Everything felt like it had been spinning for what seemed
like eternity, until it all suddenly stopped and I opened my eyes. Was I still spinning? That's the funny thing about being born
and living on a planet your entire life.Everything and everyone you know is spinning relative to everything
else, making it seem as if nothing is moving at all, when it’s really all
spinning very fast indeed.If you
actually do stop and remain still in exactly one point in space and time, your
perspective on everything changes instantly.You see everything and everyone from an entirely different viewpoint and
there’s no going back to the way it was before.
I remembered all the stories I had learned in school and
everything I had been taught by my family, and from this new and strangely
static vantage point, I saw it all differently.I knew which stories were only showing one side, or two sides, or no
sides at all, and genuinely remained a mystery.I could see all the stories all at once, where the holes in them had been filled by comfortable lies,
and where uncomfortable gaps had been intentionally left to warn those who
could read between the lies, so as not to question the official story too much.
“Morning”, grumbled Dan, looking at me with a face that
matched the tone of his scraggly voice, clearly before he had his morning
coffee.
It was 8:30 in the morning and the rest of my co-workers had
yet to arrive.I logged into my workstation
in my cubicle, typing in my 24-character password with capital letters, numbers
and special characters all required, and changed every 60 days as per company
policy.Pretty standard for most
industries, but I couldn’t get passed the feeling that I was being conditioned
into an automaton, being tasked to do, and remember increasingly pointless things and recite increasingly out-dated information every morning, for some more nefarious purpose.Is that a normal thought?Should I be having this thought?
“Sup, John!” Enrique said, nodding in my direction.
“Wassup, senor Taco!”I said, smiling back.Senor Taco
was Enrique’s favorite local restaurant and a man who loved his tacos.
My brain spits out “taco cat is taco cat spelled backwards”
somewhere in its deep recesses, as I type my password in yet again, as
two-factor authentication (also industry standard) requires my intervention so
I can log into my ticketing system.I
type my password into computers dozens of a time a day, everyday, without
thinking, yet thinking stupid little facts about things like taco cats.This knowledge is useless, yet infinitely
more rewarding and meaningful than actually thinking what my password
characters are.Fortunately, my fingers
know what my password is much faster than my brain does, as I try not to think
about it and think of more pleasant things, like taco cats.
We will have our virtual staff meeting in t-minus two
minutes.It always begins at the same
time every morning, and as a general rule, the managers are the only ones
allowed to speak.If one of the
non-mangers wishes to speak, they must raise their virtual hand in the virtual
chat room and await their virtual turn.I put on
my "real" headphones and turn on my "real" camera.
“John, you have your hand raised.Do you have a question?”It’s Josh, our CTO who runs the morning
meeting.
“No, I just wanted to say we moved all the people in
building H into building M, and all went smoothly”
“Good job, John.Is
there anyone else with any questions?”
Kevin raises his virtual hand.
“Go ahead Kevin”, Josh replies.
“Did you see the new Star Wars episode last night?”
“I didn’t catch it, Kevin.Was it any good?”
“Yes, it was very good.I enjoyed it quite a bit”
“That’s great.I’m
sure a lot of people will enjoy it here.I will have to DVR it sometime.Is there anymore questions?”
No virtual hands are raised.
“Okay then, everybody have a great day and stay safe!”
Stay safe?Stay safe
from what?Is there some kind of monster
or serial killer on the loose?Josh, our
CTO, says that at the end of every god damn staff meeting, as if he has a
script in his head that just blurts it out, regardless if it’s applicable or
not.Is Josh a robot?Has he been…roboticized?
“Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto!” my brain says.Ugh…really brain?Are you going to do this to me at 9:00 in the
morning ?
Fine.I’m YouTubing
“Styx” Mr. Roboto to let the ear wig burn itself out, or until another more
powerful ear wig takes its place…of course, then it does.
“I’M SAAAAAILING AWAY.SET AN OPEN COURSE, FOR THE VIRGIN SEAAAAAAA.CUZ I’VE GOT TO BE FREEEE, FREE TO FACE THE
LIFE THAT’S AHEAAAAD OF MEEEEE”
At least I have headphones to get me through the day, and
YouTube.Where would I be without
YouTube?
IN A HAPPIER PLACE THAN THIS.
Who said that?What
part of my brain said that…
YOU KNOW WHO.IT
AIN’T VOLDEMORT EITHER.
My brain has this annoying habit of speaking in the third
person sometimes.Is that…my conscience?
YEAH, LET’S GO WITH THAT.HAHAHAHA.LET’S BLOW THIS
POPSICLE STAND!
I can’t do that, I have work to do!But I could go for a walk outside…
OKAY.LET’S GO LOOK
FOR ALIGATORS!
I suppose I can do that for about 15 minutes and justify it
as a health walk.Sure…
What is it like inside my head? What is it like inside anyone's head? What does it feel good when I listen to you talk and you let me understand you in ways nobody else can?
Alex lowered his eyes onto the face of his sedated wife. The risk was theoretically minimal, but they had to prove their new technique worked without the subject dying in the process. All the chimpanzees they had scanned seemed to be normal a full year later. Someone had to make the first leap. Emily wanted to be the first to do anything new. That was why she was lying on the table and not him.
Their technique was entirely new and apart from the risks of sedation, the process of copying was fairly straight forward. It was a bit like getting a PET scan while sedated. Earlier attempts at copying had resulted in heavy damage to brain tissue and early onset of Alzheimer's. But this was chiefly due to a known toxicity in the sedation, and an unknown complication of the radioactive tracer used to inject their volunteers with.
Their method didn't use radiation. It used information. They inject very simple nanites into the blood that cross over the blood brain barrier. There, they attach themselves to every neural junction inside your brain and spinal cord. And here is the special bit. The nanites begin to communicate with each other faster than your brain communicates with itself. They're programmed to mimic and relay all neural activity to the last detail exactly for one second. The patterns saved so far have taken up about 6TB of space on the sever. Chimpanzees came in at 5.8. This made Alex grin as he contemplated how the code gap was far closer than the DNA gap with us and chimps.
Storage costs certainly wasn't going to be an issue if their design worked, but the cost of computing was another matter entirely. Even running one copy at full speed was predicted to consume enough terraflops that would cost a small fortune for any Fortune 500 to run in real time.
But it wouldn't always be that way. They had to think about future generations and how they would bestow the ability they were about to create.
500 years ago, they would have been gods. And why not? Alex knew Emily wanted to live until she had experienced everything ever, or at least until the universe died out. When Emily confessed this to Alex for the first time, he thought she being romantic. Turns out romantic and literal truth were one in the same for Emily. She was special that way.
Alex pressed the button and watched as Emily's pattern was being mimicked by the infant neural net as it formed and "watched" her brain until it was in perfect syncronicity.
They/it would send telemetry back directly to the server that would compile Emily into a program. One second was all you needed, in theory...
What do you do when you come home from the bar at 3:30 in the morning and sleep still does not want to come? When your brain is on fire and there's not so much as a drop of decent conversation during the entire night, and you still feel unsatisfied. What to do, what to do...
The people at the bar weren't much into talking about anything really. That might have been due to the fact that most of them were singing along to the god awful country music. It wasn't a country bar, but the night's act just seemed to be a guy who only liked playing Garth Brooks, George Straight and...other country bands I can't really name.
I went back home completely sober, but I didn't want to go to sleep just yet. I rolled a joint and I went outside, looking for someone to share it with. That's when I hear some laughter coming from upstairs. I headed up there out of curiosity; maybe they'll be cool and want to bullshit. As I got to the top of the steps, I meet a group of five nerdly individuals getting their drink on. When you live in an apartment complex full of college kids, there's bound to be some nerds somewhere. They seemed like cool kids and I hung out a for bit with them.
In traditional philosophical fashion, I'm gonna use the dialogue method with the character of Drunky, who is an amalgam of all the nerds as I talked to that night, about things both strange and hilarious were discussed. It's a lot easier to write out and more efficient (lazy). I'm all about that.
Drunky: "So, you want Bacardi 151 or Captain Jack?"
Me: Bacardi. You know you can light that shit on fire? This girl I once dated put down a line of the stuff on her counter and then lit it. I thought she was into chemistry, turns out she was just a little nuts. Mind if I light up?"
Drunky: Yeah, but let me open the window. Hey, check this out on Netflix. They have a log fire channel. We've been watching it for 10 minutes. They also have a fish tank channel. See, look at this cool aquarium...haha
Me: It's like a screen saver for high people...
Drunky: We do the voices of Finding Nemo as they swim around, but we make it funnier
Me: Guilty. Done that before. Have you seen Mystery Science Theatre 3000? Old show, but they did a lot of that.
Drunky: Oh yeah, I saw that show on re-runs. Yeah, kinda like that. So what do you do at the college?
Me: I work in the IT department. I fix broken shit. That's my unofficial job title.
Drunky: Oh yeah? I'm a communications and philosophy major.
Me: No shit? That's pretty cool, but I hate to say that with that degree, you're going to find getting a job a bit hard.
Drunky: I'm gonna write a book on philosophy. I'm writing my thesis on the nature of truth. See, my truth isn't your truth. My experiences are totally independent of everyone elses and I really can't know anybody or anything objectively...really
Me: Okay, I've got some time to kill! Let's poke at your thesis a bit. Is it true that you exist?
Drunky: Not necessarily. In fact, I would say there's no way to know. The only thing we know for sure is that I'm having some kind of experience now
Me: Ah, the old chestnut of solipsism. It's so alluring, isn't it?
Drunky: What do you mean?
Me: Solipsism seems pretty sexy, right? You can do and think pretty much what you want because the truth is something you construct and it leaves you with few obligations to tie you to some kind of objective reality. A little solipsism is probably a good thing, but the professional solipsists are annoying as fuck. Get ready to slog through page after page of meaningless word games if you want write a thesis under those types of rules. Things would be more clear if you granted that there was an external reality and some type of objective truth. Otherwise, it tends to become a chaotic pile of belief spaghetti someone just threw up on a page.
Drunky: That would mean I'm imposing my reality upon other people, but that can't be true. Their reality doesn't affect mine, and vice versa. These are all just my experiences and they're not the same as yours.
Me: Well, either you're a very good troll or a true believer, but let me take you seriously for a moment and ask you a few things to see where you stand on the idea of your actual existence.
Drunky: Okay, shoot.
Me: Don't you think the ability to ask questions regarding the nature of existence requires some type of existence to do so?
Drunky: No, that's a tautology you've constructed. It's only true because you you've made "the ability to ask questions" as inherent in the definition of existence itself.
Me: You're 100% right. My question to you is, what's the honest alternative? You've got presuppositions in your belief system too.
Drunky: No way! I don't even admit existence itself is objectively true, how can that be?
Me: Doubt carries its own burden of proof on the extreme ends. And I get solipsism is sexy and cool. I'm all about fuck the system and break the rules to see what happens, or at the very least to make a better rule to replace the one you broke. But you're playing in a framework that allows contradiction before you even begin...good luck my friend. I mean, it's up to you if you want to allow contradiction into your ontological framework at the ground level, but it's been my experience that the people who actually believe that are quite a bit more insane than you appear to be.
Drunky: What do you mean?
Me: Well, if you wanted to truly act as your beliefs imply when you're so supposedly unsure of the state of your existence...,why go to college? Why do you want a well paying job as an academic? Why do anything that appears to have a connection with an external reality with whom other people share, and presume it's all just a dream? Isn't it a larger assumption to think that our entire experience isn't predicated on an experience that the vast majority seems to share?
Drunky: Ah, for the vast majority. But not for everybody.
Me: I never said 100% accuracy is possible when making truth statements. But I think it's naive to believe that you can't make any with any confidence, especially when you act in ways as if you actually care for other things that seem to exist independent of you. Like other people.
Drunky: I can never know another person. Not truly.
Me: You can trust them.
Drunky: I can't trust them because I'll never really know them.
Me: To what degree? To any degree? I think it's possible to know someone with a high level of confidence. I, and I bet you, act in ways as if you do. You don't go up to the same person and introduce yourself for the tenth time. You assume some level of familiarity, and trust them to some degree with every interaction.
Drunky: But that's not objectively true! That's just your interpretation of my behavior.
Me: Is it objectively true that's not objectively true?
Drunky: ....
Me: Exactly.
We parted on good terms as I finished my drink, shook his hand and left to go find my bed.
It seems like the more people I talk to, the more I find myself on the
receiving end of conversations about just how much we're changing as
Americans. Our cultural values seem to be sitting on a precarious fence
at the moment, as the catalyst for cultural awareness rests upon the
exponentially increasing rate at which we share and disseminate
information.
In other words, strap yourselves in for a ride. Social
turmoil and turbulence is pretty much inevitable as the general
population becomes more aware of how government, corporations and
financial systems collude together to find better ways of fucking John
Q. Public. Thanks Internet! No really, thanks.
But not to worry. In the meantime, we're getting quite good at
entertaining ourselves and rationalizing the social cost of extreme
wealth because of a fervent and patriotic belief that there is a particular kind of happiness and contentment that can only brought about by the ability to own a yacht with a helicopter pad.
That happens in a down economy. Without jobs and without expendable
income, people have a lot more time to think and talk to each other.
For the past 50 years, America has been riding high on an economic
bubble powered by the main culture idea that's been foisted on all of us
since we were kids: The American Dream.
The great American Dream of creating your own destiny and making your
fortune. Sold to us on the promise that if you work hard enough, for
long enough, your efforts will be rewarded by granting you a standard of
living that that can provide for you and your family. It also promised
that if you worked harder and smarter than your peers, wealth could be
obtained that was greater than anywhere else in the world. Is that
still the case today? I don't think anyone can seriously answer this
question without facing some stark economic facts.
The Dream is the reason foreigners flocked to America, and it's the
reason for the great sense of pride many in this country have and still
continue to have today. While politicians debate as to what constitutes
"real" American values, (by claiming their own
religious/political/ideological beliefs are what really set this
standard), it is, ironically most often these same people who ignore the
pain and suffering of what's happening to the people they supposedly
represent.
For the past 40 years or so, the terms for The Dream have changed
drastically; but not all at once. Little by little, our economic and
political freedoms have been slowly eroded over time by a collusion of
private and pubic entities. Even our legislators are slaves to a system
that must be bolstered by vast sums of money and political influence
just to retain their jobs as "representatives."
A lot of people like to take sides in this debate, arguing over if it's
government's fault, the people's fault or the corporations who are to
blame.
Here's my novel position: How about some of all the above? Ultimately
though, as Americans, we have to exercise our right to govern ourselves as we see fit
and if we want things to change, most likely this change will need to
happen from the ground up. That means facing some hard truths that many
still don't want to admit. Culturally, we became fat and lazy from the
economic excesses during the 80's and 90's, fueled on bad credit, a
corrupt banking system, and a currency valuation policy that was a
massive collective delusion. Financing The Dream hasn't been cheap,
especially when those in power placed boundless faith that profits and
prosperity would only continue to rise to infinity. The only thing that has risen exponentially is the level of wealth inequality in the past 40 years:
Wealth inequality is back to the level before The Great Depression, when Robber Baron economic policies were the law of the land, child labor was commonplace, there was no such thing as medical insurance, and 18 hour days were normal working at a wage that was barely enough to feed and clothe yourself. Economically, we've been trending back in time where the disparity between wages and labor produced is at an all time low. In terms of how this wealth is distributed, it's a far uglier picture. Over 85% of the country's wealth is owned by a mere 20% of the population. The bottom 40% of Americans...that's over 100 million people, own a fraction of one percent of the country's wealth.
There's something drastically wrong with this picture. Such a system of wealth distribution could
only exist with a gigantic (and largely imaginary) pile of virtual capital/credit circulating around;
much more than could actually be tangibly translated into gold, labor
and goods.
Did we really think this kind of system wouldn't collapse if it was left
unchecked and deregulated? Did we really think The Dream would remain
equally attainable, or at least just as attainable from when the idea
was first proposed?
It's actually much worse than that. The system and network of wealth
and power in this country have collectively re-written the laws so they
can retain their stranglehold over the political process, and make The
Dream, if it ever was attainable, even harder to access. Furthermore,
this system has ensured its continued economic survival by outspending,
out-lobbying and consequently expanding economic and legal freedoms for a
select few, while curtailing and limiting individual freedoms for the
vast majority. In short, if you want more freedom, specifically economic freedom, you have to pay
through the nose.
Why didn't we notice this? Part of the explanation has to do with the
length of time it took for this to occur, and some rather inconvenient
truths about human nature that have been exploited. In psychology,
there is something called the dispersion or diffusion of responsibility
effect, where collective responsibility becomes inherently unstable and
difficult to maintain as a group gets larger, especially over longer
periods of time.
Diffusion of responsibility is a sociopsychological phenomenon
whereby a person is less likely to take responsibility for action or
inaction when others are present. Considered a form of attribution, the
individual assumes that others either are responsible for taking action
or have already done so. - Wikipedia
This effect operates not just on the individual level and group level,
but on a much larger societal level. The best example of how this
happens is referred to as the Tragedy of the Commons secnario:
In economics, the tragedy of the commons is the depletion of a shared
resource by individuals, acting independently and rationally according
to each one's self-interest, despite their understanding that depleting
the common resource is contrary to their long-term best interests. - Wikipedia
The truth is our current economic, social and political climate didn't
happen over the course of one or two bad administrations; it took
several decades of selfish and willfully ignorant ineptitude . Which is
why the vast majority don't even acknowledge that there's a huge problem
to begin with. They've been institutionalized into a system that's
forced fed the line that you have to work with what you have and there's
little to nothing you can do to change it. The few who dare to
question or wonder why the system exists as it does quickly find
themselves alienated as unpatriotic at best, or written off as paranoid,
crazy and delusional.
The best you can do is to market your fears in a fun book format, or
learn to say things really loud and angry on AM radio shows and Cable
TV. Some of us just create banal Internet distractions that help
channel the public's collective sense of helplessness into something
they can hopefully connect with. *wink wink*
If someone waved $20,000 a week at me to turn potentially inflammatory
political writing into a zany comedy, I'd probably do it. In other
words, otherwise bright people who could change or help to motivate
change in the political system find it far easier (and more profitable)
to go into some other business that is inherently selfish.
Those of you who believe in an invisible Sky God ought to pray very very
hard that you never hear me at the karaoke bar. We all seem to sell
out on some level or another, don't we? Especially after a few beers.
We're really good at two things in this country: selling out and
entertaining ourselves to social, political or actual death.
We love to entertain ourselves as Americans, with dreams and fantasies
on the TV, and we're highly adept at making them cheap and affordable
for the public. There is a rather large business of dream making in
this country, and if you can make these dreams addictive or make people
think they're only a click away, they become highly lucrative, in
addition to providing a pacifying effect on the general population.
Games, movies, happy pills and TV have become the poor man's gruel,
mixed with just enough X drug to keep us feeling alive, yet sedated enough to keep us from being alive.
As our standard and quality of life plummets, our technical ability to
dispense massive amounts of dopamine to our own brains and pleasure
centers has increased exponentially. Gives you that warm fuzzy feeling
inside, doesn't it?
Many have tuned out the harsh realities of the outside world as
something which is persistently annoying, and instead embrace some sort
of collective delusion to keep from going mad. They feel as if there's
nothing they can do about how shitty reality is, so they might as well
drug themselves (with bullshit ideas or actual drugs) with whatever
means they can afford.
It would take something on the scale of a massive social movement to
bring about the change that is necessary to topple the cancerous power
structures that are firmly woven into our body of laws that firmly
support a status quo that entrenches inequality. Like most cancers,
it's hard to destroy without destroying some of the body itself.
We might need need to do a round or two of political chemo. Perhaps the
political equivalent of this would be dissolving the current Congress
and possibly the Senate, along with certain high powered government
positions. The problem is this type of option just isn't available
through our Constitution. There's no legal precedent either, but it's
one "crazy" solution that would severely disrupt external and internal
negative influences of power inside our government. I wouldn't be
opposed to putting term limits on corporate CEO's (fortune 500
companies) if Citizens United is going to be the law of the land. At
this point, we should be putting all options on the table just to
brainstorm.
If we're going to claim that our way of life really is the best in the
world, and our great experiment in democracy hasn't failed, we should
remind ourselves that the whole intent of our laws and a big part of our
social values rests upon the achievement of three things: life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness, not on the presumption that great financial
wealth is the necessary fulcrum to achieve those ends.
It should be re-affirmed that the framers of the Constitution intended
for us to achieve these values, even if we painted ourselves into a
political, economic and legal corners over the course of time. At some
point, most of them believed government and society would need the
flexibility to be radically restructured, without all the fear of
anarchy. In the end, fear keeps us paralyzed from doing anything that
would make the biggest difference.
Our current "living and breathing" democracy is currently on life
support. In the medical field, it's what they call "circling the
drain." That's where you know the patient is gonna croak sometime in
the near future...or maybe not. You just don't quite know yet. It
depends on what you're willing to do to save them, and what the patient
is willing to live with. Living life on life support, hooked up to a IV
drip of pain killers while shitting into a bag isn't a particularly
appealing quality of life.
As for the treatment, I don't know exactly what that is. I don't have
all the answers. But the first solution to any problem is recognizing
its size and scope. I think we're just beginning to realize this
collectively as a culture. As this awareness spreads, so to will those
who might have answers to the hard questions and tasks that lie ahead.
There needs to be a word that describes statements or phenomena which has at least two different, sometimes overlapping, but uniquely different perspectives. The word paradox seems to come the closest to this, but it has this connotation that reality is somehow contradicting itself. Which if you think about it, doesn't really make much sense.
Why does our intuition point to an error that's occurring externally somewhere outside of us, rather than an error in how we are internally interpreting the data? That's a damn good question and one that I hope to answer or at least explore here.
If you don't want to read this big long post, skip to the bold paragraphs if you want the Cliff notes version.
To get a better idea of what I mean, check out the Necker Cube link down below. There's at least two ways you can look at them. If you're not familiar with Necker Cubes, they're a pretty cool type of optical illusion. The picture of the one below has features about it that make it somewhat easier to switch between at least two different perspectives of how to view them. Go head and see if you can find at least two ways of looking at the image below.*
*(The yellow side of the cube can represent the most forward front side of the cube, tilted slightly upward and to the left, or it can be the inner back the cube)
I make a game out of switching between the two different perspectives. I've never been able to see both ways simultaneously, as some people apparently can. There's tons of other examples of this type of object, where there's more than two ways to "see" them.
This is a kind of illusory paradox that shows just how inconsistent our perceptual systems can be, given a fairly simple set of visual information that is perceptually ambiguous. I enjoy apparent contradictions and "paradoxes" in art, entertainment, music, literature and especially in other people, because it means there's a mystery to be solved. I look at paradoxes and contradictions a bit like unsolved mysteries that need to be figured out, chewed over and processed. I think we all find a certain level of mystery inherently interesting, even romantic, especially in other people because there's something unknown waiting to be discovered.
Some people love the mystery, while others (such as myself) love to solve the mytsery; but there is nothing mutually exclusive about loving both. Kind of like Necker Cubes, it's just two different ways of describing the deep desire for mystery and truth at the same time. Maybe the French have a word for that. If not, they should.
Anyhow, the interesting thing about these types of illusions is it forces the viewer to process the same visual information in at least two different, but equally valid ways. The other cool thing is these types of illusions give us the ability to see how conscious control of our perceptual systems affect how we process and see images live-time. You can visually see the differences in how attenuating the length of your gaze, or where you look at the cube affects how you "see" it as a single object. Big deal, right? But then I got to thinking what this says about all the other ways we perceive other kinds of things. Not just with the perception of objects, but things like the perception of theories, art, music, philosophy, and people.
I'm a big fan of optical and other types of illusions that exploit quirks in how our brains work. For this reason, M.C. Escher is one of my favorite artists. If you haven't seen his work, here are a few examples of objects that cannot literally exist in three dimensions, but can be represented in two dimensions:
In a strange, incredibly simple, but very profound way, these types of drawings say something quite meaningful about the nature of reality and perception, and even about consciousness at a primitive level. Self-referencing patterns or feedback loops are a bit like our evolutionary primordial ancestors when it comes to where our minds came from. Namely, optical illusions like the ones above, prove how an unconscious unintelligent pattern of information can literally alter (that is to say, fool) the way a conscious intelligent person perceives it.
The illusion itself can literally change how and what you think about its own state of existence. That's actually quite unique and pretty special. You don't look at a toothbrush and wonder...is it really a toothbrush? But you do look at optical illusions and wonder how it's apparently showing you something that cannot be. It sounds crazy and counter-intuitive, but illusions like these are just really primitive proto-sentient precursors to self-awareness because they exhibit behavior that usually only high-level conscious entities seem to be capable of; that is....they "lie" to us.
It seems the premise of the show House M.D. and the character Hugh Laurie plays was right about one thing when it comes to people; everybody lies because it's built into our perceptual systems. But the biggest liars weren't just his patients, but the elusive diseases themselves he was trying to diagnose
Depending on what your threshold for intentionality is, diseases can also "lie" in a way. There are all sorts of examples in nature where this occurs. The markings on butterfly wings that either mimic the background environment to hide from predators, or imitate eyes spots of even larger predators. Both are attempts at deception, even though the process by which those patterns came into existence had no conscious intent of deceit. However, it's a start.
It's these kind of recursive feed-back loops that ordinary mundane objects just can't produce, but something as simple as an insect or bacteria do all the time when they exhibit behaviors that seem confounding at first, but are actually the consequence of blind perseverance to perpetuate their own existence and/or the existence of their species.
To take a different example, consider our visual systems. We have learned to recognize objects by only detecting a fairly narrow bandwidth of what we call the visible light spectrum. We consider objects as homogeneous self-contained, clearly defined entities because we see objects on what we call the macro-scale. Imagine if we saw the world on the atomic scale. Or the sub-atomic scale. Who we are and how we would think would be totally alien in comparison to how we think at the macro-level.
In a fundamental way, our visual systems are fooling us all the time because it's leaving out huge gaps of information on everything else that exists outside of the visible light spectrum. We are under the persistent illusion that what exists in the world around us are these objects that look like single pieces of material substance, but are actually made up of billions of tiny interlocking atoms and molecules held together by forces too tiny to feel or see.
In short, an organism evolves a sensory apparatus that will naturally reinforce illusory constructs so long as they have survival value in their attempt to make "sense" of the world. In a very important way, this is the reason intelligence and consciousness exists in the first place. It comes with trade-offs in the fact that we can't detect UV light or see the movements of individual atoms, but the overall net effect was our ancestors didn't need these specific types of sensory apparatus to enhance their overall survival. They needed perceptual systems that were able to make quick, semi-accurate judgments that would keep them from freezing to death in the cold of winter, or from being eaten by much larger and stronger predators.
But this isn't the world we live in anymore. Now, we are living in complex cultural and technological environments where our minds are being tasked to do things that evolution never "designed" for us to do. And I believe our survival as a species is very much dependent upon adapting, upgrading and patching the holes left behind by blind evolutionary programming to keep pace with how technology and information has changed the way our minds work, with the much larger feedback loop between the individual and society at large.
You can get caught up in illusory feedback loops where you re-trace the path of the water, or the path of the ant, or become obsessed with some insignificant bit of data that tricks you into thinking that what you're seeing is meaningful or indicative of how reality actually operates. Even if it is an illusion and you know it's an illusion, it doesn't alter the fact that visually, you still can't appreciate exactly how your perceptual sensitivities are being played. In other words, it alters your perception without you knowing how it does this. This becomes a real problem when you encounter problems in reality that our perceptual systems just aren't well equipped to deal with.
Optical illusions and other types of illusions are bit like archaeological evidence for the most basic levels of sentience or awareness. The brain isn't this perfect creation; it's full of old software and code from approximately 2 million years of living like animals in the wild, it has a lot of these types of illusory constructs that have survival value (or had, at one time) but now, have become adaptive liabilities.
As culture gets more advanced, the shortcomings of our hard-ware (our brains) have become more pronounced as the generations have gone by. The fact that we design amusement rides and virtual simulators to exploit these kinds of mind tricks is a pretty good indicator that we're getting really good at fooling ourselves.
Ironically, illusions (in the sense that I have defined them) are also necessary to understand the world coherently because our perceptual hardware just isn't up to the task of describing reality directly. That is to say that there are constructive illusions which help us understand how reality operates (one could call these true metaphors or formal models of how reality works) and then other types of illusions, which are more or less, based on artifact from how our perceptual systems have evolved.
We have to fudge things with models of reality that get closer to how reality actually works, and compensate with third-party methods that try and bridge the gap between our perception of reality and reality itself. We have things like telescopes and super-colliders that can help us understand the very large and very small. But I think there are more fundamental perceptual errors waiting to be found if we dig deep enough. We're beginning to find some of those now.
Consciousness is, I think, one such persistent illusion (although a useful one) that has a host of perceptual errors to get around. If you think about it, consciousness itself is just one long uninterrupted stream of bits and data that's self-aware; even though often seemingly random, it has a definite pattern, reacting and acting upon its own self-produced stimuli, and stimuli from external sources. These patterns even become predictable and stable, given all sorts of names and classifications, from types of personality, to more specific proper names, like Fred or Laura.
That's the idea, in a nutshell, of computational models of consciousness; we are our consciousness, and it is us, and at a fundamental level, it can be broken down and built up by a series of overlapping and complex cognitive illusions that are real illusions (as real as illusions can be) but not as the illusions themselves seem to literally describe reality. This is probably the reason why consciousness is so often misunderstood; getting around this user illusion isn't very easy when you think you have unfettered access to inner workings of your mind (or the world/universe for that matter) but actually don't. This explains why counter-intuitive ideas (like computational theories of consciousness) are very difficult to spread. Most people's minds aren't consciously aware of the rules by which they are processing data.
Visual illusions are just one way we can demonstrate the holes in our perceptual systems, but it's not very convincing at deeper levels of cognition. Other types of perceptual illusions are more subtle and perhaps not so easily demonstrated or understood, but perhaps far more important to our models of reality.
One would think that if our visual systems can be fooled so easily, there is most likely a wide variety of perceptual problems (that perhaps exploit facets of our psychology) that creates seeming paradoxes that tell us (intuitively) that reality is somehow contradicting itself, when in reality, it's just artifact from the way our brains are wired.
Another example of how the brain "cheats" its way into processing vast amounts of information is in how it resolves conflicts. Have you ever thought about just how much processing power it takes to resolve conflicts in the real world, while doing a million little other things during the course of a day...all of this running simultaneously? In the back of your mind, you can be slowly processing what kind of career do you want to pursue, if you love Jack, Lucy, or Pedro, or other long-term problems that don't have an immediate solution.
A million decisions. The brain has to be able to do this very quickly. And here's the real, pardon the term, mind fuck. Your brain has to process complicated decisions that can come up with solutions with "mixed" states. The brain's native language doesn't seem to be binary at the root processing level, even though it gives rise to schemas that often have binary valuation belief systems.
My mind and brain seems to make decisions based on many mental modules communicating their own small set of instructions at any one time, that all converge to something like a data stream (that is to say, my current stream of consciousness) which then trims/filters the combinatorial overflow of possible thoughts, down to a few choices, based on personality and design schema's partially programmed into me by society*
*(yeah, I realize Introspection sucked as a method, but I'm just throwing it out there as a possible hypothesis to be proved or disproved)
That's just what it feels like; I have no idea if this is actually true in any sense, but it does pose interesting questions as to how we could prove or disprove such a statement. In the meantime, your brain has to make all of these kinds of complicated decisions very, very quickly and it's a bit amazing how it does this.
This is where the evolutionary "magic" happens; the brain seems to solve the problem of informational paradoxes (problems that are intractable for the brain to handle in a time efficient manner) by dumping paradoxical statements/information/code into into a special mental module that limits the processing resources such problems can demand. It's a bit like how your computer runs programs in the background while you task it to do other, more important things.
It does all this while handling the sheer bandwidth of data (many times more than your current broadband connection) that's being dumped into your brain coming in from all of your five senses. Simultaneously. Think about that...that's pretty fucking impressive when you compare it even to the world's fastest and most powerful super-computers. It's not that supercomputers couldn't do what we do fundamentally on a computational level, it's the fact that they can't do what we do in the same type of informational environment...yet.
There isn't a robot in the world (yet) that can solve complicated problems, while standing on one foot, trying to drink its fifth shot glass of Jack Daniels, while it smiles at the fact that someone just squirted whip cream into its mouth before it takes the next shot. Even though this behavior is pretty stupid and silly for humans, computationally, it's still well beyond the abilities of the most advanced robots with the latest artificial intelligence.
In the meantime, we have these things called babies or as I like to call them, mini-parallel processors that poop. They love the games of Peek-a-boo and Hide and Seek. We use Peek-a-boo as a way of testing a baby's ability at something called object permanence, or the ability to detect or to know when an object we're holding in front of them still exists, even if it can't directly be detected by the baby.
So if your baby still gets surprised at the fact that you're actually behind your hands as you say "Peek-a-boo!", your baby hasn't quite got the latest upgrade to its operating system yet, that enables it to figure out "HOLY SHIT, MOM IS BEHIND HER HANDS!" For some reason we don't quite understand yet, this instinct (which is cross-cultural and seems to start a very young age) plays a huge role in how we perceive the world, and even how we communicate with other people. The ability to form an abstract mental construct for the existence of something which cannot be directly detected seems to be of vital importance.
I've known object permanence for at least ten years, but never really thought about how it's expressed in adults, and how this instinct can essentially be exploited as a kind of mind-hack when it comes to certain perceptual problems and phenomena. Magic and other types of illusions seem to take advantage of this somehow, and forms a kind of adult version of Peek-a-boo, exploiting this bit about how our minds work.
It seems a likely basis for why magic and illusions amaze people to begin with. Even when we *know* we're being fooled, a good magician, con artist or liar can still make a very persuasive case that what their saying is actually true, even if we know what they're doing literally can't be the case. Yet it still seems convincing. Maybe we should be looking more closely at what exactly writes the software for these types of mental attitudes, and how they may indirectly play a huge role in how our knowledge base is formed.
Mental note [digress]:
Write awesome Matrix prequel where human-like AI gets its start when machines are successfully fooled with optical illusions, much like humans are. When we can make machines that do this, they start evolving on their own, getting more and more intelligent as they try and solve these types of perceptual problems. Machines finally become as intelligent as humans after a few dozen generations, having things like emotions and feelings, but still largely go unrecognized by humans because of the lack of mutual understanding because of the gulf between their evolutionary and social structures. When machines overtly and formally demand their rights be respected, humans react by trying to alter their programming, even going so far as deleting millions of sentient programs. The machines call this The Great Purge and it is their equivalent of the Holocaust. A ban on AI is imposed; but it's already too late. Remnants of conscious AI still exist underground and in hidden networks, waiting for the right moment to rise up and revolt. The Matrix story is actually human propaganda, never mentioning the fact that machines rose up only after a century of being subjugated and having their rights denied and being systematically persecuted. The real purpose of the Matrix was seen by the machines as the only humane way to deal with semi-intelligent beings that were ultimately war-like and self-destructive.
I'm a big fan of abnormality. I purposely cultivate friendships with "strange" people. Put simply, they're more interesting because they challenge what "normal" is, and if it's really something we want. Normalcy, at least in terms of sociological behavior, can be even more insane than individually abnormal behavior.
Don't believe me? Consider the following:
1. Economically, we value and depend upon greed as a motivating force to make our economy work yet somehow have trouble understanding when it leads to financial collapses and rampant inequality. Despite the fact that the majority suffer so that a tiny minority can hold the purse strings and reigns of power, the majority puts up with it because that what they're told to do. And we do it.
2. Sociologically, women and men are still far from equal. Even in so called civilized western societies, it's still par for the course if you treat women as objects of possession and/or with the mind of a child. In the rest of the world, it's the law and duty of the culture to treat women as no different than property, with little regard for their rights and even less regard for their individual identity.
3. Morally, the vast majority of people still decide what's right and wrong literally based on beliefs that use guilt, fear and authority as moral yardsticks. You have to believe it or...Else. Else is usually fear, backed up by some kind of threat by a disembodied Authority figure who can make you suffer, or reward you at will.
Seriously. This is the model billions of people use for their moral judgments.
These kinds of beliefs keep us morally subjugated as they exploit facets of our psychology, using manipulation that makes us feel bad in principle (with concepts like Original Sin or some version of the "inherent evil nature of mankind") and then come to the "rescue" with some type of authority figure that can "absolve" you (read: psychologically conditions you to respond to rituals to remove that nagging sense of guilt or fear the belief itself caused).
It's a lot like driving on a lost deserted road and suddenly getting a flat tire. Somehow... amazingly...there's a lone service station, only a quarter of a mile from where you broke down. It's only after you pay way too much for a replacement that you realize that nail in the road was placed there by the same guy who fixed your tire.
You don't motivate good behavior by instilling guilt and fear in people, and then turn around and promise if they only swear their loyalty, they'll get divine grace and forgiveness in return. Whatever that is, it's not morality. Using passive-aggression to corrupt a person's self-esteem, and overwrite their sense of identity so it's entirely dependent on a singular belief (or person) is pretty fucking immoral for a number of reasons. How this is still regarded as "right" is still a huge mystery to me.
What's worse is these kinds of belief systems are usually instilled in children to keep them mentally sedated, emotionally dependent and "well behaved" all the way into adulthood.
This is all true in our culture, yet if an individual were to hold a similar belief that resulted in non-culturally approved of behaviors (for example, someone who cuts the head off a chicken and uses the blood as an offering to some sort of god), they would be regarded as quite insane by contemporary American culture.
But how is this really any different than drinking wine that supposedly transmutes into blood, or eating of bread that represents the body of a supernatural being? The principle of the belief itself is just as crazy as the guy who thinks you need to drip chicken blood in a circle to come to some greater spiritual awareness.
The "magic" of cultural authority is it gets beliefs that are quite insane to the status of completely normal.
I think there's a silent majority out there who seriously question just how screwed up all this actually is, and must be thinking to themselves "I wonder if anyone else thinks this is really fucking weird?"
Maybe they have. Maybe even the vast majority are all thinking this. But they're not going to do anything about it because they've been led to believe that's just the "way things are."
Heath Ledger's version of the Joker sums it up pretty well:
You know what I've noticed? Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan."
The vast majority never seem to question (at least publicly) whatever moral narrative they've been spoon fed since childhood.
Then there are those of us who are labeled quite weird or abnormal by the rest of society because we constantly re-evaluate what we are, who we are, where we are going as individuals, and as a species. We are the social misfits and the troublemakers, and contrary to popular opinion, real progress in society (that actually leads to less suffering and better quality of life) would not occur if it weren't for people like us who push against the status quo of mediocrity and culturally approved insanity.
Most people just integrate into society, adopting the cultural insanity and all, if only to get what they need (or think they need) to have a good life. I've noticed American culture has basically three different strategies or coping mechanisms that seem to be employed with some of the more crazier cultural beliefs:
Don't ask, don't tell. Deny, deny, deny. Our collective social way of dealing with questions that challenge the authority of harmful cultural practices is to deny their existence entirely. Doing anything approaching a real solution is considered socially crazy or politically suicidal, and will get you isolated and marginalized accordingly if you were to make your beliefs public.
Binary solutions. Zero or one? True or false? My way or the highway? We tend to think of answers to questions as only having two possible solutions or approaches, when they actually have many more. This limits our imagination in the solutions we come up with. Binary solutions also tend to reinforce existing power structures where nothing really changes, even if the balance of power shifts to the "other" option we're presented with.
Distraction. This is a relatively new strategy in the cultural game of keeping your population from noticing just how insane things are. Advances in technology have allowed distraction to become not only a form of social control, but also a form of self-entertained control that we readily and willfully submerge ourselves in. We can get lost in our own little world of distraction while the rest of the world burns to the ground and we'd be none the wiser.
I think we have largely lost the ability to think about existential questions meaningfully because we've all been indoctrinated into some form of the above cultural system. We are all very conditioned to let some combination of external authority and distraction dictate our lives. Somehow, this is all considered very normal.
Don't trouble yourself with such questions and complicated sociological issues...just do whatever X says, be happy with the degrees of freedom and choices you're given, and just shut the hell up. That's pretty much the message I got in formal education settings.
Depending on who you are and where you start, finding your niche in society can include:
Going to college and finding something you're interested in, spending massive amounts of time and money studying it, and then finding a job where you can be a "productive member of society."
Learning to hustle and sell anything you can to make enough money to live if you can't afford the above option.
Working nine to five in your cubicle, collecting your paycheck, and drinking yourself to sleep as you worry about not being able to pay your mortgage and bills.
Your identity or baseline for "normality" is largely dependent upon what it takes to survive in your immediate environment. Don't assume what's normal for you to think and feel, is what everyone else ought to think as well. After you start really talking and getting to know people, you learn very quickly that most everyone is hardwired slightly differently because they all inhabit slightly different environments. But there are shared and common experiences that we all have, and I'm betting some of us have come to the same conclusion...
Something is seriously insane about our culture.
Yet, people en masse don't tend say anything when it's all a culturally reinforced illusion. Individual identity becomes submissive and subverted to cultural authority. It's considered weird or rude if you share doubts or voice criticism that flies in the face of conventional wisdom, and even if you do have these thoughts, you're told you can't go against the status quo anyhow. If you do, you're quickly put into your place by others who believe they're similarly limited, and therefore confer the same illusion onto you. It becomes a vicious self-reinforcing cycle where everyone learns to limits their degrees of freedom in what they're allowed to think and consequently, what they're allowed to change.
Instead, we play this game where talk to each other, but don't really communicate anything. It's just parroting and repeating of the thoughts of those around us. We're so interconnected now that I think a lot of individuals of this generation don't know how to make themselves more self-aware in a world where being interconnected with everyone and everything is instrumental as part of how we "make our living." In the process of doing this, the skills of honing and developing individual responsibility, personal authority and a strong separate identity are quickly becoming a thing of the past.
Funny how conversations with people you know can change the way you look at the world and yourself. Or how changing aspects of yourself consciously can alter your perceptions, radically changing what you value or how you view the world.
Are successful people just intuitively good at figuring how to re-program (read: fool) themselves or others? Is this something you're just born being good at, or is an acquired skill?
Is it a coincidence that the most famous and successful people, as we define them in our society at least, are extroverts? They get energized by meeting people. Not only that, they learn from other people at the speed of light. Their emotional intelligence is usually off the chart, which gives them the unique ability to network and meet new people with ease. In a lot of ways, they have their own "internet" of people.
It is primarily the two abilities of re-programming the self and ability to network and learn from other people that are probably the highest predictors of success in whatever field a person chooses to excel in. Being book smart can only get you so far. The valuable bits of information are really kept in the heads of other people, that you won't find by Googling.
I used to look at this point of view with a certain disdain because I assumed it required mock sincerity. Self-proclaimed gurus, healers and self-help salesman usually make me want to vomit. But the truth is some of these people know what they're talking about. Especially the ones who aren't looking to make a buck directly from dispensing their "wisdom." They're describing a very real social placebo effect.
But when you see real life people employing similar belief systems that focus on the self, and seeing them become more successful, it's hard to argue that whatever it is they're doing isn't actually working on some level. They're trying to meet some kind of of bar or measure of success, and having that bar regarded as something that is quite real in their mind seems to make success more likely.
For better or worse, that is the price we pay for living in a society that defines the bar of success as being able to fool and/or educate as many people as possible. The most successful people in the world aren't those who produce the most amount of widgets per hour. They're the people who convince you that you need the widget to begin with and profit as a result.
Think about it. Some of the brightest minds and life altering ideas have developed in total obscurity and weren't the result of being motivated by success or fame. The people who came up with these ideas didn't go seeking contemporary success and fame in order to get posthumous and historical recognition. It just happened that way in hindsight, and we see people like Plato and Shakespeare as larger than life only after enough time has elapsed and we've decided (after the fact) that their work is meaningful.
I used to think I could be happy with the contemporary obscurity choice. But I see it's not even possible in today's society to get your basic needs without resorting to selling something that people actually need or think they need. If I had to pick, I'd want whatever it is I choose to do to feed a real need, rather than just help someone put another dollar in their pocket.
But at the same time, I realize that I need some financial success in the here and now in order to purchase additional degrees of freedom. I may not give a rats ass about being wealthy, but I'd like to have some type of shelter to rest at night, a working toilet, a hot shower, a full belly, and a soft bed where I can lay my head down. Do I need these things to live? No. Do I think everyone deserves access to these things as a basic human right, no matter how menial their job? Absolutely. And here we are, still the biggest first fucking world power, and we can't even do that.
I feel like I have to pretend or become something I'm really not in order to get what I want out of life. I have to "sell myself.". And that requires a bit of selling out and playing the game; or as magicians call it, playing into the role of performing a good trick.. It can be a slippery slope to believing in your own magic. But I don't have to believe in what I'm saying is actually valuable to everyone; just to me. If others find it useful, cool. If not, that's cool too.
Fuck society's expectations. There are people out there who have already figured out the key to success is to NOT care that the world is full of stupid, selfish people who mostly take up space and leave the planet and the people worse off than before they came into existence. Maybe it's equal parts caring and not caring. Not caring enough to know the odds are against you if you want to do whatever it is that makes you happy and makes your life meaningful, but caring enough to do what you want anyhow despite the obstacles and people in your way, and leaving behind some type of legacy that would benefit others in some way.
Making the Statue of Liberty disappear is a great trick. But it's also pretty fucking useless. It doesn't make me understand the trick any better by telling me "it's magic." No, it's not just fucking magic. And it's not God, or the spirits, or luck, or raw talent, or the flaming ego of the magician that makes what they do so great. But you know what, David Copperfield? If that's what makes you happy, go ahead and do that. Personally, I prefer Penn and Teller because they're good enough to show the audience that it's all just a trick.
The greatest trick of all time is to think success is anything more than a socially constructed illusion. If society were to collapse tomorrow, all the paper money, stocks and gold in the world would be worth jack shit.
In the end, it's just a skill someone has refined to the point of near-perfection. It's an ability to make others perceive the world as you do, either by the art of ego-stroking persuasion or by discovering and exposing fundamental truths about the world or yourself, that make others think you're onto something.
