Interesting point of view, well-worth reading.
Tag: anthropology
Repost: Consciousness, Big Data, and FIML
Modern neuroscience does not see humans as having a discrete consciousness located in a specific part of the brain. Rather, as Michael S. Gazzaniga says:
The view in neuroscience today is that consciousness does not constitute a single, generalized process. It involves a multitude of widely distributed specialized systems and disunited processes, the products of which are integrated by the interpreter module. (Source)
Computer and Big Data-driven sociology sees something similar. According to Alex Pentland:
While it may be useful to reason about the averages, social phenomena are really made up of millions of small transactions between individuals. There are patterns in those individual transactions that are not just averages, they’re the things that are responsible for the flash crash and the Arab spring. You need to get down into these new patterns, these micro-patterns, because they don’t just average out to the classical way of understanding society. We’re entering a new era of social physics, where it’s the details of all the particles—the you and me—that actually determine the outcome. (Source)
Buddhists may recognize in these insights close similarities to core teachings of the Buddha—that we do not have a self; that all things arise out of complex conditions that are impermanent and changeable; that the lion’s share of “reality” for any individual lies in being attentive to the moment.
Notice how similar Pentland’s insights are to Gazzaniga’s—the whole, or the common generalities (of society), can be far better understood if we can account for the details that comprise them. Is an individual mind a fractal of society? Do these complex systems—societies and minds—both use similar organizational processes?
I am not completely sure how to answer those questions, but I am certain that most people are using similar sorts of “average” or general semiotics to communicate and think about both minds and societies. If we stick with general averages, we won’t see very much. Class, self, markets, personalities don’t give us information as sophisticated as the detailed analyses proposed by Gazzaniga and Pentland.
Well then, how can individuals cognize Gazzaniga’s “multitude of widely distributed specialized systems and disunited processes” in their minds? And how can they understand how “the products” of those processes are actually “integrated” into a functional “interpreter module”?
And if individuals can cognize the “disunited processes” that “integrate” into a conscious “interpreter,” how will they understand traditional psychological analyses of the self, personality, identity, biography, behavior?
I would maintain that our understanding of what it is to be a human will change deeply if we can learn to observe with reliable clarity the “disunited processes” that “integrate” into a conscious “interpreter.” That is, we will arrive at a completely new understanding of being that will replace the “self” that truly does not exist in the ways most societies (and people) understand it.
FIML practice shows partners how to observe with great clarity the “disunited processes” that “integrate” into a conscious “interpreter.” Once these process are observed in detail and for a long enough period of time, partners will realize that it is no longer necessary to understand themselves in the “average” terms of self, personality, identity, biography, behavior, and so on.
Partners will come to understand that these terms denote only a more detailed version of a naive, static view of what a person is. Most psychology is largely a more detailed version of a naive, static view of what a person is.
We see this in Gazzaniga and Pentland’s findings that are derived from complex analyses of what is actually happening in the brain or in the multitude of real transactions that actually comprise a society. We can also see very similar insights in the Buddha’s teachings.
It is my contention that FIML practice will show partners the same things—that their actual minds and actual interactions are much more complex (and interesting) than the general semiotic averages we normally use to understand them.
From a Buddhist point of view, when we “liberate” ourselves from “attachment” to “delusive” semiotic generalities and averages and are truly “mindful” of the “thusness” of the ways our minds actually work, we will free ourselves from “suffering,” from the “ignorance” that characterizes the First Noble Truth.
Ashkenazi Jews are not white – Response to Haaretz article
Every time I read about a Jew somewhere identifying as a white person, I cringe. As an Israeli Jew, who like most other Israeli Jews, is completely foreign to the concept of Jews being “white” I would like to address this article to my Jewish brothers and sisters in America.
Why values are important – Gabriel Branby
This is a talk about the Swedish axe company Gränsfors Bruk.
Micro, meso, and macro levels of human understanding
This post is concerned with the micro, meso, and macro levels of existential semiotics and communicative thought, and how those levels affect human understanding.
- Micro levels are very small units of thought or communication. These can be words, phrases, gestures, etc. and the “psychological morphemes” that accompany them. A psychological morpheme is the smallest unit of an emotional or psychological response.
- Meso levels lie between macro and micro levels. Longer discourse, a sense that people have personalities or egos, and the basic ideas of any culture appear at this level.
- Macro levels are the larger abstract levels that sort of stand above the other two levels. Macro levels might include religious or scientific beliefs, political ideologies, long-term personal goals or strategies.
Most people most of the time socialize on the meso level, often with support from shared macro level beliefs or aims. For most people, the broad outlines of most emotions are defined and conditioned at the meso level. This is the level where the nuts and bolts of convention are found. This is the level that tosses the beach balls of conversation back and forth across the dinner table and that defines those balls. The meso level defines our subculture and how well or badly we conform to it. The meso level is necessary for much of social life and sort of fun, though it is by definition not very detailed or profound. It is something most people can agree on and work with fairly easily for an hour or two at a time.
Many people define themselves mainly on the meso level and judge others by their understanding of this level. Many subcultures become stifling or cloying because meso definitions are crude and tend to leave out the rich subjectivity of individuals. Macro definitions are not all that different from meso ones except that they tend to define group feelings more than meso definitions. Groups band together based on macro level assumptions about ideologies, science, religion, art, style, location, ethnicity, etc.
Since most people are unable to fully access micro levels of communication the rich subjectivity of the individual mind is rarely, if ever, communicated at all and almost never communicated well.
In other fields, micro levels are all important. For example, the invention of the microscope completely changed the way humans see and understand their world. All that was added by the microscope was greater resolution and detail in the visual sphere. From that arose germ theory, material sciences, modern biology, modern medicine, and much more.
Micro levels of communication are basic to how we understand ourselves and others. Poor micro communication skills consign us to communication that occurs only at meso or macro levels. This is a problem because meso and macro levels do not have sufficient detail and also because meso and macro levels become the only tools we have to decide what is going on. When we are forced to account for micro details with the crude tools of meso thought, we will make many mistakes. Eventually we become like the long-term cigarette-smoker whose (micro) alveoli have collapsed, destroying full use of the lungs.
Without the details of the microscope, people for millennia happily drank germ infested water. Without a way to resolve micro levels of communication, people today, as in the past, happily ingest multitudes of micro error—errors that make them ill.
Micro communication errors make us sick because we make many serious mistakes on this level and also because our minds are fully capable of comprehending the sort of detail we can find at the micro level. We speak and listen on many interpersonal levels like crude beasts when we are capable of very delicate and refined understanding.
FIML or a technique similar to it provides a method for grasping micro details. Doing FIML for a long time is like spending a long time using a microscope or telescope. You will start to see everything differently. Detailed micro analyses of interpersonal communication changes our understanding of micro communication and also both the meso and macro levels of existential semiotics and communicative thought. Microscopes allowed us to see germs in water and also to understand that some of those germs can kill us.
Modern warfare is semiotic
The only thing that can be expected from the next US president is more war, more murder, and more oppression of the gullible American people. People as uninformed and as gullible as Americans have no future. Americans are a dead people that history is about to run over. (Source: Interview with Paul Craig Roberts)
Modern war, as is being fought inside the so-called “free world” (US, EU, etc.) is almost entirely semiotic. Internationalism, post-nationalism, boundless multiculturalism are semiotics that take power away from geographically-defined peoples and bestow it on the transnational, oligarchical groups Roberts discusses in more detail at the link above.
Modern war, as it is being fought outside the so-called “free world” by the “free world” is matched in scale and violence only by the impotence of people anywhere to understand and control “their” governments. Highly recommend the interview.
DiResta Aluminum Hatchet Handle
Great video. Well-worth viewing.
Race and the 2014 election
Kevin MacDonald
Race again loomed large in the 2014 elections. The CNN exit polls showed that Whites of all age groups, both sexes, and all social classes voted Republican. White males: 64%-33%: White women: 56%-42%; Whites 18-29: 54-43%. Whites without a college education voted 61-31 for Republican House candidates.
End-user cultural consumption as narcissism
words 1090
I don’t really like the term narcissism because it is vague and in important ways can be applied to almost anyone.
The concept does have value though in that it is widely recognized and understood and does seem to point to something real.
Narcissism basically means being excessively selfish, self-centered, or vain. We can imagine a narcissist as someone who is trapped in a hall of mirrors, or trapped in their own imagination. Being trapped by your own imagination sounds paradoxical. But we can indeed become trapped when the terms, elements, or substance of our imagination is trapped in something else. Just as our bodies can be trapped in a prison cell, so our minds can be trapped within limited concepts, a limited sense of our options.
I contend that end-users of culture (virtually all of us) are trapped. A better term than end-user might be retail consumer. In this sense, we could say that retail consumers of culture are trapped by what they are consuming. I avoided the word retail above because it implies buying things with money. What I mean is accepting cultural norms as real or complete or good enough when they are not.
Rather than define narcissism in the usual ways, let me now define it based on signaling. A narcissist is someone who exhibits “unnecessarily reduced signaling.”
What does that mean?
Unnecessarily in this context means it doesn’t have to be that way. Reduced means there could be much more. Signaling means any and all communicative signals—words, expressions, gestures, actions, etc., but especially words.
A retail consumer of a culture, thus, unnecessarily accepts reduced signaling. To put it another way, end-users of culture are trapped by what they have consumed or “bought.”
Retail implies wholesale while end-user implies that the thing used was made or designed by someone else. For cultures, this implication is exactly right. Very few people make culture, though culture most definitely is made by some people.
Why are end-users or retail consumers of cultures narcissists?
They are narcissists because they are trapped within the reduced signaling of the culture they have “bought.” The wholesalers of culture, those who have made it, don’t think the signals are “unnecessarily” reduced; they want them to be that way. They want end-users to accept their ideas and do what they say, which is what most people do.
Most end-users have no idea they are trapped and do not consider themselves narcissists. But they are narcissists because they are completely stuck at the retail level. They have little or no control over how they understand things. And they have almost no control over how they speak to other end-users or how they hear other end-users.
How do I know this? One way is this: people almost everywhere are capable of complex understanding, be it tying flies for fishing, knitting, doing engineering, designing a home, etc. Nearly everyone exhibits complex understanding of at least a few things.
But almost no one exhibits a complex use of communicative signals. This is so because communicative signals move quickly and usually move through sound (speech).
Without training, it is very difficult to isolate and analyze communicative signaling in real-time. And if you don’t do it in real-time, there is no other way to do it. Even if you have a tape and a video of a communicative exchange, it is impossible to be sure of your analysis after the fact.
Real-time signaling is quick and complex. A single mistake can change the course of a conversation in one person’s mind without changing it in the other person’s mind. From that point on, mistakes will multiply.
What all of us normally do almost all of the time to correct for this problem or difficulty is we reduce our signaling.
And what do we reduce it to? We reduce it to cultural norms. Like narcissists, we assume that other end-users think like us, speak like us, and hear things in roughly the same way we do. If there is any confusion, most of us run quickly toward the nearest retail cultural artifact, thus blurring the real exchange and permanently trapping ourselves in end-user culture.
The mores, taboos, and preferences of culture become what we think we are. And that is a profoundly reduced package from what we are capable of. If you have any complex skill or understanding of anything, take a moment to compare it to how you conceive of your own mind during acts of communication. Or the minds of others during acts of communication.
I bet your understanding of how to take care of your tropical fish or do your favorite hobby is better and more detailed than how you conceive of your communication with others.This is the narcissism of the cultural end-user. It’s a small, made-by-others, prison of ideas within which the individual, maddeningly, resides.
If you do have a complex conception of communication, I bet it is strategical, designed to get you what you want and is thus narcissistic in that sense.
Rather than end on this depressing note, I can add the way to fix this problem. Do FIML or something very much like it. Once you can control, analyze, and fully understand real-time communication, you will be free of or have the means to get free of the reduced terms of retail culture.
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Update 11/4/14: Another way to view end-user cultural narcissism is through the concept of “narcissistic supply,” which is “…a type of admiration, interpersonal support or sustenance drawn by an individual from his or her environment and essential to their self-esteem.”
Retail consumers of culture require narcissistic supply that validates their cultural consumption, admires it, praises it, agrees with it, and conforms to it. Retail culture is deeply characterized by fairly set patterns of mutual narcissistic supply that permit only slight deviation from whatever its norms are. My guess is scam artists and psychopaths learn how to work the patterns of narcissistic supply to get what they want. Scam artists often deflect moral judgement against themselves by saying that they were only able to fool people because those people wanted to believe. There is much truth in this defense though, of course, wanting to believe is not the same as wanting to be fooled or cheated. In a similar vein, retail cultural narcissists are capable of a sort of psychopathic behavior themselves in that they cannot bear to have their supply-values ignored or disrespected and will lash out, often with great vehemence, at anyone who does not comply with their need for supply.
Happy People | Spring
Very good documentary on a town in Siberia.
Charles Barkley On The ‘dirty dark secret’ in the black community
The names are different, but the game is essentially the same in all cultures. Culture is a lowest-common-denominator set of controlling concepts. And every culture in the world discourages serious thought about itself in many important ways. Ethnic and religious myths are built on this, as are anti-ethnic and anti-religious myths. As is all politics. There is no escaping the herd mentality of whatever culture you happen to be stuck in. In this sense, culture is sort of “democratic” in that loosely-defined groups of low-minded idiots will always seek to and often succeed in pulling down anyone who is perceived as smarter, different, or better in some sense of the word.
Culture is a simplified fractal set of the language(s) it uses. Individual humans are fractal sets derived from the culture(s) they live within. If you step out of this matrix, even with the best of intentions, you are going to have a bad time. It doesn’t matter which culture it is. It’s essentially the same wherever you are.
Barkley is speaking about the American black community, but anyone anywhere in the world can, and many should, say roughly the same thing about their culture. The human mind is potentially wonderful and language is awesome in its capacity to express, and even culture has some good stuff as it gets us started in life. But wherever you go, culture is like a cage of light or darkness in the adult mind.
Yet another example of how irrational we are
The gist of a recent study, and there are more than just this one, is that people form strong opinions about others based on their faces—their shapes, prominent features, eyebrows, etc.
An article about the study, which is behind a paywall, can be found here: Impressions shaped by facial appearance foster biased decisions.
The authors of the study suggest a few ways to mitigate the facial effect, but admit that “more research will be needed.”
I doubt there is much anyone can do to mitigate the face effect, the lying-sack-of-shit-effect, the phony-persona-effect, the self-deceiving-fake-personality-effect, or any of other ways that people fool themselves and others.
Similarly, ideologies have not fixed the problems of bad government and never will.
In my view there is only one thing we humans can do to ensure that we get good leaders in society, honest workers at all levels, and real friends—develop accurate brain scans that can test for conscious lies and psychopathy.
Technology like that could be used to do more harm than good. But it could also do a lot of good. Any system of government will work if government officials are all honest. The same is true for education systems, businesses, science, and many other endeavors with significant social ramifications. If the people in those systems are all verifiably honest and verifiably well-meaning, the efficiency of society will increase tenfold if not more. Trust among the population will increase apace and most of us (save the psychopaths and scam artists) will be greatly relieved knowing that members of Congress really are upholding their oaths, teachers really do have their students’ best interests in mind, scientists really do believe their data, police really are there to protect and serve.
I don’t see any other way to raise ourselves out of the mire of deceit, error, mistrust, cruelty, and usury that has characterized all human societies for all time. Nothing changes in our minds when we change systems and ideologies. On the scale of society, only technology changes us.
(On the scale of the individual, change can happen due to personal and interpersonal effort.)
MacDonald on Shipman
In his The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, Eric Kaufmann described liberal Protestantism as one of several liberal traditions in American history. Although it had its origins in the 19th century, by 1910 there arose a liberal Protestant elite committed to “universalist, humanitarian ethics.” Elite Protestants (but not the great mass of Protestant Americans) were opposed to immigration restriction in the 1920s and were at the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. They embraced the dream of universal humanity, and they developed idealized images of Jews who, after World War II, had assumed the leadership of liberal causes in the U.S. (Bruce Shipman and the Idealized Image of Jews among Elite Protestants)
An anthropologist on Rotherham
I think we are going to have to consult with anthropologists if we want to figure out what happened at Rotherham and what to do about it.
The anthropologist Peter Frost does a good job of analyzing Rotherham in his essay Rotherham: The search for answers. Here is a short passage:
First, most Britons have been living in denial. Few wish to believe, at least openly, that organized gangs are preying on school-age girls. Fewer wish to believe that the gangs are overwhelmingly non-white and largely Muslim. And even fewer wish to believe the extent of the problem: perhaps one in ten of Rotherham’s white families, if not more. It all sounds like vicious propaganda that only ugly hate-filled people could believe.
Yet it’s true. So what comes next?
Frost argues convincingly that the root of the problem is not “racism” or “Islam,” but culture because, as he says assimilation to British society
…does not mean giving up the restraints of one culture and taking on those of another. It means the first but not the second. Immigrants leave an environment where behavior is restrained mainly by external controls (shaming, family discipline, community surveillance) and they enter one where behavior is restrained mainly by internal controls (guilt, empathy). To the extent that assimilation happens, external social controls will weaken and may even disappear, but they will not be replaced by internal mental controls. There is no known way to give people a greater capacity for guilt and empathy than what they already have. No such psychotherapy exists. This is true even if we assume that population differences in these two traits are due solely to cultural conditioning, and not to inborn tendencies.
Please read Frost’s whole piece as the short quotes I have used do not do his argument justice.
A proper analysis of Rotherham must go much deeper than political memes or the maddeningly shallow emotions of political correctness, for as Frost writes, humans are not “…interchangeable units in a global community. Each human and each community is a product of adaptations to specific circumstances, and what works in one set of circumstances may not work so well in another.”
Why the Rotherham sex scandal is good evidence for the need for FIML
The Rotherham scandal was a terrible tragedy and a great crime, but it is also a very good example of how bad people are at communicating and thus thinking. It shows on the big screen of scandalous public life how weak the human mind can be and why it needs a technique like FIML to help it discover its many significant errors.
If you have not heard about Rotherham, here is an article on it: Rotherham: politics ‘imported from Pakistan’ fuelled sex abuse cover-up – MP.
There are many other stories on the scandal, but I chose that one because it is was at-hand and because it contains this gem, spoken by Denis MacShane, the former Labour MP for Rotherham, who said he shied away from the issue because he was a “Guardian reading liberal leftie.”
Essentially due to liberal beliefs, which included a PC deference to the Pakistani community, MacShane failed to investigate the rapes of some 1,400 British girls that had been ongoing for years and had been reported to the police many times. A single thought, idea, symbol, semiotic, call it what you like, prevented MacShane and many others from investigating and stopping the crimes.
From what I read, Rotherham is not alone. Similar gangs exist in other parts of Britain, in Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, and elsewhere in Europe. The reason this is happening, it seems, is similar to Rotherham—people are so afraid to appear “racist” they cannot or will not do anything to prevent the raping of their own children.
That is the power of ideas, of semiotics. You can see this power displayed in virtually any issue in the public sphere. Rather than think clearly and use reason, people fight over simple symbols or ignore issues entirely.
I would submit that what we can clearly see in the public sphere in Rotherham (and everywhere else to different degrees) also exists within the psychologies of all individuals. While as individuals we may not be susceptible to Rotherham-levels of blindness, we are all susceptible to serious blindness on individual levels. This blindness cannot be fully extirpated without doing FIML practice or something very much like it.
MacShane could not see his own blindness until he was confronted by an in-depth report and public outcry. This is a sworn public official who was blind to a massive crime and was only awakened by overwhelming events.
As an individual, how do you propose to awaken yourself to idiosyncratic blindness within yourself? Idiosyncratic blindness is much the same as the shared blindness of the whole group of Rotherham officials who chose to look the other way. The only difference is it is unlikely the public or an official report will wake you up.
It is very difficult to see where we are wrong, often profoundly wrong, in both the public and private spheres. If you have a better way to monitor, analyze, and change wrong ideas, beliefs, and semiotics in your own mind than FIML practice, please let me know what it is. Errors in thinking and believing must be confronted as they manifest in semiotic output and perception. This is so because they slip away otherwise and are very hard to see when they are analyzed as generalities. You have to see examples within yourself of how they are actually functioning in real life. If MacShane and the many others who ignored the scandal had had experience with FIML practice, they would have acted much sooner, right away, as in hindsight anyone can see they should have.
American Buddhist Net 