Tag: psycholinguistics

Speech comprehension and context

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A new study on speech comprehension shows that humans respond to the “contextual semantic content of each word in a relatively time-locked fashion.”

These findings demonstrate that, when successfully comprehending natural speech, the human brain responds to the contextual semantic content of each word in a relatively time-locked fashion. (Source)

This process is roughly illustrated here:

While I do not doubt these findings for simple speech in simple contexts, I do wonder what the results would be for speech in psychologically complex contexts, whether that speech is simple or not.

I wonder this because I am certain that in almost all psychologically complex contexts (those rich with subjectivity, emotion, idiosyncratic memory or association, etc.) the “contextual semantic content of each word” will necessarily be different, often very different for each speaker.

Psychologically rich interpersonal speech is almost always fraught with contextual differences that can be very large. Sometimes participants know these differences exist and sometimes they don’t. It is very common for speakers to make major mistakes in this area, the most important area of speech for human psychological well-being.

It seems possible that EEG with increased sensitivity might one day be able to detect “context diversion” between speakers, but even if complex emotional information is also included, people will still have to talk about what is diverging from what.

My comments are not meant to detract from the very interesting findings posted above. I make them because these findings illustrate how inherently problematic real-time mutual comprehension of the “contextual semantic content” of all spoken words actually is.

FIML practice is the only way I know of today to find profound real-time mutual comprehension of complex interpersonal speech.

Metacognition and real-time communication

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Metacognition means “awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes,” or “cognition about cognition,” or “being able to think about how you think.”

To me, metacognition is a premier human ability. How can it not be a good thing to be aware of how you are aware and how you think and respond to what is around you?

In more detail:

The term “metacognition” is most often associated with John Flavell, (1979). According to Flavell (1979, 1987), metacognition consists of both metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive experiences or regulation. Metacognitive knowledge refers to acquired knowledge about cognitive processes, knowledge that can be used to control cognitive processes. Flavell further divides metacognitive knowledge into three categories: knowledge of person variables, task variables and strategy variables.

(the original source for this quote has disappeared but this article on Wikipedia makes the same points and more)

Most people do metacognition and are aware of doing it. We do it when we plan, make decisions, decide how to get from one place to another, how to relate to one person differently from another, and so on.

Where we don’t do metacognition is in real-time communication in real life, where it matters most. This is not because we are not able to do it. It is because very few of us have the right technique, Flavell’s “acquired knowledge” that allows us to do it.

If we have the right technique, we will be able to gain a great deal of knowledge about real-time cognitive process while also learning how to control them.

FIML practice is a metacognitive practice based on, to quote the above source, “acquired knowledge about cognitive processes… that can be used to control cognitive processes.”

In the case of FIML, the “acquired knowledge” is the FIML technique which allows us to gain conscious “control over cognitive processes” of real-time interpersonal communication.

FIML is different from other analytical communication techniques in that FIML provides a method to gain control over very short or small units of communication in real-time. This is important as it is these very short real-time units that are most often ignored or not dealt with in most analyses of human communication.

If you know how to catch small mistakes, they become sources of insight and humor. If you don’t know how to catch them, they often snowball into destructive misunderstandings.

FIML is fairly easy to do if you understand the importance of correcting the minor misinterpretations that inevitably arise between people when they speak and communicate. By using the FIML metacognitive method, partners gain control over the most elusive kinds of interpersonal error which all too often lead to serious interpersonal discord.

FIML can and does do more than catch small mistakes, but first things first. If you cannot correct small errors in real-time communication, you are not doing anything even resembling thorough metacognitive communication.

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.

first posted JULY 30, 2013

I wrote this ten years ago, before the rage of new identities was as hot as it is today. It provides a solid Buddhist view in modern terms of what an identity is and what its pitfalls can be, why all identities are fundamentally delusional. A point worth adding is you really do not need an identity. You can walk around all day long without ever thinking of your identity and you will be better for it. A persona or social thing we show others has some value when dealing with others but it is not an identity as described above or what you are in a deep sense. It is definitely not something to cling to. And it is not something to carve yourself up over. And it is absolutely not something to carve children up over. Clinging to a false self or tautological identity causes suffering; in fact, that is the cause of suffering as explained by the Buddha. Buddhist practice is all about not doing that, not clinging to a false self, a tautological identity, a delusion.

A word on what a persona or social thing is. It is a convenience in language and semiotics, a way of organizing speech and thought when dealing with others. That’s all it is. When we reify our personas or take them too seriously, we begin to delude ourselves and cause suffering through clinging and making bad decisions. ABN

FLASHBACK 2020: The science behind the covid masks was MIND-CONTROL

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Masks during covid were signs of compliance. They induced fear while distancing people from each other and from reason itself. Virtually all of ‘The Science’ during covid was mind-control through behavioral manipulation. Keeping six feet apart, arrows on the floor, staying inside out of the sun and fresh air, being arrested for going to the beach, etc — all of that was mind-control through controlling the body. When you do or don’t do something with your body, your mind will follow. Taking the vax was the ultimate irrational submission to authoritarian lies. ABN

You’ll be attacked if you speak but lose everything if you don’t — Eva Vlaardingerbroek

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Speech—psycholinguistics—is a major theater of mind control. If you can control speech you can control minds. Never allow anyone to control your speech if what you are saying is true, reasonable, and not purposely obstreperous. Beware of people who call for restrictions on speech or changing the First Amendment; they are totalitarians attempting to seize total power. Once they have it, you will never get it back. ABN

Interview with Andrew Lobaczewski Author of Political Ponerology

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I have only spot-checked this interview but it seems to be well-worth watching because Lobaczewski’s insights are based on his experiences in communist Poland. First-hand experience with actual communist regimes is essential for understanding communist states of the past and also the usurpation of the Western world now ongoing. The techniques of this usurpation and infiltration of Western institutions is textbook communist power aggrandizement through lying, cheating, infiltrating, and treason. Ask anyone who has lived in a communist country or escaped from one — they will all say much the same: you do not want that to happen here or again. I myself am speaking from personal experience. ABN

Reversive blockade: Ponerological Definition and as used by Psychopaths

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Reversive blockade: Emphatically insisting upon something which is the opposite of the truth, this blocks the average person’s mind from perceiving the truth. In accordance with the dictates of healthy common sense, he starts searching for meaning in the “golden mean” between the truth and its opposite, winding up with some satisfactory counterfeit. People who think like this do not realize that this was precisely the intent of the person who subjected them to this method. If such a statement is the opposite of a moral truth, at the same time, it simultaneously represents an extreme paramoralism, and bears its peculiar suggestiveness. We rarely see this method being used by normal people; even if raised by the people who abused it; they usually only indicate its results [on their thinking] in the shape of characteristic difficulties in apprehending reality properly. Use of this method can be included within the above-mentioned psychological knowledge developed by psychopaths concerning the weaknesses of human nature and the art of leading others into error. Where they are in rule, this method is used with virtuosity, and to an extent conterminous with their power.

link

This concept reversive blockade deserves some real thought. It is fundamental to mass mind-control. Ponerology is ‘the study of evil’. Mind-control is a major weapon of evil political systems and their top actors and toadies. Claiming mass illegal immigration into USA is good for the country is an example of reversive blockade; you can feel your mind trying to make sense of that statement, even in the light of knowing you are paying for it and there is no money for citizens in Lahaina or Appalachia after recent disasters, which themselves appear to have been caused by ponerologists. ABN

Philosophical psychology

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Are your thought patterns valid? Are your premises true? Is your mind sound?

Buddhism further asks are your mental states wholesome? Are they conducive to enlightenment, wisdom, freedom from delusion?

There are many things we can do while alone to clean up our thought processes. And there are some things we can only do with the help of another person.

Only another person can tell us if our premises, thoughts, and conclusions (however tentative) about them are true, valid, and sound.

Buddhism has a concept of a “spiritual friend,” a “good friend,” a noble friend,” or an “admirable friend.” All of these terms are translations of the Pali Kalyāṇa-mittatā, which is well-explained at that link. (Chinese 善知識). That link is well-worth reading in full.

From the link above and from many years of working with Buddhist literature and people, my sense is that a Buddhist “good friend” is someone who is to be admired and emulated. They are similar to what we mean today by mentors or “good role models.”

I deeply respect the concept of a Buddhist good friend, but find it lacks what I consider the preeminent virtue of philosophical psychology—real-time honesty based on a teachable technique.

Indeed, I cannot find anything anywhere in world philosophy, religion, or literature that provides a teachable technique for attaining real-time honesty with another person.

I also do not quite understand how this could be.

For many centuries human beings have thought about life but no one has come up with a technique like FIML?

How can that be?

I do not see a technique like FIML anywhere in the history of human philosophy nor anywhere in modern psychology.

The importance of a “good friend” who does FIML with you cannot be overemphasized because it is only through such a friend that you can discover where your premises about them are right or wrong, where your thoughts about them are valid or not, and through those discoveries where your mind itself is arranged soundly or not.

first posted MAY 30, 2017

UPDATE 12/14/23: Buddhists can and should make Buddhist practice their own, update or improve the practice with new ideas that are sound, valid, and true. This is a very positive and excellent side of Buddhism, which itself is not written in stone. Buddhism is preeminently a mind-to-mind teaching. It does not depend on ancient texts or the absolute interpretation of words. It depends on fulsome understanding of the deep truths at the core of all Buddhist thinking—impermanence, emptiness, and nirvana. Anything that is consonant with those three truths and conforms to Buddhist morals is good Buddhism. Anything that contradicts those three truths and/or Buddhist morals is not Buddhism.

The Buddha encouraged teaching the Dharma in people’s native languages. He discouraged writing his teachings down because he did not want them to become sacred texts that people worship rather than understand. FIML practice is an efficient, detailed, sound, and accurate way for “good friends” to deeply share mind-to-mind communion/communication with each other. In this sense, it is excellent Buddhist practice. FIML has no other teaching than how to communicate really well with a good friend. FIML does not tell you what to think or believe. Anyone can do it. ABN

A useful guide to understanding what FIML is

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The Ethical Skeptic (TES) has written a very good essay: The Distinction Between Comprehension and Understanding. I want to use a schema presented in his essay to describe what FIML is, how to see it and understand it. Comprehending it requires doing it and reaping its benefits.

TES provides this illustration of the layers of thought and psychology that culminate in comprehension:

I might not use a hammer to represent comprehension but since we have a hammer, it would represent FIML’s ability to smash through the dogma of psychology, our ordinary understanding of psycholinguistics, the simplicity with which we view real-time speech, and our ignorance that there exists anything profound in being able to analyze real-time, real-world speech as it is happening.

FIML is a method, a technique. It has no content save what you bring to it. FIML works with and reveals the profound subjectivity of the individual. Since basic FIML cannot be done alone but only with a partner, it also reveals the profound subjectivity of your partner. In doing this, it smashes the dogmas of psychology and virtually all public/common notions about what the human mind even is.

The difficulties of FIML are fundamentally two: 1) seeing it at all and 2) doing it. FIML is not something people normally ever do. I have been writing, reading, and thinking about FIML for many years and have never seen any reference to anything like it anywhere in the history of the world. If you know of one, please tell me. I will be delighted.

FIML is probably hard to see because all languages everywhere contain a very strong proscription against questioning anyone in the moment in order to begin a sober analysis. People just don’t do that. Getting that close and personal about something someone has just said (or did) is instinctively perceived as disrespect, argumentativeness, stupidity, rocking-the-boat, etc. FIML 100% is not that, but since no one has cultivated the habit or acquired the training to do it, no one can even see it let alone do it.

Most of us can see moments of speech and change our minds quickly if we are ordered, instructed, or want to curry favor. I guess that is a starting point, but none of that is FIML. FIML begins with a subjectively felt (or comprehended) need to find out if you have interpreted something correctly. Very ordinary, right? Yes, it is in “slow-time,” but not in real-time.

When done in real-time, the emphasis is on the one asking the question because this one has noticed an interpretation arising in their mind that may be wrong. The interpretation could be completely new or more likely habitual. By frequently noticing these interpretations and then asking your FIML partner about them (using FIML rules) and listening to their reply, you will gradually begin to see a true picture of your actual profound and marvelous subjective mind as it moves through and responds to its living existence.

FIML is no more difficult to learn than playing a musical instrument, riding a motorcycle, or cooking. Once both you and your partner understand what FIML basically is and why it is so necessary, you will progress quickly and gain many insights into your behaviors and thinking processes. At some point, you will achieve a kind of mutual comprehension of each other that is very clear and beautiful and cannot be gained in any other way.

Some oddities of communicating with doctors

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One aspect of seeing a doctor is you will remember them (often vividly) and whatever rapport you thought had been established, but when you next see them (assuming weeks or months have passed), they almost certainly will not share your memories of whatever rapport you may have thought had been established, if they remember you at all. This can make them seem cold or unfocused or unstable.

From their POV, many doctors handle this by being kind of plastic friendly at best. For patients, it’s weird because there are few other communications as important as with your doctor and yet there is almost no one else you know who is as disconnected from normal relationship dynamics with you as your doctor. So a doctor’s mood when you see them probably has next to nothing to do with you.

ABN

The Astral Plane

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The astral plane, also called the astral realm or the astral world, is a plane of existence postulated by classical, medieval, oriental, esoteric, and new age philosophies and mystery religions.[1] It is the world of the celestial spheres, crossed by the soul in its astral body on the way to being born and after death, and is generally believed to be populated by angels, spirits or other immaterial beings.[2] In the late 19th and early 20th century the term was popularised by Theosophy and neo-Rosicrucianism.

Another view holds that the astral plane or world, rather than being some kind of boundary area crossed by the soul, is the entirety of spirit existence or spirit worlds to which those who die on Earth go, and where they live out their non-physical lives. It is understood that all consciousness resides in the astral plane.[3] Some writers conflate this realm with heaven or paradise or union with God itself, and others do not. Paramahansa Yogananda wrote in Autobiography of a Yogi (1946), “The astral universe … is hundreds of times larger than the material universe … [with] many astral planets, teeming with astral beings.”

link

My sense is the term astral plane has fallen a bit out of favor. In some cases it is replaced by ethereal plane. In Buddhism, it is traditionally referred to as ultimate reality or vaguely as nirvana, or what comes after nirvana. More recently among scientists and philosophers, we are seeing the concept of a conscious universe or a thinking universe, a universe in which consciousness is a primary force, feature or dimension. However we refer to it, we need a term that evokes dimensions or planes of awareness beyond earthly or mundane awareness or ‘relative reality’, as it is put in Buddhism.

The concept of an astral plane dates back to Plato if not before. The Buddha was referring to something like that without using any term when he spoke about nirvana. The Buddha was a Scythian who argued against the strong Scythian belief in an absolute distinction between right and wrong and a single, great God (Ahura Mazda) who created the world and could be known only through doing good.

It’s a good development that scientists and philosophers today are increasingly seeing what the Buddha and many others have seen throughout the ages. I believe deep meditative states and a moral life afford us frequent opportunities to commune with or glimpse dimensions or realms beyond our normal default cultural behavioral realms.

Buddhism is a profoundly ethical teaching but it also rejects absolutes. We humans are characterized by emptiness, impermanence, and the suffering wrought by clinging to any concept, belief or idea, and yet are capable of freeing ourselves from ‘relative reality’ through ethical practice and experiential samadhi states.

The Buddha remained silent on matters related to anything like the astral plane because he knew that focusing on ethereal aims (especially in his day?) tends to reify them, which then leads to ossification, doctrine, worship without reason. I wonder if in our day, the Buddha would reason differently as many reasonable thinkers now accept that consciousness may be inexplicable by rank materialism or particle physics or biology based on those; and thus may/must be a primary aspect of all that we know of.

My current understanding of Buddhism and ancient history has been recently influenced by Christopher Beckwith’s The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China, which I highly recommend to Buddhists and everyone else. ABN

The Dark Arts of Psychology: Nudges

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During the Covid crisis, nudging emerged as one of the primary psyops tools used by globalists, governments, NGOs, and “security” (intelligence) forces against us ordinary folk. 

Recently, a number of peer-reviewed papers have come to light, exposing just how pervasive and damaging the use of nudges was during Covid-19. They also reveal how nudging, including fear nudging, is being used to control individuals and populations on matters such as health, climate change, meat-eating, tobacco use, alcohol use, weight control, electoral candidates, political campaigns, and more.

The PsyWar Campaign continues to work to control our hearts and minds on all matters of statecraft.

For those that need reminding, nudging is a form of psychological manipulation that is often used in psyops and psywar campaigns.

A nudge is a technique for modifying people’s behavior in a predictable way by influencing people to behave in a desired outcome. Nudging is usually performed covertly, although that is not considered a criterion of the nudge. A nudge can be described as: “any aspects of the choice architecture that predictably alters people’s behavior without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.” 

Nudging alters the environment, triggering automatic cognitive processes to favor the desired outcome. Nudging makes it more likely that an individual will make a particular choice or behave in a particular way.

Fear nudging involves using nudges that utilize a fear component to drive behavior, opinions, or decision-making. While this is a particularly effective form of nudging, it is absolutely unethical, in my opinion and that of others.

link

Nudge is just a cute word for mind-control. It is itself a psycholinguistic trick to control your mind. Our world today can very legitimately be described as a mind-control circus. Virtually, everything you see in the public realm is mind-control. You have no intellectual toolset if you don’t understand this. Once you see it, it is easy to renegotiate your world far more wisely. ABN