Do your best. Speak the truth.
The following link contains a short film written by an algorithm.
From one point of view, the film illustrates through exaggeration what communication is like without FIML.
Movie written by algorithm turns out to be hilarious and intense
I do not see the film as particularly hilarious because that is the way most interpersonal communication is.
Large social systems, especially those with many members who do not know each other, evolve into hierarchies because the number of connections is reduced.
When the number of connections that hold a group together is reduced, it is less costly to maintain the group and thus such groups are more likely to survive.
Military organizations, companies, religious organizations and schools are usually organized into hierarchical structures. Creative, independent modules can relieve some of the formalism of hierarchy but these modules will still fit into the hierarchical structure somewhere.
Hierarchies are (always?) organized around a purpose—money for corporations, winning for militaries, belief and organizational systems for religions, food for animals and so on.
You can even see the hierarchical principle in plant structures.
A research project on this topic as it applies to artificial intelligence demonstrates that biological networks evolve into hierarchies:
…because hierarchically wired networks have fewer connections. (Research showing why hierarchy exists will aid the development of artificial intelligence)
If we accept this principle behind the development of hierarchies, I would submit that we can also apply it to how language has developed as a hierarchy in and of itself and also as a support system for the social hierarchy within which it is used.
Language and culture are held together by a system of hierarchical categories.
These categories are what we think of as beliefs, values, codes, stories, political systems, who’s who in the group, and so on.
Hierarchical systems based on general categories of that type typically also exist between individuals within any society. Indeed, we can find the same sort of hierarchical system within the individual.
This is an efficient and very reasonable way to maintain a society and a language.
Problems arise in this system, however, when the individual does not know any other way of organizing themself or of communicating with others.
An individual who exists and communicates only within a hierarchical structure will be alienated from the great mass of idiosyncratic perceptions, responses, thoughts, and emotions that exist within them and others. I think that this causes a great deal of psychological suffering and is a major part of what the Buddha meant by delusion.
FIML is designed to fix this problem between individuals.
The following video provides a good example of arm’s length communication happening in a public forum.
This is a type of formal communication in that it follows some basic forms and deviation from them is rarely allowed. Private communication, in contrast, is intimate communication between close friends where deeper levels of subjectivity are allowed, even desired.
No need to watch too much of this vid because it quickly becomes a ridiculous shouting match:
Do I even need to point out that no one even bothers to define racism? It’s a strong semiotic that once hurled tends to prevent further thought.
My point today is not Trump and the judge, but rather how Trump and the judge is a good example of something that can also happen in private settings.
When nebulous words, ideas, values, or beliefs become strong symbols in private conversations like the word racist in the video, confusion, bad feelings, alienation, or apathy will be the result.
In arm’s length communication, the instinctual human lurks behind signs and symbols much like a wild animal in the forest.
In formal settings, this is typically not a huge problem because everything is predefined. In the video, the exchange is largely a performance designed to excite the viewer.
In private settings between close friends, however, arm’s length communication is a recipe for disaster.
This is so, because even if there are no bad motives, there will be bad interpretations. And these bad interpretations will snowball and eventually lead to problems.
Since almost all of us have been raised in environments that only allow arm’s length communication and see it as the norm, almost all of us carry very heavy psychological baggage.
Few of us know how to overcome the very serious limitations of the communication norms we have learned.
The people in the video are being ridiculous, but almost all of us are just as ridiculous in our own kitchens.
If you want to do better, practice FIML.
This video has an excellent analysis of Trump’s speaking style.
One thing I can add to this explanation is he has been married twice to non-native speakers.
If you spend a lot of time with non-native speakers, your sentences will tend to shorten and you will tend to emphasize important words more.
At the same time, rhetorical flourishes, complex sentences, subordinate clauses, and less common vocabulary words will tend to be left out.
The essay A Framework for Reclaiming Reality is a great example of good reading on the Internet today.
The author, Jonathan Revusky, skewers a good deal of what passes for thought and analysis in modern society. Whether you agree with every point he makes, his case is a strong one and surely mostly correct.
A lot of the fun of articles like Revusky’s comes in the comments section. For essays like this, I usually read most of the first comments plus all of the author’s replies, but skip a good deal of the back-and-forth between commenters.
Revusky is concerned with macro-societal-and-history-level BS and he nails a lot of it. A good deal of what he describes is the same as what I often describe as “public semiotics,” political positions (and others) which function more as social signals than real thought and that often are dead wrong.
If you can see Revusky’s point on the macro scale, you should be able to also see that we all do a lot of that sort of thing on the micro and meso scales of interpersonal communication and belief.
I have categorized this post under “Buddhism” because I believe a good deal of what the Buddha meant by delusion is falling for BS public (and private) semiotics.
On this site we have often employed the idea that human instincts function within a “semiotic realm,” rather than a realm of “nature” that is external to us.
In line with this idea, we have used such concepts as “public semiotics,” “social semiotics,” “private semiotics,” “semiotic wells,” and “semiotic networks.”
A semiotic network is a connected web of semiotics that exists privately (or idiosyncratically) within a single mind or publicly within a culture or society made up of many minds.
A semiotic well is a “gravitational well” within a semiotic network; a gravitational well is like a solar system of semiotics that revolves around a semiotic-sun that defines it and holds it together.
Individuals can create their own semiotic wells within their own idiosyncratic semiotic networks, but most people most of the time import their semiotic wells from the public semiotic network(s) they find around them.
A good example for all of the above might be the American cultural value (now shared by much of the world) of owning your own home.
Most Americans gradually assimilate to (or import) this value, or semiotic well, as they grow up. As they become young adults, many Americans start planning to buy their own home. And many of them imagine all sorts of other things—children, community, picket fences, coffee in the morning, etc.—that go with the semiotic well of home-ownership.
Depending on how strong or weak the gravitational force of this semiotic well is, an individual who entertains it may be more or less “healthy.” If the desire for a home is “excessive,” consuming more time and resources than are “appropriate,” this semiotic well will be “unhealthy.” If the desire is reasonable and doable, it may be considered “healthy.”
Readers can define the words in quotation marks in the paragraph above however they like. It is really up to you, and your partner/family if they exist, to decide what is “excessive” and what is not.
In this context, an “excessive” fixation on owning a home can become a fetish. A semiotic fetish.
If someone believes that they simply cannot be happy until they have a home of their own, they have probably fetishized home-ownership. When such a person gets their home, they may find it is not making them happy or that they cannot share their happiness or that their happiness is based far more on what they have than what they have.
It is my contention that all of us do stuff like this all the time in many areas of our lives. In fact, I do not believe anyone who does not do FIML or something very much like can escape fetishizing many parts of their life in this manner.
A fetish is a “displacement,” “replacement,” or “misplacement” of something richer and better with a symbol. When we replace emotional contentment with the fetish of owning a home, we have misplaced our contentment.
When we replace constructive, honest communication with the prideful fetish of social “status,” we have misplaced communication.
When we misplace our sense of who we are with an excessive fixation on physical vanity, we have fetishized the natural sense of being-a-body-in-this-world with a semiotic well that can take on a life of its own.
Why do I say that FIML practice or something very much like it is essential to breaking this pattern?
The reason is semiotics tend to become static. We need semiotics to think and communicate, so semiotic stasis is necessary in many ways and often a good thing.
But we do it too much and we misplace how we do it. Thus, we get emotions, instincts, values, and beliefs all mixed into a few simple semiotics, a few signs and symbols.
One may be able to see this intellectually and even be able to capably analyze this process, but that can never be a substitute for seeing how our fetishized semiotics—our unique semiotic wells—actually function in the world.
Once you do see that, your whole view of what constitutes human psychology will change. And with that will change how you view culture and what you want out of life.
Consider how many common concepts that we take for granted can be or can become fetishized semiotics. Our understanding of what it means to have a “personality,” a “personality trait,” a “soul,” “no-soul,” a “need,” an “instinct,” a “hobby,” an “addiction,” a “psychology,”and so on can and often are fetishized semiotics that distort how we perceive our “selves,” the world, and the people that we know in it.
Consider also how easily our fetishes and semiotic wells can be manipulated by news and communication media.
Are we living in a world where other people communicate authentically with us or are we living in a world where other people communicate with us through fetishized semiotics?
Without FIML, how can you know?
FIML not only accesses individual word maps but also the maps of all communicative signs.
Here is the brain model of semantic maps.
And here is the study: Natural speech reveals the semantic maps that tile human cerebral cortex.
Here is a brief article about the study: Scans Show ‘Brain Dictionary’ Groups Words By Meaning. From this article:
Gallant says the findings contradict two beliefs nonscientists commonly have about the brain. First, that only the left hemisphere handles language. Second, that the brain has localized regions that handle specific tasks.
Edit: When you frequently access your word maps with the help of your FIML partner, both of you will become much more conscious of how these maps are structured and how they function during acts of communication.
This allows partners to make conscious meta-decisions to change and improve these maps in any way they want.
The meaning held in semantic maps (or semiotic maps) is the very meaning of your life as you understand it.
Not only do your maps form the basis of your communication with others, they also form the basis of how you understand yourself. How you communicate with yourself.
Gaining access to these maps is extremely liberating because it allows a degree of control over your own mind that few of us ever experience.
When we say that FIML has no content, no required beliefs, this can be understood as meaning that FIML gives us access to our own maps and control over them.
What you do with this access is entirely up to you and your partner.
Narcissism is an interesting condition because it does not appear to have a large genetic component, if any, and it can be understood as a cognitive strategy.
Narcissism often co-occurs with alcoholism or is the result of alcohol addiction.
I think it is probably a mistake to say that narcissism leads to alcoholism because alcoholism so often begins in the late teens and early twenties when personality and cognitive strategies are not well developed.
We generally study language and cognitive development by studying growing children, but we can also gain valuable insights into language and cognition by studying how they decline in alcoholism and other degenerative conditions later in life.
My sense is that in alcoholics, narcissism can be understood as an overall cognitive strategy that works because it is a simple and relatively easy way to organize general cognition.
With fewer things to consider, the narcissist is better able to function while drunk or while suffering the neurotoxic effects of years of alcohol abuse.
Why are narcissists and alcoholics so often malicious?
I think the reason is much the same as the argument above: malice is a simple, self-centered response to poorly understood or completely misunderstood social stimuli.
Malice is a side-effect of the simplicity of the narcissist’s overall cognitive strategy which has placed enormous emotional weight on an inflated sense of self.
In terms of FIML theory, narcissism is a dominant network of semiotics centered around self-interest and self-aggrandizement. (Narcissism as a cognitive strategy)
I think FIML practice would be very difficult, maybe impossible, for mid-stage and beyond alcoholics due to reduced capacity for the meta-cognition needed for FIML.
A non-alcoholic narcissist or an alcoholic in the earlier stages of the disease would, in my opinion, benefit greatly from FIML practice if conditions are good.
Rather than being a mysterious force directing personality, I believe narcissism is cognitive strategy. As such it is based on self-centered heuristics that are founded on semiotic networks that can be perceived through FIML practice.
I also believe that these networks almost certainly will be identified by brain scans or other instruments within the next few decades.
Here is a story about a cat who “hunts” socks and shorts instead of birds and mice.
Brigit has collected 50 pairs of socks and likes to steal them in pairs.
Besides making for a cute story, this behavior is probably a very basic form of symbolic behavior, where clothing items replace prey.
These items symbolize or “stand in for” normal prey and by so doing redirect hunting instincts into the realm of signs, symbols, semiotics.
The ability to use signs and symbols is fundamental to complex communication.
When the signs and symbols of political discourse cannot even be questioned, they are totalitarian.
Totalitarianism and fascism are not supported only by guns and jackboots, but also by the manipulation of semiotics, the signs and symbols of political and social communication.
Many of these signs and symbols are inanimate, but some are real people who can talk back and explain how they are being manipulated.
The video below contains an analysis of semiotic manipulation by one of America’s most renowned political symbols. Well-worth viewing.
Edit 3/3/16: Excellent analysis of the same issue: Ann Coulter: Trump Wins “Disavowal” Game, Then Super Tuesday
The video below—White Girls Black Dolls: Destroying White Bias —is an analysis of the semiotics of dolls.
A doll can be a powerful cultural sign—a semiotic—that can be manipulated to achieve various effects.
Since semiotics (and dolls) can be manipulated and are manipulated by people, semiotic analyses of this kind should say who is doing the manipulating and why.
This video claims that a great deal of the manipulation of white/black cultural semiotics is and has been done by Jews. This is a reasonable claim supported by evidence, some of which is presented in the video.
Senator Joe McCarthy is mentioned in this film. His reputation as a maniac who wantonly destroyed the careers of innocent people is false. His reputation has been manipulated in ways not dissimilar to how dolls are manipulated.
There really were communist spies in the US government. They really were doing harm. You can check this claim by looking into documents released from the Venona project and the Soviet archives. It is most likely that McCarthy was being fed true information by J. Edgar Hoover.
There are a couple of books that exonerate most of what McCarthy said and did (he did go too far sometimes), but even with all this evidence it will be a long time before the semiotics of his reputation change. Most people will see him as an archetype of badness for long time to come.
Obviously, this prevents us from understanding who those communist spies were and what they were doing, but that is another story. Semiotic manipulation can hide things as well as direct our attention toward things.
You cannot possibly understand cultural life today without having a rich appreciation for how and why the signs and symbols—the semiotics—of culture are consciously manipulated by people, people who often have bad motives or at least motives that are not in your best interest.
NOTE: The video—taken down by YouTube, I presume, to protect the innocent—can be found here. Pretty sure that’s the same video. Obviously, removing a video like this is a form of semiotic manipulation, something you may agree or disagree with in this case as in all cases.
Umberto Eco, an Italian scholar in the arcane field of semiotics who became the author of bestselling novels, most notably the blockbuster medieval mystery “The Name of the Rose,” died Friday in Italy. He was 84.
Basic signaling can be described or explained as follows:
These are the most basic features of all signals. More complex signals contain these three basic features and also exhibit other features, such as:
From the three features of basic signaling, we can say a lot about human signaling.
The first feature of basic signaling simply defines what a signal is. I can signal to myself or I can signal to you. A simple example is I check my hair in the mirror (signal to self) and then present myself to you (signal to you). Insofar as my hair signal to you has a conscious element of how my hair looks or doesn’t look (sloppy, messy), the hair signal I sent to myself via the mirror is now being sent to you via my imagination.
This hair signal can also illustrate the second feature of basic signaling—how big or small the signal is. My hair signal may be important to me while I am looking in the mirror (big signal) or not very important (small signal). In like manner, my hair signal may be big or small in your mind.
This hair signal can also illustrate the third feature of basic signaling—its truth or falsity. If I have dyed my hair, in some sense I am sending a false signal. If I have not dyed my hair but you think I have, then you are receiving a false signal.
One could also say that dyed hair is not a truly “false” signal because it is common for people to dye their hair. Similar arguments can be made for combing or cutting hair or anything we do with our hair. The truth or falsity of many human signals is open to interpretation in this manner.
Normally, we use the three basic features of complex signals described in the second bullet list above to decide which interpretation to use. Changing the context and complexity upon which our interpretation is based will tend to change our interpretation of the signal.
Notice how many signals achieve their effects primarily by being big. Big signs, bright lights, loud music, heavy make-up, loud sexual signals, perfume, odor, big muscles, fake boobs, expensive cars, big houses and yachts, etc. all work in part by being big signals. Bigness or smallness is point two in the list above.
Bigness alone can explain why people lie, slant, or falsely accuse. As long as a signal is big, some people will be attracted to it and come under its spell. If someone accuses you falsely of something and spreads their accusation around, you may be faced with a big problem. If the lie is big enough and artful enough, you now are forced to defend yourself. If you do not even know what is being said about you, you can’t even do that.
Another version of the effectiveness of a big false accusation is one made to your face. As soon as it is uttered, the scene and context will shift dramatically. You are normally required to immediately defend yourself, derailing whatever rational exchange of ideas preceded the accusation.
We can see how this works in interpersonal communication and we can also see how it works on a larger scale. When nations go to war, they invariably lie about each other. Politicians lie, cultures lie, groups lie, religions lie, sports fans lie, and so on.
Lies or false accusation work because they send big signals that require a defense and, since they are lies, can be hard to defend against.
To me, this is a depressing side of human communication. Lies and false accusations very often win against the truth.
Simply stated, false accusations are aggressive lies, but we also know them in milder form as spin, slanting the facts, one-sidedness, tailoring the message, and so on.
Note: I got the idea of the importance of false accusations from a book I am reading on alcoholism: Vessels of Rage, Engines of Power: The Secret History of Alcoholism.
The author of this book, James Graham, makes the claim repeatedly that alcoholics very often engage in false accusations. In discussing this book with my partner, we came to conclude that Graham is right about this—false accusations do seem to be common among the alcoholics we both know.
Since I like to break things down into basic principles, my partner and I came up with the principles outlined above.
A false accusation sends a big signal into a social group while at the same time protecting the alcoholic from criticism. It allows them to say, “You see it is not me or my drinking that is the problem here, she is the one who is crazy!” Or, “Can you believe what he did to me?” Of course, he didn’t do anything but to a drunk, the accusation feels good and often works with others because it is big.
On a larger scale, false accusations in public today often take form as PC dictates. That’s “racist,” “sexist,” “micro-aggressive,” “privileged,” “homophobic,” etc. Just knowing that we might be accused of one of these attitudes has been enough to keep most people from saying anything that could even be tangentially interpreted in that way.
Note two: FIML practice entirely removes false accusations and any basis for them between partners. No FIML partner should ever say, “You did too mean that!” Or “I know why you did that!”
Partners who have established a habit of frequently checking their interpretations of each other should experience very few occasions to feel that their interpretation of something their partner signaled is better than their partner’s interpretation.
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*A false signal that is not conscious might be a non-poisonous snake or insect that has evolved to look like a poisonous one.
Delusions must start somewhere.
A recent study (Emoticons in mind: An event-related potential study) convincingly demonstrates that our responses to emoticons as simple as a colon next to a parenthesis :) are similar to our responses to real human faces.
Clearly, this response has been learned. No infant is born with that response and no one anywhere had it just a few decades ago.
Our tendency to respond to :) as a face arose with its use in email and texting. This response is now a well-established “public” response to a “public” semiotic. In this context, public means “understood and shared by many people.”
A public semiotic is a sign with wide currency. It is a unit of culture and often of language itself. We can see in the case of the emoticon :) that a new sign can arise due to unique circumstances and that that sign can come to have a deep meaning for many people.
The sign :) seems quite beautiful to me because it is very simple, very easily produced, and very telling about how our minds work. If the elements of the sign are reversed (: people no longer respond to it as a face, though of course we could learn to do that if the reversed sign were used that way more frequently.
I remember the first time I saw a derivative sign ;) and wondered briefly what it meant. If you had a similar experience, you may be able to remember how such a simple sign can bloom in your mind and go from something that is unknown to something of considerable significance in just a few seconds.
That is an example of the birth of a sign, the birth of a semiotic in your mind.
When the semiotic is public, we strive to learn what other people mean by it. When it is private—that is, with a meaning known only to us—there will be other, often very significant, implications.
What would a “private sign” be like? A straightforward example might be a code we use in a diary. Such a code would have at least one visual sign whose meaning is known only to us.
Another kind of private visual sign might be a facial expression that we have come to interpret differently from other people. My guess is everyone has a good many of these. That is to say, the “idiolect” of facial expressions we each use to understand other people is at least as various as different idiolects within a spoken language.
Now add tone of voice, posture, accent, word choice, topic choice, and so on to this mix. Each of those areas of communication uses signs that can and always will be interpreted in a wide variety of ways, including private ones.
Now, consider how an individual may get lost in all this. If someone ever smiled at you as they hurt you, you may have learned to be suspicious in your interpretation of human smiles. Or you may employ your own smile in ambiguous ways.
Now consider all the signs of communication and how many possible interpretations there are. Then consider the study linked above which shows how deep our responses can be to something as trivial as the sign :).
One way we form delusions occurs when our interpretations of communicative signs become too private and/or do not correspond well with the interpretations employed by other people. The other way we form delusions occurs when our interpretations of signs does correspond well with the interpretations employed by other people, but those other people are wrong.
In “public” situations—professional, commercial, business, school, etc.—it is fairly easy to communicate well enough based on established norms. But in interpersonal communication, you can only take “established norms” so far. At some point, you will have to understand your partner and be understood by them in much greater detail than “established norms,” or public semiotics.
Here is a newspaper article on the study linked above: Happy days: Human brain now registers smiley face emoticon as real facial expression.
This photo is interesting because it shows a kid in the 1950s internalizing symbols or semiotics in much the same way as he internalizes language and ideas.
American Buddhist Net 