THE SOCIAL IMPULSE - PART I

September 16th, 2020

 

Chances are you’ve had the strange experience of unintentionally eavesdropping on a conversation between two people at a coffeeshop or a restaurant and realizing after a number of minutes with strange astonishment that neither person has actually said anything despite a constant exchange of words.  And yet both parties are animated and engaged with the interaction.  What exactly is going on during this absurd phenomenon?

 

The answer lies in conjunction with a common aphorism:

It’s not what you say, but how you say it.

 

Most communication is not an exchange of information, it is dance of emotional alignment.  We  need only approach the situation through the other end of the metaphor: when two people are dancing together in a synchronous and unified way and it’s clear that both people are having fun, what exactly is the meaning of the dance?

 

This is of course, a nonsensical question: a dance doesn’t necessarily mean anything.  Sure we might be able to awkwardly paste some sort of interpretation on it, or swap in tangential facts about exercise, but at the end of the day, we dance mostly because it’s fun.  Plain and simple.  We understand this intuitively and no one watches a dance in utter confusion because there doesn’t seem to be any useful information that’s being transmitted between people.

 

But talking is different, right?  Words mean things, and when we string them together, we do so for the sake of creating and transmitting meaning. Right?

 

The fact is, this is what language is used for sometimes.

 

Language is a multifaceted tool, just as the body is.  We can use the body to dance and have fun, but then we can turn around and do something with the body that is purely utilitarian, like pick up the toys and put them in the toy box so no one steps on them, or so we can clear the floor for dancing.

 

Language, likewise is most often used for a form of dance between minds.  In debate we might think of it as a volley of combating ideas, like, say, tennis, but when it comes to a couple of friends having a whole lot of fun talking an incredible amount of nothing, we’re best to think of it as an emotional dance through the medium of words.

 

This desire and pleasure of emotional alignment is at the heart of the social impulse we all have.  It’s perhaps at the core of why we have such tribalistic tendencies.  Simply put, there is a pleasure reward for being emotionally aligned with a group that you feel kinship with, and resisting a rival tribe only amplifies this emotional reward as delivered by your in-group.

 

This is most certainly an evolutionary adaptation.  Well-formed groups stood a much higher chance of surviving, particularly groups that developed a hardwired assumption that other groups are most likely bad.  This is perhaps best evidenced by the lack of speciation around humans despite archeological evidence that many existed, the most commonly discussed example being neanderthals who were wiped out along with a dozen or so other human-like relatives.

 

In the absence of a commonly perceived enemy, however, we turn on each other and our own internal subdivisions become the new boundaries of conflict.

 

This is a shared cognitive program that is doomed to self-immolate.  Even if one group were to somehow achieve the tragic goal of wiping out all humans who are somehow not like their group, the demarcation of differences would simply collapse again to a lower level, and subgroups within this surviving group would again start becoming rivals until a new internal conflict adopts the same extreme measures.  All because our need to belong is so deep and our pleasure of feeling like we belong promises to be so great, just so we can merely sit and talk pleasantly with each other about absolutely nothing.

DOWNGRADE TO UPGRADE

September 15th, 2020

 

The most crucial aspect of intelligence today and in years to come is the ability for us to recognize aspects of psychology that do not benefit our aims and consciously suppress our automatic reactions.  The most prevalent example of hardwired psychology gone stale and awry in modern times is the fight-or-flight response.  We are predisposed to outrage and attack in situations when everyone would benefit far more from a mindful and conscientious response that is initiated with a calm and thoughtful pause.  Another piece of psychology that has outlived its utility is our attraction to shiny things.

 

This tendency to upgrade to the fancier, glitzier version is everywhere and is often the result of comparative happiness, or what’s more colloquially referred to as keeping-up-with-the-Joneses.  Tech start ups with a huge infusion of investor money pour it into fancy offices with smoothie stations and ridiculous art.  Authors cashing in on their first bestseller fawn over the delivery of their new oak writing desk.  First time movie stars buy that sexy sports car to spin around in.  But after some time, there is often a conflict between actual utility, or how effective something is, and the purported image that an upgrade has actually occurred.

 

A rather fanciful example that elicits the issue comes from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series.  In this fantasy series, there is, among other unrealistic things, a talking bear that goes into battle with the king of his tribe.  The king wears guided armor, beautifully inlaid and decked out with fancy ornamentation.  Meanwhile, the character we root for as readers wears the plainest armor imaginable, composed of simple sheets of thick metal.  It doesn’t take much guessing to figure out who wins the battle.  The fancy ornamentation cluttering the king’s armor gets in his way and limits his movements, meanwhile, the fighter with the simpler cheaper option   is far more capable and wins.  

 

This fanciful anecdote works as a good parable and metaphor when mapped onto real life examples.  The new accommodations for the tech start up deactivate the lean drive of employees that made the endeavour a success, all the while the spent money ends up looking squandered when an unforeseen obstacle makes revenues crash and suddenly the whole venture is in jeopardy.  Another real-life example is contained in an anecdote from the writer Stephen King who apparently did have a big and beautiful oak desk that he purchased to write novels. Turns out the only thing he could manage to do while sitting at that big expensive oak desk was get drunk.  And there’s at least been one star who couldn’t afford the car insurance for the fancy new car after that first breakout roll (Jamie Foxx?  Google failed me on this attempt to place the distant memory.)

 

Strangely, we become intoxicated by a structure of value unrelated to the mechanics of our success and abandon what works with the logic that something fancier will work better.

 

Paradoxically, we need to downgrade in order to achieve the upgrade we thought we’d get via the boons of success.

 

But can this inefficiency be extrapolated even further to greater benefit?

 

What can be downgraded before the foolish upgrade to achieve better results?

 

An exercise from stoic philosophy illuminates this possibility.  Seneca who was a fabulously wealthy philosopher in ancient Rome would often spend a few days enduring the simplest existence possible: eating plain rice, sleeping on a stone floor, wearing the garments of a beggar.

 

Why did he do this and suggest others to do the same?  Seneca realized that if his fortunes of his situation suddenly disappeared due to the vagrancies and randomness of life and he were left to endure the most meagre existence…. He would be ready for it.  The regular exposure to such a situation brings - not just a familiarity - but even a comfort.  The secondary benefit is that such a varied perspective allows a person to appreciate what they actually do have.  Most people undergo hedonic adaptation, which is the phenomenon of getting so used to the good life that it’s no longer good and feels entirely underwhelming.  Seneca’s exercise is a way of re-priming the system to crack perspective against the good fortune of life so that each day can be filled with gratitude.

 

We might wonder: what else can I cut out of my life to achieve better results?  What else can I consciously downgrade in order to achieve an upgrade?

 

PLANNING THE ITERATIVE BUILD

September 14th, 2020

 

The perfect plan is a mirage, but not one that keeps us moving forward; it is a mirage that merely perpetuates our thinking and imaginative striving toward that perfect plan.  There is an attempt to deconstruct completely the goal and reverse engineer its constituents until it unravels to our present circumstance.  This is simply impossible, and so we try try the reverse: we try to see as many steps ahead as possible with the expectation that we’ll be able to imagine footsteps leading all the way to the imagined promised land of achievement.  This too isn’t possible, but we can imagine such a plan existing, and this ability to hold a pair of ideals in our mind paralyzes the body from taking any action.

 

Not even nature can see across this gulf between present situation and goal. Nature iterates through generations and through branching species, always building with nuance and tinkering with different qualities.  This is iterative building.  If natural selection hadn’t been able to tweak changes through successive generations, we wouldn’t be here.  Our very minds are the result of this iterative building, and it’s still unclear where this process of iteration is leading, even to us.

 

There are many instances that seem like something has a perfect plan.  The development of an embryo to a fully formed human infant for example.  The process is miraculous in its ability and it seems as though there is a perfect plan set out for this growth.  But the word ‘plan’ isn’t exactly valid in the sense that we use a plan to aim our actions at a desired goal.  The miraculous growth of all living creatures from a single cell is the result of something more akin to a recipe.  DNA forms a set of instructions, like a recipe which is perhaps unique, but the uniqueness of each strand of DNA is more akin to the fact that no two loaves of banana bread turn out exactly the same, no matter how rigorously one attempts to follow the recipe perfectly.  Such recipes and instructions are always written after something is built, and so it is with our DNA - the instructions of our growth: they exist because they have worked before, and these plans have grown as a result of tinkering with smaller versions that worked well enough to replicate in some way.  We can imagine a primordial world where the first nucleotide formed, and then a second, and the two joined to form the first polynucleotide, which began laying the way for the gargantuan strands of DNA that exist in all of our cells.  Every single piece of us could, in theory, be traced back to a step in this iterative process.

 

So when it comes to forming a plan to achieve some goal, why do we fool ourselves into thinking that we might be able to visualize every step of a path that we’ve never stepped foot on?

 

The plan of the iterative build is to start with just the first step: one that ideally moves in the direction of a goal, and ideally, even this first step will yield feedback divulging whether or not we’re headed in the right direction.

 

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: FLEETING OPPORTUNITY

September 13th, 2020

 

Lucilius woke up on the floor of the command deck, a crushing headache screaming in tune with the ship’s alarms as he stumbled up and pulled himself back into his seat.  He looked around at the rest of his crew on the floor, all of them coming to and looking around.

 

“Engineering, status report.”

 

The lieutenant was grabbing his head as he looked at the various blank screens and controls.

 

“Life support nominal, engines coming back online,” the lieutenant called out.

 

The rest of the bridge was dark, dim with emergency lights.  Lucilius rubbed his eyes, trying to figure out what had happened.  Lucilius was captain of the Starship Fredinand, now lost somewhere in the deepest reaches of the August Galaxy.  His mind ran through familiar protocol as he wondered at the possibility of some sort of electrical storm, trying to guess what might have happened as the ship’s systems rebooted.

 

“Captain,” called one of Lucilius’ lieutenants. “scanners have picked up a spacial anomaly and a ship, in the forward quadrant, ”

 

“On screen,” Lucilius commanded.

 

Before the command crew a blank wall wavered into focus to show a spinning disk of light and hovering before it, a ship, tiny in the distance.

 

“Navigation, do we have readings yet?” Lucilius queried.

 

“No sir.”

 

“Comms?”

 

“Still down sir.”

 

“Engineering?”

 

“Engines nominal, hyperdrive is down, weapon systems down, primary and secondary life-support down, tertiary active.

 

“Johann,” 

 

“Sir?” Answered the pilot.

 

“Bring us in closer.”

“Yes, sir, distress protocol?”

 

“No,” Lucilius said.  “Don’t know who’s down there, still don’t know what happened.  Fly casual.”

The ship began to approach, and slowly the distant ship began to grow before the enormous disk of light.

 

“Comms?”

 

“Still down sir.”

 

The distant ship continued to grow on screen as they approached, the details still bleary by the distance and the glow of the spatial anomaly.  Lucilius squinted at the screen.

 

“Navigation, magnify.”

 

“Already at full resolution sir.”

 

Lucilius stood up, wavering for a moment as the blood rushed from his still pained head.  He steadied himself and walked to the front of the bridge to look closer at the wall screen.

 

“Comms?”

 

“Working on it sir - the system seems to be locked in a recursive reboot.”

 

“Nav, we have a location yet?”

 

“Seem to be having the same problem, systems are displaying old positions with every reboot.”

 

Lucilius squinted hard at the shape of the ship on the screen.  The screen momentarily flickered as the navigation officer rebooted the system.  Something about the bleary geometry seemed familiar.  He had the eerie sense that he’d seen this ship before.  It seemed to be edging closer to the disk of light.

 

“Nav, what’s going on with this ship?”

 

“They are approaching the spatial anomaly.”

“Johann, speed it up a bit, I don’t want to lose them.”

 

“Comms?”

 

“Status unchanged, reboots are throwing no errors, The Ferdinand is only picking up its own comms systems, it’s reading like there’s nothing else in the area.  Still trying to determine what’s wrong.”

 

“Jammed?”  Lucilius asked.

 

“I don’t think so sir, it’s like we’re alone, jamming would disrupt our own signal which is stable.”

 

“Do a general broadcast.”

 

The Comm’s officer nodded to signal Lucilius.

 

“This is Lucilius of the Starship Ferdinand, identify yourself immediately.  Communication jamming is an act of war.  If you do not identify yourself we are bound by federation law to engage you as a threat.”

 

All that followed was silence.  

 

“Sir, the ship is approaching the disk.”

 

“Johann speed it up, I want eyes on this ship before it passes into the anomaly.”

 

“Distress protocol?” The pilot queried.

 

“Engage all tactical measures necessary.”

 

The glimmer of a smile fluttered momentarily across the pilot’s face as he opened the ship’s throttle, sending them hurtling forward at attack speed.  Lucilius took another step closer to the screen.

 

“Nav, get me geometry read-out on this ship before it vanishes.”

 

“The spatial anomaly is disrupting scanners,   Only partial readouts are coming back.”

 

“Piece it together!” Lucilius commanded.

 

“Working on it.”

 

Lucilius looked back at the pilot “Open it up!”

 

Johann slammed the throttle all on and the ship lurched forward, but moments later the ship ahead disappeared into the disk of light.  The pilot eased up until they slowed to a stop before the disk.

 

“Sir I have a bogey in rear quadrant.”

 

“What?”

 

“Just popped up out of nowhere.”

 

“What’s it doing?”

 

“Just sitting there.”

 

“Nav error?”

 

The navigation officer looked back at Lucilius with a baffled look about the strangeness of the entire situation.  Lucilius nodded.

 

“Engineering, warp still down?”

 

“Yes sir.”

 

“Weapons?”

 

“Still unresponsive.”

 

“Nav, where is that bogey, do you have a reading on the ship yet?”

 

“Hasn’t moved.  No resolution, proximity to the anomaly seems to be corrupting our scanners.”

 

“Engineering, reboot all systems now.”  He stepped closer to the engineering consul to watch the screen readouts.  The young engineering officer quickly touched a temple, wincing with pain before tapping more initiation commands into the consul. 

 

 “Come on my boy,” Lucilius said, “give me my guns.”

 

The screens read anew and turned up the same readout.  Only primary engines and tertiary life-support systems were active.

 

Lucilius spun around, “Nav, where are they?”

 

“Approaching.”

 

“Speed.”

 

“Cruising.”

 

“Comms?”  Lucilius called out.

 

But before the officer could respond, the bridge boomed.

 

“This is Lucilius of the Starship Ferdinand, identify yourself immediately.  Communication jamming is an act of war.  If you do not identify yourself we are bound by federation law to engage you as a threat.”

 

Lucilius grabbed his own forehead.  “Comms, reboot your systems now.  Nav give me 10 second updates on position, if speed changes give me a weapons distance countdown.”

 

“Engineering, warp status.”

 

“Still down.”

 

“Can anyone give me information on this thing in front of us?”

 

The bridge was silent.  Spatial anomalies were extremely rare but Lucilius had come across one or two.  He knew their instruments wouldn’t be able to penetrate the details of its mystery.  He knew his crew would have no answers.  The question was designed not for an answer but as a proposal to his officers, illuminating the few options they now faced in the event of assuming the worst.

 

“Move us closer.” Lucilius said.  Johann looked back at his captain and Lucilius nodded.  The ship broke its stationary position and began to approach the turning undulations of light.

 

“Sir, the ship is accelerating.”

 

“Comms?”

 

“Unchanged.”

 

“Jammed?”

 

“I don’t know, could be the anomaly.”

 

The Navigation officer spoke, “The ship has entered weapons distance and is still accelerating.”

 

Lucilius looked back at his pilot “keep us out of range!”

 

They all knew their only option now in the face of an approaching enemy within weapons distance.  The anomaly was an existential gamble, perhaps more fraught than destruction by an enemy, but all of them were bound by the simple tenets of their profession to endure and explore at the cost of potential destruction.  Fate at the hands of an approaching enemy was a two headed possibility at best, but a spatial anomaly contained possibilities that could not even be calculated.  All of them knew that without their proper systems, their only choice was to follow the chased ship into the portal.  Perhaps that ship had ventured into the unknown knowing where they were headed…

 

“Weapons distance, 10 seconds!” The navigation officer called out.

 

“Johann?”

 

“5 seconds to impact.”

 

“Comms?”

 

“No change,” the officer called out.

 

“4 seconds to impact.”

 

“Engineering?!” Lucilius barked.

 

“Warp down, weapons down.”

 

“Nav?”

 

“5 seconds weapons distance.”

 

“3 seconds to impact,” Johann called out. “2 seconds.”

 

“Brace for impact,” Lucilius shouted, and just as the ship closed in on the blinding anomaly Lucilius noticed one of the unnoticed screens to the side of the navigation officer.  The ship’s computers had patched together data on the ship they had chased before it had disappeared into the anomaly and was now displaying the image on one of the navigation screens.  As they passed into the anomaly Lucilius finally realized why the ship had seemed so familiar even  in its blurriness.  On the screen glowed the sheer and sleek lines of The Ferdinand.

THE NARRATIVES OF OTHERS

September 12th, 2020

 

If you woke up and found yourself in a completely different reality governed by beings you could not even see nor hear nor even conceive and they asked you to describe your world, how would you do it?  Would you start talking about how unfair the current leaders of your tribe are, and perhaps name people who are popular today and perhaps the ways we all sort of intermingle with one another despite the resistance we have toward one another.  Or, would you start by describing general things like a force that sticks you to the ground, and an invisible substance that you suck into your body during every other moment of your life and the heat and light that comes from a lofty celestial source that rises and falls and lapses into darkness once a day?

 

This later one could just as easily sound like an archaic religious system as it is a quasi description of physics as we experience it.  It’s clear the first description regarding mostly people and the ways we interact requires a much larger context in order to understand.  And of course one description is quite dependant on the other.  The celestial bodies would still turn and hurtle through space without humans to witness it, but humans would be unable to evolve and witness anything without the turn and hurtle of celestial bodies.

 

Notice how staggeringly incomplete it is to describe reality through the lens of personal identity.  Take for instance political affiliation as a subfield of personal identity: is a thorough summary of the current warring political parties a good measure of the constituents of reality?  How does such a description fair in comparison to something politically charged like changes in atmospheric composition, which would, should, or could veer away from reality as understood through personal identity..

 

A full description would inevitably include both as they are both aspects of the reality we experience.  The importance of juxtaposing them, however, is to examine the disproportionate way such views of reality actually occupy our view of reality.

 

We are, on the whole, far more consumed with a description and view of reality as filtered through the lens of personal identity.  Other considerations like atmospheric conditions or the actual statistics of a given controversial event are often one step removed since the cultural component of these topics is primary.  The “facts” of a situation often don’t even make it into the conversation because we are too busy painting and repainting our own narrative of the world with attempts to repaint the narratives of others who are likewise trying to do the same to “us”.

 

There exists a simple explanation why we have such a difficult time focusing our collective conversation on a cold and sober exploration of facts, and it’s best introduced by a quote attributed to a dictator who was responsible for an extraordinary amount of death.

 

Joseph Stalin is popularly attributed with saying:

The death of one man is a tragedy.  The death of millions is a statistic.*

 

Sad, no doubt, but perhaps true.  The human mind just can’t relate to the concept of a million.  And what exactly does it mean to relate to a concept?  The tragedy of a single person is relatable primarily, and perhaps exclusively because it evokes a strong emotional reaction.  Statistics, on the other hands rarely, if ever evoke an emotional reaction.  Strangely, it requires a a good deal of cognitive horsepower to really grasp the meaning of important statistics in a way that can have an emotional impact.  On the other hand, most of our emotional reactions, as we might have by witnessing the death of a single person, are automatic reactions.  These are built in responses that don’t require any work to have.  Whereas the cognitive effort required to understand a statistic on an emotional level is far greater.

 

This is why our narrative about reality is most often fuelled and filtered through a lens of personal identity.  If personal identity in current times can be summed up as anything, it’s probably fair to say it’s a collection of those things that are most likely to make us emotional.

How many people consider the laws of gravity as part of their personal identity?  Very few indeed, despite the fact that gravity is vital for our daily functioning.  But of course this is because gravity isn’t something that we can easily get emotional about.  Just imagine that: an impassioned and raging debate full of emotional hysterics regarding gravity.  This perhaps happens in certain scientific laboratories and perhaps at a physics convention here and there, but if this somewhat hilarious event made it on to mainstream media, most people would barely even blink at it.  Now flip the narrative and think about all the impassioned hysterics that fill our view of the world.  How much of it is fleeting, and how much of it is based in facts that actually reflect the wider status of reality?  If we weren’t so easily triggered by such topics, how might our actions regarding such topics be different?  Would our choices be… wiser?

 

Much growth and learning is simply the ability to properly regulate one’s emotions.  Learning, for example, can be boiled down to the way a person deals with the experience of confusion.  If the default reaction to confusion is frustration and impatience, chances are learning is going to be slow with a high likelihood of stopping altogether.  If, on the other hand an individual reacts to a confusing subject with curiosity, the chances that person makes headway is much higher.

 

We might reframe this topic of emotional regulation in the context of personal identity and how that becomes our filtered narrative of reality.  It’s plainly obvious that little if any emotions regarding our most triggering issues are being well regulated if regulated at all.

 

We hinder ourselves in the absence of such regulation.  The clearest and most effective path only becomes visible and apparent when we are calm, passive and at peace.  Strangely, our impassioned emotional reaction is a self-defeating response - it is more likely to hinder our ability to make things better and resolve the issue that is causing such strong emotions.

 

So often, in this wide rambling game of human discourse, the issue that triggers us the most and to the greatest degree is, oddly and simply, the narratives of others.

 

 

*The sentiment behind the quote most often attributed to Stalin was most likely the creation of a Geman Journalist named Kurt Tucholsky.