Month: January 2016

Repost: Semiotic proprioception in dreams and waking

~ ABN ~ 1 Comment

Proprioception means “one’s own” or “ones’ individual” (Latin proprius) “perception.”

We normally use this word to refer to our physical position in the world—whether we are standing or sitting, how we are moving, and how much energy we are using.

When we dream, our capacity for physical movement, with rare exceptions, is paralyzed. But we still do a sort of proprioception in dreams—a semiotic proprioception, or proprioception within the semiology of the dream.

In dreams, we grope through semiotic associations and respond, gropingly, to them. People and things often look smaller in dreams, or distorted, because we do not have either the need or the capacity to calibrate our physical proprioception as we do in waking life.

Dreams move from one semiotic proprioception to another via our individual four-dimensional (3D plus time) groping/associative function. In one short segment of a dream we are at home, then we go through a door only to find ourselves on a boat in the ocean. Our 4D semiotic proprioception within dreams readily accepts groping, associative shifts like this.

Much of what we perceive when we are awake is memory. We glance at a room we know well and call up our memory of it rather than actually look closely at the room.

I am fairly sure that the memories we call up to aid perception while we are awake are much the same as the groping proprioception we experience in dreams. A major difference is when we are awake we can and do check our waking proprioception with the people and objects around us, while in dreams the associative function has a much freer range.

Notice how dreams move from scene to scene rather slowly. Things can go quickly, but normally dreams grope somewhat slowly along the 4D path of semiotic proprioception.

In waking life, our dreamy use of memory and association to aid perception of the world happens constantly.

When we speak with another person, we use this function to make groping associations concerning what we think they are saying. We grope and respond to them as in a dream while at the same time searching for clues that indicate we are both on the same page.

These clues that two people may sort of “agree on” while speaking are normally standard public semiotics that belong to whatever culture(s) they share. By “agreeing” on them, we form a sort of agreeable camaraderie with whomever we are speaking, and this can be satisfying, but if we only get this, it can also become deeply unsatisfying.

The four dimensional groping/dreamy function of our mind is far richer than any standard collection of public semiotics. In our public lives—professional, commercial, based on organizations, etc.—we have, at present, little recourse but to accept normal public semiotics, to agree with them and manifest agreement.

We can express some deviation from them and sometimes makes jokes about them, but we are generally fairly bound to the semiotics of the culture or organization that generates the context of our speaking. Consider how people in the same church or school are bound by the semiotics of those institutions.

In our intimate relations, however, we do have recourse to investigate and understand how our groping, 4D semiotic proprioception works. This is what FIML does. It allows partners to observe, analyze, and understand the semiotic proprioceptions of their minds as they are actually functioning during interpersonal communication.

If you constantly avoid FIML types of investigations, you will be stuck with a mix of dimly shared public/private semiotics that will tend to become highly ambiguous, even volatile, or very shallow.

Danish journalist says European men are acting like women

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Anissa Naouai interviews Iben Thranholm. 8:38

There has been a much stronger response to the migrants in Eastern Europe because the people there very clearly remember being invaded and dominated by alien races and ideologies during Soviet times.

If you cannot defend your culture, your culture will be destroyed. It can be destroyed physically in war, by demographic infiltration through mass immigration, or through ideas that undermine pride and cohesive social values.

Many years ago, I remember a Polish woman telling me, “You Americans want to get rid of all your strong men, but what you don’t understand is you may need those men one day to defend your society.”

She could have said the same about Western Europe.

Memories of war and domination by others fade quickly.

Much of what the Bolsheviks did in Russia and Eastern Europe was mental, psychological, intellectual. They also murdered many millions (the first mass murders in modern European history), but the intellectual groundwork came first and Eastern Europeans still remember.

Demography is destiny. Similarly, those who control the ideas of culture, control the culture. Those who control media, academia, and politics control the ideas.

“Masculinity” does not just mean having muscles and fighting. It also means, in the context of this video, being strong enough mentally to stand for your values, your people, your history, your culture.

Repost: Mr Genness from Worcester Academy

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A reader asked us to put out a feeler for Mr. Genness who taught English at Worcester Academy (in Massachusetts) during the 1968-69 school year.

He was the best teacher I ever had and I think about him often. He taught me things that are still paying-off today. I want to thank him but cannot find out where he is or how to contact him.

The requester does not know his first name and was unable to get any info from the school. Mr. Genness was into theater and had connections with the theater crowd in NYC. The spelling of his name—Genness—is a guess, but likely correct.

If you know or suspect you know Mr. Genness, please send an email to “fimlingo at gmail.com” or just reply to this post.

We read Faulkner, the Iliad, Pirandello, and much more. He was a genius and a superb teacher. Probably saved my life. Definitely improved it immensely.

I know the feeling.

The power of words and habit formation

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How we use and hear words becomes a habit.

A recent study on personal space, reported in Personal Space Is a Fear Response, shows that this fear response can be stimulated by words alone.

When placed in an MRI—and told a person was standing over the machine—[people with normal amygdalae] showed heightened activity in their amygdala; when they were told the person was further away from the machine, the activity returned to normal. This shows, says the study’s leader, Ralph Adolphs, that the belief that someone is too close for comfort is enough to spark the same activity as if they actually are.

You could also say that just hearing the words that “someone is too close for comfort is enough to spark the same activity as if they actually are.”

I doubt I need to illustrate this idea as most readers are surely aware that all people have many strong emotional responses to words, gestures, facial expressions, as well as personal space encroachments.

Another recent study, unsurprisingly, shows that forming a habit leaves a lasting mark on specific circuits in the brain. In more detail:

In the basal ganglia, two main types of paths carry opposing messages: One carries a ‘go’ signal which spurs an action, the other a ‘stop’ signal.

Experiments by Duke neurobiology graduate student Justin O’Hare found that the stop and go pathways were both more active in the sugar-habit mice. O’Hare said he didn’t expect to see the stop signal equally ramped up in the habit brains, because it has been traditionally viewed as the factor that helps prevent a behavior.

The team also discovered a change in the timing of activation in the two pathways. In mice that had formed a habit, the go pathway turned on before the stop pathway. In non-habit brains, the stop signal preceded the go.

These changes in the brain circuitry were so long-lasting and obvious that it was possible for the group to predict which mice had formed a habit just by looking at isolated pieces of their brains in a petri dish. (same link as just above)

The study on habits is about mice with sugar habits, but I think it is fair to hypothesize that something similar happens with humans in their use of communication cues.

Humans, in my view, habituate to semiotic stimuli in much the same way that mice habituate to sugar.

The Duke study shows that the stop pathway grew as much as the go pathway in the mice, the main difference being that the go pathway turned on before the stop pathway.

Since human language and its uses is more complex than mice habituated to too much sugar, there must be many more stop and go pathways within the language and communication networks of human beings.

Many of these pathways will be similar among people in the same culture, but many of them won’t. Each human being is a repository of a multitude of idiosyncratic emotional and semantic responses and outputs.

So how do you figure out what your pathways are? And how do you correct ones that aren’t working well? And similarly, how do you figure out your partner’s pathways?

FIML practice helps partners to both identify their idiosyncratic communication habits and correct ones that are not working well. FIML finds and corrects pathways through micro-analysis.

It seems very likely to me that a FIML-style analysis corrects mistaken communication pathways by bringing the stop pathway to the fore. When a particular mistaken response is stopped a few times and under analysis seen to be wrong, the go pathways for that response will tend to be extirpated.

By using words to analyze micro units of miscommunication, FIML partners tap into the power of words to change actual pathways of neurons in their brains, thus reorganizing the deep linguistic basis of habitual psychological responses, no matter how idiosyncratic.

FIML as pedagogy

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In a nutshell, FIML practice is pedagogy.

It is the art and science of teaching your partner about you and getting your partner to teach you about them.

The FIML technique works mainly with small (micro) units of communication. It uses these small units because they can be mutually agreed upon by both partners and because they constitute very good data.

FIML micro units in many ways are better data than a tape recorder or video because what tapes and videos record is extrinsic material. FIML micro data is the immediate, intrinsic data actually remembered by both the sender and receiver of the message.

This kind of data is very revealing because immediate reactions and/or impetuses arise out of discernible contexts that can be understood, if we catch them quickly enough.

When you do FIML, you are teaching your partner about how you think, feel, and express yourself. At the same time, you are doing all you can to learn similar information about them.

If there is anything about yourself that your partner should know and does not, teach them. And if there is anything about them that you do not understand, ask them about it.

This process should never stop because people change constantly. FIML helps us monitor and understand how personal transformations occur and why.

Pedagogy is also an art. So FIML is also an art. The headings at the top of this page provide links that explain the basic FIML technique. Application of this technique in your own life is a work of art you can share with your partner.

The topic and materials are the two of you.

BREAKING: Harney County Fire Chief Resigns. FBI Caught Posing As Militia At Local Armory

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I am not completely sure what the issues in Harney County are. But far as I know:

The precipitating issue is the Hammonds were sent back to prison for arson, which many find dubious and excessive.

The underlying issues are federal ownership and control of the land.

The argument for the feds is there is a lot of case law, bills from congress, and court rulings that show the feds do indeed own BLM land.

The argument against that position is 1) all of the above violates the Constitution, which it does appear to do, and 2) all the parties that claim the feds own the land are themselves federal—congress, courts, BLM, FBI, prosecutors, and probably more than that.

I really like the people in Harney County and tend to trust them. Seems to me the feds are pushing too hard, especially by sending the Hammonds back to jail for five years.

Also, I am strongly in favor of states’ rights because that is how our system is supposed to work.

That said, I also fear states’ right in land issues in the West because once states control that land it will be corrupt state officials selling the land to their friends, not necessarily being reasonable with ranchers.

It seems to me that the feds have overreached in this case and now can’t back down because they are a stupid bureaucracy. Would have been better to give the Hammonds a pass and let them continue ranching rather than send them back to jail.

Since they didn’t do that, it would still be better for the feds to back off, let the Hammonds out of jail, and let the County return to business as it was. Good law enforcement often calls for de-escalation and this case is an example of that, imo.

Lithuanian independence January 13, 1991

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Today marks the 25th anniversary of a major turning point in modern Lithuanian history as well as the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union.

On January 13, 1991 tens of thousands of unarmed Lithuanian citizens confronted Soviet tanks and soldiers at the Parliament building in Vilnius and the Vilnius TV Tower.

Iceland was the first country to recognize Lithuanian independence on February 11, 1991.

More about the events of January can be found here.

Edit 01/27/16: Lithuania opens mass trial for 1991 Soviet crackdown

Basic signaling and what it explains

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Basic signaling can be described or explained as follows:

  • A signal is information sent from one place and received at another.
  • A signal can be big or small.
  • A signal can be true or false.*

These are the most basic features of all signals. More complex signals contain these three basic features and also exhibit other features, such as:

  • having complexity or context
  • being conscious or not
  • being consciously designed to have an effect

From the three features of basic signaling, we can say a lot about human signaling.

The first feature of basic signaling simply defines what a signal is. I can signal to myself or I can signal to you. A simple example is I check my hair in the mirror (signal to self) and then present myself to you (signal to you). Insofar as my hair signal to you has a conscious element of how my hair looks or doesn’t look (sloppy, messy), the hair signal I sent to myself via the mirror is now being sent to you via my imagination.

This hair signal can also illustrate the second feature of basic signaling—how big or small the signal is. My hair signal may be important to me while I am looking in the mirror (big signal) or not very important (small signal). In like manner, my hair signal may be big or small in your mind.

This hair signal can also illustrate the third feature of basic signaling—its truth or falsity. If I have dyed my hair, in some sense I am sending a false signal. If I have not dyed my hair but you think I have, then you are receiving a false signal.

One could also say that dyed hair is not a truly “false” signal because it is common for people to dye their hair. Similar arguments can be made for combing or cutting hair or anything we do with our hair. The truth or falsity of many human signals is open to interpretation in this manner.

Normally, we use the three basic features of complex signals described in the second bullet list above to decide which interpretation to use. Changing the context and complexity upon which our interpretation is based will tend to change our interpretation of the signal.

Notice how many signals achieve their effects primarily by being big. Big signs, bright lights, loud music, heavy make-up, loud sexual signals, perfume, odor, big muscles, fake boobs, expensive cars, big houses and yachts, etc. all work in part by being big signals. Bigness or smallness is point two in the list above.

Bigness alone can explain why people lie, slant, or falsely accuse. As long as a signal is big, some people will be attracted to it and come under its spell. If someone accuses you falsely of something and spreads their accusation around, you may be faced with a big problem. If the lie is big enough and artful enough, you now are forced to defend yourself. If you do not even know what is being said about you, you can’t even do that.

Another version of the effectiveness of a big false accusation is one made to your face. As soon as it is uttered, the scene and context will shift dramatically. You are normally required to immediately defend yourself, derailing whatever rational exchange of ideas preceded the accusation.

We can see how this works in interpersonal communication and we can also see how it works on a larger scale. When nations go to war, they invariably lie about each other. Politicians lie, cultures lie, groups lie, religions lie, sports fans lie, and so on.

Lies or false accusation work because they send big signals that require a defense and, since they are lies, can be hard to defend against.

To me, this is a depressing side of human communication. Lies and false accusations very often win against the truth.

Simply stated, false accusations are aggressive lies, but we also know them in milder form as spin, slanting the facts, one-sidedness, tailoring the message, and so on.

Note: I got the idea of the importance of false accusations from a book I am reading on alcoholism: Vessels of Rage, Engines of Power: The Secret History of Alcoholism.

The author of this book, James Graham, makes the claim repeatedly that alcoholics very often engage in false accusations. In discussing this book with my partner, we came to conclude that Graham is right about this—false accusations do seem to be common among the alcoholics we both know.

Since I like to break things down into basic principles, my partner and I came up with the principles outlined above.

A false accusation sends a big signal into a social group while at the same time protecting the alcoholic from criticism. It allows them to say, “You see it is not me or my drinking that is the problem here, she is the one who is crazy!” Or, “Can you believe what he did to me?” Of course, he didn’t do anything but to a drunk, the accusation feels good and often works with others because it is big.

On a larger scale, false accusations in public today often take form as PC dictates. That’s “racist,” “sexist,” “micro-aggressive,” “privileged,” “homophobic,” etc. Just knowing that we might be accused of one of these attitudes has been enough to keep most people from saying anything that could even be tangentially interpreted in that way.

Note two: FIML practice entirely removes false accusations and any basis for them between partners. No FIML partner should ever say, “You did too mean that!” Or “I know why you did that!”

Partners who have established a habit of frequently checking their interpretations of each other should experience very few occasions to feel that their interpretation of something their partner signaled is better than their partner’s interpretation.

_______________

*A false signal that is not conscious might be a non-poisonous snake or insect that has evolved to look like a poisonous one.

Repost: Emotional “meaning”

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  • I challenge readers to find an emotion that does not have “meaning.”
  • Emotions that have no meaning do exist, but are not common and are generally ignored.
  • What is “meaning” in this context?
  • Meaning here means, quite specifically, “that which is connected to (interconnected in) a semiotic network.”
  • Emotions arise due to bodily functions, metabolism, external events, communication events, life events, etc.
  • Once an emotion arises it is either discarded (given no “meaning”) or it is taken up into a semiotic network.
  • Once it is taken up into a semiotic network, an emotion will resonate within that network, have an import and “meaning” based on that network.
  • For example, a single impression of microaggression will almost certainly be defined by prior learning, by the prior existence of a semiotic network that accepts and defines this sort of perception.
  • That is to say, if the perceiver has been trained or self-taught to perceive and react to microaggression, their preformed sensibilities (its “meaning”) will respond to it, often far more strongly than conditions warrant.
  • A similar analysis applies to any emotion.
  • Watch yourself as you discard the brief feeling you might get from looking at a nondescript wall or a leaf curled on the ground. Compare emotional reactions you don’t discard, such as ones involving human expressions, tone of voice, things left unsaid, etc.
  • This shows that we will learn more about emotions by analyzing the semiotic networks that give them meaning rather than trying to trace them back to their intangible origins or follow their ambiguous development.
  • Emotions do develop as the networks that “hold” them develop and/or as the emotion itself is given greater or lesser prominence within its network(s).
  • In this sense, emotions can grow very large or become very small.
  • Ones that had meaning can and do disappear. But no emotion will appear and maintain itself for long without being taken into a semiotic network, given a meaning or assigned a meaning.
  • Notice how you have sensibilities and emotions connected to how you have been trained. And notice how these emotions and sensibilities are different from others who have not been trained as you have.
  • A trained gardener, salesperson, doctor, cook, surfer, etc. has emotions and sensibilities that are different from people who have not had their training, whether that training is formal or informal.
  • If you just spend time thinking about something you will be “training” yourself, developing different sensibilities and emotions about whatever it is.
  • Humans are semiotic animals that spend most of their time in semiotic environments.
  • A semiotic network communicates both with the self and with others.
  • Semiotic networks include everything that can be communicated, including language, ideas, emotions, beliefs, values, memories, skills, and so on.
  • If you were trained in a certain safety procedure and you agree with it (thoroughly putting out campfires, for example), it will drive you nuts to see someone ignore the basics. This is true for almost anything you were trained in and agree with.
  • Training gives us richer and different emotions, either in kind or in degree.
  • Training strengthens and broadens the semiotic network(s) holding or defining emotions, thus making them stronger, more sensible, more reasonable or, conversely, weaker, less sensible, less reasonable.
  • “Personalities” develop through training, some of it formal, much of it informal and idiosyncratic.
  • Some training is good and some of it is bad.

More basic anthropology and how that affects news and politics

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Yesterday I discussed the basic principle of consanguinity and how that affects societies that practice it.

To continue in this vein, today I want to describe how some very basic anthropological concepts apply to Europeans.

Yesterday we saw how large groups of clannish people from consanguineous cultures are all but guaranteed to cause problems in Europe, which historically eradicated consanguinity and most clans.

But that leaves open the question of why Europeans are blind to the inevitable problems that will arise when consanguineous clannish cultures migrate into Europe in large numbers.

In the news this morning, I found this article: ‘Cover-up’ over Cologne sex assaults blamed on migration sensitivities.

Here are some quotes from it:

Politicians and police were facing mounting questions on Wednesday over how a crowd of some 1,000 men “of North African or Arab appearance” was able to mass around the city’s main train station on New Year’s Eve, with roving gangs allegedly assaulting dozens of women with impunity.

and

There has been widespread condemnation of the city’s police force after an official press release on New Year’s Day described the celebrations as “peaceful”.

…questions are being asked over why it took five days for the media to report the incidents.

So why did that happen?

The basic anthropological reason is Europeans are extremely sensitive to feelings of shame.

This is so because European communal bonds are built on the ideas of fairness and universal morality that developed after clans were eradicated in Europe.

These ideas have existed in European populations for so long that those populations have evolved to rely on them for social cohesion. This is an example of the co-evolution of genes and culture.

Co-evolution of genes and culture is a feature of all societies. It almost certainly accelerated during the past 3,000 years since the advent of large-scale agriculture.

In European society, this sort of co-evolution encouraged the emergence of a strong sense of shame or guilt. These emotions emerged because shame, public shaming, and guilt are used to police European post-clannish, universal morality.

Now we can answer the questions posed above from the linked article.

Why did police allow the large crowd of rowdy men to gather? Because they were ashamed to do anything because if they had, they might have been criticized for being “racist.”

The police not only did not break up the crowd to protect German women, they further falsely described the celebrations as “peaceful” in a press release.

How could German police feel more ashamed of a word (racist) than of not protecting German women?

The answer is their natural tendencies and professional requirements to protect German women (or anyone) were overruled by the dictates of their consciences.

Their brains malfunctioned so much that the police protected themselves against false imaginary accusations instead of doing their jobs by protecting actual women.

I say malfunctioned because in a larger context that is surely a malfunction.

But within German or European culture, actions like theirs have not so far been seen as malfunctions, except sometimes after the fact.

The Rotherham sex scandal in England is another example of widespread fear among police and officials of being shamed. There are literally hundreds of other examples throughout Western Europe.

These examples show how a culture that evolved in response to the absence of clans developed a sense of moral shame that is poorly adapted to the present world.

The actions of European politicians who have allowed these problems to develop and of the press that consistently hides these same problems can be explained in the same way the actions of police in Cologne have been explained.