KNOW THYSELF 101

April 5th, 2021

It’s said that at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, there was an inscription that read “Know Thyself”.  It’s powerful command, one that seems to encapsulate so much of what it means to be a thing alive that experiences this world.  It carries a weight that seems to invoke the sense that to know one’s self is to somehow know what life is.  The two are inextricably linked.  There is so much more to a person than merely their personal preferences, which might be the most superficial interpretation of the Delphic axiom, but it might not be a bad place to get started.

In fact, something as mundane and ordinary as personal preferences might be the only place to start on the quest to know yourself.  Kids are fairly enthusiastic on this point.  They pout at the brussel sprouts and grow wide eyed at the chocolate ice cream.  I like this.  I don’t like that.  But of course, this kind of preference is pretty rudimentary compared to an individual decades older who marvels at the delicious preparation of brussel sprouts while having dinner at a fancy restaurant and doesn’t pass up on the chocolate soufflé either.  It perhaps gets a bit deeper when someone understands the neurochemistry behind these experiences and why we might desire one so much more over another.

However, what such preferences really constitute within the topic of knowing yourself is that they comprise a pattern.  Notice the connection to habits.  As it’s been said before, we are what we repeatedly do.  Preferences fall into the same rubric, they describe what we will probably gravitate to again, and again.

Pattern recognition is the first part of learning.  The next part is to understand the pattern so well that it can be manipulated for a particular effect.  A practical example helps.

Say you have a lot of work to get tone today.  One thing that often pops up just when we are getting close to starting this work is a pang of hunger.  The self-deceptive logic is familiar to everyone: eating is important.  You need fuel to get things done right?  Plus the sensation of hunger itself is distracting, annoying really.  Wouldn’t it be best just to get this pressing issue out of the way by taking a little time to eat first?  

This is part of a pattern of experience that we are all familiar with, and it’s got some lies laced into it. Fact is, for the modern human, you almost certainly have plenty of ‘fuel’ to get your work done. Hunger might be a signal that blood sugar is low, but it is in no way an indication that your resources for energy are depleted.  Only when you’re hungry and you can quite literally see the contour of most of your bones and the definition between every muscle can you then perhaps say that hunger is an indicator that resources for energy are low.  For the most part, hunger is just timed response of ghrelin, which is a hormone that creates the feeling of hunger.  Ghrelin doesn’t have too much correlation to blood glucose levels.  It’s controlled mostly by how much eating has occurred in the last few days, the frequency and the amount.

If you think about it, it would be pretty silly for us to evolve hunger in response to low energy levels, as though we need the energy in food to go do things.  In fact, the exact opposite makes more sense.  Evolution has primed us with a system that gives us access to more energy when there’s no food around because there’s a practical necessity to get up and go look for food, which is of course, going to take some energy to accomplish.  Once that food thing is satisfied, there’s little evolutionary need to get up and get going.  Again, it’s the opposite.  The food has been procured.  Now it’s time to sit back and relax and pack on the pounds.  Hence the modern term “food coma”  

Now here’s a question.  When someone is going through that self-deceptive internal logic about why it’s important to eat before getting to work, why doesn’t the thought about a food coma come up?  This is understanding the pattern on a deeper level, and the path to manipulating it is only one easy step away: its the realization that eating would actually be very counter productive and make the likelihood of getting anything done lower, than if the hunger I just grudgingly ignored and all attempts are made to dive right into the work at hand.

The productivity world is all about these sorts of ‘hacks’.  But they aren’t really hacks at all.  Such things are simply part of the human pattern understood with enough depth to manipulate that pattern toward larger goals.

The tragic thing about something as simple as what to eat, when to eat, and it’s impact on other parts of life is that many, many people go their whole life without discovering such practical manipulations.  Most people are directed by the whim and will of their impulses and the way those impulses conflict with external obligations, like work and family.  

Of course there is a universe of depth beyond such simple and pragmatic examples, such as knowing what you are like outside of your own pattern.  As Robert Sapolsky once wrote “Know thyself, especially in differing circumstances.”

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: AUTOCEPTION

April 4th, 2021

Lucilius had a problem.  He’d somehow gotten himself in a bind.  He had a fairly overwhelming amount of work he had to do, but for whatever infuriating reason, he could not figure out how to get himself going on this enormous task.  That was, until he remembered a recent method for solving problems which he’d practiced to great effect.  His face lit up with the idea, and so he set about seeing if it would work for this task.

He laid down on a particularly comfortable couch, and luckily, his overwhelming feelings of being behind and procrastinating created a particularly weary cocktail for his mental state that made him ripe for sleep.  But before he dozed off to escape the world that he couldn’t seem to get going in, he had just a little bit of effort that he needed to put in.

As the normal borders of his mind loosened and the edged blurred, the corners softening to rounds that shifted, moving away from their usual conscious anchors, he spoke within his own mind.  He thought of the real world problem he had, and he set about making a request to his own mind to figure something out about it while he was asleep, and most importantly, he managed to tack on a request to remember it upon waking.

And then Lucilius slumbered, his mind undulating through that phantasmagoria of vision merged with concept, doused with incoherent splashes of memory and sensation.  His mind took hold of it’s own being and stretched it, parsing it, molding it and refracting it through countless perspectives.  The dream is a hallucination, a crazed existence if only for it’s incoherence, it’s mangled logic and seductive conviction.

Lucilius’ eyes slowly opened.  He knew where he was but his mind was still soft, fuzzy on a threshold of time as the environment of his consciousness rapidly changed.  

How easy it is to forget the place we’ve just been, Lucilius thought.  Like walking through a knew building, entering a new room and having no idea what the hallway looked like.  Were ancient people more skilled in this realm of sleep?  Lucilius wondered.  He felt he once knew the answer, but he couldn’t explore it, for there sitting in the center of his mind was the idea, the solution to his qualms in the real world.

“Of course,” he said out loud.  He sat up with a start, and then bounded for his computer.  He clacked away at it for a moment, but it wasn’t yet for the work that still loomed over him.  He was busy building a simulation.  He’d built many, but he’d never thought of one so simply until the little nap he’d just had.  It took little time at all to cook up, and with it done he readied his neuralsync for the experience.  The connection was active and nominal, and then Lucilius smiled, and before pressing the final button, he said..

“Good luck old friend.”

And then Lucilius woke up within a softly lit cube.  The lighting was perfect.  Which was a relief.  He had no way of changing it now.  Against one wall was a simple desk, a chair and atop the desk was an old mechanical typewriter.

Lucilius sat down and smiled.  “Well, you devious friend, we’re stuck here until you hit your word count.”  

Lucilius laced his fingers together and pushed his palms out away from himself, cracking his knuckles.  The tips of his fingers suddenly felt alive, eager to hit keys.  Finally, there were no more distractions.

COMMUNAL HALLUCINATION

April 3rd, 2021

What exactly is the meaning of that word?  We’ve all occasionally had disagreements about this or that word, either by slip of memory of genuine mistake.  Though, what exactly are we arguing about, and how can we be sure about the truth of a word?  

Surely a dictionary is the obvious source of truth in such a case.  But if this statement itself were true, there would be no reason to print new dictionaries.  It’s not just that new words are bing invented, dictionaries are reprinted because words are also shifting and sliding in terms of what they mean.  Even the most casual thought about etymology should prove this point.  

Language is a dynamic, organic entity that grows and evolves.  But where exactly does it do this?  It’s hosted not so much on paper and within books as it is within our minds, and particularly, our communal minds.

A secrete language known by only one person is fairly useless.  Surely it may be useful for that single individual who wishes to keep thoughts and ideas private, but it’s utility is inevitably tied to what the person does in concert with other people, namely the expression of those ideas and thoughts through other forms, as when their secret research finally bears fruit that can be shared with the world. 

Language is, a communal hallucination.  It is validated for stability through it’s continual use, and this process of testing it for truth unfortunately only has a partial connection to reality.  Much of language remains stable across multiple minds through a circular proof.  There are many words and usages that become detached from practical reality and drift off into an ether of what might be called ‘nonsense’.  

And yet the nonsense functions because it’s shared, and many people can, together, have the same fantastical idea.  Reality is always an interesting wake up call when such meandering forms of meaning start to inform actual behavior and that behavior comes into hard contact with the consequences of the world we live in.

We are all living in a fairly concentrated hallucination through language.  So much so that our idea of things through language can blind us from what’s actually right in front of us.  It’s fairly easy to get lost in that hallucination because talking is so much easier than actually doing things that have practical consequences.  

So no matter who is talking, be it yourself or someone else, it’s useful to remember that we’re all just dabbling in a pool of fantasy.  Sometimes it yields some useful things that we can use in the real world, but for the most part it’s a staging ground - the original simulation that we use to toss ideas against one another in a harmless battle royale to get a sense of what might actually work.

THE DEAL WITH CURRENT EVENTS

April 2nd, 2021

Trends in communal attention are almost always the result of a conceptual microscope being placed upon an issue at the exclusion of proportion to other issues.  This is not to say that some issues don’t need a bit more focus and attention in order to make things better, but that the weight of communal attention always risks an over-reaction that misses the goal: much like an elephant stepping on a lop-sided toy boat in an effort to right it.  The chances that toy boat gets crushed, or simply perverted by now tilting in the exact opposite direction is huge.  In fact, those chances are probably relative to the size of the crowd gunning for the change.

We do the same thing on an individual level.  We ruminate on a topic, allowing the same feelings and thought to engrain repetitively until it’s blown out of proportion and we are far more worried about some innocuous issue than we need to be.  We are each more than familiar with this personal phenomenon.  How on Earth would such a phenomenon keep in check when multiplied across hundreds of thousands of people, all equipped with the same attentional microscope?

Emotions enlarge when shared.  The power of communal feeling creates a tremendous degree of salience which can and often does push people to take action that feels equivalent to that degree of salience.  This is how buildings that are totally unrelated to an issue get burned down.  This is how the results of the action we take can actually be completely at odds with an actual solution and even exacerbate the issue at hand that we are trying to remedy.  

Emotions are the primary fuel for people, help on a ton of emotion, and chances are, there will be a proportional amount of action.  Now enters the real problem: is the emotion in proportion to the problem?  How can we ever be sure?  Especially when the size and intensity of emotion is so variable, and so likely to accelerate when it becomes shared among more and more people?

There is a clean view of reality that would place every conceivable issue on a hierarchical list that ranks every human issue in proportion to others in accordance to our communal long term goals and ranked by statistical likelihood of jeopardizing our long term goals.  Such goals would be the unarguable hopes that are shared by virtually everyone: the wish that our species continues through time, that our experience of that time improves, et cetera.  But of course this list is a fantasy.  Such a list would instantly be invalidated when someone sees an issue with a specific ranking that they disagree with.  Attention is a finite and narrow resource, and it’s impossible to hold too many issues in mind simultaneously.  Because of this, we would each see an issue on the list that has a lot of personal salience and feel that most if not everything ranking above it doesn’t matter as much.  This is exactly what happens with “current events”.  What happens this coming Monday or this morning often highlights something on our list of communal priorities.  It becomes “THE” issue, as though it floats straight to the top.  Does this mean that it should be the top issue?  No, not at all.  It just means that we’re simply all focused on it.  It becomes “The Obvious Choice”.  

It’s worthy to note that the etymology for the word ‘obvious’  derives from ‘frequently encountered’.  This means that ‘the obvious choice’ bares no real relation to the concept of the ‘right choice’ it’s just the issue that we see the most, and this happens almost exclusively because everyone else is talking about the issue which makes it pop up in virtually every avenue of life that we interact with short of going for a hike in the woods alone.

‘Current Events’ and the dialogue that orbits such instances bare more resemblance to bouts of hysteria than it does some effective avenue toward progress and meaningful change.  Those last two golden eggs often occur quietly and slowly.  What is loud and feverish among groups rarely burns away the problem that everyone is squawking about.  If anything, intensity of emotion, on an individual level and a group level makes clear thinking less possible, and because of this, individuals and groups can be steered somewhat mindlessly toward targets held in mind by calmly malicious actors who see the angry mob and simply point at the store front.

The wild disparity that often accompanies the feelings around current events and the actual issue is the fundamental reason why Tinkered Thinking avoids current events as a rule.  Beneath the fickle and polar swing of communal attention resides a stronger, subtler current of human functioning, and it’s this current that Tinkered Thinking is constantly trying to tap into and explore.  To be swept up by the river of emotion that changes course through human attention nearly every day is to lose sight of the river itself.  We risk getting trapped in eddies of repetitive thought, bickering about one tiny nook in the river instead of focusing on where exactly the river is headed beyond it’s many twists and turns..

DISARMING EXPECTATION

April 1st, 2021

There is an anxiety intrinsic to expectation.  Even when the expectation is for something positive, the experience is most often coupled with a nervousness.  When the outcome is positive we generally say ‘excited’ instead of ‘nervous’ but the two indicate the same sort of salience, regardless of flavor.  

The apprehensive quality of expectation carries with it a kind of resistance.  Something has seized our sense of being, and the anxiety or excitement results from a subtle reluctance.  But reluctance to what?  The future?  The inevitable object we dread or eagerly await?  Certainly in the negative version of the situation the reluctance makes sense, but is it also appropriate to dread what you eagerly await?

The most straightforward explanation for dreading the positive would be a fear that it might not happen, or it might not happen in just the way we imagine.  Both are reasonable ways to poison the good things we look forward to, but there is perhaps something a bit more subtle at play, something inherent in expectation that is not so straightforward, something that does not discriminate between good and bad things that the future holds.

Expectation is a mutation of the present.  It’s a conceptual realm that is divorced from the here and now. Positive or negative, we disservice ourselves from the process that brings about these outcomes that we either dread or hunger for.  It’s a bit like dazing off into space thinking about how proud you’ll be when your child graduates and in that state you completely miss the instance when they take their first steps.

So what is to be done?  Never think about the future?  Certainly not. Mental health rarely lies in a pendulum swing to the other side of an extreme.  Planning for the future is a wise necessity, and the trick is to be present and plan for the future.  The point here is simply that we devote far too much time and thought to the future at the expense of what is going on right now, even when the future seems bright.  The antidote to expectation is a surrender to the process of the moment.