UNIFYING REALMS OF DATA

December 21st, 2019

All creatures have some kind of input.  Humans have a few.  We can taste, we can touch, we can hear and we can see a certain sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum that we call visible light. 

Bees can see ultraviolet light and humans generally can’t, but beyond these small slivers in the electromagnetic spectrum, there is a huge range of activity that bees are oblivious too and humans for the majority of our existence have also been oblivious too.

The important difference is that we have figured out how to access that spectrum without having any sense organs that are designed to interface with these other regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

We have been able to notice everything from Ionizing radiation to microwaves and beyond.  This hasn’t just given us new capabilities like transmitting massive amounts of information through your average wifi network which utilizes radiowaves, it’s also allowed us to study the fabric of the cosmos.  When we simply look up at the night sky with the un-aided eye, we only see specks of light, but with our ability to access a larger portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, we see an outpouring of information raining down from the heavens.  This information gives us a more nuanced and detailed perspective of what is potentially going on when we look up at the night sky.

Just as our use of radio waves via wifi or cellular networks provides us with access to an endless stream of information about what’s happening around the world, with our family, our friends, or even if we wish to access the vast treasure trove of human knowledge.  Because of our awareness and manipulation of this part of the spectrum that we cannot see nor taste nor hear nor touch, we no longer have to make a trip to the library or write a letter or make the arduous journey to visit someone.

Perhaps most important, however is our ability to unify these realms of information.  Not just in a manipulative sense in that we can convert something like sound or a picture into a form that can utilize radiowaves, but that our juxtaposition of these different realms allows us to make assertions about the nature of physical reality that is simply unavailable to your average bumble bee or octopus.

This is an assumption that Octopi and Bees don’t have some hidden access to the whole electromagnetic spectrum, but chances are they would express this access in some sort of use. 

Natural selection has little use for the useless.

Humans, on the other hand are quite quick to put a new discovery to use.  Curious findings rarely remain just curious findings.  We find some way to use it, manipulate it, and bend it to our benefit.

Just as we had no knowledge of Gamma rays for most of human history despite their presence nearly everywhere, we must wonder, what else is right in front of us, just waiting for our minds to create some portal so it can be seen?

What keys might such unknowns hold to the questions we see in other places?

RIVALNYM CASE STUDY: NATURAL SOCIETY

December 20th, 2019

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of a Rivalnym, it is something developed by Tinkered Thinking to address a certain class of words and concepts that fall in a strange place between Synonyms and Antonyms.  A rivalnym is a word, or rather, a pair of words that are somewhat synonymous in literal meaning, but opposite in terms of the emotional valence we ascribe to the thing being described.

An easy example is the pair of words cooperation/conspiracy.  Both describe a group of people who are working together to bring about a commonly desired goal.

But cooperation is generally positive and conspiracy is generally negative.

This episode seeks to explore a pair of concepts that are a bit more complicated than the usual rivalnyms that have popped up on Tinkered Thinking before.

First, enter one of the most ambiguous and difficult to define words in the entire English language:

Natural.

Ask 10 different people what Natural means and you’ll get 10 different answers with a vague trend of similarity.  You’ll also get a few perplexed pauses.

One inevitable answer is that natural is whatever occurs in nature.  This seems reasonable enough, but the construction ‘in nature’ contains a fair amount of problem.

For example, can we say that human society is natural?  The aim here isn’t to answer it outright but simply to point out that ‘in nature’ implies somewhere else: the woods, where wild animals outnumber humans, and the ocean which might as well be totally unavailable to the average human – aside from what we haul out of it to eat.

Human society seems to be somewhat separate from nature given the way that we use these words.  And of course there are countless people who believe that we should ‘return’ to more natural ways.  The existence of this perspective is perhaps the best evidence to underscore the separateness that we’ve managed to squeeze between society and nature.

The problem with this dichotomy is easy to unravel and it requires only a simple question:

Where did human society come from?

Some might simply say ‘humans’, but where did humans come from?  Well if Darwin has anything to say about it, we arose from the “natural” world.

The fact that human society ultimately arose from the natural world is unavoidable.  In fact, without human society and culture, the concept of ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ wouldn’t even exist.  They are things we created.

The interesting thing about this dichotomy which makes it begin to look like a Rivalnym is that we can say the exact same thing about the word ‘society’.  Without human culture and society the concept of ‘society’ wouldn’t exist.  We can take it to one more level of paradox and point out that ‘society' as a concept and as a real functioning thing, wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for…. ‘nature’.

Both ‘society’ and what is ‘natural’ are describing a process that we see on earth.

The most functional definition of what is ‘natural’ is simply what is physically possible.

This means that it’s natural for animals to eat each other alive, which happens everyday.

It also means plastic is natural and space travel, and of course, society.

But of course some of these things we feel good about and others we don’t feel good about and it’s because of this deep human trend to categorize things in such ways that we split things into different words.

Is it a conspiracy?

Or cooperation between people?

All depends on if you approve of their goal.

Nature is a sort of master category which subsumes all other categories.  To claim that we are separate from it, or straying from it is to completely miss the larger picture.

Mother nature curiously created humans, and she’s clearly interested about where we are going to go and what we are going to do.

ANALYSIS PARALYSIS

December 19th, 2019

This episode is dedicated to Clay Nichols.  You can connect with Clay on Twitter @ClayNichols

Balance is an overrated concept, and this is only because it is misunderstood.  It’s propped up in our hectic culture as some ethereal ideal, but it’s shoved into our frameworks for understanding in a broken way.

A useful way to see how balance is used in a broken way is to think about walking.  Yes, walking.

Walking is not an expression of balance.  Standing in one place without falling is an expression of balance.  While standing, the virtue of your body’s posture as placed against the ground is in balance with the force of gravity that is pulling your body to the ground.

If you think about walking carefully, you realize that

the only way to move forward is to throw yourself off balance.

Think about it: if you’re standing in one place, what is the very first thing you do in order to take a step forward? You lean forward.  But at this point in your life, your reaction to this destabilizing action is such an automaticity that you don’t realize that each and every step is actually an act of catching yourself before you fall flat on your face.

The physics of walking is quite literally the act of throwing yourself off balance and then catching yourself, over and over and over.  Do this enough and it seems like a new type of ‘balance’ emerges, one that seems more pronounced when we run at a fast clip.  But balance is probably not the best word.  Something like the word ‘flow’ might be a better fit.

The structure of walking and it’s relation to the concept of balance can act as a useful framework for other areas where we hope to make progress.

And walking might be more fitting as analogy for progress than we might at first realize.

After all, the definition of progress is: forward or onward movement toward a destination, or  advancement toward a better, more complete, or more modern condition.

The primary definition of ‘progress’ might as well be the definition of ‘walking’.

To use the word progress in a more contemporary sense, we can wonder: how does this rhythm of balance and off-balance apply to things that are less literal in their movement towards a place?

or rather:

How does balance make sense in the context of progress towards a goal?

This particular question might evoke similarly problematic flavors of speech and phrasing that are all too familiar, like: are we on track to achieve our goal?

The two together can be cobbled together into an image of a train that is properly balanced on it’s tracks and headed towards a specific destination.  This is a dangerous way to think about progress for one simple reason:  if we are trying to achieve a novel goal, then it’s something that hasn’t necessarily ever been done before, and a train track is proof of a destination that has been reached before.

If you are trying to achieve something new, then you have to blaze a trail.  There are no tracks or roads or paths nor trails to the place that has never been visited.

If the place we wish to achieve is not physical, then what does our rhythmic process of balance and off balance look like?

These two states boil down into two of our most basic options as conscious beings.

There is thinking

and there is doing.

We cannot achieve something through pure thinking alone, even if some brilliant realization comes along, that realization needs some sort of expression in order to be meaningful, and such expression is the doing part.

Likewise, if we only do things, then the effectiveness of our action is left to the whims of fate.  Luck favors action asymmetrically in this case because pure thought has almost no visible impact on the world.  But, simply doing things without some sort of thoughtful pause and analysis runs the risk of doing the same dumb thing over and over.

Given any point in time, if we just stop and think about things, our thoughts have a high likelihood of settling into a fairly repetitive pattern.  Perhaps, we could call this balance, in that our understanding of reality has reached some sort of stability based on what we know, but this doesn’t mean it’s comfortable, nor does it mean we are making progress.  It doesn’t take much time standing in one place to grow uncomfortable.

As with standing in one place, so too with thinking: we must throw ourselves off balance.  In the literal framework of walking, this instantly gives us a new perspective.  With progress, in order to gain a new perspective on reality, we have to poke it.  We have to do something in order to get a response from reality, and this response carries new information, which ideally updates what we understand about reality which further develops our perspective in the way that movement does in a literal way.

Think for a moment about hiking in the back country.  It’s necessary to stop in order to get your bearings and figure out which way to go next.  You stop to look around and get a sense of where things are and where you are in relation to them.  Then you move on.  And this process repeats.

The same repetition is necessary for thinking and doing.  The trick to thinking in order to stay fresh and keep from falling into analysis paralysis is to ask an effective question.  The question ideally poses a curiosity about reality that we currently have little to no information about.  If the question we ask simply spins our thinking off into a different circular pattern, then it is not an effective question.

It does well to remember what a question really is, as Tinkered Thinking explores in episode 128.

A good question propels us into action for an answer that lies only in the folds of reality.

Once we’ve taken some action that mines an answer from reality, we can again pause and think about the implications, as we integrate this new knowledge and check our bearings on where we are in relation to the place we imagine might exist.

Repeat this over and over, and the sky’s the limit.

This episode builds off of Episode 133: The Right Track, Episode 128: Question and most importantly Episode 269: Blazing Tracks, and . . .

Make sure to subscribe at TinkeredThinking.com.  Subscriber-only content is in the works. . .

GET BEHIND YOURSELF AND PUSH

December 18th, 2019

Doesn’t matter why you don’t feel good.  Doesn’t matter what happened during the day.  Doesn’t matter how much you don’t want to do it. 

It simply doesn’t matter what you are feeling if those feelings stand in the way of what you need to do, what you could do, and what would lead to a better life.

Sometimes, you just need to get behind yourself and push.

As with this episode.

MANY MASKS

December 17th, 2019

This episode is dedicated to Paul Graham and Deeyah Kahn.

In an essay entitled “Keep Your Identity Small”, Paul Graham strings his bow and fires an arrow of insight straight through the countless hollow faces of identity. 

The favorite line often pulled from this essay seems to be the last one: The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

And in order for it to make proper sense it’s vital to understand the context Graham builds about the difference between knowledge and conviction.  Identity is rooted in belief, conviction, and feeling – not knowledge.

Identity is associated with strong feelings, so any discussion involving the topic of this identity is bound to trigger a person.

One of the most useful observations that Graham makes in his essay is that people are partisan by default when it comes to any discussion that involves their identity.  This is a subtle point that is easy to miss, but once seen it acts like a highlighter.  Opinions that we hear ourselves share begin emerging with an underscore etched by our own bias.

For the contemplative individual this can turn into an exploration about why these emotions and biases pop up, what sort of experience has produced them, and ultimately how useful such an emotional perspective is. 

Graham’s advice is to eschew the stamps of identity, and for the individual who can understand this and integrate it with their emotional web, this can work.  But where does this leave us when we confront others who can’t pull off this intellectual hacking of our emotion-fueled identities?

Deeyah Kahn is a filmmaker who has explored this difficult quandary in some of the most extreme ways possible.  Born to Muslim parents, she incurred criticism at an early age from her own religious community and has gone on to make documentaries where she explores the intricacy of extreme views, interviewing white nationalists and exploring Muslim extremism.  In so doing, she uncovered similarities that exist in both extremist groups.  As one might piece together with the discussion of Graham’s essay, these extreme identities are adopted because of circumstances that provoke extreme emotions.

The most impressive aspect of Kahn’s work is not the insights she has uncovered, but the method she uses to engage her subject.  Kahn’s style of interview is more akin to that of a curious acquaintance, and to place this stance, we can ask:

Does curiosity carry with it any serious commitment of identity?

No, not at all.  And the effect of Kahn’s outlook is that she ends up creating the seeds of friendship between herself and the people she speaks with.  Such conversations taken from a stance of genuine curiosity register with compassion, and through such interactions, the extremist positions of the people she speaks with begin to relax as emotions counter to their identity begin to influence their thinking.

Just about anyone who might read or listen to this can probably recall an experience when someone in their life was so emotional that the person was simply unreachable.  The words ‘calm down’ in such situations, while practically-intended, only function like fuel on a fire.  The point being is that Graham’s essay, while brilliant, most likely requires a mind with a fairly high degree of emotional regulation and introspection in order to have a behavioral impact on the people who read it, but this is a guess.  It would certainly be a very interesting experiment to see what Jihadists and White Nationalists would think about Graham’s essay.

Kahn’s work, on the other hand reveals that in order for people to soften their attachment to  strongly held identities, an experience is most effective, one that evokes new emotions that turn out to be in conflict with this identity.

 The rationalizations follow the emotion, and only in those who already have a high degree of emotional regulation can it be the other way around.

For an individual who seeks to escape the chance of being to tightly identified, a piece of advice emerges that seems totally opposite to Graham’s prescription at the end:

If you don’t want to be partisan, than it’s best to try on the mask of the enemy.  Or we can import the old aphorism: walk a mile in the shoes of the one you disagree with and then see how things look.

Instead of taking no labels, try them all with a supple grasp, one that always maintains a willingness to switch.  This is the mostly failed goal of the classic ‘liberal’ education, and while it’s beyond the scope of this episode, it seems that such liberal goals have succeeded only in collecting identities as opposed to expanding experience.  The point of Kahn’s work is that many of the extremists she engages don’t simply pick up an additional label or identity because of their interaction, it’s that they end up giving up their old destructive one.

In order to alter identity to a significant degree, a meaningful experience is required.  This is something that the medical industry is slowly discovering.  The generally poor and problematic results of anti-depressants, for example, is beginning to create a vacuum of necessity for the exploration of alternative answers, and one potential answer that is beginning to emerge is the use of psychedelics.

Among the many things that are possible with psychedelics and relevant here, one notable, but under mentioned benefit, is that a bad trip can generate a huge and lasting amount of compassion for the mentally ill.

While discussion of the ‘bad trip’ generally doesn’t bode well for the emerging field since it can be superficially pinned down as a reason not to investigate these substances, there is perhaps no greater example of bridging an understanding between two radically different perspectives.

The reason why a bad trip can generate compassion for the mentally ill is because a bad trip –in retrospect- looks and feels a lot like mental illness, and for a healthy person to visit this place is to perhaps quite literally walk in the shoes of those less fortunate.

So when we deal with others, it bodes well to keep in mind that the best way to bridge minds and build perspective is through a shared emotional experience.  For some, an intellectually stimulating essay can do just that, but for others another medium may be required, one that can reach deep into the emotional well.  We can tinker with our approach with a question:

What are we more likely to open up to?

An intellectual analysis complete with a potentially generous prescription?

or

Kindness, and curiosity?

While the first is probably what comes to mind in discussion, we would do well to pause and wonder whether the door for such a thing is open on the other side of the discussion.  If not, we can certainly see from Deeyah Kahn that kindness and curiosity is a great way to gently knock on that door.

This episode not only draws from Paul Graham’s essay and the documentaries of Deeyah Kahn, it also relies heavily on a couple earlier episodes of Tinkered Thinking, episode 17: The Identity Danger, and Episode 157: Conquer of Concur?