A companion blog, The Metacognition Project, has been created to focus specifically on metacognition and related consciousness processes. Newest essay on TMP: Goals and Problems, part two

Tuesday, June 5, 2018
The Life We Will Not, But Must, Live: part one
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The world is a very complicated place: from quantum
mechanics to auto mechanics and political correctness to living correctness; it
is easy to get tangled up in the cacophony of the many unconnected events that
impinge on us daily. But, there is still
the interplay of the immediate present and the consequential future within
which our lives and the lives of all future generations, of both humans and the
rest of the living earth, will take place.
It is that ‘consequential future’ that we have relegated to the most
narrow considerations possible – because it is convenient to do so and because
a comprehensive view is hard.
Here is an almost cartoonish comparison that illustrates:
the ‘seventh generation’ ethics of many materially simple people and the ‘quarterly
report’ ethics of people gathered into what are presently called ‘corporations’
(we use the term corporation as though we actually understand what it is and
its functioning in our social/economic/political world). Even making sense of the quarter year is too
long a time scale in the current Trumpian political space; we are routinely
overwhelmed daily, even hourly, with deeply significant possible actions from
this administration; actions that seem to be driven by the immediate and the
personal and even the pathological; actions that in ‘seventh generation’ thinking
would be considered wildly ludicrous, if not insane.
The questions of how best to live a human life, one that
fulfills the evolved nature of the human animal are laughably irrelevant in ‘quarterly
report’ ethics. Ways of living that adapt
both the species’ existence and individual members’ lives into the immediate
ecosystem and the biophysical space as a whole… and that recognize the
specialized and powerful newly evolved adaptations that humans bring to the
world… are completely removed from consideration.
* * *
Humans are the first animal to evolve on the earth that
have belief as an important organizing principle (I entertain the possibility
that other members of the genus, Homo, might also have adapted belief, but ours
is the only species that has fully expressed belief outside of the dominant
control of the ecosystem). Belief is
special in that it is inherently unlimited by biophysical reality; all other
species have their physical form and behavior structured within and tested unceasingly
by biophysical limits. Our species also
existed for many tens of thousands of years using the adaptation of belief as a
powerful tool within the guardrails of the biophysical, but belief (and its
primary supporting adaptations) escaped these limitations – by imagining and believing
that we could [1].
We developed what I am calling the Consciousness System of
Order (CSO), within which imagining is a basic function. Belief, a sense of will (free or otherwise),
a specialized awareness, language (its powers of information transmission and storage),
art and ornament (again information transmission and storage), technologies (a
form of solidified imaginings) and the various forms of human organization are
all part of the CSO.
Of course, the CSO is not a stand-alone function, but is
completely interpenetrating with motivation, emotion, cognition, learning and
any other behavioral forms that might be definable; the CSO is an information
handling and organizing system formed of the many cognitive behaviors (and the
physical structures that supply them) found in other animals, but not organized
into an integrated system as in humans [2].
The result is a completely new and internally sustaining way of
organizing information: selecting, storing and implementing information in ways
never before occurring in the known universe.
The CSO construct is not the thrust of this essay, however,
only a necessary element in understanding how it is that humans have gone
“right” and how we have gone “wrong” in our relationship with the biosphere –
the final frontier, as it were, for our adjustment to living on the earth. Our consistent, successfully maladaptive,
approach to living in defined ecosystems is now confronting how our ways of living
function in the total ecosystem, the biosphere, and, with that confrontation,
all the rules – the things we have come to believe in – have changed; the
biophysical reality is reasserting itself on the human animal with the
absolutism that has controlled life on the earth for 4 billion years.
Our imagination allowed us to conceive of a sharpened stone
tied to the end of a stick; imagination also allowed us to believe that we
owned the plants and animals that could be collected with that stone-on-stick.
And the imagination of and belief in owning made all things possible, more than
possible: right and necessary. The
stone-on-stick and the hundreds and, then, thousands of variations created powers
of control over, and the power to change, the immediate environment; human
numbers went from thousands to millions and the domination of the land went
from a few hectares for a hunting and gathering village to thousands and
millions of hectares for agriculture, mining, travel ways, and habitations; the
structures of ecosystems changed as we removed competing plants and animals –
as we changed both the chemistry and the shape of the land itself.
It was once realized (imagined in close comportment with
biophysical reality) that everything taken from the environment required
compensation – not understood as an ecologist might and not as thoroughly
implemented as a fully integrated member of an ecosystem would do. Though this understanding was trivialized
over the many years into sacrifice rituals, there remained a seed of truth: one
must give to receive. However, the imbalance of ‘give and take’ became more
common: years of salinization, over grazing, over hunting compensated by a
basket of grain, a goat or, if really serious, a human child. Again, imagining and belief; if the child is
valuable to us, then it must be valuable to the earth.
These are the ways that we have gone astray: With the
voices of imagination and belief guiding behavior, the daily whispers of the
environment are overpowered; the consequences of not listening were put off by
the stone-on-stick and its increasingly many variants. And if conditions became too difficult the
people could move to another place less reduced in fecundity. We have evidence of this process from 30,000
years ago and it began in earnest in various places 10,000 years ago.
Each new generation believed that it didn’t apply to them,
and so, has been continuous and unattended until that old recognition is forced
upon us by the ultimate power of the environment: the failure to continue to
supply “free services”: fertile soils, fresh water, unpolluted air, waste
recycling, predictable climates and the host of intangibles that invigorate
life.
* * *
There are several facts that must be stated, believed and
acted on if there is to be continued existence of the present ecological
structures and a majority of the present plants and animals (a large number of
species of both plants and animals have either already become extinct or are in
such perilous condition that their end is almost certain). I intend some relevance to the order of
presentation, but am not wedded to it.
1) Wealth and power inequities must be challenged
relentlessly. The beliefs around wealth superiority must be vanquished and the
present inequalities seen as the theft that they are. The distortions of society and the
pathologies created in human beings by such accumulations need to be made an
open part of our discourse.
2) There must be an immediate reduction in the activities
that produce global consequences on the biosphere. This includes the production
of carbon dioxide, methane, biocides, many fertilizers and more. Also, the release and over use of
antibiotics, the massive production of meat animals and actions that increase
the distribution of disease vectors for both humans and other species.
3) The gathering and destruction of “wild” animals and
plants must be forcefully regulated or stopped completely for some species.
Over fishing, whaling, sport hunting, exotic pets and plants are all
unnecessary and endanger the survival of individual species and ecosystems.
4) Some meaningful controls and limitations on the actual
possibility of using nuclear, chemical and biological weapons need to be
structured in both political terms and in technical solutions.
5) Moral and ethical beliefs need to be structured that
allow for and guide the reduction of world human populations toward 2 billion
or less over the next hundred years. I list this last knowing that many might
think it primary, but last because,
without the others, this would be an entirely useless exercise.
Reading through this list a thoughtful person will almost
certainly agree with the need in all or most cases, but also realize the
‘impossibility’ of making these changes. I think it true that no direct assault
on the present economic, social and political system can accomplish even a tiny
percentage of the need; only the failure of the environment to supply the “free
services” upon which life depends can force these changes directly – that would
be, of course, an irony: most of the living world would have to die for the
world to be saved (the other possible option is all too obvious: authoritarian
domination and the murder of billions).
There is, however, another way; a way of great uncertainty, but the only
way that has even a small possibility of successfully accomplishing this list
while maintaining a shred of what we call humanity.
I wrote above: “…(when) the voices of imagination and
belief (are) guiding behavior, the daily whispers of the environment are
overpowered; the consequences of not listening were put off by the
stone-on-stick and its increasingly many variants.”
Upton Sinclair said that, “It is difficult to get a man to
understand when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” I broaden, simplify
and remove some of the distortion of economic context by suggesting that ‘we
become what we consistently put our hand to.’ And I mean actually put our ‘hand
to’, only putting the ‘mind to’ is not the same thing. We all put our hand to something, and if that
something is ‘nothing’, then that is what we become (I know that this is not
very generous, but bear with me).
What are we to put our hand to? If you turn a tap and water flows forth at 50
PSI ‘forever’ without you making the slightest effort to make it continue, then
you have put your hand to turning a tap, not to getting an essential life
sustaining substance. If you work a pump handle pulling water from the ground,
water flows when you move your arm and stops when you stop; if you carry that
water to where it is to be used, feel its weight, avoid spilling and wasting
because the measured work of your body is there in every liter…then you have an
ecological relationship with water.
If you walk a mile, you have absorbed the mile into your
body; but, not so if you are carried. If you collect or grow your food, if you
dispose of and compost your own waste, if you design how to stay warm when cold
and cool with hot and dry when wet, if you learn to live watchfully with the
dangers around you without demanding their destruction or removal, if you
discover ways to compensate the biophysical space for what you take from it
(first realizing what you do, in fact, take from it), then you will have put
your hand to living in the world as an associate, as a partner with the rest of
life.
Well…this is certainly too much to ask! Everyone can’t
possibly do these things, and in many cases there would be laws preventing such a
way of life. And so the dilemma: What must be done is too much to ask. In such a case it is time for imagination and
belief to be devoted to the need, the need to do what cannot be done: this is
the province of the imagination. The list of “the impossible” that human
imagination has made possible is the story of the CSO’s construction of new
probability structures for the possible.
[1] Belief is the ‘mental’ hormone. In general somatic
physiology, hormones set the processes to some organized outcome, guiding the functioning
of both biological and perceptual events. These patterns originate by
evolutionary processes and are, therefore, adapted to species’ roles in
ecosystems. Belief plays a similar role
by also organizing biological and perceptual events into coherent behaviors of
not only individuals, but groups of individuals; and not just in the moment,
but over time and space. There are,
however, no biophysical limits as to what can be believed, and no natural
forces of order holding belief to comport with biophysical reality.
[2] The CSO’s relationship to the LSO (the living order) and the PSO (the physical order) is weakly
analogous to LSO’s relationship to the PSO. The LSO is a completely new way of
organizing and handling information that is completely interpenetrating with
the “Laws of Nature”; there is nothing in any action that is new, only the way
the actions have become organized.
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Understanding, But Not Understanding, Obama (and Black America):
(The recent events in Missouri and the general naiveté of “white America” encouraged me to
reprise this essay written in March 2011. Nothing has been changed from that earlier
rendering, but the contextual emphasis is less on Obama and more on the nature
of the Black Experience.)
There are many issues this spring leafing out on that
tree! They have to do with ambition –
something that his peers fully understand and others might have hints of. They have to do with raw talent and capacity
– something beyond most of his peers, supporters and detractors. They have to do with the gauss count of his
moral compass – a very difficult quantity to measure. And they have to do with his worldview –
since this is the most difficult and ambiguous, it is one that I will write
about.
Understanding of such complexities begins at home. A simple
man will find it impossible to understand a complicated one (without help); a
computer is not repaired with a hammer and chisel. A good bit of the difficulty in understanding
Obama arises from this fact.
In part because I grew up in a clash of cultures, in a house
of secrets, in a town of secrets, in a land of secrets I became what might be
called socially hypervigilant. And it is
hypervigilance [1] that I see in Obama as one of the main principles that
serves up his experiences. It becomes so
natural, so ordinary, that one forgets that everyone doesn’t experience in the
same way.
As I understand Obama’s history he grew up as the
outsider. An American black kid in
Indonesia, a black child in a white family and a ‘regular’ black guy in
American society. While much of that
history is not in my experience, I have watched, with my own version of
hypervigilance, blacks in American society; paying vigilant attention at
remarkably high levels is required. As a
metaphor, think of most people only needing and being able to see and respond
to four colors, and most minority people being required to see a million colors
and to make importantly difference responses to those colors and their various
combinations. They also learn quickly
not to try to explain that world to the color blind and color challenged.
In my experience of the American south, blacks must not only
be acutely aware of what is happening around them, they most also seem unaware
and disinterested in exactly the right amounts.
The perceptual acuity and concentration required are enormous. The dominant society has its 4 color
prescription for the acceptable behaviors of minorities which is mindlessly and
ruthlessly enforced.
Obama has to be a master of these skills. He has always been, I would guess from his
first real sentience, a seeker of the way; building a body of skills and habits
within which he was safe, or safer than without them, and with which he quickly
discovered he could control his world.
One price is that not one person in a thousand (or more) can see the
world as he sees it.
This makes him dangerous as the most important man in the
world. No matter what he tells us, it is
not the truth; we can’t possibly see his real truth, and, possibly we “can’t
handle the truth” should we see it through his eyes. But is he more dangerous than the 4 color
seers who defile him or those who would replace him? Almost certainly not. When Obama is not ‘telling the truth,’ it is
often because what he has to say is so difficult to translate into communicable
form; the others are just lying [2].
I believe that there are lots of black folks in the US who
understand this, but they won’t tell – the unaware and disinterested rule,
remember.
Up to this point I have been operating on the assumption
that Obama is an honest man; here is where it gets dicey. Knowing how to read and understand him would
be difficult enough were he completely honest, but if he is dishonest like
(almost) all the rest of the political world, then where are we? Then we have a president who is a master at
seeing the subtle hues of all the colors, understands their nuance and is
willing to lie about their meaning for his own advantage.
People like McCain, Huckabee, Barbour, Bachman, Gingrich,
Palin and Romney tell such transparent lies that all but their sycophantic
followers are embarrassed for them. Just
a little learning and their 4 color world begins to look colorless and empty of
useful solutions. This, of course,
doesn’t mean that they can’t get into positions of power and cause a lot of
trouble by applying simplistic, self-serving notions to complex problems, but
it does mean that we can watch in informed horror as they do it.
Obama is another story.
What seems a lie may be the truth.
What seems distance and disinterest may hide the closest attention. What seems concern and engagement may be pro
forma sidestepping. If I am right,
Rooseveltian resolve is as foreign to Obama’s deepest comprehensions of how to
think and act as the rainforest is to the desert. And yet, I think that Obama might be trying
to be the more honest man. He farms out
his administration’s dishonesty to his staff and cabinet. Roosevelt did the opposite; he could lie
easily and so keep around him some number of people with moral wisdom exceeding
his own. If this is so, then we might
understand the meaning of Obama’s choices for retainers in a new light.
Some people seem to disclose themselves completely in their
public selves. Others have a public
persona that is accepted as fully adequate, though not exhaustive of the
person. Some seem understandable, but
not especially transparent. And yet
others present a public exterior that not only hides, but is intended to hide
the machinations of the person beneath.
There is a fifth category much more complex, people who deflect personal
evaluation and press their designs for action onto the ‘natural’ behaviors of others. The socially hypervigilant person often finds
this a comfortable way to function; and they can, if they are smart enough,
stay in control of the vast amounts of information needed – up to a point.
I have been befuddled and outraged at many of Obama’s
choices of people to serve among his minions, not the least by Emanuel,
Summers, Geithner and Gates. These men
are self-serving functionaries devoid of human feeling compared to a Frances
Perkins or Eleanor Roosevelt, devoid of the capacity to inform a president of
the order of magnitude difference between operating the levers of power and
the humanity that must be vested in a leader of living, breathing men, women
and children. And I continue to be
deeply troubled by adding Daley and Sperling to the mix.
But these are people that can be read like a children’s
book. They have a one dimensional
presented nature; like tools: a hammer for this, a saw for that. They are the people a hypervigilant would
select. Hilary Clinton is the most
complex person in the upper reaches of the administration, though she knows how
to deal with people like Obama and Bill Clinton; she was a safe choice.
There has been a great deal of confusion about Obama among
the people who are his natural supporters; is he a liberal? Is he a good man playing with bad people? Is he a bad man playing with good
people? Is he playing chess with
conservative checker players? Or my question, is he playing chess with
progressive checker players? It just
might be that he is playing chess with everyone – all the time.
Ultimately, I don’t think that we can know. I don’t think that we will ever know for
sure, will not even be able to finally measure the man against the actual
results of his administration. It is
almost impossible for it to have been otherwise. The first black man elected president would
almost have to be a question wrapped in an enigma.
Obama is probably the most dangerous president we have had
since FDR – dangerous in the sense of being president at a time when great
damage can be done to democratic governance – and is, like FDR, among the
presidents most unlikely to seek to do the nation ill; his capacity to protect
the nation is another matter. But the
nation will be changed dramatically and forever by the events that occur during
his presidency. And it is almost a
certainty that Obama, the man, will never be clearly seen with his hand on the
guiding controls of national power. And
no, this is not a good thing, but it may well be in the nature of the man to
watch us all very closely and try to stay a step ahead of our actually
understanding him [3].
[1] I am using the term hypervigilance in a somewhat, though
not completely, different way than it is used in psychological diagnosis as
part of PTSD. I am surmising a social,
systemic form of vigilance that is extreme and integrated into a complete
behavioral system appropriate to circumstances; it is generally explained in
the text of the essay. Here is another
example: where I grew up there were more rattlesnakes and water moccasins than
almost any other place in the country.
Children learned to look very closely when walking or even opening a
door to the outside since there were often rattlers on the cement porches
warming in the morning sun or gathering warmth in the evening – the stories I
could tell! To this day I do not step
over a log or a rock or otherwise put my foot down without checking around
it. I even notice a little twinge
stepping around a blind corner inside buildings. To some extent my minor obsession with visual
pattern recognition might be related to the adaptive ‘hypervigilance’
appropriate to walking around on the central Florida Gulf coast palmetto fields
and mangrove swamps.
[2] 4 color seers, of course, cannot recognize the
difference. Complexity for them is
always a lie and the inherent dishonesty of simplicity is their truth. This is a deep problem for the species as we
find ourselves confronting a complex reality and needing understanding beyond
our present habits of adequacy.
[3] Check my essay Obama Is No
Country Song written right after he was elected.
Monday, October 13, 2014
Populations in States of Strategic Fear
(Please, read the
previous essay, Fear
as Adaptive Device…, before reading this one.)
While our experience of life in the present world says
otherwise, human societies are very unnatural structures. We talk of nations, religions,
mega-corporations and other vast collectives as though they have substantial
existence and understandable definition; they do not. In another of the many paradoxes that attend
our present “realities”, the bigger and more complex the structures of our
organization, the simpler, more primal and less generally adaptive must be the
principles holding those organizations together – the less full human
expression and experience can be manifest in them. These large collectives are
organized around single emotional/behavioral states like greed, fear, and
illusory wellbeing; whole societies can be characterized by the primary emotion
of their structure. [1]
It would seem that this should make social collectives
understandable and give them substance, but no; each individual unit, the human
animal, that makes them up has all the complexities of the evolved species and,
thus, is both diminished by the acts
that fit them to their society and floundering
in their struggles with the unavoidable demands of their biological complexity. Ultimately, a huge collective must adapt to
being organized around some powerful biological/emotional element that has
predictable consequences on the collective’s participants: that emotion is
almost always fear; just as, it was said, ‘all roads lead to Rome,’ all
large-scale social organizations have adopted fear as the central principle.
This has been going on for a very long time, for as long as
human social collectives have been numbered in the thousands or more. Fear-based social organization is so
ubiquitous, and our projection of fear-based processes onto the world beyond
the social is so complete, that it is almost impossible to realize another
option.
Wellbeing is the other option, but because wellbeing is
based in a gestalt of needs satisfied, the structural principles are diametrically
antithetical to fear-based societies; there is no paradigm of transition from
fear to wellbeing in the structure of large collectives even though these two
conditions are (were) completely mutually supporting in their origins. How to deconstruct, then reconstruct those
relationships and apply them to larger social organizations than the tribal
communities of our origins will be the measure of our future as a species.
First, fear-based societies: How is a fear-based society
recognized? It is simple; make a list of what you are afraid of. Here is a sample: crime, being cheated,
losing a job, being slandered, being devalued, the power of authority, police,
taxing agencies, other drivers on the road, the anger (really the fear) of
others, disease, costs of medical and legal services, lack of accurate
information, strangers, the “enemy,” loss of freedom, economic or social
collapse, people who believe differently, people who don’t like you, environmental
collapse, random violence, sexual perversions, God’s wrath, the elderly, the
young, the future and all the specifics and variations that can be made of
these.
Such societies tend to have a fear du jour. The habit of fear makes this a simple
process. In fact, without a fear of the
day the free-floating fear state would not have a ready reference, and could
become dangerous to the economic and political elites that use fear as a
controlling principle since the focus of ‘national’ anxiety might turn on the,
actually, easily observable, dangerous actions of the elites.
Now make a list of how society supports your sense of
wellbeing. This is a more difficult
list; don’t let it be only a list of how fears are limited or relieved (see the
footnotes). Here is a hypothetical
example: my neighbors and I share resources so that no one is forced to face
dangers alone; I can express my ideas and concerns freely knowing that I will
be heard with respect; the principles and forces of social order are designed
to respond to my interests, not to enforce my obedience to some arbitrary
standards: Since we live in a fear-based
society, these are more wishes than statements of our condition!
I leave it to the reader to fill in specific examples of how
the fence lines and corrals of fear control daily movements and actions, for
both themselves and for the sub-communities of which they are a part. But these will most likely involve money,
credit, social prestige, loss of material standards of living, militarized
authority and an amorphous physical fear of the desires and powers attributed
to “others” beyond our immediate experience. The sense of wellbeing will come
from close association with trusted friends and from illusions of protection
supplied by religious and related pathologies. [2]
* * *
In modern societies only human action seems significant;
biophysical processes are seen (if they are realized at all) as substrate
conditions upon which “real life” occurs or inconveniences to be overcome. This is amplified by the fact that many real
dangers do come from the effects of our human numbers, the design of our
economics and vast influences of our technologies. But, even though these
dangers are certainly real, the use of strategic fear by economic and political
elites has been to increase them rather to diminish them. In other words, the fears of the general
society are used to make societies more dangerous rather than less.
This last has been, until now, very difficult to see from
the position of the so-called middle class societies of North America and
Europe. These centers of illusory
wellbeing were organized around the relief of fear, not genuine wellbeing; and
we are beginning to see how easily the transition is made to the direct use of
fear in those societies as the power elites move to globalized control of
populations and resources.
There are primarily two real dangers to fear, and to act on in
the natural pattern of this essential emotion: (1) the disruption of the
biophysical systems that allow complex life to exist and (2) the insanity of a
power elite that works assiduously to maintain their authority and their incredible
excesses of resource use. The plethora
of dangers we are told to fear – the fears du jour – focus our attentions in
the wrong direction, with purpose. We must
find our sense of real wellbeing in supportive community, refuse the strategic
fears delivered to control us and realize the real dangers from the power elite
and the destruction of environment (the two are closely connected).
The redirecting of fear is itself frightening – changing
old habits of such great consequence – but it is beginning; one need only look
to the real attitudes of your neighbors and friends. And since the refocusing of attention is
beginning we can expect the quality of the dangers served up to us to increase,
both in illusion and reality. But, the
nakedness of the attempts to control societies by fear will only become more
and more obvious as the dangers are made more and more real.
[1] Fear and wellbeing are primal motivational (emotional)
states; temporary relief from fear is not
wellbeing, though it has come to be seen so.
The full emotional state of wellbeing has become rare. Greed is the infantilization of the normal
developmental process, an emotional neotony.
[2] Religious behavior has not always been pathological,
though it has always been illusory. When
humans lived in intimate contact with biophysical reality, the details of which
were beyond their understanding, adaptive processes adjusted behaviors to
function effectively. Explanations for
the behaviors were most often fantastical, both because detailed understanding
wasn’t possible from the existing knowledge base and because the fantastic
could have poetic power. In today’s
world, religions are madness driven by biological impulses with only circular
self-referencing as guide; they are a perfect vehicle for the delivery of
illusory fear and illusory wellbeing – the very essence of strategic fear.
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