COHERENCE DRIVE

February 10th, 2022

Dedicated to Micle, connect with him on twitter @MicleMihai

Looking at the etymology of the word ‘coherent’ it means for two things to stick together. A contradiction feels uncomfortable because two things are being squished together that don’t belong together because they don’t make sense together. Coherence arises when things that make sense together, stick together. Or in the case of human thought and speech, it’s when we place words and ideas in a sensible order.

But at what level do we run our validation test for what a ‘sensible order’ is? For example, there are plenty of nonsensical sentences that make grammatical sense. Take for instance this one:

“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”

Grammatically there is nothing wrong with the sentence. But as to what sort of coherent thought it’s meant to inspire - that’s another question. How can something sleep furiously? Let alone an idea? And how can it be colorless and green?

So taking the simple concept of a sentence, there’s at least two lenses through which we can judge coherence. There’s grammar and syntax, and then there’s actual meaning, which is what we’re usually concerned with. Interestingly, we can have sentences that make sense which are not grammatically sound, so it may seem that syntax and grammar are perhaps arbitrary - but this of course depends on which ruler we are using to judge coherence!

Let’s zoom out from the single sentence and examine the following two sentences as a pair:

The following sentence is false.

The previous sentence is true.

Each sentence is sensible on its own - not just grammatically but semantically. However, when paired, we have a sly contradiction which is anything but easy to resolve. But the point here is to illuminate another level where coherence can be determined. If we zoom into each sentence, we have coherence. If we zoom out, suddenly coherence is destroyed. Unless of course we are using syntax and grammar as our ruler, then coherence is maintained. So again, it depends on the ruler we use to judge coherence.

This process of zoom can continue outward, to paragraphs, pages, chapters, and whole shelves of books and bookcases.

And then of course we can jump out of the world of words and thoughts and examine the galaxy of action. One particularly old proverb pops up: Actions speak louder than words.

What’s interesting is that much of an individual’s behavior is consistent and coherent, but with many people, that coherent behavior isn’t coherent when placed in conjunction with the words such a person says. Actions speak louder than words because it’s a person’s actions that are more likely to effect the world, not their words.

Another axiom needs to be mentioned here: Walk the Talk. Which simply means, do what you say you will, or: make sure your words and your actions are coherent.

Imagine a person who has virtually perfect coherence between all the things they say, and also with all the things they do. What sort of person emerges in the mind? Is this an angry person? A depressed person? Hopeless? Or is it easy to imagine this person as calm - at peace?

Now we perhaps get to why coherence has any value or attraction. What does it mean to be a coherent person, with a coherent message and coherent actions?

While every person operates with some level and contamination of contradiction, the desire and drive for coherence is simple: it’s authentic and genuine, and most importantly: it’s the one thing that inspires trust, because honesty operates on rails of coherence.

It’s impossible to trust someone who has little or no coherence, no matter which level we are talking. Generally, with people comfortable with lying, there’s coherence in the words they say, but the coherent reality they spin up with words is totally incoherent when mapped against their actions on a long enough timeline.

As a species, our one true superpower is our ability to cooperate - especially as strangers, and in order for this to occur, there has to be a significant amount of trust, or, coherence. A desire and drive to be coherent inspires trust in others, raising our communal power of cooperation, further increasing that we’ll be able to help each other achieve the sort of tomorrow that all parties are hoping to make a reality.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: GLITCH REPORT

February 6th, 2022

Lucilius was walking down a city street. The sky was bright up in bands between the towering building and he wore a faint smile, pleased with the course of his day. He was enjoying the round flow of his thoughts, circling on the day’s events, fantasizing about the good that would come in days to follow when something caught his eye.

There was movement like a stutter across the street. At first it felt like something had been thrown, or a startled bird had jolted into the motion, but when he looked he stopped. At first he couldn’t make sense of it. And then he thought perhaps it was some sort of advertisement. But there was no frame, no projection.

He slowly walked into the street, crossing it, and as he neared the far side, his disbelief grew stronger. His thoughts ricocheted frantically for an answer, an explanation. But nothing about what he was seeing made sense. He walked right up to it, bewildered by the fact that no one else even seemed to notice.

Before him was an ordinary man, dressed in a suit, a phone clasped to one ear, taking a step forward. But when his foot hit the ground, he was instantly transported half a step back, as though he’d sprung back in reverse. But his motion backwards was instant, and each time he took his step forward, he was launched backwards.

Lucilius slowly walked around the jolting man. It was not a projection. There was no screen, and when Lucilius reached out to the man his hand was catapulted away at an extraordinary speed as the man jolted in reverse.

Lucilius looked around. Absolutely no one seemed to be interested in the bizarre phenomenon. He reached out to someone walking by.

“Do you see this?”

A woman was taken aback for a moment by Lucilius’ question, then she looked in the direction he was indicating and then just smiled at him as though he’d said something amusing and then she continued on her way.

He took out his phone and opened up the camera, switched it to video and trained the tiny digital portal on the man. He took a video, slowly walking around the man as his existence toggled between forward and reverse.

Lucilius watched the video to make sure it had rendered, and also noticed the time. He was running late.

He looked back up. What could he possibly do, he wondered. But he was late and simply had to move on. So he started walking again down the street, looking back over his shoulder every few seconds to get one last look at the man trapped in that moment of time, infinitely repeating.

He ended up posting the video online. Over the next day it got a few hundred views, some appreciation and comments. The first one asked how many cameras he used in his set up. Another one simply said ‘cute’ and another referenced a movie. 

How futile, he thought as he walked back to the spot the following day. Trying to post something like this online, of course it’s going to look staged or generated.

When he arrived at the same place he was dumbfounded to find the man was gone. What had he really expected? He sat at cafe across the street and sat watching the place where the man had been, and then he watched the video over and over again, confused, wondering what it meant, with the proof right there in the tiny screen.

SHEDDING JOY

February 5th, 2022

An important aspect of a meditation practice is developing the ability to render joy irrelevant. This may likely strike many as odd, counter-intuitive, and perhaps downright wrong. Render joy irrelevant? Isn’t the point of meditation to increase one’s wellbeing? Surely that isn’t achieved by getting rid of the good? Or is it?

Some people laugh at funerals. And for nearly the complete majority of such people, it’s not because something is funny. The thing is, the neural infrastructure that communicates an act of laughing is also the same set of rails upon which crying runs. When overcome with sadness, sometimes the signal gets misinterpreted, and someone laughs. This is also why getting tickled often starts with laughter but can quickly lead to crying.

Point is, the mind and body have a suite of pathways upon which our emotions run and through which such emotions effect our body and through which our body effects our mind.

If meditation can be said to have a practical goal, or if there’s a skill that one can reasonably attain through the practice, it’s an ability to find and maintain a hold on ground zero. This is a kind of baseline existence where consciousness is neutral, and where thoughts and emotions aren’t so all encompassing, enthralling and intoxicating. Thoughts and emotions are held as objects of meditation, and for the practiced meditator, it can seem that such things are more observed than they are experienced. The experience of these things begin to acquire a kind of toggle that slides along the spectrum deciding how much we identify with the particular thought or emotion. This can be incredibly valuable for things like anger. Being able to hold the emotion of anger and the thoughts it inspires at arms length - so to speak- and decide consciously how much this aspect of consciousness should influence our next set of actions becomes a superpower for the person previously rendered a slave to their anger.

Emotions, like colors have their compliments, and the experience of each in the set can be startlingly similar. Take for instance these pairs of words: anxious vs. eager, nervous vs. excited. Each pair pretty much points at the same experience when we think about the sensations that occur in the body. But in each pair there is a negative version and a positive version, much how a sensation of great sadness can cause laughter.

The ability to consciously shed joy in a session of meditation is no different than an ability and an opportunity to practice shedding something like anger. They are both emotions, they are both alterations of consciousness, and being able to return to ground zero - to a neutral state of consciousness means being able to abandon joy in just the same way we seek the ability to abandon anger.

THE WAVE OF YESTERDAY

February 4th, 2022

If today were your first day, what would you do? This hypothetical requires a little fantasy of course. Let’s say you’re at your current age, you have all your current skills - unlike a new born, - but like new born, say you have not a single shred of your past.  All grief and loss and trauma, hardship and heartache is erased. With it all goes all the good times, but this isn’t an issue - you can’t miss what never occurred, and this premise simply plops you into your current existence without any of the bitter nor the sweet of yesterday.

Would you be more or less held back? Would you be able to do more? And if so, what would it be? There are plenty of culture pointers in this direction, phrased as quaint aphorisms: 

This is the first day of the rest of your life.  

Dance like no one is watching.

The first asks you to march forward without the shackles of yesterday. The second isn’t really talking about the gaze of others, but how you gaze at yourself.  Self-consciousness, one developed from a past filled with embarrassments that lock you into constrained behaviors.

The wave of yesterday is our biggest constraint: outlining the program of our own behavior, heaping on the baggage, and dragging the mind away from the moment to dwell again on things that will remain unchanged.

The relationship we have with the past might be the single biggest defining factor in how we go about our present day. Does the past linger and overwhelm when sleep finally removes it’s veil, letting the day flood in as we slowly remember who we are and where we are? Or do we wake up remembering forward? Do we wake up looking forward to what we have planned for the day?

A plan is a strange concept - it allows us to remember something that hasn’t yet happened. It’s a proposal of play for the future, making it both a piece of the past and the future at once. (Unless of course we are in the midst of forming the plan)

A plan is a sort of dream. And while usually such things are rendered as boring and trivial as to-do lists, like chores, such plans and to-do’s are the best way to escape a past that still has the teeth of it’s trap lodged in an ankle. Making a plan for tomorrow is a subversive way of injecting our hopes and dreams into the past - by planning them, writing them down, and waking up to them, we wake up with a yesterday that has a gem embedded in it.

IMPRESS ME

February 3rd, 2022

We’ve all been guilty or privy to the very human impulse to show off, or attempt to impress someone with our deeds or qualities.  Unless the items on the docket are far above our sense of ordinary, such antics are met with a private eyeball.  There is something incredibly unimpressive  about someone trying to impress.  But why?  And more importantly, if it’s often so ineffective, why do we do it?

Nearly everyone is guilty of lauding over their own accomplishments or traits in this way, though it usually feels a bit embarrassing to think about such instances and focus deeply on where the impulse came from.  There seems to be two core reasons that we impress upon others in this way.

One reason is that we try to impress other in an attempt to see how convincing or persuasive our endeavor is. If others are ‘wowed’ by what we are doing, then it’s reassuring that it’s a good path to continue following.  And of course, we are almost always enamored of such a path so the desire to convince or impress it upon others is all the greater.  We have a confirmation bias which is fairly easy to reflect through other people with a little pushiness and seductive wording.

The other reason is to try and impress ourselves.  The thing about accomplishment, especially something that seemed large, complex and very difficult is that after it’s been done, all the magic is gone.  Before the task is begun, there is so much mystery and unknown surrounding the dream.  It has a majesty and exoticism that is completely dispelled by it’s actual accomplishment.  After all is said and done, anyone could imaginably query you about any given challenge that arose and there would be a very straight forward answer about how that particular twist or turn in the path toward accomplishment was navigated.  This leaves the hero of the accomplishment’s story at a bit of an underwhelming loss when all has come to pass.  The hunt for this magic is perhaps part of what drives the creator and entrepreneur, but it’s never truly found for anything pulled off is done so with steps that are ultimately pragmatic.  This is the bittersweet edge of the pathetic attempt to impress others.  It’s an attempt to impress one’s self.  Though the magic be gone, there’s hope that others will revive the awe once felt since they don’t know the simple steps within the mountain of effort that lead to such an impressive outcome.