RIVALNYM: APATHY & EQUANIMITY

April 14th, 2021

If you are unfamiliar with rivalnyms, they are a particularly juicy class of words that exist between synonyms and antonyms. They often define the exact same thing but with completely opposite emotional valences. 

A simple example of a rivalnym pair is nervous and excited.  Both describe something about what’s happening with our nerves, but one is positive and one is negative.

Another rivalnym pair is Apathy and Equanimity.

If we think about these two words in terms of the behavior they inspire, they are identical.  An apathetic person does nothing.  Someone who is equanimous is also likely to be doing nothing, but the reasons underlying the inaction are, strangely, counter valenced.  The apathetic person does nothing because they either don’t care or don’t think any effort would do anything.  The equanimous person takes no action, not because they don’t care, but because there’s simply no discernible reason to take action.

And yet, one of these states is far more desirable than the other.  One in essence describes peace, which can be a hard idea to swallow in a world that could still improve by a great deal and which requires a lot of work in order to make that improvement actually happen.  Apathy, in the same context seems more like a state of being overwhelmed, as if things are so bad that nothing should be done because no improvement is possible.  

With this rivalnym pair we approach something eerily close to neutrality while still stretching to each extreme on a different spectrum.  It’s a good example of how our experience at any given time is really poorly captured by a single word, or even a few.  We are constantly traversing many spectrums that may even seem to actually be contradictory.

And yet, the core function of language is to reduce experience to these communicable units.  We scrape the universal from the unique in order to find a bridge to other people who can relate by having the same universal aspects present in their own unique experience.

As with progress in nearly every field, we reduce and then expand.  With language we reduce the universal to language that can be shared, and then we expand the language to encompass more experience.

AS GOOD AS THE WORD

April 13th, 2021

It’s a high compliment in any age to say that someone is as good as their word.  Language is the communal hallucination that allows us to distort reality in ways that are congruent across different perspectives, and because of this, it’s a useful distortion.  Realty doesn’t always bear the fruit of our words however, but time always proves whether we at least strive to live up to our own word or not.

If you think about language as a separate organism, they way you might think of a computer virus as separate from you computer but which invades your computer and appropriates it for a particular use, we have to admit that language has done quite a good job of infecting the human mind.  Words like ‘virus’ and ‘infect’ are negatively valanced of course, and don’t hint at a possible symbiotic relationship.  Language, whatever it might really, truly be classified as, is certainly one half of a symbiotic relationship.  We keep it alive by using it, and we keep using it because it’s useful.  Now that we’ve made the bond it’s quite a difficult feat to think of a human future somehow divorced from language.  Can you think of what tomorrow would be like without language?  The task is much like asking someone to imagine the sky without the color blue, or clouds, or stars or the darkness of night.  We are intertwined with language to a very very deep degree.

To be as good as your word is to have your language in line with your behavior.  Your word describes your future actions.  This is a rather extraordinary feat to behold.  It requires not just an accurate model of the future, but also of one’s self, and how that self might act in the future. And then of course the ability to communicate this to another person.  With all told, it’s a quite a miracle that we can coordinate to achieve such grand aims.  Other animals certainly communicate in collaborative ways but we humans seem to have discovered the secret sauce to super charge this ability into a quantum leap.  Just try to realistically think about any other species on the planet putting a space station in orbit with a few of it’s kind aboard.  The idea is laughable at best, and humbling when truly considered.

And our quantum leap is achieved purely on rails of language.  Other species may have a little information to pass on, like bees sharing locations, and other animals may have rhythm, beat, and melody, but only humans combine all these elements with a staggering amount of content, and we do it in many forms.  These words can be listened to or read.  They can be emailed, or printed, tweeted or texted.  A song from a whale or a bird can only be heard.  That’s it.  The song can’t be listened to again unless it’s remembered perfectly, and while this is possible, memory is never perfect.  Like genes, memory allows for mutations and shifts.  Language is similar.  Words shift through time, and some might argue a word never means the exact same thing twice.  But nonetheless, our ability to record language in such a variety of ways increases the fidelity of our communal memory.  Language is the first medium that allows us to encode the past and the likewise, potential futures.  No animal has ever had such a tool, and just look how effortlessly we take it for granted.  It’s little wonder that language itself sometimes loops back upon it’s hosts and causes some damage.  But still, we progress, and it’s likely that we will, with the tool of language, discover the form of it’s replacement, whatever that may be.

THOUGHT KNOT

April 12th, 2021

With all the thoughts we have on loop, we’re bound to make a knot.  And when thought and mentality and psychology is all knotted up, what is the solution?  More talking?  Talking, or language in general is often what gets us in the jam I the first place.  We’re universally convinced by our constant urge to talk that more talking will fix things, but what if talking about a problem simply makes it more of a reality?

Albert Einstein once said that “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”  Now we might wonder, what is the most effective way to evolve a new form of thinking?  Do we evolve new forms of thinking by talking and rehashing?  Maybe, but the answer doesn’t seem clear cut either way.  We might wonder if there are other methods that are far more effective.

If anything creates new forms of thinking, it’s new experience, pure and simple.  Experience, as vague as the word is, wraps up all the senses.  Not just the ones that help out thoughts get all knotted up.  Experience is something done with the body that engages the spirit.  

Now an odd angle on this is whether talking about an old problem is such an experience?  Or rather, is talking about an old problem a new experience?  We might like to think so when we feel marginally better.  Again, it’s a matter of degree.  Why move the needle a single degree when there are other experiences out there that might swing the needle across tremendous swathes of change?

Perhaps we’re not so adventurous and many actually prefer the crawling progress of merely talking out one’s problems.  An practical example might be someone likening a 10 hour psychedelic trip to 10 years of talk therapy.  Many have certainly undergone experiences that would be phrased this way. 

But where is the middle ground.  The world of therapeutic psychedelics is still just beginning and there’s a tremendous amount to figure out. 

What is left to us in the real world to dive into in ways that might heal?  Where is the breakthrough that requires not a single word?

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: GLOW OF THE GAZE

April 11th, 2021

Everything was white.  The frozen and furious sky blurring past the horizon, down into the land.  Lucilius huddled closer to the meagre fire as it’s flames were whipped about by the snowy wind.  The sphere of heat was small but it was enough.  The fur of his animal skin clothing was frozen, melting and refreezing around the edges of his neck, his matted hair his own hood, his beard a solid scarf. 

The white grew grey with evening shadow.  The light of his small fire brightened, and he carefully, expertly fed it another piece of wood from his small scavenged pile.  Lucilius was a creature well-versed in the art of fire, knowing how to make the fire eat the new log slowly, knowing how the wind and this cold would temper and spread the heat he would squeeze out of the dancing light.  But his eyes grew too accustomed to the vibrant light, and with the gathering darkness he was blind to the shadow till it was too close.  

Lucilius sprung up, grabbing the long flint-tipped spear stuck in the snow, instantly levelling it forward toward the figure now near the fire.

The two were locked at a distance now from the fire.  Each held the other’s eyes, gauging the threat, the sense of violence ripening.  But neither bore teeth.  And slowly, each took a tentative, gentle step forward, toward the fire.  Lucilius raised his spear again as he got closer to the fire, getting closer also to this other person, this stranger.  They had no language, no names, no common music.  But they could agree as they sat, and then finally they could release their locked eyes in relief and instead look to the fire, concentrating on it’s warmth.

The dim memory of all this clouded Lucilius’ eyes as he dazed off into space.  But a cheer rose all around him and he snapped back to reality.  The luminous screen bathed the cheering crowd in a glow.  A point had just been scored in some game playing out far away from the bar where Lucilius now found himself.  Friends clapped high hands and pulled down fists in their aggressive joy.  Lucilius half smiled to himself, picking up a nacho piled with all kinds of glory and taste.  What extravagant living, he thought.  But some things, he realized simply never changed as he watched everyone turn back to the screen, all these eyes now huddled around it, relieved from that task of looking at each other.  

EDGE OF BELIEF

April 10th, 2021

In the visual realm there are all sorts of qualities that we can discuss without even mentioning the subject at hand.  Is it bright?  Is it opaque or translucent or transparent?  Does it emit light? Or is it matte or glossy? Does it have well-defined border or are they a little fuzzy?  All of these questions could apply to a painting by Raphael, a video game level or a landscape seen in real time with your own eyes.  So much of our language is anchored in the visual, probably because it’s our primary sense.  But what about things that don’t exist in the visual world.  Do such things also have a set of meta-qualities that we can ask about?  What about belief?  Can belief have a hard edge or a fuzzy one?

There’s no real framework for this kind of language, but it’s worth thinking about.  Take honesty for example.  Everyone has a certain belief about how important honesty is.  Telling a fanciful story for entertainment’s sake is different from telling a white lie, but they both probably reside in a similar realm of honesty.  For some honesty and an adherence to it is very important, as though it has hard, well-defined edges.  For others it’s a bit more of a fluid concept.

Compare this to a belief in UFO’s.  Some people are quite convinced, while others remain skeptical.  But compared to the experience and function of honesty in one’s own life, one is replete with empirical evidence.  We all have a fairly clear picture of how well our belief in honesty and adherence to it functions.  Our individual lives are in some sense a result of our relationship to honesty.  Nothing even remotely similar can be said about UFO’s.  The evidence remains shockingly fuzzy despite the hard edges of so many people’s belief in the phenomenon that we’ve been visited by extraterrestrials.  There seem to be at least two qualities here that we could pin down similar to our language around visual when we talk about brightness as opposed to contrast.  With belief there’s a degree of conviction and there’s also a degree of evidence.  Clearly the two don’t correlate fairly well in humans considering how hypocritical and inconsistent we can be.  Nonetheless, it does seem that beliefs have certain meta-variables that are present regardless of the actual belief.

Another potential variable that is independent of the actual belief is it’s sharing potential.  This seems to be one linked more to the individual and their personality, but it’s still a quality attached to the belief.  What is the likelihood that you will share this belief with someone else?  Some beliefs turn people into proselytes who seem unable to talk about anything else with the aim of convincing others and spreading the idea.  Is such a quality inherent to the belief?  Perhaps with some beliefs, for example those associated with information about danger.  We’re quick to warn loved ones of a danger.  Such information has high sharing potential.  But now we’ve crossed a border from belief into information, which is journey for another time.

We might one day have an entire framework for analyzing and categorizing. Belief, just as we do with the myriad aspects of vision and light.  Such a framework could perhaps be very useful for becoming cognizant of personal biases.  And this is exactly the sort of thing that language frameworks provide.  It was our developing language around light that allowed us to track our progress in understanding it.  In fact that might be an elegant definition of a framework: a track record of our progress for understanding.  We’ve since been able to manipulate and use light in all sorts of fantastic ways, through photography and movies to phone screens and virtual and augmented reality.  It’s fascinating what might happen and what thinking and decision making might feel like int a future that has a robust language framework around beliefs and their qualities.