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.
Tag: brain science
Malignant narcissism and identity
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
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.
Semiotic proprioception in dreams and waking
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
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.
Warren Field – The Beginning of Time?
Sexy NSA Commercial With Sasha Grey
The NSA database shows once again that it is technology that moves the world more than ideology. I doubt there is anything anyone can do to stop this database or others like it, here or abroad.
We can maybe hope that those who have access to databases of this type are completely honest and that they function within perfect systems that have no corruption, but historically that is highly improbable.
Big databases like the NSA’s (and we know there are more of them) create a form of international competition akin to the arms race. If we don’t get ahead of others, they will get ahead of us.
In the near-term, our best hope is probably for even more technology in the form of accurate lie-detectors that can be used to keep all of us honest, including those with access to the database. I do believe that the database has rendered our traditional form of government obsolete and that there is no turning back.
In the long-term, the database will surely look passe, even puny. Isn’t it likely to be a precursor to the even larger database that will house our electronic/digital “selves” once we have achieved a non-biological stage of evolution (if we haven’t already)? Will we need or even want privacy then?
For today, a conundrum in the database arms race is that the NSA has in one way made us “safer” by staying ahead of other countries (I guess), but it has also made us less safe because no database like that can be made perfectly unhackable.
The database should make it clear to even more people that we fundamentally have no idea how our government works or who controls it to what purpose. Rather than look behind the scenes for who has the “real” skinny, as we naively did twenty years ago, now we must wonder if anything known to the public has any bearing at all on what is really going on.
On the antiquity of language: the reinterpretation of Neandertal linguistic capacities and its consequences
…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…
The NSA database
words 417
Firstly, that database is a sociologist’s wet dream. It is without question the greatest sociological analytical tool ever to come into existence.
The NSA database—using just metadata alone—is capable of discovering and describing in near-perfect detail nearly all social networks in the world.
It is possible that some very secretive groups figured out which way the wind was blowing twenty years ago and have kept away from all electronic surveillance since then, but I doubt that even they can be certain that their membership is not known, or knowable, to the NSA.
In addition to being able to find and analyze all, or virtually all, groups and networks in the world (secret or otherwise), the NSA almost certainly has the capability to reach back years into the content of those groups’ phone calls and other forms of communication.
This makes the database even more than a sociologist’s wet dream. It is also a tool for exceptional good or evil.
First, the evil—anyone with access to the database can spy on virtually anyone anywhere and use the information gained to blackmail, steal inventions or investment ideas, bribe, intimidate, or otherwise do bad stuff behind the scenes.
For the good, the database has the power to figure out groups that are doing bad things and stop them. The database could be used as a massive national and international “lie-detector” or “shit detector.” Just about any group of people up to anything unsavory should be discoverable through the database.
So who controls it? Is there one person at the top? Or a group? Who watches the group?
I am all but certain we will never be rid of that database. If by some miracle the US destroys the NSA database, some other country will surely set one up.
So liberty and goodness now mean that we have to figure out how to make sure the people controlling the database are good people. That they will never do bad things with the information available to them.
How do we do that? Is there any conceivable politics that can bring that about? We need databases watching databases all of which are controlled by groups that are watched by other groups. If we have perfectly reliable lie-detectors, could we establish groups like that? Is there any way forward other than massive transparency of everyone’s life?
It looks to me like our traditional political system is finished. Checks and balances and individual rights are meaningless in the face of that database.
Panopticism
A Panopticon is a circular building with an observation tower in the centre of an open space surrounded by an outer wall. This wall contains cells for occupants (for example, inmates in a prison). This design increases security by facilitating more effective surveillance. Residing within cells flooded with light, occupants are readily distinguishable and visible to a guard/official “invisibly” positioned in the central tower. Conversely, occupants are invisible to each other, with concrete walls dividing their cells.
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault builds on Jeremy Bentham’s conceptualization of a panopticon as he elaborates upon the function of disciplinary mechanisms in the prison and illustrates the function of discipline as an apparatus of power. (Source)
An aspect of power is how do you know who is spying on you? How do you know who your real friends are? How do you know if you are on top? How do you even know who is on top?
Joseph Stalin knew he was in control of everyone in the Soviet Union because he knew that he was able to use the NKVD (his secret police) to control the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) and he knew that he could use the CPSU to control the NKVD. He also knew there wasn’t any other power base.
Even still, to be certain he imprisoned and shot millions of innocent people. By doing so, he removed imaginary (and sometimes real) threats and, just as importantly, he proved to himself and others through mass murder (the ultimate crime) that he could do whatever he wanted.
Who controls the NSA? How many people have access to that data? The metadata alone will tell anyone who has access how everyone in the world is connected and to whom. There are several whistle blowers (probably including Snowden) who claim the NSA is also storing phone calls and other digital data.
Information, as Foucault knew, is the basis of power. The NSA has a massive amount of information and thus massive power, but the question fairly screams—Who is at the top of all that power? Who controls and has access to all that information? Who gets to see how the metadata fits together?
I doubt that in today’s world just one person is at the top. We know Congress is not, nor is the president. Does the head of the NSA or the CIA know who is on top? I doubt they are. Is there a group within those bodies that knows? If there is a secret group (not publicly known) that is on top, or thinks they are, they will be able to get a sense of who their competitors are by metadata analyses and by more direct means of spying.
But who may be spying on them? Is there another group within their group or outside of it that knows even more than they do?
Digital panopticism in today’s world implies the profound likelihood that there is more than one “observation tower” or group on top. This is a massive problem for those of us without any power, but it is also a deeply disturbing problem for those with power because none of them can ever be certain if someone is above them and who that might be.
Is that the core reason the spying grows and grows? Because, futiley, they have to spy more and more to be sure they are on top or to be sure they know who is on top, and yet they also know that they can never be sure.
Repost: Why you can’t fix it with generalities
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.
“Is Reality Real?”
Repost: Idiolects and idiotics
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.”
Consciousness After Death: Strange Tales From the Frontiers of Resuscitation Medicine
The main substance of the linked piece is an interview with Sam Parnia, who practices resuscitation medicine. Below is a quote from the interview.
It takes time for cells to die after they’re deprived of oxygen. It doesn’t happen instantly. We have a longer period of time than people perceive. We know now that when you become a corpse, when the doctor declares you dead, there’s still a possibility, from a biological and medical perspective, of death being reversed. – Sam Parnia
In Buddhist traditions it is widely believed that consciousness stays with or near the body long after the point in time that standard Western medicine says this is not possible.
NIMH Delivers A Kill Shot To DSM-5
From the article:
DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. (Thomas R. Insel, M.D., Director of the National Institute of Mental Health)
I think this is very good news. Notice how it changes the semiotics of mental illness. A better paradigm for mental illness is that intolerable stress causes a wide variety of symptoms in people. A major stressor of this type is, of course, interpersonal stress. FIML cannot by any stretch of the imagination fix all mental illness, but it can help suitable partners greatly reduce interpersonal stress.
Edit: Yesterday, I read reasonable objections to Insel’s statement to the effect that we are not able to obtain “laboratory measure(s),” or biological markers, for all mental illness. I completely agree with this objection.
The synthesis of the two points of view (Insel v/ the DSM) seems to me to be that drugs should only be very guardedly prescribed, if they are prescribed at all, in situations where there are no “laboratory measures” or biological markers (both are fairly vague terms).
Does interpersonal stress produce biological markers? I bet it does. Does interpersonal stress of the type that can probably be cured by FIML practice produce biological markers? I bet it does. But I also bet that it would be far better to try FIML, or something else, long before resorting to drug therapy.
Another point: I believe it is probably healthy to feel nervous, anxious, depressed, repulsed, etc. when around people who communicate dishonestly, manipulatively, or with strong ulterior motives. Since I also believe that most people communicate pretty badly, it actually seems to me that many psychological “problems” are thus healthy, valuable responses.
American Buddhist Net 