Reflection 157: Categories

(Copyright © 2009)

What do you see?

 

 I don’t know about you, but I see butterflies. Three of them. Each different, but all butterflies nonetheless. One brown and white; one orange, black, and white; one yellow and black. But I “see” them as butterflies. That’s how I reach out to them and incorporate them into my experience. Three creatures in one category. Which has room for hundreds of others. What a clever trick, treating unique items in experience not as individuals but as members of a single class. Butterflies. One word fits all. One concept fits all. Easy. Convenient. Efficient.

Now what do you see?

 

 

Mushrooms. Toadstools. Fungi. Six kinds. Different sizes, shapes, colors, yet all mushrooms. There it is again, categorization by the mind, not the eye—by concept, not percept. Mushrooms in nature don’t come bearing labels as they would in a museum. They’re just out there, waiting for us to come by to recognize and identify them as we will. The words, labels, categories are ours, not theirs. Connected to damp soil, they’re going about their business of being mushrooms. Who knows what they really are to themselves, the forest, the Earth.

Categorization is one of the ways we organize our experience of the world by sorting it into bins that accord with our values, and so are important to us. We sort people and animals by sex and age because none of us would be here without sexual reproduction. This is not a reasoned rationale; it is how we are built—with our prime biological values at the forefront of expectation and awareness so we are always on the lookout for sex, food, drink, shelter, rest, and possible danger, among other items our survival and wellbeing depend on as appropriate to our current situation.

But we are on the lookout in a particular way. Which is where categories enter the picture. We don’t have the brainpower to keep every possibility of what we might come across in mind all the while. Instead, we scan the world categorically in terms of what matters to us at the moment on a particular occasion. Our outlook cannot be finely detailed because that would require too much brain power. We’d be apt to miss what we were looking for, if we actually came across it, for it wouldn’t conform to the image we had in mind. Rather, we look conceptually for generic types of things, leaving it to our situation to provide specific instances that might fulfill our fears or desires. Saber-tooth tiger at nine o’clock—run for it! Pizzarina Uno ahead, let’s give it a try.

Categorization clearly depends on concepts and memory more than immediate perception. It provides a basis for looking around, guided by some sort of summary of past experience—which is exactly what concepts provide. This allows us to cast a wide-meshed net on the world suitable for bringing back the kinds of things we need at the moment, not everything that is out there to consider. If I’m out for butterflies, I go where the flowers are, and look at anything fluttering around. If it’s mushrooms I’m after, I go to woods with moss, duff, and damp soil when the temperature is warm enough to support fungal growth. If it’s company I want, I look for social settings where people gather—bars, dances, movies, sporting events, maybe even a church service.

Gerald Edelman writes a great deal about categorization—from the point of view of a Nobel Laureate molecular biologist with special interests in immunology, genetics, and consciousness. He writes for his peers, which include relatively few people. To paraphrase Edelman on the topic of categorization, consciousness results from the comparison of two mental processes, one being a form of memory of occasions when basic drives were met in the past, the other being current sensory perception as driven by those same drives brought up to date by ongoing perceptual categorization in the here and now. (For what Edelman actually wrote, see * below.) That is, the bins we sort the world into are not accidental or frivolous. They are the underpinnings of who we are. When memory informs perception, it seeks to bring detailed, present sensory experience into line with generic memories representing a class of past experiences so that the specific sensory findings in the now fulfill the promise of expectations built in the past, the two together constituting an understanding that “here is just what I have been looking for.”

That’s what understanding means, our generic experiences in the past stands under (supports) our detailed specific experiences in the now, the two together bound in fulfillment of a common motive, need, desire, drive—in a word, what Edelman calls value. Not just any old value such as peppermint tea or chocolate ice cream, but a biological value on which our survival or wellbeing depends at this moment. Consciousness is always intentional in being consciousness of . . . one thing or another that we are searching for because of the makeup of our current situation. The value-driven category is there at the outset in our expectations, available to wrap itself around any sensory percept that complements its sketchy nature with relevant, telling details.

Meaningful experience, then, results from three aspects of consciousness coming together in a coherent pattern told by a surge of feeling and engagement: 1) a biological value, 2) a conceptual category derived from a lived history of prior experience, and 3) a sensory percept fulfilling hopes or expectations raised by 1) and 2). Shazam, an episode of experience is achieved through the resonant tension between concept and percept. Opening the way to subsequent episodes as the situation develops.

We have a lot of terms in English for the sensory and conceptual aspects of categorization that complement each other in such an episode: terms such as token and type, species and genus, particular and general, example and principle, member and class, instance and category, tenor and vehicle—all variations on the broad themes of sensory being and conceptual meaning, which, when combined, can spark a sense of understanding or immediate apprehension of truth.

The process of categorizing is inseparable from the act of perceiving because it is the very engine behind our reaching out to the world in the first place. If we come across something we don’t recognize, our first question is, “What’s that?” meaning, what category does it belong to? The second question is, “What’s it good for?” meaning, what’s its value to me? Why should I care? The names we give things are actually labels of categories in our heads. Even names like Eifel Tower or Barack Obama or Titanic are “proper” names in labeling categories containing but a single member, yet distinct and identifiable categories of experience nonetheless.

I titled the dissertation I wrote at Boston University’s School of Education in 1982, Metaphor to Mythology: Experience as a Resonant Synthesis of Meaning and Being. That synthesis is none other than the process of categorization, which led me on a merry chase through the many valleys between metaphor and mythology. Writing it was a great adventure because I wrote inside out, using my personal experience as a guide. Here I am, 27 years later, blogging about the same thing in much the same way. But this time around, hopefully, in more accessible, less academic language. That seems to be the kind of person I am, one who cannot take personal conscious experience for granted, and is determined to make tracking it down the chief adventure of his days on this Earth. 

 Finally, what do you see now?

 

Boats. Six of them. Different colors, different wheelhouses, on different seas, but all similar in size and configuration. What kind of boats are these? Yes, fishing boats. What category of fishing boats? That depends on the categories available to you, on your past experience with such boats, and on the biological relevance of that experience to the rest of your life. I see lobster boats because here on the Maine coast they’re around me for most of the year. If we care about boats, we learn to distinguish lobster boats from scallop, mussel, or urchin draggers because of the way they are rigged. Bay boats from ocean boats by their size. If you spend most of your time on the Great Plains, you might not find such sub-categorizations to be significant. Instead, you’d be able to spot the logos of railroad lines on sight, tell fields of corn from soybeans, and recognize a tornado sprouting on the horizon. You might look down on anybody who couldn’t automatically make such distinctions.

Our looping engagement with the world lets us project our favored memories outward in the form of concepts to seek meaningful embodiment in sensory shapes and patterns (categorization or assimilation), and conversely, welcomes novel shapes and patterns into ourselves that they expand the breadth and depth of meaningful memories funded by our personal values (learning or accommodation). Together, these two processes are as natural and necessary as breathing in and breathing out. This contrasts with our natural tendency to view perception as a one-way street from the world into our depths via the senses, the world revealing itself to us rather than we exposing or declaring our conceptual selves to the world. With the result that we must hold our breath and, unable to return it to the world, quickly pass out. The idea of a perceptual give and take with the world turns the natural attitude or tendency by which things have meanings on its head so that it becomes apparent how it is that significance is bestowed upon sensible objects in order for conceptual meanings to have things—the very essence of categorization.

_______________

* What Edelman actually wrote in summarizing the conditions under which primary consciousness arises is this:

Consciousness is the result of an ongoing categorical comparison of the workings of two kinds of nervous organization. This comparison is based on a special kind of memory, and is related to the satisfaction of physiologically determined needs as that memory is brought up to date by the perceptual categorizations that emerge from ongoing present experience. (The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness, Basic Books, 1989, page 93.)

Reflection 156: Outrageous Fortune

(Copyright © 2009)

Trapped in our minds as we are, we sometimes ridicule those whose minds and ideas differ from our own. Rather than accept or celebrate such differences, we find them personally offensive or threatening, and so lash out at those who dare to be different—that is, different from ourselves. There’s a lot of that around these days, displays of public scorn, mockery, bitterness.

Where do these tongue-lashings come from? These dyspeptic outbreaks? These trainloads of sour grapes? These sneering, snide, and brutal attacks?

That’s easy. They stem from the scornful ones sensing they are on the outs—have lost what they might have had—so are themselves being scorned and put down. In a word, from a sense of personal threat or defeat. Which cannot be publically admitted, yet calls for retribution, so is thereby transmuted into derision, casting blame, finding fault. That way, the defeated cloak themselves in the virtue of the truly superior, and the successful are demonized as dishonest, disingenuous, disgusting, and generally despicable. If the ploy gets enough coverage, the losers pass as winners among their fans. 

As in bullfighting, the art of the faultfinder is in stunning and then exhausting the designated victim, leading to delivery of the fatal thrust. The spiteful predator turns his prey’s virtues into faults, then dismembers the wretched carcass while still alive. Such is the vindictive politics of our day. Whatever you do, don’t take defeat lying down. Rise up and be a man; show your stuff. Rant and rave—and make sure to notify the press. Better yet, be the press. That way you can make sure every slur gets the coverage it deserves. Even if it doesn’t deserve any coverage all, it enters the public mind as if it were news, not bluster.

Illusion, it all comes down to illusion. To deceiving a public that loves sports and spectacle more than truth. It doesn’t matter what you claim, just come out swinging. The audience will side with you and fill in the blanks. They’ve been taught, after all, that life is a multiple-choice test. Feed ‘em the answer; they’ll love it.

No one likes to be publically humiliated. To be humbled—brought down in the eyes of the people. Particularly not those who thrive in the limelight. If exposed as mere mortals, their reflex is to divert attention by shedding light on someone else’s faults, which brings to mind their particular enemy. If he doesn’t have conspicuous faults, it doesn’t matter—just make them up. Deride his accomplishments, smear his virtues, mock his integrity—again and again. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to get traction as a cynic because the public is nothing if not gullible and loves a good fight.

One defense against slings and arrows is to deflect them toward an innocent party. Turning the tables is easy, just spin your vices into virtues (such as speaking your mind), and your opponent’s virtues into vices (such as his not seeking your advice or sharing your values). Spiteful feelings are always an undercurrent when one side wins over another. But when those feelings vent as outrage directed at the other team, igniting violent speech and acts (as after a soccer game when the home team loses), then attitudes are shown to have consequences, like road rage escalating to assault and battery.

The damning of the president by Fox News and others is no game—it is a calculated strategy to dull the brilliance of his aura in order to undercut the stature and power of the man. At best such attacks are distractions; at worst they disrupt judgment, attention, and consciousness itself. These are not personal slights. They are corporate onslaughts, campaigns by organized groups to ruin a man whose intelligence and influence they are afraid of. This is not the work of envy, hurt pride, or rabblerousing on the fringe—this is out-and-out war.

How did we get to this point? And once here, why do we tolerate such behavior? Put simply, there are two classes of people, leaders and followers. The division between them is told not by ability but by wealth. Those without cash, work; those with cash hire the best lawyers, PR fronts, muscle, and outside agitators to see that their wills are imposed on their lesser brothers and sisters. This is a laughable interpretation of “survival of the fittest,” but it has become the bumper-sticker wisdom of our age and our nation. You needn’t bother getting elected, you can buy your way to power. Not only can you, but you must; only millionaires need apply for membership in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. They are ushered into office by the very corporations whose interests they serve. This is far too important a process to be left for the people to screw up by electing the wrong person.

What a sad little story: the collapse of one of the greatest ideas ever advanced by the human mind—with its checks and balances, one vote and equal opportunity for each unique person, and peaceful transfer of power from one generation to the next. A vision rent in two by assuming there are two classes of people, the haves and have-nots, one superior to the other, the nobler (wealthier) class having an obligation to govern on behalf of their dependents. Viewed from the top, that division into classes is a convenient fiction; from the bottom, a life sentence to hard labor.

But consciousness does not come in two classes. There is only one class of consciousness, and it is responsible for promoting the wellbeing and happiness of its owner. It is the social system that has grown up around consciousness that is corrupt in favoring a small but aggressive elite over the general population. Privilege is concentrated at the top, duty at the bottom—the difference told by a cultural mindset calculated to keep power and wealth on the high side of the boundary between the two classes. That is the structure which looms so large in the cynical attacks on the president and the policies he favors, including a fair and decent public healthcare option covering all Americans. Wealthy individuals and corporations fear losing their influence, so their agents scream bloody murder to discredit the commoner whom the people elected to restore balance and judgment throughout the nation and the world.

The voice of consciousness advises treating others as you would have them treat you: with respect and compassion. The voice of status takes a different approach: the elite know best what is good for you; let us rule. The issue rides on whether all people are assumed to be equal or not. Which is it to be, power to the people or power to the elite? That question is at the heart of the fracas. Through experience we know that mutual respect is a better strategy than lording it over others to get your way, then berating them if they don’t bow to your will. Democracy allows for human differences under the umbrella of equal rights and respect. Taking dominion over others is a sure sign of dissent, which invariably leads to schisms, hard feelings, and violence. That is the Fox News route; the Obama route is to regard those who differ from yourself with respect, then see what you can work out together.

  

 

 

Reflection 155: Card Game Consciousness

(Copyright © 2009)

Last Friday I watched the first episode in the TV series Charlie Rose is putting together about Understanding the Brain. Sit a group of experts around a table, all coming from different perspectives, and you get a poker game with each player being an expert on his own hand, striving to outdo everyone else and take the whole pot. One plays the memory card, someone else the neural underpinnings of consciousness, followed by the social underpinnings, or the genetic underpinnings, then on to brain pathology, levels of brain functioning, round and round, hand after hand. Who wins? It all depends on how you look at the brain, and talk about the brain, and bluff your way by trying to convince the rest that you hold the answer they’ve all been looking for.

I have a game like that floating in my head all the time. Writing my blog or teaching an adult ed class, I have to decide what’s really important to know about consciousness, how it all fits together, how it relates to the brain, to behavior, to childhood development, to life experience, to evolution, to genetics, and so on. How do I lay my understanding of conscious out for others to grasp and compare with their own? Blogging and teaching, I have to engage my audience, not stuff my particular views down their throats. It all has to make sense, or if not, at least point in a direction that seems plausible.

When your conscious mind looks at itself—at its own hand—and is not at all sure what consciousness is, or even what the possibilities are, then the problem is doubly compounded and the best thing to do is fold to cut your losses. Sure, know thyself, but don’t try too hard because it’ll drive you nuts. That’s the feeling I had watching Charlie Rose and his panel of brain experts. Which is similar to the feelings I sometimes have while blogging and teaching about consciousness.

Fortunately, one aspect of consciousness is its flexibility, which allows for improvement and self-correction. Old synapses can be abandoned or strengthened, new ones encouraged. So when I feel I’m not getting my point across, I review my situation and try to see how I can do better. After posting 154 essays on aspects of consciousness, together with teaching my recent adult ed class, I offer a few thoughts intended to unclutter and refocus my mind so in future games I can play similar hands better.

Resolved 1:  Put consciousness in a context of alternative ways to bridge from sensory input to action in the world; that is, show how reflexes, habits, rote learning, and assumptions offer other paths to action with more immediate results at a cost of much less mental effort than required to sustain full-blown consciousness.

Resolved 2:   Remember, since the point of consciousness is effective action in the world, the mind must be seated in the brain somewhere near where sensory inputs connect to motor planning areas—between, say, an incoming pole on the lower side of the temporal lobe near where faces and objects are recognized, and an outgoing pole in the lateral prefrontal cortex where working memory translates sensory inputs into motor responses—an area encompassing cingulate and entorhinal cortices, hippocampus, amygdala, hypothalamus, midbrain reticular formation, and mediodorsal thalamic nucleus. Though the entire cerebral cortex may contribute to consciousness, the mind seems to comes together between the two poles I have mentioned.

Resolved 3:   In everything we do, our values, feelings, and past experiences (memories) moderate the tension between the poles of perception and action. Reflexes, on the other hand, produce hardwired responses that would be slowed and made ineffective if we had to think about it when, say, sand or liquid is thrown in our face. Consciousness develops over time, so is much slower to produce a bodily response. Values come into play, that set of salient priorities which promote our adaptation to whatever situation we find ourselves in. Feelings give a positive or negative tone to the occasion, alerting us to reach out or be on our guard. And memories of past occasions suggest what we might do (or avoid doing) in light of our history of past successes and failures. Where perception and motor planning intersect, values, feelings, and memories are in the vicinity, ready to influence our judgment.

Resolved 4:   Neural correlates of conscious (NCC) aside, the mind is situated in the brain, the brain in the body, the body in a family within a community within one human culture or another, and that culture within the habitats and ecosystems constituting a region within the biosphere of planet Earth. It is often hard to tell which combination of our several layered environments influences us as any one time. It is safe to assume that, one way or another, all of them are impinging on us all of the time. We are creatures of the whole—of Earth, our region, our culture, our community, our family, our body, our brain, and our mind. How we treat any one of them always comes back to us as a sure sign of how we regard (or disregard) ourselves.

Resolved 5:  It is good to remember that consciousness is autobiographical. The history of any one person represents the history of a good portion of the Earth, including plants, animals, watersheds, and cultural communities.

Resolved 6:   Too, our every conscious act reflects our state of mind, which in turn affects every layer we are embedded within. In acting for ourselves, we act for our families, communities, and the living Earth as a whole. We are made of Earth stuff, and can’t help enacting it every day of our lives.

Resolved 7:   Where consciousness is, unconsciousness is not far away. In a very real sense, the goal of consciousness is twofold: 1) to solve problems that affect our survival, and 2) to build facility in solving similar problems so we don’t have to work so hard next time we face a similar situation. That’s why high school English teachers assign term papers, so in college and at work we don’t find writing reports as daunting as we did the first time. In that sense, the role of consciousness is to convert the stages of a complex project into an automatic (that is, unconscious) routine in order to save time, energy, and a great deal of worry. As William James put it in 1890:

We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work (Principles of Psychology, page 122, italics deleted).

Resolved 8:   Regard the history of human works as a reflection of the history of human consciousness. Every work of the human hand is a work of the mind before that. We are revealed to the world, not by good intentions, but by what we plan and bring about. Action suited to our life situation is the goal of consciousness. Nothing can have more survival value than that. Growing rice, corn, wheat, and other grains is an act of will. Milling them into flour is an act of will. Baking bread is an act of will. All so we can break bread together and be grateful to be alive and receive the gifts of the Earth. Poems and songs serve the same end.

Resolved 9:   Beware the powerful, for they are out to shape our endeavors and our minds to their advantage. Buy this, they tell us; Do that; Vote as we tell you; Trust us, we are your friends. All the rest of us need to do is retire our minds and let them make our decisions for us. Those who control our culture create an infrastructure allowing them to think for us and control our minds. Their goal is to be alive in our stead, to steal our life’s energy so that we must work for them, not ourselves. Free will is the prerogative of the arrogant. Our job (they tell us) is to obey. When the infrastructure of our minds bears their trademark—and it amazes me how often that is true—we are lost to ourselves. Freedom is freedom to think for oneself. To surrender that privilege (it is no inherent right) is to surrender to slavery on behalf of The Controllers, who are happy to co-opt our privilege. Fox News, for example, is not just standing by but actively reaching into our brains to implant its alien new world. As Eric Alterman writes in The Nation of November 9 (page 10):

Fox is not a news organization; it is a propaganda outlet, and an extremist one at that. Is it any wonder that according to survey after survey, Fox News viewers are among the worst informed Americans when it comes to politics, despite their obsessive interest? A recent study by Democracy Corps finds that this audience believes “Obama is deliberately and ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt our country and dramatically expand government control over all aspects of our daily lives,” with the ultimate goal of “the destruction of the United States as it was conceived by our founders and developed over the past 200 years.”

The scary thing is that in our own little world, we are the powerful, and it is ourselves we must beware lest we mistake the way the world seems for the way the world really is. Irony of ironies, our own values determine what kind of world we discover around us. We paint that world to our liking, or more often, disliking. Cultural values—religious, political, economic, military, social—make us who we are and set how we act and react. Yet our values are invisible to ourselves and, instead of reflecting how we were raised and our earlier experiences, seem to be properties of the world itself. This tragic error is the root cause of the misjudgments rampant in today’s world. We blame others for our disaffection, and determine to eliminate them as the “cause” of our discomfort.

Resolved 10:   In order to understand consciousness, look to the culture in which it is immersed. And vice versa, to understand culture, study the consciousness of one who is embroiled in it. It is difficult to tell where culture leaves off and consciousness begins. The language we speak is the one we are born to. The gestures we make, the tools we use, the work we do, the manners and ways we take into our personal selves as our very own—are cultural in origin. Every member of a particular culture or subculture shares in similar repertoires of values, and is apt to express some variation on those values. The ways we prepare food, eat, dress, dance, entertain ourselves, make love—are ours largely through imitating or learning from others. We are distinctly ourselves, yet at the same time suppress our uniqueness in order to resemble our companions. We personally exemplify the ways of our culture in almost everything we do, think, and believe. At the same time, we contribute our uniqueness to the texture that makes our culture what it is. It is of us, we are of it. Loops of engagement carry us into the cultural world, and the cultural world into us. The reality we find is an extension of our conscious life; the two feed into each other as if parts of an endless Mobius band feeding into itself. Religion gives us our cultural god, who we then make responsible for creating the natural Earth, which clearly emerged billions of years before anything like culture existed in the human mind. Strange business, yet business as usual because we don’t discriminate very well between the cultural and the natural—between what we make happen and what makes us happen in the first place.

Resolved 11:   Finally, be clear that the basis of good and evil is in us, not the world. Our memories come in two sorts, those giving us pleasure and those causing pain. We have soothing dreams, and nightmares. Our feelings come in pairs of opposites: happiness/sadness, love/hate, confidence/fear, triumph/failure, and all the rest. Our minds color everything that happens either positively or negatively, making sure that whatever happens, we remember it for better or for worse. The world is the world, its seeming goodness or badness depending on how we seize it and take it into ourselves. Similarly, integration and differentiation are built into consciousness—putting things together or taking them apart. Induction and deduction are aspects of mind, moving from the sensory, specific, concrete, and detailed toward the conceptual, generic, abstract, and schematic—and back the other way. And we distinguish between chords and melodies because the qualities of simultaneity and succession are built into our sensory apparatus. Too, relative motions in the world are told by the brain, which for survival’s sake struggles to distinguish personal motions from those of others, the difficulty being that sometimes it’s ours, sometimes the others’, and sometimes both are moving at the same time. Dancing is possible because there’s a beat to the music, and both partners key their moves to that rhythm. Without such a frame of reference, the brain searches for clues to help it decide how to act when everything, for whatever reason, is in flux. We may think it trivial to distinguish our own motions from those of other objects and beings, but if you’ve ever sat in a railway car and compared the relative motion of your car and the one on the track next to you without being able to tell which train is moving, then you’ve had the giddy experience of (your brain) not being able to say whether you are moving ahead (without a giveaway jolt) or the other is silently sliding to the rear.

Reverting to my earlier metaphor, it’s not the hand we are dealt that determines our fate, but how we choose to play it. Consciousness is as consciousness does—as we make it happen. Up till now, those thought to understand how consciousness works have tended to use that knowledge for their personal advancement. Think politics, education, advertising, public relations—think John B. Watson, inventor of behaviorism. It is crucial that the workings of consciousness become widely studied and eventually known, so enabling people everywhere to act advisedly on their own—and their common culture’s—behalf.

Reflection 154: Haiga Consciousness

(Copyright © 2009)

Haiga are a Japanese form of haiku accompanied by a visual image. The image, however, is not to be taken as an illustration of the haiku, both poem and image adding to more than the expressive sum of the media involved. The image is meant to be free, extending and amplifying the inner life of the poem. There is a strong bias against using photographic images in such service, because too electro-optico-mechanical in nature, being untouched by human hands. After all, photography didn’t exist in Basho’s day. But it does exist in my day, so, since photography has been my lifelong medium, my “haiga” are based on digital photography. I say it is the mind shining through the medium that counts, not the medium itself. Poem and image resonate to form an outward and visible portrait of human consciousness. Here are a few examples.

long nights  first coffee  of the new year

 

red year  berries, maple leaves  blood of war

 

old anchor  holds only its shadow  to the snow

 

winter moon  at the stoplight  horns honk behind me

 

flowers and all  summer is rolled  in great wheels

 

 the year starts  with three clouds  and two trees 

 

autumn sunset  contrails of cargo planes  back from Iraq

 

 old stump  autumn shadows  cut short

Not just any old stump as the words imply, but this singular old stump in all its particular details. Moss, leaves, and pine needles aren’t even mentioned. Yet they fulfill the promise of “old stump” in a novel yet satisfying way. It is the jolt of fulfillment that makes the haiga, the going beyond what is given while, at the same time, being consistent with the verbal premise. Not just any morning clouds, but these three particular clouds sighted in the New Year’s sky on a walk at sunrise. Bodies of fallen soldiers aren’t even mentioned, yet they are in that high plane—or another just like it—giving my mind concrete shape. Seeing that particular moon, I switch lanes at the last minute to position it just there. The light is red—but turns green. I grab my camera and shoot through the windshield while other drivers in cars lined behind me grow impatient. You can’t hear the honking, but you can sense it in that image as a blaring accompaniment—given concrete form in the relationship between those three shapes suspended before my eyes. And so on: consciousness revealed in everyday objects and the tensions between them. Tensions not embodied in the objects themselves but laid upon them by my situated consciousness. Consciousness given concrete form so that I can see myself being conscious, reaching out to the world, claiming it as my own. Which it is—my little life in this place at this time.

Reflection 153: jpg Consciousness

(Copyright © 2009)

Enough words. Time for pictures. These are slides from the PowerPoint I showed on the last day of my adult ed class on consciousness at MDI High School in Bar Harbor. See for yourself.

 

 

  

Steve Perrin

Reflection 152: Getting It Together

(Copyright © 2009)

The “It” in the title refers to my understanding of my personal consciousness as made up of various processes which I am able to identify through self-reflective experience. In the order they come to mind (not the order in which they kick in), they include:

1. Arousal informs me I am more awake than asleep, definitely not in a stupor or coma.

2. Alertness seems to be an attitude preparing me for paying attention. I sense something’s up—or might be up.

3. Attention is a kind of outreach I direct or extend via my senses—looking, listening, sniffing, tasting, touching, or heeding what my body has to tell me. Attending to comes before consciousness of. That is, expectancy precedes its fulfillment in perception.

4. Expectancy is a kind of pre-viewing or pre-engagement made possible by my point of view at the time as informed by my values, interests, concerns, and feelings. Expectancy is situational in that it arises from what has gone before, in either the immediate or remote past. Memory is clearly involved in projecting the familiar onto the current scene of the now. Expectancy is largely abstract (less detailed than actual perception) and conceptual, that is, derived from a set of earlier perceptions, but lacking the concrete particulars of any one of them.

5. Fulfillment of expectancy (or not, as the case may be) is a flash of recognition by which the object of my attention is identified as that which I was looking for, so that consciousness acquires intentionality in being consciousness of . . . one thing or another. Specific details in the now give substance to the abstract envelope of expectancy as if the two aspects of consciousness—abstract expectation and concrete perception —came together in a fulfilling, mutual engagement.

6. That engagement has a quality of salience representing the degree to which my motivated expectancy (hopes, fears, desires) is being met in the current episode of awareness—at an appropriate level of discernment. Enabling me to make a judgment confirming or disconfirming this is what I was looking for, or had in mind in the first place.

7. The comings together of concepts and percepts lead to a sense of understanding, of my self standing under (supporting) this new instance of consciousness, taking it in, reaffirming my grasp of (or relationship to) the world, conveying a sense of my being of that world, providing a strong sense of affirmation that my grasp is appropriate to my situation.

8. If my expectations are fulfilled in a new or surprising way, then surprise and novelty play roles in consciousness, stretching my understanding in order to accommodate or incorporate an instance I did not anticipate, challenging or perhaps enlarging my understanding. This gives me the option of fulfilling my expectations by habitual application of a tried-and-true response to account for, discredit, or dismiss this unanticipated episode of experience. Or, on the other hand, of opening myself up to new experience in such a way that expands my grasp of the current situation. (Note: This is what I was laboring over in my last post, Reflection 151: Error Signals, that effort prompting me to simplify the matter and place it in context in today’s reflection.)

9. All of which can culminate in new learning, or reaffirmation of my prior understanding. At this stage, clearly, memory is involved. Earlier synaptic connections are affirmed, or perhaps an effort to establish new ones as a basis for improving the effectiveness of my actions in the world is made possible.

10. All leading up to reaffirming or improving my being in the world through planning leading to effective action by equipping me to make myself happen more aptly in light of my circumstances, which is the point of being conscious in the first place.

In the order I present them here, that’s: arousal, alertness, attention, expectancy, fulfillment, salience, understanding, novelty, learning, and action. In addition, I would stress the roles of perception, conception, and memory as major players in consciousness, for a baker’s dozen of topics to whirl in the mind much as jugglers whirl Indian clubs in the air. Any scientist of the mind could probably double or triple that number, but that’s as many as seem particularly relevant to me today in keeping this reflection as straightforward as I can make it.

 

Reflection 151: Error Signals

(Copyright © 2009)

Looking at the world, as each of us does, through her own eyes, we see that world in reference to the uniqueness of our personal makeup and experience. My senses embody my particular history of life events, as your senses embody yours. These personal histories include our formative development, birth order, sex, class, education, temperament, political leanings, and the host of other influences that make us who we are.  Other people inhabit other worlds from ourselves, privileged by nature to exercise their unique sensibilities, often presenting themselves in ways that seem strange from our point of view. Sometimes, without knowing, we feel alienated from such other worlds because they strike us as being so foreign to our own.

When others conduct themselves in ways we would not conduct ourselves, we register the disparity as a strong sense of discomfort. That sense serves as a kind of error signal warning us we are out of our native element and approaching the limit of personal tolerance. Appropriate action being the desired outcome of any act of consciousness, we consider how we might improve the situation. Do we respond to what we take to be an insult with humor? Do we laugh it off, jeer, display hostility and aggression, seek sanctuary, or give way and, thinking we might learn something, pay attention while the others do their thing?

In truth, we have a great many options, but often resort to habitual modes of behavior for dealing with situations we take to be threatening. That way, we don’t waste any time thinking things through, but respond spontaneously as if the signals we take as insults were intentionally meant to inflict harm.

“You lie!” we shout, or “That’s stupid!” “Death panels!” “Killing Granny!” “Infidel.” If armed, we might shoot from the hip. The point is to take control of the situation by intimidating those we bother ourselves about. “Shock and awe!” was Rumsfeld’s battle cry in Iraq, as if mighty Ozymandias had shouted from the grave. “Let ‘em come!” said his boss, the same man who recited the phrase “axis of evil” from his Tele-Prompter.

Enmity is a cheap substitute for extending consciousness to embrace others who make themselves happen differently than we do. Particularly when affront is taken at, say, differences of dress, accent, sex, or religion. Distinctions interpreted as threats cause havoc, not righteousness. They can lead to attitudes of superiority over lesser beings, to put-downs, intolerance, bullying, armed conflicts, holocausts, colonial domination, and political strife.

Often envy, one of the seven transgressions formerly punishable by death, is at the root of such hostile behaviors. If they have what I want, I am justified in despising them, I tell myself as I blame others for frustrating my ambitions. Native Americans were in the way of European settlers, so were dispensable. The same for Aboriginal peoples in Australia, Palestinians in the so-called Holy Land, Obama in the White House through the eyes of those who choose to feel threatened by his right to hold office. It’s a figure-ground kind of thing.

We are prone to laying our assumptions and preferences—our personal values—on others as if they were obligated to act in our self-interest and not their own. This leads to domination, a sort of colonialism of the mind by which we impose our values on others as self-evident truths for the greater good (as seen from our personal perspective). This great game of as if causes more trouble in the world than almost any other aspect of consciousness. Think of the violence committed against children, wives, members of the true church, and other inferiors in the name of paternalism, the grand pretention that Father (or Husband) Knows Best. A great many advertising claims fall into this category, which confounds consumer interests with those of dealers and manufacturers. Such corporate or commercial takeovers of consumer consciousness are rampant in our way of economic thinking.

Consciousness is our greatest asset in dealing with challenges presented by the worlds we inhabit; that is, as long as it is managed by its rightful owner. Surrendering consciousness to those who covet it for their advantage amounts to resource extraction like mountain-top coal mining, clear-cutting extensive forest ecosystems, or mining the wealth (formerly known as fish and sea mammals) of the world’s oceans. Our current economy is based on invading, subverting, and capitalizing on the consciousness of a gullible public. Minds are extracted every day for profit: that’s what capitalism amounts to: the coercive transfer of assets from those who have less in order that others can have all the more.

Being swayed to misinterpret the disparity between our expectations and what actually happens leads to the erosion of personal consciousness for the sake of getting along with groups of others characteristically more aggressive than ourselves. Self-realization (what I call “making ourselves happen”) by others’ rules is a brute distortion of the most fundamental principles of evolution and survival, which concern the well-being of individual persons, not institutions or corporate bodies. As Jeff Madrick reports in The Nation (August 31/September 7, 2009) regarding a study of Harvard College grads from the early 70s, 80s, and 90s of the last century:

Many more college grads have entered finance since the early 1970s than in previous years. That’s no surprise. But the premium they earned over their peers in other fields was enormous. Katz and Goldin found that the grads in finance made, on average, almost 200 percent more (“Money for Nothing,” page 6).

Of course the reckoning came later—with the financial collapse in the fall of 2008—but the young financiers had made a killing in the meantime, and their corporate bosses are still making a killing many times over. In our society, we consider them the smart ones. The ones we admire and would emulate if we could. They are emissaries of capitalism who mine the conscious minds of the rest of us as so many natural resources to be exploited for personal gain.

The disparity in wealth in the world represents a disparity in consciousness between those content with sufficiency and those who lust for more. The smart money capitalizes on that disparity, as mortgage grantors capitalized on the vulnerability of mortgagees struggling to pay their bills, widening the gap on their own behalf rather than equalizing distribution of Earth’s limited resources—always the anonymous standard backing any currency you can name.

The root of the problem lies in the gap between our conscious expectations and the hands we are dealt by the movers and shakers of our society who deliberately squeeze us to gain as big a survival edge for themselves as they can. When Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” as President Obama was pushing his healthcare plan, it was the disparity between his party’s power and the president’s that made him do it. He never considered that his party’s fate had anything to do with chronic overreaching by Bush-Rove-Cheney, et al. who perversely plumped their slim hold on power into a mandate. The gap is in the eye of the beholder, who funds it with his personal brand of meaning—as long as it is to his personal advantage.

Such are the frailties of consciousness. The simple remedy is to wonder, when confronted by a gap between expectation and fulfillment, “Am I being unrealistic and it isn’t their fault at all?” Blame casting is our national sport, driven by our desires more than any realistic assessment of our performance. But my guess is that it is more likely that nine times out of ten, we have surrendered responsibility for our own behavior in order to find fault with some fall guy in order to cut him down to our size.

Envy used to be deemed a capital offense; maybe we should revisit that discussion. Or at least treat the defamed and exploited as innocent until proven guilty. As I said, it’s a figure-ground thing.

 

 

 

 

 

Reflection 150: The Big IF

(Copyright © 2009)

Our outlooks on the world are governed by networks of electrochemical connections in our brains, in turn governed by the unique biochemical circumstances in which those networks were formed during earliest infancy and childhood, as well as by changes in neural connectivity resulting from subsequent life experience.

Our outlooks on the world determine our expectations. Our expectations determine how we extend ourselves into the world through personal behavior, which in turn determines how we receive world gestures into ourselves as episodes of meaningful experience.

How we take the world into ourselves influences our next round of behavior, which sets us up for the next cycle of feedback to be interpreted in light of our outlook.

Round and round we go on the continuous ride of expectancy and fulfillment in a looping engagement with a world we cannot know in itself but interpret nonetheless from our unique point of view within whatever situation we construe as our current reality.

Our ongoing loop of engagement with the world is none other than our personal life. Which is unlike any other life because our innermost electrochemical connectivity and our experience are unique to ourselves. So, too, are the values by which we guide our adaptation to what we take to be the outside world as an expression of our will to survive. Our minds are our unique, personal minds, our acts are our acts, our interpretations are our interpretations, our adaptation is our adaptation, our survival is our survival, our life is our life.

But that’s only the beginning. Imagine all the relationships each unique person has with those around her—including family, friends, society, pets, wildlife, vegetation, landscapes, habitats, institutions, governments, cultures—all those loops reaching out from each person into his surrounding milieu, generating occasions for feedback, interpretation, and subsequent responses through actions, gestures, utterances, and so on.

Considering the complexity of our ongoing interactions, engagements, interrelationships—all different, all changing—we can appreciate the challenge of even the simplest human life we can imagine—that, say, of the infant, or the hermit in his mountain retreat. Add the necessity of keeping track of it all though learning and memory (and blessed forgetfulness of trivial details) so that our experience is more-or-less cumulative and orderly, it is a wonder each of us isn’t overwhelmed by the relentless flux of events in our personal worlds of  consciousness.

If in fact we are created equal, it is as equal experiments in the universe. Where many will adapt to the occasions of their lives and muddle through, others will succumb. Day after day, the issue is personal survival. If our respective sets of unique characteristics are a match for the conditions in which we strive, and our minds and bodies are up to the challenge, we will live another day. That is the big IF in whose shadow we awaken each day, and surrender to mock oblivion later on.

It is not that I am pitting my values and uniqueness against yours for the privilege of making it through till tomorrow. Living in the shadow of the big IF is the lot we share in common with humanity and all life. But it is not surprising that within that one lot, differences are inevitable. Those differences are part of the plan in setting us up for the ultimate test of survival. Those who are most adapted to their life circumstances will go on, while others stumble, and eventually collapse. That’s what it means to exist as one of Earth’s children.

But when one group or class takes advantage of another, using it to boost its own comfort and chances of survival—then campfires and bombardments will light the night sky in answer to such skullduggery. 

Human history is written in blood spilled by one group rising against another in response to unjust oppression for the sake of stealing a survival advantage. Every chapter tells of farmers standing against ranked troops, archers or rock throwers against those with guns who have invaded their land, suicide bombers killing as many innocents as possible, slaves against masters, workers against bosses, subjects against armies of kings and emperors, those out of power against those in power, and on and on. Power, ultimately, bestows a survival advantage upon those who possess it, depriving the powerless to an equal degree.

Consciousness matters because it is the gauge of our equality under the circumstances that prevail in our current social situation. We can tell our relative station in life by how others treat us. If we feel put upon, neglected, abused, under-represented, or generally at a disadvantage compared to others in our social realm, we will act according to our degree of disaffection. Nowhere is it written that one class should stride upon the bodies of its underlings. Nor is it decreed that the socially underprivileged must bow to their self-styled betters as exemplars of a more noble form of humanity.

Uniqueness is uniqueness; humanity is humanity. Each of us has an inherent right to equal treatment and respect. It is not up to us to impress others into serving our personal values and goals. If all do not stand for one, and one does not stand for all, we risk  elevating ourselves as higher beings more fit than the rest. Yet we are born to die—as everyone is—mortals first-to-last. If our uniqueness is to receive its due, it is as a proclamation that our respective gifts have equal worth as agents of survival in the universal experiment that is humanity. We do not know where the next great advance will arise—in what climate, habitat, nation, genome, or stream of consciousness.

We cannot see beyond the shadow of the big IF that falls equally upon us. Therefore it is not for us to weigh the value of others’ gifts. We can only manage our consciousness to make our unique selves happen as best we can under the circumstances that befall us—and insist on everyone’s right to do the same.

In this light, personal consciousness is not primarily a means for advancing ourselves beyond others, but rather a means of striving for sufficiency while recognizing we are in this life together and deserve equal chance to make ourselves happen—not as higher and lower beings, but as uniquely gifted members of our common humanity. Each of us is but one biochemical wonder among many with diverse outlooks and expectations, all with equal hopes of fulfillment in adapting to the world shadow that falls across us for the duration of our lives.

 

 

Reflection 149: Blind Walk

(Copyright © 2009)

Bending down, I reach into the front-loading dryer and scoop the jumbled laundry into my basket. Back in my apartment, I place the basket on my bed and begin to sort it—underwear in this pile, T-shirts here, sheets there, socks lined up by pattern and color along the edge of the mattress. Finding a dishtowel but no dishrag, I figure it’s hiding among the sheets, which I shake out—there, snug in the corner of the fitted one. I put the piles of clothing I have sorted away and make the bed.

A routine episode from almost any Saturday morning in the past twelve years. I am a creature of habit, and of sorting things into groups having similar characteristics—pencils, tomatoes, bugs, butterflies—courtesy of distinctions I make in my conscious mind. I am a classifier, a categorizer, a sorter into piles. And so are we all, as shown by the way we use language.

‘What is this, class?’ asks teacher reaching into her shoebox, holding up a red toy truck about two-and-a-half inches long.

‘A truck,’ answer the first-graders in unison.

What is it for?

‘Going places,’ says one; ‘Carrying stuff,’ says another.

‘What is this?’

‘A cow.’

‘What do cows give us?’

‘Milk;’ ‘Ice cream,’ says someone in back.

And this?

‘A house.’

‘Are you sure it’s not a store or a barn?’ 

‘It’s where people live.’

Except that teacher doesn’t heft a truck, boat, or house from the box—she is dealing strictly with miniature toys, simplified representations of familiar objects without motors, without internal organs, without windows or kitchens.  She is not teaching the class to discriminate on the basis of sensory details so much as to think in terms of broad categories of utility. She is having her students sort the world conceptually in terms of labeled ideas, not firsthand experience. This is more an example of cultural indoctrination than education.

Then there is the blind walk.

I get permission to take my class of seniors to the grounds of a large, unoccupied home in the neighborhood where we won’t bother anyone. I tell them the idea of the blind walk is to get to know the area, not by looking, but by feeling their way with their hands. I want them to concentrate on touch, sound, and smell—any and all senses except sight. They pair up, decide who is to go first. One is the ‘guardian’ whose job is to make sure the blind-folded ‘explorer’ doesn’t get hurt. Partners are to tactilely explore their surroundings for half an hour, then switch roles, trade the blindfold, and go at it for another half hour. My job is to keep everyone safe and active. At the end, students are to share  highlights from their experience as guardians and explorers, respectively.

For the watcher—me—the exercise turned out other than I had imagined. I presented it in terms of sensory exploration, but my students took that as a challenge to name objects they could not see. In twelve years of schooling, the ability to savor their sensory experience had been stripped from them. These were first graders grown large, but perceptually diminished. They could classify their experience, but not enjoy it. They were eager to identify whatever they came across by touch, but that was all. As soon as they said “pinecone,” “rock,” “stick,” “tree,” “grass,” or “gravel,” they moved on to something else without pausing to explore the feel or smell of what they had touched. Their approach was wholly and uniformly conceptual. Getting the “right” answer was the only thing that mattered. Even warmth from the sun was reduced to naming the source, not savoring how it felt on a particular day in early spring. We teachers had done our job too well, creating students who could sort the world into a standard set of categories—wholly bypassing personal experience, the basis of all pleasure and true knowledge.

As a result of what passes for education these days, many of our children fit themselves to a world of concepts and ideas, not sensory exploration. They get good at sorting things into bins, which has a certain utility, but is also sad because they developed that skill to please their elders. During the course of my life, I have watched an emphasis on concept formation descend through the grades from high school to grammar school to the earliest rungs of preschool. Our children are prepared by society to think and work categorically rather than develop their personal abilities to experience the wonders of this Earth.

My point is that, in the best of all possible worlds, consciousness relies heavily on both sensory and conceptual aspects of experience. To meet the challenges of life we need extensive practice in both realms. To a man or a woman, we are all latent artists and scientists, cooks and judges, poets and talk-show hosts. Lumping things together by sorting, classifying, categorizing on the basis of broad similarities is an essential life skill—but so too is distinguishing between specific features, qualities, and subtle differences. To know a thing, a person, or a field of endeavor requires not only knowing about their general characteristics, but acquainting their specific details as well through personal experience.

Much has been written about the objectivity or intentionality of consciousness, the being aware of things as wholes in themselves rather than in terms of their separate parts, qualities, or details. Consciousness initially renders the world in terms of recognizable units; it takes deliberate effort to analyze such units in terms of their myriad sensory components (hearing individual voices in the symphony of the whole). We are immediately conscious of coherent objects or scenes as overall images or summaries, so not to be overwhelmed by the jumble that William James described in his famous cartoon of infant consciousness as “one great, blooming, buzzing confusion.” In The Principles of Psychology (1890), James writes:

Any number of impressions, from any number of sensory sources, falling simultaneously on a mind which has not yet experienced them separately, will fuse into a single undivided object for that mind. The law is that all things fuse that can fuse, and nothing separates except what must (italics deleted).

The overall effect being to achieve the unity of a scene or an object, a wholeness that must be discriminated into its parts through deliberate effort and refinement of attention. Much has been made of perception as a process for recognizing the world in terms of its fundamental units or categories. Aristotle treated those units of oneness as “modes of being,” as if they were properties of things in themselves. Kant saw them more as phenomena created by consciousness itself in its own terms through the process of apprehending the world. Gerald Edelman presents categorization as a quality of perception dictated by values inherent in the perceiver which are necessary to acting in the world adaptively for the sake of survival.

However we account for consciousness, attention, and awareness, we must allow for two types: 1) concrete, sensory perception, and 2) a more generally applicable type that is less specific and so more abstract and conceptual. Consciousness can balance or move between the two types, from the abstract to the concrete, and back again, encompassing both example and principle, token and type, species and genus, concept and percept. How the brain achieves this remarkable dynamic is not fully understood, but there is no doubt that both types can be joined in the workings of consciousness. Except that education tends to tip the balance toward the summary judgments of conception.

It strikes me that what I was doing in sorting my laundry in the first example above, the first graders were doing in labeling the teacher’s toy truck, and my seniors did on their blind walk—was casting abstract, conceptual expectations onto the world as a kind of outline for what we thought was possible in and appropriate to our respective situations. We then confirmed those expectations as they were fulfilled on those three occasion by acting appropriately to our situations, students calling out the name (as they had been taught) that fit most closely to their expectations as a kind of easy shorthand for the full-bodied (detailed perceptual) experience, and me sorting my laundry into piles I deemed appropriate to my subsequent tasks of putting clothes away and clean sheets on the bed. 

As I have often written, expectation is destiny. We don’t live in the world so much as in our expectations of what that world should be. We make the evidence of our eyes and ears conform to what we want to happen. Our stance toward the world, our fundamental attitude toward reality, determines how we act far more than the evidence of our senses. It as if we were wind-up toys that head off as soon as set on the floor. Education winds us up, life fulfills what we have been taught. That is, it is our preconceptions that drive us, not the existential facts of our lives.

This is the understanding I have been seeking since my first post to this blog in early October, 2008. Taking time off to reflect on my posted reflections, this is what I have discovered. As humans walking our diverse ways, we are condemned to find what our families, peers, teachers, and overall cultures have prepared us to find. We fit the world to whatever model of the world we have assembled over the course of our training. That is our reality. Which our experience inevitably fulfills because—contrary to public belief—perception follows and does not lead the dictates of conception.

Picture humans on their blind walks through life, judging and labeling what they find according to their acquired pre-dispositions, and that is my portrait of the human predicament of days gone by, which is identical to the one we find ourselves in today.

 

 

Reflection 148: Achilles’ Brain

(Copyright © 2009)

Because each person on Earth is inherently unique, the landscapes we live in depend on where we are situated in our heads. Self-centered perspectivity is the tragic flaw we all share in common. The human predicament is to be one-of-a-kind—yet to act as if we each set the norm. Unrelentingly, we mistake our personal views for the way things are, confounding our limited personal grasp of affairs with universal truth. We are so full of ourselves, we often foist our personal brand of consciousness onto those around us, who, if we are tough enough with them, bow to our shows of conviction as signs of wisdom and power. To wit: patriarchies, chains of command, pecking orders, management and labor. Day after day, we bull our way through one situation after another, or submit and get out of the way.

Our uniqueness is not a matter of degree; it is absolute. Each of us may boast some 23 thousand genes, but they are wholly inadequate when it comes to specifying the one million billion (1 followed by 15 zeroes) synaptic connections between brain cells in our cerebral cortices. During development in the womb and through strong experience, we forge those connections on our own—or don’t if we fail to exercise them actively during infancy, childhood, and thereafter. As Gerald Edelman summarizes the underpinnings of consciousness (“Building a Picture of the Brain,” in Edelman and Changeux, The Brain, Transaction Publishers, 2001):

At the finest scale, no two brains are identical, not even those of identical twins. Furthermore, at any two moments, connections in the same brain are not likely to remain exactly the same. Some cells will have retracted their processes, others will have extended new ones, and certain other cells will have died. . . . There are no absolutely specific point-to-point connections in the brain. The microscopic variability of the brain at the finest ramifications of its neurons is enormous, making each brain unique. (Pages 38-39.)

In managing personal consciousness, each of us is on her own. Our brains are unique, our minds are unique, the worlds we create for ourselves are unique. Quite literally, reality is beyond our reach because we live in our bodies by interpreting signals from some outer world of which we can only dimly and partly be aware. Conjure that world as we may, the results bear our personal signatures for, as projections outward from our perspectives, they are largely our own doing instead of a welcoming of the world as it is. We each place ourselves at the center of our worlds, creating a multiverse of which we are but one facet among seven billion.

Yet hour by hour we rise on our soap boxes and proclaim or act out the truth as we see it—as if it were the only truth there is or could possibly be. If that isn’t a travesty, then it is a tragedy which we enact every every day without questioning whether or not we know what we do, or appreciate the impact we have on those around us or on Earth itself, the planet that has supported us up till now no matter how badly we have treated it.

Which raises an obvious question: Who am I to defy the very point I am trying to make by daring to break out of the fortress of my subjective outlook in this blog? Surely, I am no less tragic a figure than any other. All I can say is: I write for myself and you read for yourself. Perhaps our worlds overlap to some degree. In which case I could claim to be a columnist like Alexander Cockburn, say, who writes in The Nation (October 5, 2009):

Was there ever a society so saturated with lunacy as ours? One expects modulated nuttiness from the better element, particularly those inhabiting the corporate and legislative spheres. But these days insanity is pervasive, spreading through all classes and walks of life.

Or for another example, like Daniel Lyons in Newsweek (September 28, 2009):

[M]ost of what streams across Twitter is junk. One recent study concluded that 40 percent of the messages are “pointless babble.”. . . Then again look at TV: fat people dancing, talentless people singing, Glenn Beck slinging lunatic conspiracy theories. Stupid stuff sells. The genius of Twitter is that it manages to be even stupider than TV. It’s so stupid that it’s brilliant. No person with an IQ above 100 could possibly care what Ashton Kutcher or Ashlee Simpson has to say about anything. But Kutcher has 3.5 million Twitter followers, and Simpson has 1.5 million.

Insanity and stupidity are pandemic. They’re finally getting across as our preferred way of life. We are conjurors all, flaunting vanities from our secret worlds. Whatever became of modesty, humility, judgment, and respect? We’re making a killing by foisting subjective views on a public starved for outrage and comic relief. Think of those trillions of synapses going to waste, now disconnected and lost for good. And we can’t stop ourselves from putting witlessness on display any more than Republicans can stop trying to kick Obama’s chair out from under him so they can smirk when he falls.

The take-home message? If you’re not good at building a better world through discipline and hard work, trash the one you’ve got just for laughs. That’s what we’re doing with our unique set of gifts instead of contributing to the greater good. The tragedy is that in trashing the world, we’re trashing ourselves. Playing our foibles before the crowd, we appeal to the least of our possibilities instead of showing our stuff in meeting the defining challenges of our times. It is we who choose how to make ourselves happen during our brief stay on this Earth. If life turns out a tragedy, so be it: the name on the script is our own.