust our store and in so doing, we reclaim what we’ve lost.

While civility is an endless gift to us against violence, words are not physical violence, and in the case of language, we might be a healthier people if we give our verbal taboos a little light and let linguistic civility slide a little.  By airing out such closeted skeletons, we can diffuse our general triggered nature.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: ENTROPY SHARPENING

March 31st, 2019

One of the very faintest memories that Lucilius often wondered about -as perhaps a dream- was an image of his two hands, each with a rock, ramming one into the other at careful angles, cracking off flakes.  The finished piece was a crude edge, slowly inspected while a small scatter of rocky shards littered the forest ground.

He thought of this hazy image as he carefully ran a blade along a wet stone block.  He flipped the blade and brought it back towards him.  Slowly, the thin layer of water grew murky as he swept the water back and forth with the blade.  The whole knife used to be much bigger, but over the many years it has dulled and sharpened, by the stone and by the task it lost and found it’s edge, always by losing more and more of itself.

Lucilius could also remember a crude copper knife, and later on, iron.  Every blade he’d made and honed through the centuries had slowly ground down to nothing or snapped.  Each time he honed his skills at the forge, bending bright metal onto itself under great heat, pounding the softened metals, then grinding down edges.

As he sharpened the small blade he now had, he wondered: how many such tools had grown by the hands of man and withered under the same hand to stay sharp.

He flipped the blade and dragged it slowly against the smooth stone. 

His phone rang, but he did not hear it.

He flipped the blade once more.

The TV’s talking head droned on with new alarm, but Lucilius did not hear it.

He only concentrated, keeping the blade at the right angle.

Even the thoughts of past tools he had built and used, melted away as he concentrated more deeply.

He brought the blade to pass once more.

And once more.

And there was nothing in his mind save for the task at hand.

Soon this knife would be used up and gone too, but Lucilius did not think of it.

Both the past and all that might still happen were sheared from his mind.

He only moved the blade across the stone,

merely holding it at the perfect angle.

IN OTHER WORDS

March 30th, 2019

We love sound-bites, quotes, jokes, maxims, axioms and all manner of adage, for they simplify the world for us.  Beyond this, the brief, but thought-provoking phenomenon of such mimetic morsels is a pleasure.  Literally a pleasure.  Such statements do not evoke wise behavior in those who hear such Yoda-like statements.

Even a kid can pick out which of Yoda’s sentences are probably the wisest and most profound.

If this disconnect between recognizing a wise statement and being a wise person weren’t so profound, then there would be far wiser people walking and talking.  Alas, our ubiquitous balking, squawking and bad-faith finger-pointing indicates that we’re far from a more enlightened state as a species.

In other words, recognizing wisdom does not make a  person wise.

This is much like beauty.  We can recognize beauty, something that has been crafted with thoughtfulness and deft skill, but this does not mean that we can immediately do the same thing.

In the case of an artist, aesthetics of this sense is not just a matter of recognition, but a matter of practice.  The artist practices a skill and seeks to recognize beauty in the result.  A beauty that can uniformly be recognized by those who do not practice in the same way.

What practice of a skill does in this case is build a context.  Like the wide life that we experience, an artist’s cannon of work is a generative work that the artist not only creates but also experiences in much the same way a spectator would.  The artist functions in two ways whereas the spectator only functions in one.

With regards to wisdom, it does not take much observation of life to recognize a wise action or statement. Merely living in the world is the only prerequisite for gaining the context for statements that can be phrased more simply in other words.  But to evoke wise behavior within one’s self requires a practice much like the artist who develops a skill.

In other words, it’s not enough to recognize wisdom, one must experience it, and this takes practice.

HARD BOUNCE

March 29th, 2019

For anyone who has ever figured out the basic workings of a yo-yo, it’s clear that getting the yo-yo to come back up has everything to do with how it went down.

Masters of this simple toy will launch their yo-yo as hard as possible in order to create as much rotational motion as possible, motion which will eventually be recaptured and harvested on the way back up.  Youtube any of these masters of the toy and you’ll be met by yo-yos moving through all manner of acrobatics with the string fully unraveled.  The entire time this is happening the yo-yo is still spinning, but that motion hasn’t been tripped into coiling the string and thus making it climb back up to the hand.

We have the same phenomenon with a bouncy ball.  The harder we throw it at the ground, the higher it will go.  Beyond the equal lengths that a yo-yo falls and rises, however, a bouncy ball can be launched at the ground with such force that the resulting height is many times the height it initially started at.

We can mine these images for an allegory about how to pivot hard and in a difficult direction. 

How we start or maintain a diet might benefit from such images.  Of course there is yo-yo dieting, the act of losing weight and then binging it all back on.  This fits out image somewhat, at least with the yo-yo, but how might it translate into a ball hurled at the ground with such force that it goes high into the sky?

For the yo-yo dieter, we can look at the equal and opposite motivations that propel such behavior.  The diet is undertaken for health, or reasons of body image.  There’s some sort of well-intentioned reasoning going on here that understands that something must be given up in order to gain something of a different category.  Tasty food for a more pleasant experience while looking in the mirror, or at pictures, or that subtle feeling of increased well-being during the day.  The corresponding opposite motivation is that evolutionarily programmed desire to consume as many rich foods as possible.

These two forces compete with on another, and in the yo-yo dieter they might achieve something close to equal influence, ensuring that neither really win, and all that’s happening is one variety of unpleasantness followed by another, ad nauseam.

Here we might try to switch out our allegorical images and interpret what this would look like in practice.  Instead of a yo-yo, what would the diet look in terms of a bouncy ball hurled at the ground as hard as possible? 

What this might look like in practice is someone who is finally fed up (pun intended) with the yo-yo dieting and wants to take more drastic actions, but instead of just going on a longer, harsher diet, such a person predicates doing such with a gluttonous binge of epic proportions.  Such a person might set a date a week away for an extended diet to begin, and then, spend the ensuing week eating all manner of pleasurable and gluttonous food, and not simply enjoying, but force-feeding, in order to make one’s self somewhat sick.  This might sound somewhat unpleasant and masochistic, and it is, but for potentially good reason.  We could say that the person throwing the ball at the ground harder is crueler than a person who merely drops it, but if the ball can handle the force of transition that happens when hitting the ground, then the payoff is that much more.  For the dieter, this might be akin to an internal monologue that is finally sick and tired of the nagging little voice that always wants the donut or the coffee cake or the mac’n cheese, and responding with: you want it?  You got it, and feeding that little monster past it’s limits of enjoyment.  For those who have not been in a healthy state for quite a long time, this might actually be dangerous, but for someone younger and more robust, this kind of experiment might be well worth the memories it creates.  The gorging here is solely for the memory, of disgust it will create, so that when a healthier, difficult diet is undertaken, such feelings of sickness and disgust can be paired with temptations and thereby ameliorate their effect.

If such a categorical change in behavior can be maintained long enough for that behavior to form a structure of habit within the brain, then we can perhaps succeed in levelling-up our health and our life.

But such allegorical images might be useful in other realms.  The real fruit of such images is to realize that success can sometimes be achieved by going in counter-intuitive directions.

This episode references Episode 150: Pivot Harder and Episode 42: Level-Up

PREDICTING THOUGHTS

March 28th, 2019

We have all had the eerie experience of struggling with a problem and by chance noticing some new aspect of the problem which ushers in a Eureka moment.  In such a case, our attention has happened upon some stray and key detail. 

Ideally we are directing this attention into unexplored territory in an efficient and systematic way.  Unfortunately, our attention seems to bounce around more by the whims and wills of chance rather than by the design of some overtly conscious system.  Our own consciousness seems to tile over this disturbing fact with feelings of identity and  the ownership of one’s own experience.    But the fact is, we cannot really predict the next thought that we will have. 

Notice how the very word ‘prediction’ separates into pre- and –diction, meaning simply ‘before spoken’.  Prediction, in this etymological sense means thought, as in, we can predict what we will say because we have a thought about it immediately preceding the event.

But can we actually predict what is before our diction?  This is a redundant regression.  Our definition and use of the word prediction has conveniently expanded beyond this more narrow etymology, but the functional problem of predicting a thought remains.  To try and predict a thought is to actually have the thought, there is no ‘pre-thought’ that we can access.  We can certainly plan on doing some type of work, or theorize about the kinds of thoughts we will have in a certain place and time and in a certain context, but the nuances and details do not arise until we are actually experiencing such a future moment.

We can rewind back to the introductory image of struggling to solve a problem and see that while we can’t predict actual thoughts, we can actually map out their negative space.  What does this mean exactly?  In visual art, negative space is the space around an object.  We can easily imagine someone selecting an object in Photoshop with a function that detects it’s borders and then deleting that object.  This would turn the object into a negative space.  The areas of a jigsaw puzzle that appear as though they’ve been cut out of the piece can qualify as a negative space in this context.  The useful aspect of negative space in this instance is that we have the capacity to slowly map out the negative space of a solution as we investigate a problem.  This is somewhat like predicting a thought. 

Eureka, after all is greek for “I have found it.”  What exactly did Archimedes find when he exclaimed this?  More important than finding a method for measuring the purity of gold, he found a thought.  A system of thoughts that his mind predicted might exist.  And like shuffling through a bucket of keys and trying different keys for a specific lock, his imagination kept generating more keys until one finally fit.

We inevitably have only one tool for this entire process: the question.

At the root of all thought and progress, the question is humanity’s single superpower.

Not only is it an open ended concept that propels us into a new adventure,

it is a mechanism for mapping, outlining, and in some sense predicting the future of our own thoughts.

For a different discussion of this tool, check out Episode 30 of Tinkered Thinking, entitled The Only Tool.