What do you know?

"How do we know what we know?" was a question posed by psychologist and Palo Alto Mental Research Institute member Paul Watzlawick (working with such prestigious alumnus as Gregory Bateson, Virginia Satir and Jay Haley) in a book he edited with a similar title.

So, how do we separate inferences and biases from our map-making or ideation of the world?

Consider an artist meeting a group of people. One works as an electrician, another as an accountant, the third a graphic designer. Introducing himself as well as his occupation, the abstraction process begins almost instantly. The electrician and the accountant, unfamiliar with art figure he is a painter of portraits. The designer, however, cannot accept his abstraction so easily and make a reversal of order and thus probes further. Suddenly, it is revealed that the artist sculpts figures from stone. What we seldom achieve is the self-awareness to ask ourselves how we arrive at our conclusions. Is it intensional assumption or extensional reasoning by way of evidence and testing?

If the accountant and electrician had not gone further in their inquiry they would only have partial knowledge of the artist's extensional occupation - they would have the word the artist used to describe himself and no other real, concrete knowledge. Their maps would be incomplete, shaded by unconscious biases and internal referential indexes based on what they had encountered previously, not in the present moment. Of course, artist₁ is not artist₂, yet it seems awfully convenient to coddle together all artists into an indeterminate class to save on time and mental energy.

I ask the question; does a culture that demands instant gratification inevitably demand the dissolution of knowledge into the manageable and familiar, possibly restricting the range and probity of thought and inquiry?

If expediency breeds increased probability for error, as has been demonstrated in so many cases, could the same lust for rapidity erode maps, distorting them to such a degree that it impairs sane and rational judgment? We are all guilty of this and oftentimes it leads us into despair and ruin. I would implore all people to use their nature's gift of self-reflection and self-awareness to avoid such semantic and symbolic traps and to use their nervous systems and the nervous systems of others for the greatest outcome. How? By routinely asking questions and (almost) never staying satisfied with the first answer you get.

In the words of Robert Anton Wilson: "Doubt. Doubt that you have doubted enough. Doubt your doubts." Never take anything on its face value; the world is infinitely complex and in constant flux; those that attempt to answer simply and definitely we should be especially skeptical of.

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http://twitter.com/crushtor

A Static Flame

Looking around this society of ours, we have become so preoccupied with time and its forward motion we have become afraid of its very existence. In one respect, we in Western countries have strode headlong into a complete disavowal of change. We fear it, we reject it and we try to cover it up to the best of our ability.

As Marcus Aurelius said in his Meditations, "The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it." We sell bottles of anti-change, we charge money to keep change at bay and we legislate change away in parliament.

In my view, I feel that the fear of change is another source and cause of so much misery and discontentment for so many people. They fail to recognize the only constant is the thoughts of the self and his actions and those too are subject to change. People jump unabashedly into work, into relationships and into commitments that prevent or minimize the chances of change. People foolishly believe that some institutions are forever; that once one problem has been solved, it cannot resurface in another guise as it evidently does in many cases.

Politicians are even scrambling to cover up the fact that change is inevitable; they use scientists with dubious rationality to insist that climate change is a myth; there is no credible reason for things to constantly change, even at the submicroscopic level. Just like a belief in God, they believe that humanity has no agency for change; all is predetermined, all will reveal itself in God's own time. This divine control is filtered down into religion, into politics and even into households that follow the words of God, Allah and Yahweh.

So we attempt to control change and re-label it progress. Like unconscious Marxists, we believe that progress towards higher standards of living and technology will lead us into utopia. With all changes, there are winners and losers. We focus on minimizing harm rather than maximizing utility associated with change; we irrationally suppress all change just in case something bad happens.

And shit does happen; it happens to every one, some more frequently than others. Sometimes shit happening allows us to learn and lead us in a new direction. To embrace that rather than shy away from it is the challenge we must all face. To recognize a life in four dimensions can still lead to one of fulfillment and happiness is the one change I believe that everyone should make.

What was once a great love is now deadened; what was once a routine hobby lies in the corner of a room. There's change everywhere; its ultimately up to the individual whether he stands amongst it or walks along with it, tempering it to his own needs.

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http://twitter.com/crushtor

Strategies for Unsanity

In my dreaming last night, I saw more literal signals than symbolic, i.e, conversations in their entirety without adulteration by my unconscious mind (which would have to be taken with a grain of suspicion anyhow!)

A friend of mine called me out of the blue - he wanted something from me and I figured as much since I had never received a social call from him before. We got to talking and he hit upon his recent feelings about being depressed. I had noticed after much self-reflection that his depression was not innate or a priori, but learned and reinforced throughout his life.

If we maintain that the Structural Differential holds true-to-fact, then language shapes thought and thus behavior. So at which point can we define the fundamental causes of undesirable or depressive feelings being generated? In my opinion, identification at the evaluation level and its confusion with the event level effects on our feelings with greatest impact.

My friend would say (i.e., utter and most likely subvocalize) that his pursuits both for his work and pleasure were nothing to be commended; that they were "adequate" at best. He would mostly downplay his achievements and enforce irrational restrictions on his well-being.

The maps he had internalized in the past now bear claim to appearing as "reality", using broad and vulgar terms. Despite his activities being "neutral", he identifies them as good or bad by holding them up to unattainable comparisons (i.e., his writings are not read by millions, therefore it is a failure or inherently bad) or believing them as so instead of evaluating them as they are in their environment, or liking/loving them unconditionally as an extension of himself. He continually struggles to feel happy by placing demands on the universe when realizing it is neither benign or malignant but indifferent to his needs.

If you wish to feel inadequate or worthless, I recommend you start or continue to do the following:

• Need rather than want, or have second-order needs: i.e, "I need my need for love."
• Misidentifying others' problems for your own.
• Reversing the order of abstraction by mistaking your evaluations of reality for reality itself.
• By thinking either too negatively or positively in absolute terms.
• By tying your well-being to external events and external evaluations (i.e., verbal praise)
• By using outdated maps (i.e., past situations) to navigate present territories.
• By merely hypothesizing and never testing situations to gain the facts.
• By thinking the universe owes you something for services rendered or intentions pure.
  

I do not claim to be a psychologist; I do however claim to be a student of General Semantics. By using the GS approach, much of his needless self-imposed suffering could be avoided and effectively remedied.

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http://twitter.com/crushtor