Category: Functional Interpersonal Meta Linguistics (FIML)

Paradigms and problems

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One of the problems in transmitting FIML practice to others is no one has a paradigm for learning that includes a friend saying to them “I have something good to tell you, but it will take a fairly long time for you to understand what I mean and learn how to do it.”

People are used to getting small bits of information from friends, not large, wholly new ways of seeing themselves and the world around them.

This problem in FIML transmission is compounded by the need for FIML practitioners to speak to each other in a way that is taboo in almost all cultures and subcultures. FIML partners must be able to thread a communication needle, the eye of which lies very close to a common human flash point.

The flash point is our “identity” as it is actually functioning in a real-world conversation in real-time.

I don’t know of a single culture anywhere (except those of FIML partners) that allows real-time queries of the sort that form the basis of FIML practice. In all cultures that I know of, queries of that type are seen as rude, petty, carping, nasty, distracting, lacking proper decorum, weird, and most of all, threatening.

Culture supports identity and vice versa. This makes the culture-identity matrix a very difficult entity to analyze in real-time.

To touch on it or even near it is to touch that flash point that tells people they are being threatened, that they must defend themselves against a dangerous assault on their sense of who they are.

Of course, FIML does not actually assault or threaten anything, but as mentioned, very few of us have a listening/learning paradigm that will allow FIML to be given a proper hearing.

One day, I imagine, FIML will be taught in classes where students will have desks and chairs and white boards and where they will be given handouts and lessons will proceed gradually and logically from point to point until the whole is revealed to them with a nicely prepackaged smile.

That day has not come yet (and I hope I am doing something else when it does). For now, all we have (and all you need) is the raw idea, a willing partner, and a paradigm shift that allows you to undertake a new way of communicating.

Do you realize how ambiguous you are when you speak?

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And how bad you are at interpreting what others say to you?

If not, you are living in a very muddled world that is probably “anchored” to nothing more than your “feelings,” your “identity,” or some form of extrinsic “belief” or “faith” in your nation, group, religion, career.

Either you are a sort of slave to a public semiotic (religion, ethnicity, career, etc.) or you are a sort of slave to your muddled interior—your volatile emotional sense of “who” you “are.”

The only way I know of to fully comprehend how badly you speak and listen is to do FIML practice.

You may understand in the abstract how wrong and ambiguous speech and listening frequently are, but if you don’t do FIML you won’t be able to see with any specificity  how wrong you are and where and why. If your understanding is only general or abstract, it will function as just another level of ambiguity, another source of mistakes.

Mildly sorry for being so blunt, but it’s true. Only FIML, or something very similar, can give you and your partner real-time access to objectively agreed upon communication mistakes being made between you. And there is no general or abstract substitute for that.

Even a single mistake can have massive consequences. But we all make dozens of mistakes every day.

Saṃvega

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The oppressive sense of shock, dismay, and alienation that come with realizing the futility and meaninglessness of life as it’s normally lived; a chastening sense of our own complacency and foolishness in having let ourselves live so blindly; and an anxious sense of urgency in trying to find a way out of the meaningless cycle. Source.

Malignant narcissism and identity

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Malignant narcissism is an extreme form of narcissism characterized by aggression against people who threaten the narcissist’s narcissistic supply.

A malignant narcissist sees the other person as the threat, not just what they say or do.

This makes sense in that a narcissist has at some level concluded that they as a person are the standard for all things; thus, other people are blamed and attacked far out of proportion to whatever the narcissist believes they have done.

In Christian terms, the malignant narcissist blames the sinner not the sin and thus attacks the sinner, even when the sin may be as mild as a withheld compliment or a deserved rebuke.

I think all narcissists behave in a manner similar to this, though the ordinary type, which is very common in this world, is less aggressive than the malignant type.

Since narcissism is so common, one can say that in some ways narcissists have good reason to be suspicious of others and take revenge on them. There really is a good chance that they are dealing with another narcissist, who will do the same to them if they get the chance.

In a previous post, I wrote about the vortex or tautology of identity, the tautology of basing our identity on a semiotic matrix that, by its very nature, always refers back to the same “identity.” A malignant narcissist is an extreme example of this problem.

The semiotics of malignant narcissism are such that the narcissist sees his or her identity as being the person they really are. Seeing themselves in this way, narcissists apply a similar logic to others—at their core they are people who must be opposed or attacked for even the slightest perceived offense.

A group example of extreme malignant narcissism might be North Korea. If an NK citizen makes a single mistake—even a slight verbal mistake—they run the risk of being executed and also having three generations of their family sent to prison for life. The reasoning is that the original offender is a very bad person, which can be known from what they said. And since they are very bad, they must have influenced every person in their family who is younger than them and been influenced by every person in their family who is older than them.

If that isn’t hell on earth, I don’t know what is.

It is my belief that most groups, even very cute and nice ones, tend toward narcissism and many of them tend toward and become malignantly narcissistic. This happens because groups form and maintain themselves on the basis of shared semiotics, which necessarily are formulaic or simplistic.

We can see malignant narcissism in many religious, political, nationalist, or ethnic groups. The clearest sign is a disproportionate response to criticism—banishment, murder, violence, loss of employment, etc.—but narcissistic groups can also be clever and hide these responses or delay them long enough that the connection to the “offense” is hard to see.

Just as narcissistic groups cannot bear criticism, even self-criticism from within, so individual narcissists are bad at introspection. For either one, to honestly view and assess the core value (me!) is to destroy the false identity. For either one (group or individual) this would be a wonderful thing for them and others, but it is hard to do because their semiotic matrix is a tautology and they cannot admit this, or usually even see it.

Identity as a vortex or tautology

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Our identities are fundamentally made up of semiotic matrices. That is to say, in part, that our identities have meaning; they mean something to us.

Often they mean a great deal to us and from them we derive the semiotics of motivation, intention, life-plans, many of our central interests, and so on.

Identities have strong emotional components, to be sure, but our emotions are ambiguous or diffuse if they are not positioned on a semiotic matrix and focused or defined by that matrix.

Identity is usually tautological in that its components, interests, and associations tend always to lead back to a few central elements. Often these elements have been inculcated in us by training. Some, we learn on our own. These elements are our values and beliefs, and also how these values and beliefs are understood and pursued.

The semiotics of identity must mean something to the person identifying with them. In this sense, they are almost always tautological. I do what I do because that is how I learned how to do it, think it, feel it, perceive it.

Most people are more adept at moving the parts of language around than they are at moving semiotic elements around. When semiotics are unconscious, they act like a vortex pulling perception, emotion, and understanding always toward the center of the identity. I think this is another way to say, in the Buddhist sense, that the self is empty; that it has no “own being.”

We can pursue an understanding of an empty self through Buddhist thought and practice, but we will get better results more quickly if we add a practice that deals directly with the semiotics of our identities.

Since there is no book you can go to to look up how your unique semiotics of identity works, you have to see for yourself how it works. You can do much of this on your own, but eventually you will need a partner because there is no way you will be able to get an objective perspective on yourself acting alone.

FIML practice is the only way I know of to fully see into and through the semiotics of your “identity.” Beneath identity there is a sort of artesian well of pure, undefined consciousness. FIML helps us experience that well while keeping us from rushing back into the tautological matrix of identity or static self-definition and clinging to it.

FIML is able to do this because FIML is process. FIML itself has no definition, only a procedure. It is not a tautology because it has no semiotic boundaries.

Semiotics, FIML, and identity

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After you have a done a good deal of FIML, you will start to see semiotics as things, similar to words or memories.

FIML facilitates this process by forcing us to pay close attention to the ways we use semiotics and the ways they affect us.

Our identities, such that they are, are based on our closeness to or need for semiotics that define us, assure us, make us feel at home, tell us who we are.

Our use of semiotics in that way is very common but it is hard to grasp if we have no other basis for our identity, which few of us do.

FIML practice provides a different basis for identity than “extrinsic” semiotics, the conscious and unconscious semiotics of culture, upbringing, media, advertising, schooling, what we may think others think.

FIML partners, by constantly paying attention to the play of interpersonal semiotics, gradually will shift the bases of their identities from largely static extrinsic signs to dynamic intrinsic, or interpersonal, processes. This is what makes semiotics start looking like things rather than abstract elements of linguistic analysis.

Semiotics are things as much as words are. They differ in that there is no dictionary of them; we have to see them for ourselves and understand how they have been formed and why they affect us as they do.

Once partners do this through FIML practice, they will eventually notice that their habitual extrinsic semiotics will start to slough off, to fall away from them. This happens very naturally as a rich dynamic realm of largely error-free communication develops between them.

The falling away of habitual extrinsic semiotics that had been used to define or maintain the identity is accompanied by delightful feelings of freedom and lightness, independence and assuredness that one’s being is better served by the intimate communication of FIML than the inculcated beliefs and values of the past.

Semiotic proprioception in dreams and waking

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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 in the same dream.

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 make 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.

Identity and signaling

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Identity is constructed of memories, memories that have to be tended to, and this takes time and energy.

You have to remember who you are and often have to work pretty hard just to maintain that image within yourself, to say nothing of projecting it toward other people and getting them to accept it.

A big problem with this way of constructing a “self,” an identity, is it’s probably based on misinterpretations and a good deal of self-deceit.

Our identities, such that they are, are complex fictions. They are a central flaw in our internal signaling system.

If your identity is large and complex, it will use a good deal of energy. As you signal internally to yourself about your identity, you will also be receiving signals from other people, and these signals will necessarily be processed by your large and complex identity. And that, of course, will lead to serious misinterpretations, both internal and external.

If you belong to a group that defines, or helps you define, your identity, you can save some energy but will have as much fiction, maybe even worse fiction.

Consider the codes of group behavior (group signaling)  for Stalin’s NKVD officers who purged so many millions of innocents in the 1930s. All of those officers had identities that were largely determined by signals coming from the NKVD and Joseph Stalin.

There was a weird sort of ethical behavior among those officers in that they were trying to adhere to a group signaling system and not go their own way. This same problem in less serious form can be observed all over the world in every culture.

One problem with ethics and ethical signaling within groups is ethical questions can be difficult. There are few formulas that will always work, and formulas are what hold groups together.

Back to your identity. I hope it is clear that you have to be careful when you base your identity on group signaling systems. If you are a banker, you might do many bad things out of loyalty to your group. Same for all of us.

While ethics are hard to codify, the will to behave ethically is simpler. I want to do the right thing but I don’t always know what it is or how to do it. That is a good statement to make. If you can honestly say that to yourself, that is good because that means that your internal signaling system is seeking greater integrity, great clarity.

When we seek clarity and integrity within our signaling systems, we are seeking better ethics. We are changing our identities, or allowing our identities to be transformed by a higher desire for clarity, purity, integrity, goodness.

When we seek to improve our signaling systems, our ethics, we begin to abandon static identities and poorly constructed fictions about ourselves by subjecting them to a higher order of thought. If we can take a meta-position on ourselves, we will find the process of improving signaling is easier and more enjoyable than clinging to a static fictionalized identity that may have been constructed years before.

Everyone imagines

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When you listen to someone speak, you have to imagine, or interpret, what they mean. This is obvious.

But if it is so obvious, what are you doing about it?

Are you imagining correctly? And just as importantly, are others imagining you correctly?

People are like cut-outs always posturing one way or the other to produce some desired effect in the minds of other people—an effect that they imagine.

With most people, it is very difficult to leave that system, to correct erroneous or imaginary interpretations of what we say and hear. But with those closest to us, we can correct wrong interpretations.

The only way that I know of to do this effectively is FIML practice. All other methods that I know about only lead toward generalities, stories, and more imaginary posturing.

Semiotic codes and signs can be understood and gotten outside of in a very profound way, but this has to be done at the micro-level, the level of basic FIML practice. It must be done “in the moment” at the interpersonal level between (almost always) just two people.

This is so because speech is clumsy and if you add more people, there will be more confusion. It is possible for three or four people to do FIML together, but it will be more difficult in most cases.

You also cannot do FIML—or any profound semiotic analysis—alone. This is because a mind alone is inevitably liable to bias and self-deception (self-posturing).

If any reader knows a way to accomplish FIML results without doing FIML, please let me know. So far, I have not seen anything else that does it.

On the antiquity of language: the reinterpretation of Neandertal linguistic capacities and its consequences

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…This reassessment of the antiquity of modern language, from the usually quoted 50,000–100,000 years to half a million years, has profound consequences for our understanding of our own evolution in general and especially for the sciences of speech and language. As such, it argues against a saltationist scenario for the evolution of language, and toward a gradual process of culture-gene co-evolution extending to the present day…

Link to the original paper

Repost: FIML is practical semiotics applied to the psychology of intimate human communication

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A “psychological morpheme” can be identified with or stimulated by a “sign” that “indexes” a “library” of “meaning.”

FIML practices interrupts the indexing of the sign before it calls up meaning from the library. This is a technical way to say what FIML practice does.

The terms used above, indicated by quotation marks, can be defined as follows:

A psychological morpheme is the smallest unit of psychological meaning. It is analogous to a morpheme in linguistics, which is the smallest unit of meaning in a language, or the smallest semantic unit in a language.

Continue reading…

Repost: Why you can’t fix it with generalities

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Psychological, cognitive, emotional, or communicative problems cannot be fundamentally corrected by using general analyses or generalized procedures. You can teach someone to think and see differently, even to behave differently, by such procedures, but you cannot bring about deep change by using them. The reason this is so is change through generalizations does little more than substitute one external semiosis for another. The person seeking change will not experience deep change because all they are essentially doing is importing a different explanation of their “condition” into their life.

This happens with Buddhists who remain attached to surface meanings of the Dharma as well as to people seeking mainstream help for emotional problems. Any change will feel good for a while in most cases, but after some time stasis and a recurrence of the original problem, or something similar to it, will occur.

Continue reading…

Five myths about privacy

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Source

I am on vacation and so have been slow to add new material to this blog. The linked article is interesting and worth reading, but I chose to post it mainly for the following sentences, which have a wonderful Buddhist-American ring to them:

Even if a person is doing nothing wrong, in a free society, that person shouldn’t have to justify every action that government officials might view as suspicious. A key component of freedom is not having to worry about how to explain oneself all the time.

So agree with that and believe it should also apply to friends and colleagues. That may sound opposite to FIML practice where we say that all contretemps should be fully analyzed/explained, but it really isn’t. FIML is about finding deep freedom to communicate honestly with your partner. It doesn’t require you to justify everything you do, but rather provides a chance to speak deeply without fear of being misunderstood and judged wrongly.

Repost: Idiolects and idiotics

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An idiolect is the “dialect” of one person. It is unique to that person. We all speak an idiolect unique to us. No one else speaks in exactly the same way as you do. In fact, the varieties of idolects among speakers of even the same dialect can be quite pronounced, to say nothing of speakers who have been acculturated to different dialects.

Virtually, the same thing is true for our use and understanding of semiotics. Each one of us has a unique tangle of semiotics even if we share the same culture. Even if two people were born and raised in the same very strict cult, they will have different takes on their “shared” semiotics; they will see thier semiotics in individual and unique ways.

The term “idiolect” is a blend of the prefix idio, which means “own, personal, distinct to the individual” and the suffix lect, which is taken from the word “dialect.”

Continue reading…

Notes on FIML vocabulary

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On this site we have generally been using the term semiotics to indicate the amalgam of a sign, its meaning, and the emotions associated with it.

The word semiotics literally means “the study of signs and how they are processed or understood.” Just as we can speak of the psychology of a person or activity, so we can speak of the semiotics of a person or activity or anything else that uses signs for thought, feeling, perception, or communication.

The purpose of FIML practice is the optimization of interpersonal communication. Communication cannot but use signs. Interpersonal communication cannot but include emotion. This is why we use the word semiotics as we do—to indicate the amalgam of a sign, its meaning, and the emotions associated with it.

On this site we use the word index to mean a small sign that may be associated with a vast library of meaning. When an index appears or arises during interpersonal communication it starts as nothing more than a small sign. If an index is not held in abeyance, it may “call up” a library of much more complicated meaning.

A jangle is an emotional response to an index. Jangles are often negative. FIML practice seeks to identify jangles and use them as indicators that an index has appeared and that that index must be held in abeyance; that is, it must be prevented from accessing the emotional library of meaning it is normally associated with.

Ideally, a FIML query should be initiated the moment a jangle and index are noticed by a FIML partner. Often this partner is the listener, though partners who are speaking may also observe indexes in the partner who is listening.

The FIML query is designed to stop the index from immediately referencing the library of feeling and meaning typically associated with it. Doing this allows the partner making the query to ask of the other if the index/jangle they have perceived is based on something that actually happened or is simply a mistake based on a library they are holding in their own mind which does not reference anything that the speaker actually meant.

In the Peircean (Charles Sanders Peirce) branch of semiotics there are three kinds of signs—symbolic, iconic, and indexical. When we use the word index on this site we do not mean a Peircean indexical sign.

FIML practice is designed to help partners deal with the great welter of semiotics that each of them uses to communicate, think, feel, and understand the world and each other.

The FIML term idiotics indicates the unique welter, or agglomeration, of semiotics held by each individual human being. Just as each of us speaks an idiolect, each of us thinks, feels, and communicates with a unique idiotics.

The FIML term sociotics indicates the basic social (or public) semiotics of a culture or subculture. Just as all human beings have a unique idiotics all cultures have sociotics. The sociotics of large groups tend to be fairly simple semiotics that effectively communicate with many people. Sociotics hold cultures together and make communication work well-enough in many situations. Strongly held group sociotics within interpersonal relations can be a disaster, though, because, by definition, they deny individuality, even as they may attempt to define it. FIML partners are encouraged to form their own sociotics unique to them, thus distancing themselves from unwholesome attachments to group sociotics that may not suit them.

FIML practice has great “reach”; that is, it can and will have beneficial effects on many areas of life—communication, psychology, our understanding of culture, other people, and so on.