COIN OF COMPASSION & CRUELTY

November 23rd, 2020

There is an idea and opinion among scientists that theory of mind began with the invention of predation in the Cambrian period.  Before this period, there were no hunters, and nothing was subjected to being prey.  Imagine a world of plants and molluscs, all at peace, but certainly without much incentive to evolve.  The invention of predation provided just that sort of incentive.  To develop eyes and ears, not only to look out for predators, but also to try and find lunch.

The advent of predation likely kickstarted a sensory arms race that extended not just to ways of getting information from the environment, but also ways of interpreting that information.   Theory of Mind is quite likely one of those interpretations that help an organism flourish and persevere in this cutthroat game of survival.  If you can model the mind of your prey in your own mind, then you can think like that prey, and thereby anticipate the movements and plans of that prey, to predict them, and plan accordingly in order to intercept, ideally at lunchtime.  The converse is also symmetrically powerful.  If you are prey modelling the mind of your top predator, then you are predicting how they will perhaps try to predict your own movements and by going on this little imaginary adventure, potentially thwarting the designs of an enemy who is bent on consuming you.

One disturbing ramification from the notion that theory of mind arises from the invention of predation has to do with compassion and cruelty, and how they may be inextricably linked.  

Compassion, to start with the lighter and kinder of the two requires a theory of mind.  In order to feel compassion for someone else, it’s necessary to imaginatively put one’s self in the situational shoes of someone else.  This requires, not just compiling all the situational components of their life, but also taking detailed measure of their emotions as represented by their actions, their words and their expressions.  With so much information, the compassionate among us can close eyes and imagine the world as someone else, to model the mind of that person and to then feel the pain or pleasure, sorrow and surprise that someone else a tally experiences.  This is one of our greatest gifts as a species.

There is, however, an uncomfortable flip side to this powerful theory of mind.  Cruelty at its most diabolical requires the same exact theory of mind.  In order to consciously and deliberately hurt someone as much as possible, one must first play the same trick: to imagine what it is like to be that target person and then ask, what would be the worst thing that could happen to someone with this perspective?  Without theory of mind, the cruel intention can’t land as close to the heart as possible.  Cruelty is a potentially random strike, like a first move in a game of Battleship, equipped with a fairly random set of odds as to whether action will land effectively or not.  Theory of mind removes a lot of this guess work by zeroing in on what is important for another organism.  This is exactly how it likely functioned with predation.  What is important to the predatory is inversely identical to the prey, so the development of a theory of mind potentially had a large incentive to iterate quickly.  What is important to the prey is to not be eaten and the predator is equally in need of lunch, hence the need to model one another’s view of the world becomes equally important.

It’s certainly just conjecture, but it’s possible that compassion - one of the most exalted qualities that we prize among our species may in fact be a product of something that is anything put compassionate: predation.  

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: MURMUR

November 22nd, 2020

In the sky a dark wave unfurled and lightened as it thinned, the birds resolving as tiny dots in the evening light.  The whole mass of them turned up on end like an undulation of water commanded by some ethereal force.  And there they twisted tight and dark before collapsing down and spreading out again.

“What is it?” The boy asked Lucilius.

“It’s called a murmuration.”

The boy slowly repeated the new word, before looking to Lucilius again.  

“Why do they do it?”

Lucilius breathed deeply and then sighed.  “Oh, well, there’s a piece of the puzzle that you can’t see right now.”

“What’s that?”  The boy asked.

“Well, if we were to go diving in the sea, we’d eventually come across a school of fish doing much the same thing, tightening up together like that.”

“The fish do that too?”

“Yep.”

“But why?”

“Well the fish do it because there are much bigger fish in the sea trying to eat them, so they gang up together to stay safe.”

“Does it work?”

Lucilius nodded his head from side to side.  “Sometimes, but often it just makes them an easier target.”

The young boy watched the birds dancing together in the sky, squinting in a bit of confusion.  He looked around at the rest of the sky.

“But there’s nothing hunting the birds.”

Lucilius smiled gravely at the young boy.  “A long time ago there were much bigger things floating through the skies, much bigger things that needed to eat.”

The boy wore an unbelieving look as he studied Lucilius’ face for other signs, but when a fish jumped far down the shore the boy started and quickly looked before gazing up and around him for anything else that might be in the sky.

“Where are they now?”

“Extinct.”

“So why do they still do that if they aren’t in danger?”  The boy asked, looking up at the thousands of dancing swallows.

“That’s an excellent question.  And you should remember it as you get older.  You’ll find a lot of people continue to do strange things because they were once in danger but aren’t in danger any longer.”

“It sorta just looks like they’re dancing.”  The boy mused aloud.

“Well here’s a good question: why do things dance?”

“Because they’re afraid?” The boy offered.

Lucilius shrugged.  “Maybe.  It’s certainly a good strategy that some people have figured out.”

“To dance when you’re afraid?”

“Sure, people often sing to themselves when they’re scared.  It can help calm yourself down.”

The boy sat with a look of odd surprise, digesting the notion.  Then slowly the boy grew curious, confused.  He looked to Lucilius.

“When did those big birds go extinct?”

“Oh, long time ago, real long ago.”

The boy grew suspicious.  “How do you know about the big birds that went extinct?”

Lucilius gave the boy a knowing smile.  “Maybe I saw them?”

“That’s impossible, you’re not old enough.”

“How do you know?  I was here before you.”

The boy considered with more suspicion.

“Kiddo, you have to realize, it’s a strange tradition, but adults are constantly lying to kids about stuff.”

“About everything?”  The boy nearly shouted.

“No, not everything, but for whatever reason, a lot of stuff just doesn’t get properly explained, and often you just get something that’s wholesale off planet.”

“But why?”

Lucilius shrugged his shoulders.  “Ya know, I’m not really sure why.  I think maybe it has to do with the fact that other adults are often so unwilling to believe or accept what other adults say, and maybe it’s just refreshing to have a kid around who will believe any old thing, and adults just have a bit too much mindless fun with that freedom, or they’re just trying to make a short cut so they don’t have to explain something all the way.”

The boy was a bit dejected, looking down at the grass, till he noticed again the rolling murmuration in the sky.  He smiled at it, and then tried to imagine a bigger bird diving at the flock, trying to eat some of the smaller birds.  The murmuration seemed to split and move in a way that would dodge the attack.  A light smile formed on the boy’s face.

“Wait.” The boy exclaimed, pausing for a moment to gather his words as Lucilius looked to him.

“Are you lying to me?”

UNEXPECTED EFFECT

November 21st, 2020

There are certain efforts that have results that are entirely unlike the process of getting those results.  In fact, most things are like this.  The experience of having a clean and tidy room is not at all like the task of cleaning a room and making it tidy.

Unfortunately there are many useful habits that run on the same paradox.  The 3rd day of attempting to meditate is not at all like the 300th day of meditation.  And it goes even further.  The whole day when we squeeze in that third session of meditation is entirely different from the 300th whole day when 299 days of consecutive meditation are stacked up behind.  It’s the difference between walking into a completely wrecked room and trying to do a few minutes of cleaning walking into a fairly well kept room and organizing just a few items that are out of place.

The important difference to note is that the effects of sustained effort aren’t really available to the person who’s just starting.  This simultaneously goes without saying and needs to be explicitly spelled out.  When starting out, we all have a hazy intellectual notion of what the effect will be, but so often we give up before receiving any meaningful result because the bridge between that intellectual understanding and a meaningful, visceral and tangible result is vast.  Having done it contains an important gulf that is very rarely crossed by intellectual understanding alone.  And in some sense that gulf can never be crossed by conceptualization alone.

This is one of the diametrically faulty and virtuous aspects of the imagination.  For some people and some circumstances, conceptual faith, as aided by the imagination is tantamount and required for making good decisions, as with navigating decisions around an invisible enemy like a virus, or radiation poisoning.  In such cases the conceptual imagination - that is reasonable imaginative extrapolation upon facts - is vital for getting enough of an understanding in order to avoid experiencing the real thing.  

The flip side is using that conceptual imagination - that is the reasonable imaginative extrapolation upon facts in order to get enough of an understanding in order to take the leap of faith and go for it.  The version of this regarding meditation is to take certain facts and place them at the core of an enduring practice that feels pointless in the moment for the sake that one day such effects will turn up.  For example, brain changes, as seen in MRI scans, induced by meditative practice aren’t visible until a person has racked up a minimum of 3 or 4 months of consistent practice.  That’s quite a long time to do something without receiving some sort of positive result.  Now granted, for many people, subjective results come long before this 3 to 4 month period is traversed, but it’s possible that such results are psychosomatic.  Real progress can only be objectively verified by brain changes, regarding primarily the size of the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the size of the connections linking the two along with the connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.  

So there’s a tricky balance to strike when it comes to those things that we understand but haven’t actually experienced.  It’s easy for the imagination to run off on it’s own into the realm of unsubstantiated conjecture.  Strangely, at the same time, the human mind seems fairly resistant to pulling the same trick when the fulfillment of those substantiated conjectures require real work, regularly and consistently.  The actual effect, if an when we finally take the leap and put in the time is often, a surprising if expected experience.

SUPERPOWER

November 20th, 2020

Our most fantastic forms of entertainment entail a radical expansion of human agency.  These are the heroes and villains who can simply do more because they have capabilities beyond the normal person.  As a species, we just love to imagine what we could do… if.   “If only” is the name of the game, and it’s a game that we’ve been playing since childhood.  From that young vantage point adults are the original superhero simply for the fact that they are orders of magnitude more capable, just as a run of the mill action hero is compared to a normal adult.  If only I were older, then I’d be able to do this and that.  However, we don’t ever seem to grow out of the stage of if only.  We are always imagining and pining for a new level of capability, and as our own agency plateau’s hard, it can -for some- be even more intoxicating to live vicariously through the flimsy fantasy action stories that populate the silver screen.

Such stories are unfortunate and deceptive in two ways: often a superpower is accidentally acquired, or thrust upon an unwilling and unwinding individual who is now burdened with the awesome power of radically expanded agency, or a montage glosses over the important lesson of acquiring a superpower.  The first one bares little need for further bashing.  It’s the equivalent of winning the lottery, whether it’s because of a spider bite or some military test or just being born that way.  If anything, such ‘origin’ stories only play into the talent myth: you’ve either got it, or you don’t.  Which is a really unfortunate amount of bs when paired with a person’s capacity for growth and change. 

The second is the montage.  There’s the iconic getting in shape montage, like from the Rocky movies where a tremendous amount of time passes in just a few dozen seconds and it’s during this time where all the boring but very important training, learning, growing occurs. Intellectually the montage makes sense, but viscerally it doesn’t: we understand abstractly what’s required to level-up, but we don’t have any feel for the tedium, headache and sense of endurance required to make it through a real life montage.  

Our entertainment sourced from superpowers ironically handicaps our ability to actually make the long trek to acquire one by making it look quick and easy.  Real superpowers, that is the sort of rare human ability that some people actually do have that leave the rest of us to marvel at require absurd amounts of time and consistency.  These are people who win gold metals at the olympics, or the best performance musicians in the world, writers, artists, coders.  The best of the best of each field certainly looks like they have a superpower when placed next to someone who hasn’t put in the time required to level-up in such ways.  But for these people, the montage was many years long, and there was no spider bite or radioactive exposure - just boring work, most often.  It’s a bit ironic that the process of gaining more ability is often inversely correlated to how boring that process is.  A newb coder who manages to get Hello World to show up on the screen is probably has a far more exciting experience then the moment when a more experienced coder finally gets Gunicorn and Django wired up correctly to get a project that took months to build to finally appear on the screen.

The world of entertainment is a flashy quick-fix dopamine trip.  In a tiny fraction of a single day we see our protagonist go from normal run of the mill person to exceptionally able planet-saver.  So of course we go buy a lottery ticket.  Even Batman had the head-start of a fantastic fortune, which seems to have enabled him at least the freedom to go develop some skills - whatever those actually are.

Where most people plateau to the norm, some people do the insane thing of chipping away at the same skill or project repeatedly, over and over, hoping for a different outcome.  This has an eerie and unfortunate resonance with the odd modern definition of insanity, that is: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.  The difference is that any individual plugging away day after day with the same thing isn’t actually doing the exact same thing.  Subtle changes are occurring, but they’re unnoticeable, and only become apparent after a great deal of time when the compounded effects of many small changes seem to suddenly come together.  

We sort of all understand this.  But we don’t seem to know it.  We get it abstractly, yes, if you want to be really good at something you have to do it a lot for a long time.  But to know something is different than mere understanding.  Knowledge is understanding in motion.  To really know something you understand is to act upon it and add to the felt experience of living through a functional form of that understanding.  It’s when the vicarious is replaced with the visceral.  And then perspective changes.  Understanding, knowledge, and feeling fuse through memory, and then it becomes like many other human milestones we try to describe to younger people who have yet to have the experience it: you got to do it to really understand.

A FEW WORDS ON EDITING

November 19th, 2020

It’s perhaps a grave sin to start out on a piece of writing with such a title that is destined to receive no editing. If any redemption exists, it’s in the idea and the hope that this piece of writing will describe how it would change if this writer’s eyes and ears were dragged through it’s syllables of meaning over and over, straightening the tangles, bending the arc, conditioning the shape, and taking heed of each and every word both within it’s own sentence and within the whole of the piece it appears.

First there’s the basic stuff.  The misspelled words, the issues of grammar and syntax - the pedantic stuff.  Indeed it wasn’t until just a couple centuries ago that such customs were somewhat standardized.  Shakespeare, for example, spelled his own name a dozen different ways, made up words when it suited him, and took the same liberty with grammar when it suited him.  As much as lexicographers and linguists like those heading up the Académie Française would prefer, language is a slippery shape shifter, changing almost as fast as we can learn it - indeed changing because new minds are learning language from different points of view, in new points of time and configurations of culture and history.  Combing through the sort of pedantic detritus that consists of purely tedious things like spelling and syntax is, unfortunately where most people think editing begins and ends.  

On the contrary, a robust editing process takes a rough drafts and puts it through such a rigorous gamut of stress and expansion that it begins to resemble the incongruence that often marks the shape and size of a particular species and it’s distant ancestor.  Enormous blue whales evolved from coyote like creatures that walked on land with four legs, and apparently all of us wriggly and twitching beings evolved from a particularly fortuitous eukaryote cell.

Sometimes, the writing just flows, and it lands on the page with rare perfection.  But this is the exception and the rule is that creation needs to be kneaded, worked, molded, hammered, stress tested, sharpened, and honed.  This process happens at all levels, from single words, to clauses and sentences, to paragraphs and chapters.

Perhaps the most useful concept regarding the editing process is encapsulated by a particularly grim dictate: murder your darlings.  The phrase makes more sense in the visual arts.  Say, for example you’ve drawn a beautiful hand - it’s the best part of the entire model you’ve drawn and it’s simply an exquisite rendition.  But, it’s in the wrong place.  Perhaps it’s a little too far down, or it requires the arm to be unusually stretched.  That beautiful, exquisite local rendition is a darling, and it needs to be murdered for the good of the whole.  A fairly cruel and harsh notion, no doubt, but this is how evolution occurs.  The overwhelming majority of animals, critters and slithering thing that mother nature has killed off in order to get the world to it’s current state that includes humans is beyond human comprehension.  The earth is a churning graveyard of creativity, and so must be the page for the writer and artist.  The delightful benefit that a writer alone has, is that pieces and fragments can be saved to later germinate their own creations.  The visual artist isn’t so literally lucky and mother nature perhaps misses out on such a handy copy & paste.

The process includes the opposite. Rough drafts aren't simply culled and whittled down.  Pieces of writing must also be given space to expand and grow.  Such later growth might again be whittled away before the piece is done, but the exploration is necessary.  The expansion of one passage might simply be useful for casting a different passage in the correct light to be improved, after which it can meet the eraser.  

Each piece of writing demands a bit of a dance from the writer.  It presents, by saying, here we are, now where are we going to go?  A move in one direction - the cutting of a paragraph, the rewritten sentence - changes the entire fabric, flow and feel.  The message changes - a react that ensues from any change.  The piece of writing becomes an organic, morphing thing in this respect.  Sentences and paragraphs read differently depending on how they are framed, what they are juxtaposed with and the overall culture of words being cultivated.

The process is, unfortunately, never ending.  Each writer invariably reaches an asymptote in the process that represents the functional limit of ability given that piece of writing at that time.  This can certainly change given more experience and a return, but for that to happen a writer eventually has to move on and try a hand with a new piece of writing.  Whether unfortunate, bittersweet or a touching tribute to the notion of eternity, pieces of writing are never really finished.  We just stop working on them after a certain point.