I try to remember that our symbolic mapping systems - our ideology and beliefs and even daily thoughts - tend to bend and morph around our emotional states, much like river water bulges up around underlying rock.
With happiness and elation, the thoughts erupt and hang together like mountains.
Sadness leads to linked thoughts deflating and pulling each other down.
Not sure how this all works out really. A sketch for later, to be sure.
A useful concept for metacognition though.
Thursday, February 28, 2013
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Flames
We all waver a bit. We get blown around and our flames flicker a bit, in danger of going out. Some do go out. There are those however that burn brightly and true, that flicker back even after being blown on. They let us breathe without fear. Thank goodness for them.
Judgment
Sometimes I judge. My judgments take on the character of whatever pole I happen to occupy at the extreme ends of my bipolarity. As such, I consider incessant judgment to be a weakness, a weakness that should be exercised away at every conscious opportunity.
One problem with judgment is that it often washes back onto the judge. Each of us is many different things at many different times. It is well-documented that we imply psychological bias often, attributing extrinsic circumstances to our failures and intrinsic circumstances to our success or vice versa depending on personality. The same goes with what we think about others.
We are indeed products of the environment, but we also act on that environment, changing it ever so slightly to bring it in line with our own characters, characters that are in turn formed by exertions emanating from the said environment. There is no clear way of determining the direction of causation. To determine causation, to state for example that I am who I am because of the environment I grew up in, is to construct an artificial narrative, a narrative that is useful for navigating and manipulating the real world but that should be recognized as a disposable fiction, should the facts point in another direction at another time.
It is OK to create such fictions. If a man lunges at me with a knife, perhaps it is not cosmically true that he is my absolute enemy - maybe he is hallucinating that I am a demon, or maybe he is swinging at something behind me, or maybe he is in a temporary state of great pain and must exercise his anger - but it suits me just fine to judge him as an enemy for the time being. Both of us cannot exist at the same time in such an instance.
But getting into the habit of proclaiming judgments is highly problematic too. A judgment can function as a transgression, with the judged altering their behavior to repay the perceived judgment. For example, if I tell someone they are not trustworthy, that person is less likely to value my trust in the future, acting in ways to spite me. Judgment creates a closed circuit that limits ranges of behavior.
Things get very dangerous when we crown our judgments with the air of the absolute. When we begin to believe our judgments take their justification from eternal laws, we act to fulfill those laws even when the behavior contradicts other corollary moral laws.
For example, nestled in Christian ideology is the belief that sex is unclean. Such a judgment varies in its intensity depending on the personality interpreting the abstract principle. Certain rules and procedures crop up to ameliorate the effects of the judgment, such as marriage, or at least the Christian conception of marriage. Now such a judgment was understandable at a time when the decadent denizens of the Roman Empire instrumentalized the act of sex and debased its meaning, with a polarity arising around who gets to enjoy the act: the rich vs. the poor.
But such a judgment when calcified into an eternal law becomes constricting and damaging. Repressive attitudes on sex have probably warped our cultural sexual health in profound ways. Wilhelm Reich argued somewhat persuasively that such attitudes contributed to the rise of fascism in Germany.
So what is to be done? Perhaps in order to avoid over-judging in intellectual matters or under-judging in life or death matters, we should endeavor to strengthen our regulative apparatus that judges judgments. Agh, but such a solution carries problems of its own. To each his own then.
One problem with judgment is that it often washes back onto the judge. Each of us is many different things at many different times. It is well-documented that we imply psychological bias often, attributing extrinsic circumstances to our failures and intrinsic circumstances to our success or vice versa depending on personality. The same goes with what we think about others.
We are indeed products of the environment, but we also act on that environment, changing it ever so slightly to bring it in line with our own characters, characters that are in turn formed by exertions emanating from the said environment. There is no clear way of determining the direction of causation. To determine causation, to state for example that I am who I am because of the environment I grew up in, is to construct an artificial narrative, a narrative that is useful for navigating and manipulating the real world but that should be recognized as a disposable fiction, should the facts point in another direction at another time.
It is OK to create such fictions. If a man lunges at me with a knife, perhaps it is not cosmically true that he is my absolute enemy - maybe he is hallucinating that I am a demon, or maybe he is swinging at something behind me, or maybe he is in a temporary state of great pain and must exercise his anger - but it suits me just fine to judge him as an enemy for the time being. Both of us cannot exist at the same time in such an instance.
But getting into the habit of proclaiming judgments is highly problematic too. A judgment can function as a transgression, with the judged altering their behavior to repay the perceived judgment. For example, if I tell someone they are not trustworthy, that person is less likely to value my trust in the future, acting in ways to spite me. Judgment creates a closed circuit that limits ranges of behavior.
Things get very dangerous when we crown our judgments with the air of the absolute. When we begin to believe our judgments take their justification from eternal laws, we act to fulfill those laws even when the behavior contradicts other corollary moral laws.
For example, nestled in Christian ideology is the belief that sex is unclean. Such a judgment varies in its intensity depending on the personality interpreting the abstract principle. Certain rules and procedures crop up to ameliorate the effects of the judgment, such as marriage, or at least the Christian conception of marriage. Now such a judgment was understandable at a time when the decadent denizens of the Roman Empire instrumentalized the act of sex and debased its meaning, with a polarity arising around who gets to enjoy the act: the rich vs. the poor.
But such a judgment when calcified into an eternal law becomes constricting and damaging. Repressive attitudes on sex have probably warped our cultural sexual health in profound ways. Wilhelm Reich argued somewhat persuasively that such attitudes contributed to the rise of fascism in Germany.
So what is to be done? Perhaps in order to avoid over-judging in intellectual matters or under-judging in life or death matters, we should endeavor to strengthen our regulative apparatus that judges judgments. Agh, but such a solution carries problems of its own. To each his own then.
Saturday, February 16, 2013
A Quick Snapper
Diversity alleviates stagnation. Well, it is the antithesis of stagnation...insofar as it serves as one of the chief characteristics of dynamism. Hermetically sealed, your ideas reach a maximum extension and then become reflexive: they curve back on themselves. Only until you communicate with another intelligence can you make connections beyond the limits of your own blindspots...and continue to grow.
Thursday, February 07, 2013
Cherry on Top
It is also worth recording - to fix the image in my head - a dream I had last night. I was hanging out with an old neighbor in an old neighborhood and I was suddenly visited by two beautiful little bright red cats. Yes they were bright red, a little on the magenta side. They came to the window with large eyes and I went outside and they playfully jumped on my head. I sat down on the street and scratched them. Spiders and worms crawled on the street under me but I didn't care.
So Much Work To Do
Agh so much work to do today! Article upon article to write. Truly dull drudgery. I have too much to do. Lots of reading to do. Lots of music to make. Lots of things to write about that are much more important than this. Lots of just...living to do. I feel held back, suffocated, and fragmented as a consequence.
It isn't necessarily mechanical labor that I despise. We should all be doing our share of mechanical labor, whether physical, social, or intellectual. It is good for us besides.
No, I take issue with disembodied mechanical labor. Labor that goes towards ends that I can't bring myself to care about. Take the difference between painting one's room and working for some company. The motions of painting can be hypnotizing and zen-like. The labor itself produces a beautiful result: a room painted the color you would like to feel!
Ah but working for a company. Toiling in all these tissues of lower economic activity, embedded in the overwrought fats of empire! An empire that has gone insane no less. Insane as a result of the violent clash between illusory convictions of absolute power and the very real reality of declining power. These convictions are transmitted to the mass populace. Many believe them. A world of illusion within a world. Remarkable.
And here we go, sending flying robots over foreign lands and bombing the shit out of them. What decent person would care about supporting such a thing! Ah but we can't help it because we are a body. We are forced to exist as contradictory individuals for now. Perhaps as the cell splits, it is forced temporarily to be two things at once. Living contradiction. Schizophrenia. Of course, this could all be nonsense too.
Nevertheless, the ideas beckon. Money ties us to empire like blood ties cells to a greater body. It is the way of things for now. On to the work. Move with the flow, bow to the blows. Avoid being a jerk. And so on with various other rhymes.
It isn't necessarily mechanical labor that I despise. We should all be doing our share of mechanical labor, whether physical, social, or intellectual. It is good for us besides.
No, I take issue with disembodied mechanical labor. Labor that goes towards ends that I can't bring myself to care about. Take the difference between painting one's room and working for some company. The motions of painting can be hypnotizing and zen-like. The labor itself produces a beautiful result: a room painted the color you would like to feel!
Ah but working for a company. Toiling in all these tissues of lower economic activity, embedded in the overwrought fats of empire! An empire that has gone insane no less. Insane as a result of the violent clash between illusory convictions of absolute power and the very real reality of declining power. These convictions are transmitted to the mass populace. Many believe them. A world of illusion within a world. Remarkable.
And here we go, sending flying robots over foreign lands and bombing the shit out of them. What decent person would care about supporting such a thing! Ah but we can't help it because we are a body. We are forced to exist as contradictory individuals for now. Perhaps as the cell splits, it is forced temporarily to be two things at once. Living contradiction. Schizophrenia. Of course, this could all be nonsense too.
Nevertheless, the ideas beckon. Money ties us to empire like blood ties cells to a greater body. It is the way of things for now. On to the work. Move with the flow, bow to the blows. Avoid being a jerk. And so on with various other rhymes.
Bubbles on the Surface of Dirty Water in a Dirty, Cracked Bowl
The Buddhists are definitely right about this: you can find eternity in the micro if you look closely enough, and you know what to look for. Painting after painting of grass (or leaves) and many of us Westerners can't but shrug. But to them these are splendid displays of the eternal laws of nature, at work in the dancing greenery right below our noses.
So here we have a dirty bowl sitting in the sink, an edge of it broken off. It is filled with sink water, and on the surface of the water is a curious landscape. At the bottom left quadrant sprawls a constellation of bubbles both large and small. The bubbles cohere together, generally with the small ones scattered around the edges of the large. The bubbles hold each other in position by the outer edges of neighboring bubbles. The largest bubbles, upon reaching the limits of their extension, suddenly pop, with many of the small outer bubbles spilling into the vacuum left behind. The bubbles themselves exist as a function of the tension generated by the inner and outer pressure of air bodies existing on either side of a thin membrane of water. Pieces of this bubble continent break apart as the larger bubbles pop, causing segments of the body to drift in various directions after being pushed away by the force of the pop. Such a continent seems to have formed after the initial force of sink water crashing down onto the water's surface.
Even more curious however is the smaller configuration of bubbles drifting around in the upper right quadrant. This configuration is being formed from the single feed of air bubbles rising up from somewhere on the bowl's bottom. As these single, more uniformly-sized bubbles rise, they push themselves in formation, forming a staggered pattern of interlocking bubbles. This configuration appears more orderly with clear, delineated rows. It seems as if order in this case arises out of the repetition of relatively uniform elements.
I'm not entirely sure this smaller configuration of bubbles is more orderly in an objective sense. Isn't this larger constellation of supposedly chaotic bubble formation just as orderly, in the sense that it formed exactly as it should have, considering the violence of the crashing water? Doesn't this smaller configuration of bubbles just appear more orderly to my brain because of its uniform, repeated elements that can be more clearly read as a pattern?
It seems the sciences themselves, up until now, have taken it upon themselves to focus on the patterns that appear most intelligible to our own pattern-recognition software, so to speak. The patterns that cohere cleanly and present themselves as intelligible designs that can be catalogued into our informational systems. That of course goes for metaphysics, political theory, history, and numerous other intellectual specialties as well.
Our own concept of chaos seems strange. Here we have this supposedly ordered world governed by pretty dependable natural laws, with these great dark clouds of unintelligible chaos somehow thrust right into the middle of it! I do realize I may be presenting a strawman argument. In the past couple of decades the sciences have slowly drifted into uncharted territories, further developing notions of chaos, and now there is a great collective sense that each of our frayed specialties must be weaved together. Now is the time to pull away from the microscope, and question the larger structure of what it is we have been looking at so closely.
Haha! I laugh at myself because at certain points I feel as if I've stumbled on some vast hidden truth, but then realize that many people around the world now collectively sense this necessity for an expanded concept of order, and a deeper investigation and questioning of the concept of chaos.
And we'd better become quite comfortable with these new conceptions! As global capitalism, spearheaded by U.S. empire continues to strain itself, we find ourselves wondering whether this coherent, but corrupted system of supposed "order" will hold much longer. I can't help but wonder anyways. It has become a bit of an obsession. But it is an obsession I'm quite comfortable with now.
Regardless, we may eventually find ourselves in a turbulent world in which the old definition of intelligible order no longer applies. And we should become quite comfortable with the new. I know I've expressed that it can be quite nice to walk in the dark. It is a bipolar world, not without its nightly horrors, but worth getting to know, not only to taste bliss as well, but to experience the transcendent: a sublime fusion of the two.
We should become well acquainted with those supposedly mysterious forces that swirl about under our rational symbolic maps of order. They've always been there. Hypnosis, dialogue therapy, psychedelic drugs, meditation...more and more of us seek to face those bucking emotions being held tight under our rational countenances. In a stable world we could control those forces and subdue them and bury them under prescription drugs and distractions. But ask any student with thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, or someone being illegally foreclosed upon, or even better, a member of the impoverished who knows these strange turbulent lands well: they are forces that cannot be ignored forever.
So here we have a dirty bowl sitting in the sink, an edge of it broken off. It is filled with sink water, and on the surface of the water is a curious landscape. At the bottom left quadrant sprawls a constellation of bubbles both large and small. The bubbles cohere together, generally with the small ones scattered around the edges of the large. The bubbles hold each other in position by the outer edges of neighboring bubbles. The largest bubbles, upon reaching the limits of their extension, suddenly pop, with many of the small outer bubbles spilling into the vacuum left behind. The bubbles themselves exist as a function of the tension generated by the inner and outer pressure of air bodies existing on either side of a thin membrane of water. Pieces of this bubble continent break apart as the larger bubbles pop, causing segments of the body to drift in various directions after being pushed away by the force of the pop. Such a continent seems to have formed after the initial force of sink water crashing down onto the water's surface.
Even more curious however is the smaller configuration of bubbles drifting around in the upper right quadrant. This configuration is being formed from the single feed of air bubbles rising up from somewhere on the bowl's bottom. As these single, more uniformly-sized bubbles rise, they push themselves in formation, forming a staggered pattern of interlocking bubbles. This configuration appears more orderly with clear, delineated rows. It seems as if order in this case arises out of the repetition of relatively uniform elements.
I'm not entirely sure this smaller configuration of bubbles is more orderly in an objective sense. Isn't this larger constellation of supposedly chaotic bubble formation just as orderly, in the sense that it formed exactly as it should have, considering the violence of the crashing water? Doesn't this smaller configuration of bubbles just appear more orderly to my brain because of its uniform, repeated elements that can be more clearly read as a pattern?
It seems the sciences themselves, up until now, have taken it upon themselves to focus on the patterns that appear most intelligible to our own pattern-recognition software, so to speak. The patterns that cohere cleanly and present themselves as intelligible designs that can be catalogued into our informational systems. That of course goes for metaphysics, political theory, history, and numerous other intellectual specialties as well.
Our own concept of chaos seems strange. Here we have this supposedly ordered world governed by pretty dependable natural laws, with these great dark clouds of unintelligible chaos somehow thrust right into the middle of it! I do realize I may be presenting a strawman argument. In the past couple of decades the sciences have slowly drifted into uncharted territories, further developing notions of chaos, and now there is a great collective sense that each of our frayed specialties must be weaved together. Now is the time to pull away from the microscope, and question the larger structure of what it is we have been looking at so closely.
Haha! I laugh at myself because at certain points I feel as if I've stumbled on some vast hidden truth, but then realize that many people around the world now collectively sense this necessity for an expanded concept of order, and a deeper investigation and questioning of the concept of chaos.
And we'd better become quite comfortable with these new conceptions! As global capitalism, spearheaded by U.S. empire continues to strain itself, we find ourselves wondering whether this coherent, but corrupted system of supposed "order" will hold much longer. I can't help but wonder anyways. It has become a bit of an obsession. But it is an obsession I'm quite comfortable with now.
Regardless, we may eventually find ourselves in a turbulent world in which the old definition of intelligible order no longer applies. And we should become quite comfortable with the new. I know I've expressed that it can be quite nice to walk in the dark. It is a bipolar world, not without its nightly horrors, but worth getting to know, not only to taste bliss as well, but to experience the transcendent: a sublime fusion of the two.
We should become well acquainted with those supposedly mysterious forces that swirl about under our rational symbolic maps of order. They've always been there. Hypnosis, dialogue therapy, psychedelic drugs, meditation...more and more of us seek to face those bucking emotions being held tight under our rational countenances. In a stable world we could control those forces and subdue them and bury them under prescription drugs and distractions. But ask any student with thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, or someone being illegally foreclosed upon, or even better, a member of the impoverished who knows these strange turbulent lands well: they are forces that cannot be ignored forever.
Friday, February 01, 2013
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