Learning Programming Languages/Natural Languages

When you learn a new discipline, what you fail to pay attention to can be just as useful as what you do in fact pay attention to.

Language is very interesting. It occupies a bridge between reflex and reason. Though symbolic in nature, the usage of language itself depends on a sort of unconscious association, a form of muscle memory that one doesn't have to think about to implement. So you have programming, which is a general discipline, but requires the knowledge and skill of a programming language to carry out. The same with various forms of written and oral communications, and even arts: their implementation presupposes competency with language, a symbolic chain which induces in the brain a corresponding chain of events.

Given my habits of thought, it is very difficult to learn programming language quickly. I want to scrutinize every command, and understand the most minuscule mechanics behind them, which in the end disrupts one's fluency with the language when it comes to building greater abstractions on the abstractions.

So if you are pursuing a complex discipline, it is better that the lower level abstractions are hidden from view, and reflexive. I suspect this is part of what makes learning language difficult as an adult. As a child, you don't think logically about the words and grammar structures you are attempting to use, you simply pick them up out of imitation and reflex (and your innate language capabilities take the rest from there), because well, you don't even have that full reasoning capability up and running yet.

Which in the end works in your favor. You don't need to understand the mechanics of the words to use them correctly - though you do use very basic, binary logical processes to determine whether a given word or structure is correct, which is still closer to reflex than it is to reasoning. When you do achieve an acceptable level of fluency, you can use your unused capacity to generate more sophisticated structures of meaning, or go back and scrutinize the mechanics of the words themselves as an etymologist.  

It would be lovely if I could simply force my brain to operate temporarily on that lower level, to learn the language reflexively so I can go on to put the language to use on higher level tasks, but the reasoning and inquiry is relentless. So it is repetition and repetition and repetition that saves the day then.

Kindness and Cruelty Aren't So Simple

It takes energy to be kind. Kindness must override the reciprocal impulses to retaliation when one is slighted or hurt. Kindness is that binding impulse which kicks in to counter reaction between constituent elements embedded within a whole, which upon setting off cascades of sympathetic reaction threatens to dismantle that whole.

It is good to be kind. Thank goodness for kindness in a society that produces cruelty like bolts in a storm.

But if it were for unconditional kindness all the time, we'd be stuck with the first tyrant that rose, which, to be fair, would be impossible if it were for universal kindness, but there is nothing that can be done to control the other, and cruelty is as human as kindness.

If a whole is cruel, then kindness between constituents of the whole preserves that cruelty, so that this kindness is cruelty in disguise, and that cruelty against the cruel may very well be an act of kindness in come cases.

To make matters worse, or better, if you are a fan of metaphysical ambiguities, it is not always easy to pick and choose. To be cruel is to strengthen the impulse to cruelty, which can generalize, and to be kind is to strengthen the impulse to kindness, which can generalize as well. What you are and what you do strengthens those pathways; it makes it more so. 

So beware of dualities, such as in kindness and cruelty. Where there is a duality, be prepared for cascading dualities nested within a given polar symbol.

At this point, I don''t have the confidence to point out any given path or solution. As creatures of logic, we attempt to align our behaviors in accordance with guiding symbols, but these symbols lack the richness of lived experience. In a time of great and turbulent change, you can attempt to be what you think you are, but the world is a certain way too, and the world will act on you with or without your approval.

But in the same way, taking into account the dialectic nature of reality, one's overriding kindness could be seen to be a product of the world, and projecting kindness into a cruel state of affairs is to act on the world in turn. 

To sit and think is to understand, but too much thinking and one becomes blind. It takes doing, along with the thinking, to know.

New Year Indeed

I've been able to come out with various scattered writings, many of them probably rehashes of older ideas, and probably not very good pieces either, but oh well. I still feel the need to write and express these ideas and get them down.

I'm facing this state of affairs because I'm currently doing many things at once. I've taken to learning programming, and learning more about working with the earth and simpler technologies, on top of working to pay the bills, and maintain all of my other skills such as writing, reading, and making music, lest they atrophy. This is all on top of maintaining various relationships, helping maintain a collective living space, taking care of various animals, putting in the necessary exercise, nutrition, and meditation to maintain sanity, and etc.

Feeling a bit strained, but hopefully growing nonetheless. I probably won't have a whole lot to contribute, and the quality of said contributions may be less than what I hope, but I have some other pieces I'm mulling over at the moment, so there's that.

Programming especially entails learning to think a completely different way than I have been, which itself may very well produce some interesting philosophy. We'll see.

Trusting

When you have a complex society that relies on the division of labor to function, you have these insulated subcultures which develop within the divisions.

This insulation occurs because of human cognitive limits and tribal tendencies. A discipline grows more complex with various subdivisions over time as the basic concepts are mastered, and adherents to a given school continue to progress, creating new branches through their changing personalities and the changing constitution of society itself. Technological progress in all directions further complicates this process.

This seems to happen in cycles: metaphysical concepts are produced to account for phenomena outside the scope of empirical, or practical knowledge, with heirs in agreement with these concepts locating the concepts in more concrete and technical terms.

As this progresses in every direction, the mind's powers of cognition can only take so much. It becomes impossible to take in these expanding stores of theoretical and practical knowledge, so that subdivisions are made in the various disciplines, and students within these subdivisions can communicate with each other.

Students with overlapping disciplines can communicate with each other, and bridge separate but interrelated disciplines. Further out though, and a given discipline can require so many resources that one individual has to commit to a remote, isolated subdivision, with its own language and eventually culture.

In a stable time, in which levels of trust are relatively high, and everyone is connected and communicating with someone else and there is a general trust in the continuity of the larger project, this arrangement poses no problem. Subdivisions communicate amongst themselves, which communicate within broader categories, and so on up the chain. It all holds together.

In stressed times, in which trust drops, communication begins to wane, and each isolated subculture or discipline finds itself stranded, as if trapped on an island. There is a collapse in confidence that the greater body is continuous, and that each link - so on down to subcultures and disciplines that are remote - becomes suspect.

So each individual seeks to take on more disciplines, so as to bridge those gaps in information and action. This helps immensely, but the human mind can only take so much information. Bridging numerous disciplines - each of which has become incredibly complex - can be an incredibly strenuous undertaking.

One becomes unsteady in one's weak areas. If one given subculture is trying to solve these complex problems on its own, through its own lens and language, it denies other sectors of society. It opens a vast blindspot. Multiply this conflict a thousand-fold, with every other subculture insisting on its own solution, and you have all the necessary information blasted into endless fragments, and a population agitating and thrashing against itself.

It takes both a multi-disciplinary approach and a restoration of trust. One should open up lines of communication once again between disciplines through one's own individual efforts, but at the same time, trust others to fill in the gaps, to pick up where one is weak. This is the most difficult part.

Personality and Material Power

An individual or class in control of key resources or structures tends to project their personality, and effectively transforms the collective living environment in accordance with the dictates of the dominant personality. If you have the power of violence, however implicit  (it is violent to deny someone resources or shelter if they aren't doing what you like), you have the power to assert your will.

Intentional Communities

People bond around problem solving and creative tendencies. You'll notice that people who are really intense, really "into it" are much more comfortable talking about their work or subjects that are close to their work or the endeavors which are closest to them.

Language binds. If you can't get into the language, if you can't respond to it, and produce it yourself, you're out. If you want to get in with people, you have to talk the talk, and walk the walk, as the cliche goes. It is unfortunate, but a human tendency nonetheless, one that can lead to xenophobia at the more extreme ends.

Openness seems to come with security, and things close as insecurity rises, which is an obvious enough association I suppose.

Bad Dialogue

Surveying the early stirrings of political and religious violence cycles, one begins to see a faint pattern, which isn't all that different from patterns of neural learning, or "un-learning" in this case - destruction actually begins to resemble a deliberate construction in reverse. What seems like random, isolated acts of violence - which don't necessarily have to be random, but which can occur along certain subterranean political or cultural fault lines - becomes patterned in its repetition, which opens up a sort of corridor, or highway in which a reliable exchange of dialogue occurs. The traffic carves out a pathway, that grows all the more deeper as the traffic self-regulates and becomes visible.

So what was once a constant but invisible (invisible to mainstream perception anyways) pitter-patter of police violence against minorities, or military and collateral violence in the Middle East, becomes a pathway as the violence takes on greater symbolic meaning, in which both sides exchange a dialogue of violence, a dialogue which contains in its logic mechanisms of positive feedback, so that the pathways must deepen and amplify until there is a resolution. What that resolution will look like is another story.

Monarchs Cont'd

It is worth noting that the distortions caused by monarchical social arrangements are contingent on the state of culture itself.

It is easy to imagine that 1,000 years ago there were stable monarchical societies which functioned the way they did because of existing metaphysical frameworks that a vast majority of the populace believed in.

Today it is a less effective mode of governing, or even arranging social organizations, because of what a vast majority of the populace believes: that each person is equal before the law in the eyes of their peers, and that each has the implicit opportunity to rise as high in the hierarchy as possible. The instability in this case arises from contradictions between particular arrangements and a system-wide integrity which is held in place by mutual beliefs.

Of course, it can get much more complicated. This universal belief is slowly being whittled away as the highways of personal advancement die out, and the shape of the overall structure hardens, so that large swathes of the population will become desperate for a charismatic leader who promises some sort of actionable direction, other than stagnation and slow disintegration.

But at the same time this impulse is very dangerous. The resent that ambitious individuals feel upon being denied their ascent will not simply go away. Many Americans are horrified of any attempt at domination by their peers: the rugged individualist sensibility remains, so that the further the ambitious are denied power, the greater they crave it, setting the stage for an unstable and explosive arms race.

So the advice of Buddhists and Daoists in this case becomes much more clear: become as water, for rigid things under pressure break, which releases energy proportionate to the sum of force required to break them. When you have many rigid things that are breaking at once, well, you have yourself some amplification.

Monarchs

If you wish to be a monarch, dictator, creative tyrant, commercial monopolist, or what have you, you better be prepared to be surrounded by fools, thugs, and back-stabbers. The existence of an absolutist leader requires the existence of mindless followers and militant enforcers to rule over and to hold the shape of this mountainous topography. In other words, it requires a field of surrounding life which is denied agency, which must animate in the direction of the will of the autocrat.

Further, the nature of concentrated power is to antagonize its surroundings, ultimately to produce replicas of itself, which crash. Not only this, concentrated power antagonizes its own body, the points of contact which buttress it.

To coexist with great love and passion is to allow the sources of these things to run their course; they exist for their own sake: to simply be. They erupt where they will; they cannot be forced out like juice from a lemon or some disposable commodity.

Problem Solving

Inability to solve a problem - a problem that matters to the subject - results in frustration, a temporary confused state which passes, almost like a sneeze, jump-starting some glitch that the mind caught on. As failure is repeated, the mind becomes numb and the subject is faced with the decision to abandon the problem.

If you couple the failure of multiple problems - and this can be problems on different tiers of functioning, such as thinking failures due to nutrition or agitation, coupled with failures to fix a piece of machinery - a general state of frustrated confusion sets in, which can actually cause further failures, unless the subject turns away from the problem temporarily. Here we can easily see the development of negative feedback loops that interact with each other, eventually bottoming out when the subject turns away from the problem.

The closer the failure to solve problems puts the subject in mortal jeopardy, the more a general state of fear mounts, which causes confusion and all sorts of distortions. This is a curious phenomenon: it doesn't seem to help the subject solve a problem. It could better be described as a fire that grows and takes on a life of its own as it is fed, and this fire can run away and seek its own expressions; in this case it would destroy faculties of problem solving and kick the subject into another system of logic: that of fear and its fight or flight responses, the success of which can vary in different contexts.

Conversely, to solve a problem can cause a burst of euphoria. The subject becomes confident and enters a state of flow, better able to solve a successive chain of related problems, or even unrelated problems in some cases. Confidence and ability expand until the process plateaus from lack of problems, or novel problems which don't have an immediately discernible path of solution.

Weight Shift

This is a time of perpetual discomfort. One is constantly shifting one's weight, to attempt to achieve some new stable constellation of being which spares one pain, which can take the form of anything from minor changes in habit to major changes in lifestyle, but all of which is often fleeting nevertheless. This is the case because one is part of a massive process of contraction and shift. One is necessarily a part of falling empire, whether inside it or out. One is even part of the beginning of the end of a civilization, a thousand year old meta-organism, if one can begin to describe it.

All human relations are necessarily implied in one's person: one is acted on by one's peers, one's peers are acted on by their peers, and their peers are acted on by further peers, and so on.

Though uncomfortable, this is not a state of affairs to be afraid of. It is what is happening and is what will happen yet. Still, there are always ways to shift to positions of comfort, at least temporarily. There is always room to breathe.