Tag: thought

Game theory and interpersonal relations

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Game theory uses models to understand how people interact under predetermined conditions or rules.

The end result of any particular model is called its “equilibrium.” Equilibrium implies no one will change their input if external conditions remain the same.

One way to make a game theory model is to reason backwards from the equilibrium you want. To keep it simple, there are two players.

Let’s say we want an interpersonal equilibrium that is honest, clear, and open to the dynamic reality of life. Here is a hypothesis: an equilibrium like that should also result in psychological optimization, psychological well-being for both players.

To achieve that equilibrium, my game model will be based on the following rules:

  1. communication will be as honest as possible
  2. communication will be as clear as possible
  3. all acts of communication (within reason) will be subject to clarification, revision, correction, and explication to the point (within reason) that there is no misunderstanding and whatever ambiguity remains is reduced to its lowest practical level

To do this, players will:

  1. focus on the smallest practical units of communication because error and ambiguity (which often leads to error) frequently begin at this level; this level includes: words, phrases, gestures, tone of voice, expressions, gasps, laughter, grunts, and so on; anything that communicates; all pertinent semiotics
  2. correcting error at the above level, which we will call the micro-level, ensures that small mistakes do not lead to large mistakes; it also teaches players how to correct errors at meso and macro levels of communication
  3. since human minds are limited in what they know and can communicate, and if players are diligent in following the above rules, players will steadily become more familiar with each other; how they speak, hear, think, what their references are, their values, beliefs, and so on
  4. if they continue to maintain these practices, they will build on their mutual familiarity, eventually achieving an interpersonal equilibrium that is honest, clear, and open to the dynamic reality of life

I have played this game with my partner for over ten years and can attest that it has worked even better than we had hoped.

Not only have we achieved an interpersonal equilibrium that is honest, clear, and open to the dynamic reality of life, but also what we hypothesized has come to pass: this equilibrium has also resulted in what feels to us to be psychological optimization and psychological well-being for both of us.

The rules to our game can be found here: FIML.

Note that initially FIML will upset your normal interpersonal equilibrium, whatever that may be. It cannot be otherwise. Note also that the rules of FIML will help you find or create a much better equilibrium.

If FIML is undertaken in a spirit of exploration, creativity, and fun, it will tend to self-generate or self-catalyze many new insights into your psychologies and how you interact with each other.

The ultimate FIML equilibrium is a dynamic one that keeps both partners open to the dynamic reality of life. With little or no “content” of its own, FIML rules allow partners to adapt to or create any “reality” they want.

Once understood, FIML is pretty much only difficult in the very beginning because in the beginning it will upset your normal interpersonal equilibrium. By doing FIML, you are choosing to change your normal equilibrium to a more efficient one.

Status as a fetish

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Fetish can be defined as “a part standing for the whole” or “one thing being made bigger than it is by having become a psychological fixation.”

A good example of what I mean is pornography. Insofar as a mere image can stand for or replace instinctual sexual objectives, it is a fetish.

A sign (pornographic image) is as strong or stronger than the animal instinct. Or a sign can direct or redirect the animal instinct. That is a fetish.

Secondary sex characteristics do the same thing. You could call them nature’s fetishes but that would be stretching the concept. Human utilizations of makeup, clothing, and grooming could be said to stand “halfway” between the basic sexual instinct and the fetishized porno image.

Let’s apply that reasoning to status.

Two social psychologist I respect—Jordan Peterson and Kevin MacDonald—have both claimed many times that status is a fundamental human instinct and that it drives human behavior in many ways.

In posts on this site, I have disagreed with these ideas several times. I just don’t see it that way. Here are two of those posts: Status and hierarchy are as fundamental to human life as murder and Jordan Peterson on the gender pay gap, campus protests and the patriarchy.

In the second link just above, I said:

…I do not believe that social status is any more fundamental to human nature than murder is. Humans also possess reason and spiritual inclinations both of which can guide us away from status competition if we decide to do that and/or our conditions allow.

I still think that but over the past day or two a new understanding of the importance of status and human hierarchy has dawned on me. In essence, I think I have come to see that status really is a huge deal for many people; a much bigger deal than I had ever realized.

My explanation for that is people like me (and there are many of us) during childhood and adolescence see the “status game” as a choice. And we decide not to play it.

My SO made that choice. When we talked about this subject this morning, she said people like us are more open to art (in a broad sense) and less concerned with social hierarchies. I think that’s true. One good friend years ago used to call me a “now person,” meaning I am always living in the here and now and not doing a lot of planning for the future. I think she also meant or implied that I am not doing any thinking about my social status or the human hierarchies that surround me.

A Buddhist nun who is a close friend has often described mundane human behaviors as being motivated by jealousy. I have often disagreed with her, believing that her emphasis on jealousy was influenced too much by her culture (Chinese) or by the innocence of her monastic lifestyle.

Today, I think she was influenced by the status-conscious world she had grown up in and as a young adult renounced for Buddhism. But I also think she was able to see something I have been almost completely blind to. For me status has always been a very small cloud on the edge of the sky, not a major thunderstorm in human motivation. For her it is, or was, a storm in the human mind.

Status is a fetish. And fetishization does explain a lot about it. But if lots of people have that fetish or have that strong understanding of status, that’s how it is. As a social construct the status fetish can be even bigger and more imposing than the basic instinct it rests upon.

I hope this post helps people who see status as important understand people like me and my SO, and vice versa.

From a Buddhist point of view, I think it is important to fully understand the entire status spectrum—from instinct to fetishized sign—and to understand where you are on that spectrum and where the people you deal with are on that spectrum.

My guess is that most people reading this blog do not think of status as being very important. People like us need to appreciate that status is probably largely what motivates good people like Jordan Peterson as well as bad people like Bernie Madoff.

Might also be good if status-conscious people would understand that people like us are not all slackers or losers, nor are we seething with envy over your status. We mostly do not even see the game you are playing.

Consciousness as reality itself

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In Buddhism the idea that consciousness is reality and reality is conscious is called “mind only” or Yogachara.

David Ray Griffin, a process theologian, has come to similar conclusions—that reality is fundamentally conscious.

As has Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at UC Irvine.

Hoffman came at this subject from a mathematical angle, but arrived at a similar conclusion to Yogachara Buddhism. Hoffman says:

As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. (The Case Against Reality)

I tend to reach similar conclusions when I think about everything in terms of signals.

The advantage of thinking in terms of signals is we get a good picture of “reality” without needing to say what is real beyond the signal itself.

This kind of thinking is helpful for metaphysics but it is also extremely practical when it comes to human psychology.

Rather than posit personality types and what goes wrong or right with them, we analyze how people send and receive signals instead.

In thinking along these lines, I have come to the conclusion that most psychology as most people understand it uses “arms-length” language, the language of meso and macro signals rather than the much more precise language of the micro signals that actually comprise our shared “realities.”

The difference can be illustrated in this way: Rather than explain your most recent signal (sent or received) in terms of personality, explain it by accessing the micro-signals of short-term memory to find its true antecedents.

If you do this again and again by using a game such as FIML, you will probably come to conclusions similar to the above—that there is no deeper substance to psychological reality than your consciousness of it.

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first posted 08/05/17

Word and phrase valence as keys to understanding human psychology

~ ABN ~ 1 Comment

Since virtually everything we do, think, and feel has some linguistic component it follows that our perceived valences of words and phrases will be reliable indicators of our psychological makeup.

This is especially true if our perceptions of these valences is “captured” in fraught contexts in real-world, real-time situations.

To be even clearer and more precise, it is fair to say that it is only possible to capture actual real valences in real-world, real-time situations.

When we do not work with real-world, real-time situations, we are capable only of working with the idea of them, a theory of them, a memory of them. And none of that can possibly capture the actual valence as it actually functions in real-life.

The theory, memory, or idea of a psychological valence associated with words and phrases occurs at a different level of abstraction or cognition from the valence itself.

Theories, memories, and ideas of psychological valences can be very interesting and are worth pursuing, but they are not the thing itself and as such have only a weak capacity to grasp the psychology exposed by actual valences in action in the real-world.

In a post yesterday—Words and word groups mapped in the brain—I discussed the following video, which is well-worth viewing if you missed it the first time.

Yesterday, I said:

From these maps we can see that word groups have idiosyncratic arrangements, associations, and emphases.

And from this we can understand how analysis of interpersonal communication details can lead to beneficial changes in word group arrangements and thus also human psychology.

The video is very helpful for visualizing how words and word groups are organized in the brain. And this illustrates how and why FIML works as well as it does.

By “capturing” actual verbal psychological valences in real-time, real-world situations, partners gain immense insight into how their psychologies actually function in the real-world, how they actually deal with real life.

Focusing on very brief real-life valences has another very large benefit: though the valences are as real as they come, they are also very small, comprising nothing more than part of the working memory load at the time.

This is a bigger deal than it might seem. Virtually all of us have been trained by years of theorizing about our psychologies to see even very small incidents of real psychological valence as aspects of some theory or story about them.

No, no, no. Don’t do that. Just see each one for what it is—a brief valence that appeared briefly in working memory; and that has been “frozen” by the FIML technique as a small snapshot to be identified and understood as it is.

First get the evidence, get the data. Those valence snapshots are the data. Get plenty of them and you may find that you do not need any theory about what they are or what caused them.

They just are. Indeed, theorizing about them makes them different, bigger, or worse while simultaneously hiding their real nature.

Most of us do not know how to think about real-world, real-time valences because we tend to always fit them into into an a priori format, a format we already believe in. That could be a theory of psychology or a take on what our personality is or what the other person’s personality is.

In the maps shown in the video, that would constitute a whole brain response to a small valence that appeared only briefly.

By using the FIML technique, you will find it is much easier and much more beneficial to reorganize small parts of the verbal map one piece at a time than to reorganize the entire map all at once based on some idea.

In practice, FIML deals with more than just words and phrases, but the whole practice can be largely understood by seeing how it works with language. FIML treats gestures, tone of voice, expressions, and so on in the same way as language—by isolating brief incidents and analyzing them for what they really are.

Military thought experiment Part 1

~ ABN ~ 1 Comment

The game: Gain control of a large society by using a small number of military operatives.

Let’s use clandestine military operatives numbering .0001 of the targeted society.

100 million times .0001 = 10,000.

So 10,000 clandestine military operatives will play this game to win against a society with a population of 100 million.

The clandestine force can achieve its goal by:

  • infiltrating and blending into the large society
  • distributing 10,000 clandestine operatives widely across the society
  • this may take several generations
  • once in place, operatives identify natural leaders inside the host society
  • then they attack those natural leaders in such a way that they become poor leaders
  • this is better than killing them because they are rendered ineffective while their weaknesses demoralize others in the community
  • this method of attack is unlikely to be detected by law enforcement
  • they must be attacked in ways that are not easily discoverable, including socially, financially, reputationally, through bad grades, misdirection, poison, maiming, psychosurgery, and so on
  • it is best to begin attacking natural leaders while they are young and continue as long as effective, even for many decades
  • this tactic is greatly facilitated by hostile operatives being born and raised in the large society
  • at the same time operatives work to help those who favor their cause(s) or position(s)
  • this might include harming the competitors of those people being favored
  • within 20-30 years, social disorganization will be noticeable due to the large number of disabled natural leaders
  • within 50 years social disorganization will be obvious
  • during the same time-frame, people favored by the hostile operatives will gain positions of power
  • soon, the larger society will succumb to the hostile takeover and a small number of military operatives will have won against a much larger society

The cost is minimal and the methods are almost undetectable. Once achieved, the goal can be proclaimed a victory by those who gained it.

While the goal is being pursued, operatives will discover ways to extract resources from the host society, thus paying their own way without funding from abroad.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

____________________

first posted April 6, 2017

Wise words on Intelligent Compassion from Gelek Rimpoche

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Before I talk about love and compassion I would like to say one thing. Under the excuse of love and compassion, do not put yourself as the subject of abuse by anyone. To take abuse in the name of compassion is not right, but you cannot give up on the abuser either. You cannot say, “I cannot help that person. I don’t care.” You have to care and help, but with establishing your own needs first. If you make yourself the subject of abuse and then think you are helping, that is not right. Not only are you not helping that person, but you are damaging them. You are also hurting yourself. That is not compassion. That is stupidity. Compassion is not stupid. It is intelligent. It knows what is good and what is bad for that person and for you. Buddha’s compassion tells us, “Lead everyone to total enlightenment. Lead everyone to the state of Buddhahood.” That is compassion. (Intelligent Compassion Means Don’t Take Abuse)

Brain networks act dynamically, rapidly reorganizing on both spatial and temporal scales

~ ABN ~ 2 Comments

A new model of the brain is emerging from research that shows that:

The brain is highly dynamic, reorganizing its activity at different interacting spatial and temporal scales, including variation within and between brain networks.  (The spatial chronnectome reveals a dynamic interplay between functional segregation and integration)

Traditionally, models of brain activity have assumed networks were spatially more fixed. More information about this study can be found here: Structure of Brain Networks Is Not Fixed, Study Finds.

In Buddhist literature, it is frequently stated that one’s karma can be completely changed in the “duration of a single thought,” or words to that effect.

If we understand karma to mean the work or ongoing functional habits of the mind, and consider that in light of the above findings, we may fairly conclude that thousands of years of Buddhist practice have been based on valid insights into how our brains actually operate.

Buddhist concepts of non-attachment, emptiness, and impermanence can also be seen in this light. And this would apply both to individual psychology, group psychologies, or the cosmos itself from a Mind Only perspective.

A good tool to have is the understanding that even deep psychological states can be transformed in a moment’s time. Consider also that the Buddha did describe some individual traits as “persistent” or unchanging even after enlightenment.

Perfect communication is not possible (but greatly improved communication is)

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Human beings cannot possibly expect to communicate with each other perfectly. Perfect communication would require complete transfers of information with no ambiguity.

This point is fundamental to understanding why we need a method to frequently correct or adjust interpersonal communication in real-time.

If we do not have a method to do that, mistakes will inevitably cause problems, some of which will inevitably snowball.

TBH, I don’t understand why no one before me has figured the method out. Many have seen the problem in one way or another, but none has provided a way to fix it as far as I know.

To simplify the problem a bit, let’s just stick with language.

Language is ambiguous in and of itself. And when it is used for interpersonal communication it is fraught with ongoing and very significant ambiguities.

These ambiguities are so serious, I believe I can safely maintain that they account for a major component of our personalities. They may even be the major component.

Why does this seem so obvious to me but not to many others I speak with? I really do not know. Why didn’t Plato or Buddha or Laozi or Kant or Dostoevsky deal with this? I don’t know.

It’s possible the Buddha did privately or that’s what the Pythagorean’s secret was. Buddhist monks traveled in pairs and may have had a method to deal with interpersonal ambiguity.

If they did, I doubt it would be very different from my method, which you can find fully explained, free of charge here: FIML.

Please consider the problem of ambiguity before you undertake FIML.

Give ambiguity some real thought. Contemplate how it has affected your life in many ways you already know about. Then consider how many more ways you do not know about.

How many mistakes in communication—just due to ambiguity and consequent misunderstandings alone—have affected your life?

Watch for it and you will see ambiguity happening very often. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes insignificant, sometimes it’s tragic. The more there is, the worse it is.

When just two humans clear up almost all ambiguity between them (a process that must be constant like any other maintenance chore), amazing things begin to happen to their psychologies.

For each pair, what happens will be different because FIML is only a method. It has no content itself. What could be better than that?

Information streams plus interpersonal communication are the foundations of philosophical psychology

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In this context, an information stream is a stream of information that largely fills the minds of all who are in it such that they know much more about that information than any other.

They value that stream and believe it or believe in it more than any other stream. All human cognition and psychology is taken from and conditioned by primary information streams.

Information streams are essentially “religions.” They include all of the world’s religions in addition to other fundamental belief systems such as science, politics, atheism, a life of crime, and so on.

Interpersonal communication is the most intimate or subjectively honest communication an individual human engages in.

The quality of our subjective honesty defines human life on planet earth, especially conscious human life.

The following follows:

  • it is impossible for any individual human to know more than a few information streams well
  • very few, if any, humans have really good interpersonal communication; very few are deeply, effectively, and richly subjectively honest with anyone else
  • thus, virtually all humans are trapped within the confines of their information streams (“religions”) and their unrequited personal subjectivity
  • and thus as a substitute, we fight or feel sad or become narcissistic or seek reclusion or take drugs or pursue money and power or sports and so on

I would maintain that once you see the above trap we humans are in, if you are of sound mind, you will want to escape.

We can never fully escape our need for some information stream (we have to have something) but we can escape to some extent by knowing that there are many information streams and none of them (as far as we know) can claim perfect information.

And, though we can never fully escape subjective isolation, we can escape to some extent by doing FIML practice.

The best way to view information streams is learn about a good many of them and then assign probabilities to how true they seem to you.

For example, I might hold that a materialist explanation of the cosmos has a 10-15% chance of being completely correct and a 25% chance of being a valid part of a larger whole that is more correct but has not yet been determined or discovered.

Assigning percentages mainly helps the mind categorize and assign resources. This, in turn, affects what we read, talk about, and do.

In addition to the percentages provided above, I might assign another 25% to the Buddhadharma and another 25% to the Buddhadharma plus all of the other world religions. Then I might assign 15% to the invented God argument and then some to the simulation argument and so on.

You can do this in any way that suits you. Your percentages don’t have to add up to one hundred, but it is good to have at least a rough calculus to provide some order to the many streams of information available to us.

My own percentages go up and down. The largest one is I cannot honestly be sure of very much but believe it is profoundly worth trying to be more sure or better at trying.

I believe the above description plus having some dedication to an endeavor sort of like that is a good definition of philosophical psychology.

To my eye, philosophical psychology is a good information stream to be in because it stresses how we think and what we think about while also paying full attention to our humanity.

Ambiguity in speech as the source of most psychology

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Genes aside, I believe ambiguity in speech and its consequent cascades of error are at the root of virtually all human psychology, both good and bad.

And this goes back in time as far as we can imagine because the problem of ambiguity in speech was there for your parents, your grandparents, and everyone else who came before you. And the same is true for everyone else in the world.

All cultures everywhere are both burdened and determined by this problem.

(The only exceptions are specialist “cultures” that make a point of removing error from their communication systems, such as mathematics, hard sciences, engineering, some branches of linguistics, etc. The people in these cultures only avoid the problem while working or speaking within their specialist culture. When at home or off the job, their psychologies are the same as the rest of us. In fact, smart as many of those people are, I bet few of them have ever considered how inaccurate their common speech is or how error-ridden their listening is, to say nothing of how profoundly that messes up their psychologies.)

Ambiguity in speech comes from inaccurate words and phrases, our strong tendencies to want to keep the wrong parts of speaking too short, our fear of open, truthful speech, our hyper-focus on wording and typical refusal to allow people to take back or alter their words or our inability to see the need for that, our strong tendency to believe we know what others mean, our constant need to grab meaning on the fly, or extract it from gestures or tone of voice, the brevity of most speech acts, our fear of being wrong or saying the wrong thing (legitimate fears given the foregoing), our practical incapacity to describe our own subjectivity or even know it, our inability to get other people’s subjectivity from them because they also suck at this.

I could go on, but let’s just take one item from this loose list—our typical refusal to allow people to take back or alter their words or our inability to see the need for that.

Of course other people do this to us too. And when they do, we rarely know how to deal with it. Even when we try, it often turns out badly because our attempts are stereotypically taken as excuses or apologies.  Moreover, taking something back usually only involves glaring stuff that someone might have felt was “offensive” or that we believe reflects badly on us.

Even worse, let’s say you have taken something back successfully or rephrased it and explained everything perfectly to all parties’ satisfaction. When was the last time you did it? How often do you do it?

Not much, I bet. Because if you do do it often, almost everyone will think you have a loose screw.

How often should you rephrase something you said or allow another to do that?

The right answer is at least several times per hour of conversation.

When we don’t do that, ambiguity flourishes. Meanings are imagined. Guesswork replaces knowing. In response, everyone’s psychologies become confused or rigid. We act roles rather than life.

How can we claim to know anything about human psychology without acknowledging that almost anything with psychological import that anyone ever says to anyone is sure to be riddled with error and ambiguity?

And even when it’s not, 1) it’s very hard to know when that is and 2) the event is so rare it’s like a bird that stops flapping its wings and falls to the ground.

 

Our need to stimulate the brain stem by pushing through difficulties or challenging our senses

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…Here’s the crucial part: This expectation is likely to extend the effects of stress-induced pain relief beyond immediate cold exposure. If such an expectation – “I confronted the cold and feel invigorated” – is fulfilled, it will lead to the release of additional opioids or cannabinoids from the periaqueductal gray. This release can affect the levels of neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine, further enhancing a feeling of overall well-being. This positive feedback loop is implicated in the well-known “placebo effect.”

More generally, techniques such as those Hof uses appear to exert positive effects on the body’s innate immune response as well. We expect them to also have positive effects on mood and anxiety because of the release of opioids and cannabinoids. Though these effects have not yet been well studied, by evoking a stress-induced analgesia reaction, we think that practitioners may assert “control” over key components of brain systems related to mood and anxiety.

At present, millions of people use drugs to help with feelings of depression and anxiety. Many of these drugs carry unwelcome side effects. Behavioral modification techniques that train users in ways to influence their brain’s homeostatic system could someday provide some patients with drug-free alternatives. Efforts to understand links between the brain’s physiology and its psychology may indeed hold the promise for a happier life. (Cold comfort: exposure to chilly temperatures may help fight anxiety)

This article describes a very interesting finding that seems to explain why some people like intense sports such as rock climbing, motorcycling, free diving, skiing, and so on.

It also seems to explain why toughing it out is often the best medicine for what ails us or the best method for moving forward with our lives.

Intense religious practices, chanting, long meditations, silence retreats also seem to be drawing on stimulating the periaqueductal gray area of the brain stem.

To some extent, FIML practice does something like this by stopping conditioned and instinctual responses as soon after they have arisen as possible. Doing this requires a mental toughness and perceptual acuity that frequently carries over to other activities.