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https://www.theprosperos.com/smtg-20200216-malanaphy

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

King James Bible

Don’t feed the trolls.

Quartz|getpocket.com

• Olivia Goldhill

Photo from Reuters/ Kacper Pempel.

Wildly inaccurate facts and spurious arguments are unavoidable features of social media. Yet no matter how infuriatingly wrong someone is, or just how much counter-evidence you have at your disposal, starting arguments on the internet rarely gets anyone to change their mind. Nearly a century-and-a-half ago, British philosopher John Stuart Mill explained, in a few clear sentences, why certain arguments simply won’t go anywhere. As historian Robert Saunders notes, Mill’s analysis neatly applies to heated and futile internet debates.

Mill highlights the often overlooked reality that many opinions aren’t based on facts at all, but feelings. And so, contradictory points of information don’t shift emotionally rooted arguments, but only cause people to dig deeper into their emotions to hold onto those views.

Intuitively, most people recognize that emotions motivate opinions, and behave accordingly. We use rhetorical techniques, such as verbal flourishes and confident mannerisms, to help convince others of our views. And we know that angry reactions to, for example, evidence showing that children of same-sex parents fare just as well as those raised by heterosexual parents, are grounded in emotional prejudice rather than a deep-seated desire for the facts.

Studies reinforce these instincts about the importance of emotions. For example, patients who have brain damage in areas responsible for processing emotions also struggle to make decisions (pdf), pointing to the importance of emotions in deciding between two options. And chartered psychologist Rob Yeung, whose book How to Stand Out emphasizes the effectiveness of emotions, rather than logic, in convincing others to agree with you, points to research showing that use of metaphors motivate people to make decisions.

Online, when we can’t see others’ faces or their moods, it’s easy to lose sight of these emotional instincts. Instead of engaging with and respecting others’ feelings, there can be a tendency to bombard those with opposing views with “facts.” But even seemingly solid points of information, such as the periodic table, are often grounded in subjective perspectives; a broad philosophical theory called “social constructivism” argues that facts are always a reflection of socially constructed values. There are often multiple ways of interpreting a single point of information and so, much though some people might like to think they’re right about everything, there are surprisingly few issues to which there’s an unequivocally correct opinion.

Perhaps there’s little hope of convincing others on the internet to change their minds. But, as Saunders notes, Mill does point to another approach.

Instead of seeking to convince others, we can be open to changing our own minds, and seek out information that contradicts our own steadfast point of view. Maybe it’ll turn out that those who disagree with you actually have a solid grasp of the facts. There’s a slight possibility that, after all, you’re the one who’s wrong.

This article was originally published on January 2, 2019, by Quartz, and is republished here with permission.

VATICAN CITY—In an effort to find middle ground between liberal factions hoping to modernize the church and conservative forces seeking to preserve orthodoxy, Pope Francis issued a new decree Friday that will permanently change Roman Catholic doctrine by permitting all priests to marry him. “While we respect the vow of celibacy as a sacred choice, we hope to bring more men into the priesthood by giving them the option to participate in married life with His Holiness,” said Vatican spokesman Andrea Tornielli, clarifying that the offer of marriage would be extended to anyone actively considering a priestly vocation and willing to enroll in a seminary as soon as possible. “It has become increasingly difficult to ordain enough men for the church to function, and while we don’t want to break with a thousand years of canon law by allowing priests to marry women, we believe many will be attracted to the clerical life if they know they will still have the opportunity to join together with the Supreme Pontiff in the sacrament of holy matrimony. In fact, our internal studies show that, in recent generations, many young Catholic men have decided against becoming priests because they knew it meant they would never be able to marry the pope.” At press time, a visibly beleaguered Pope Francis quickly announced another doctrinal change that, for the first time in church history, would allow members of the Catholic faith to get divorced.

February 19, 2020 (theonion.com)

SOUTH BEND, IN—Quipping that if elected, he would be a father first and president second, Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg told reporters Wednesday that he loved his “wife Marcia and two beautiful kids, Tad and Hayden” in his latest campaign shift. “First, I’d like to thank my incredible rock of 15 years, Marcia, and boys, why don’t you come on up to the stage and give your pops a hug?” said the former mayor of South Bend, beckoning to his newly revamped campaign staff and inviting up a tall, slender woman with two suit-clad young boys who immediately sprinted over Buttigieg yelling “Daddy, Daddy.” “This beautiful, intelligent woman right here—she got me through law school, she got me through my mayoral races, and she’s going to get us to the White House. And Tad and Hayden, thank you for coming here today. But you better get going—Daddy knows you have homework to do!” At press time, Buttigieg grabbed his wife and gave her a long kiss on the lips before shrugging and telling the crowd, “Happy wife, happy life!”

By Maria Popova (brainpickings.org)

“On how one orients himself to the moment,” 48-year-old Henry Miller (December 26, 1891–June 7, 1980) wrote in reflecting on the art of living in 1939, “depends the failure or fruitfulness of it.” Over the course of his long life, Miller sought ceaselessly to orient himself toward maximal fruitfulness, from his creative discipline to his philosophical reflections to his exuberant irreverence.

More than three decades later, shortly after his eightieth birthday, Miller wrote a beautiful essay on the subject of aging and the key to living a full life. It was published in 1972 in an ultra-limited-edition chapbook titled On Turning Eighty (public library), alongside two other essays. Only 200 copies were printed, numbered and signed by the author.

Miller begins by considering the true measure of youthfulness:

If at eighty you’re not a cripple or an invalid, if you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin’ and keepin’ power. If you are young in years but already weary in spirit, already on the way to becoming an automaton, it may do you good to say to your boss — under your breath, of course — “Fuck you, Jack! You don’t own me!” … If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you’ve got it half licked.

He later adds:

I have very few friends or acquaintances my own age or near it. Though I am usually ill at ease in the company of elderly people I have the greatest respect and admiration for two very old men who seem to remain eternally young and creative. I mean [the Catalan cellist and conductor] Pablo Casals and Pablo Picasso, both over ninety now. Such youthful nonagenarians put the young to shame. Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middleclass men and women who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will last forever or else are so frightened it won’t that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.

Miller considers the downside of success — not the private kind, per Thoreau’s timeless definition, but the public kind, rooted in the false deity of prestige:

If you have had a successful career, as presumably I have had, the late years may not be the happiest time of your life. (Unless you’ve learned to swallow your own shit.) Success, from the worldly standpoint, is like the plague for a writer who still has something to say. Now, when he should be enjoying a little leisure, he finds himself more occupied than ever. Now he is the victim of his fans and well wishers, of all those who desire to exploit his name. Now it is a different kind of struggle that one has to wage. The problem now is how to keep free, how to do only what one wants to do.

He goes on to reflect on how success affects people’s quintessence:

One thing seems more and more evident to me now — people’s basic character does not change over the years… Far from improving them, success usually accentuates their faults or short-comings. The brilliant guys at school often turn out to be not so brilliant once they are out in the world. If you disliked or despised certain lads in your class you will dislike them even more when they become financiers, statesmen or five star generals. Life forces us to learn a few lessons, but not necessarily to grow.

Somewhat ironically, Anaïs Nin — Miller’s onetime lover and lifelong friend — once argued beautifully for the exact opposite, the notion that our personalities are fundamentally fluid and ever-growing, something that psychologists have since corroborated.

Miller returns to youth and the young as a kind of rearview mirror for one’s own journey:

You observe your children or your children’s children, making the same absurd mistakes, heart-rending mistakes often, which you made at their age. And there is nothing you can say or do to prevent it. It’s by observing the young, indeed, that you eventually understand the sort of idiot you yourself were once upon a time — and perhaps still are.

Like George Eliot, who so poignantly observed the trajectory of happiness over the course of human life, Miller extols the essential psychoemotional supremacy of old age:

At eighty I believe I am a far more cheerful person than I was at twenty or thirty. I most definitely would not want to be a teenager again. Youth may be glorious, but it is also painful to endure…

I was cursed or blessed with a prolonged adolescence; I arrived at some seeming maturity when I was past thirty. It was only in my forties that I really began to feel young. By then I was ready for it. (Picasso once said: “One starts to get young at the age of sixty, and then it’s too late.”) By this time I had lost many illusions, but fortunately not my enthusiasm, nor the joy of living, nor my unquenchable curiosity.

And therein lies Miller’s spiritual center — the life-force that stoked his ageless inner engine:

Perhaps it is curiosity — about anything and everything — that made me the writer I am. It has never left me…

With this attribute goes another which I prize above everything else, and that is the sense of wonder. No matter how restricted my world may become I cannot imagine it leaving me void of wonder. In a sense I suppose it might be called my religion. I do not ask how it came about, this creation in which we swim, but only to enjoy and appreciate it.

Two years later, Miller would come to articulate this with even more exquisite clarity in contemplating the meaning of life, but here he contradicts Henry James’s assertion that seriousness preserves one’s youth and turns to his other saving grace — the capacity for light-heartedness as an antidote to life’s often stifling solemnity:

Perhaps the most comforting thing about growing old gracefully is the increasing ability not to take things too seriously. One of the big differences between a genuine sage and a preacher is gaiety. When the sage laughs it is a belly laugh; when the preacher laughs, which is all too seldom, it is on the wrong side of the face.

Equally important, Miller argues, is countering the human compulsion for self-righteousness. In a sentiment Malcolm Gladwell would come to complement nearly half a century later in advocating for the importance of changing one’s mind regularly, Miller writes:

With advancing age my ideals, which I usually deny possessing, have definitely altered. My ideal is to be free of ideals, free of principles, free of isms and ideologies. I want to take to the ocean of life like a fish takes to the sea…

I no longer try to convert people to my view of things, nor to heal them. Neither do I feel superior because they appear to be lacking in intelligence.

Miller goes on to consider the brute ways in which we often behave out of self-righteousness and deformed idealism:

One can fight evil but against stupidity one is helpless… I have accepted the fact, hard as it may be, that human beings are inclined to behave in ways that would make animals blush. The ironic, the tragic thing is that we often behave in ignoble fashion from what we consider the highest motives. The animal makes no excuse for killing his prey; the human animal, on the other hand, can invoke God’s blessing when massacring his fellow men. He forgets that God is not on his side but at his side.

But despite observing these lamentable human tendencies, Miller remains an optimist at heart. He concludes by returning to the vital merriment at the root of his life-force:

My motto has always been: “Always merry and bright.” Perhaps that is why I never tire of quoting Rabelais: “For all your ills I give you laughter.” As I look back on my life, which has been full of tragic moments, I see it more as a comedy than a tragedy. One of those comedies in which while laughing your guts out you feel your inner heart breaking. What better comedy could there be? The man who takes himself seriously is doomed…

There is nothing wrong with life itself. It is the ocean in which we swim and we either adapt to it or sink to the bottom. But it is in our power as human beings not to pollute the waters of life, not to destroy the spirit which animates us.

The most difficult thing for a creative individual is to refrain from the effort to make the world to his liking and to accept his fellow man for what he is, whether good, bad or indifferent.

The entire On Turning Eighty chapbook, which includes two other essays, is a sublime read. Complement it with Miller on writing, altruism, the meaning of life, what creative death means, and his 11 commandments of writing.

By Maria Popova (brainpickings.org)

I have thought and continued to think a great deal about the relationship between critical thinking and cynicism — what is the tipping point past which critical thinking, that centerpiece of reason so vital to human progress and intellectual life, stops mobilizing our constructive impulses and topples over into the destructiveness of impotent complaint and embittered resignation, begetting cynicism? In giving a commencement address on the subject, I found myself contemplating anew this fine but firm line between critical thinking and cynical complaint. To cross it is to exile ourselves from the land of active reason and enter a limbo of resigned inaction.

But cross it we do, perhaps nowhere more readily than in our capacity for merciless self-criticism. We tend to go far beyond the self-corrective lucidity necessary for improving our shortcomings, instead berating and belittling ourselves for our foibles with a special kind of masochism.

The undergirding psychology of that impulse is what the English psychoanalytical writer Adam Phillips explores in his magnificent essay “Against Self-Criticism”, found in his altogether terrific collection Unforbidden Pleasures (public library).

One of Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for the essays of Montaigne

Phillips — who has written with beguiling nuance about such variousness of our psychic experience as the importance of “fertile solitude,” the value of missing out, and the rewards of being out of balance — examines how “our virulent, predatory self-criticism [has] become one of our greatest pleasures,” reaching across the space-time of culture to both revolt against and pay homage to Susan Sontag’s masterwork Against Interpretation. He writes:

In broaching the possibility of being, in some way, against self-criticism, we have to imagine a world in which celebration is less suspect than criticism; in which the alternatives of celebration and criticism are seen as a determined narrowing of the repertoire; and in which we praise whatever we can.

Our masochistic impulse for self-criticism, he argues, arises from the fact that ambivalence is the basic condition of our lives. In a passage that builds on his memorable prior reflections on the paradox of why frustration is necessary for satisfaction in romance, Phillips considers Freud’s ideological legacy:

In Freud’s vision of things we are, above all, ambivalent animals: wherever we hate, we love; wherever we love, we hate. If someone can satisfy us, they can also frustrate us; and if someone can frustrate us, we always believe that they can satisfy us. We criticize when we are frustrated — or when we are trying to describe our frustration, however obliquely — and praise when we are more satisfied, and vice versa. Ambivalence does not, in the Freudian story, mean mixed feelings, it means opposing feelings.

[…]

Love and hate — a too simple, or too familiar, vocabulary, and so never quite the right names for what we might want to say — are the common source, the elemental feelings with which we apprehend the world; and they are interdependent in the sense that you can’t have one without the other, and that they mutually inform each other. The way we hate people depends on the way we love them, and vice versa. And given that these contradictory feelings are our ‘common source’ they enter into everything we do. They are the medium in which we do everything. We are ambivalent, in Freud’s view, about anything and everything that matters to us; indeed, ambivalence is the way we recognize that someone or something has become significant to us… Where there is devotion there is always protest… where there is trust there is suspicion.

[…]

We may not be able to imagine a life in which we don’t spend a large amount of our time criticizing ourselves and others; but we should keep in mind the self-love that is always in play.

But we have become so indoctrinated in this conscience of self-criticism, both collectively and individually, that we’ve grown reflexively suspicious of that alternative possibility. (Kafka, the great patron-martyr of self-criticism, captured this pathology perfectly: “There’s only one thing certain. That is one’s own inadequacy.”) Phillips writes:

Self-criticism, and the self as critical, are essential to our sense, our picture, of our so-called selves.

[…]

Nothing makes us more critical, more confounded — more suspicious, or appalled, or even mildly amused — than the suggestion that we should drop all this relentless criticism; that we should be less impressed by it. Or at least that self-criticism should cease to have the hold over us that it does.

But this self-critical part of ourselves, Phillips points out, is “strikingly unimaginative” — a relentless complainer whose repertoire of tirades is so redundant as to become, to any objective observer, risible and tragic at the same time:

Were we to meet this figure socially, as it were, this accusatory character, this internal critic, we would think there was something wrong with him. He would just be boring and cruel. We might think that something terrible had happened to him. That he was living in the aftermath, in the fallout of some catastrophe. And we would be right.

One of Maurice Sendak’s illustrations for the Brothers Grimm fairy tales

Freud termed this droll internal critic superego, and Phillips suggests that we suffer from a kind of Stockholm syndrome of the superego:

We are continually, if unconsciously, mutilating and deforming our own character. Indeed, so unrelenting is this internal violence that we have no idea what we are like without it. We know virtually nothing about ourselves because we judge ourselves before we have a chance to see ourselves (as though in panic). Or, to put it differently, we can judge only what we recognize ourselves as able to judge. What can’t be judged can’t be seen. What happens to everything that is not subject to approval or disapproval, to everything that we have not been taught how to judge? … The judged self can only be judged but not known. [We] think that it is complicitous not to stand up to, not to contest, this internal tyranny by what is only one part — a small but loud part — of the self.

The tyranny of the superego, Phillips argues, lies in its tendency to reduce the complexity of our conscience to a single, limiting interpretation, and to convincingly sell us on that interpretation as an accurate and complete representation of reality:

Self-criticism is nothing if it is not the defining, and usually the overdefining, of the limits of being. But, ironically, if that’s the right word, the limits of being are announced and enforced before so-called being has had much of a chance to speak for itself.

[…]

We consent to the superego’s interpretation; we believe our self-reproaches are true; we are overimpressed without noticing that that is what we are being.

With an eye to Freud’s legacy and the familiar texture of the human experience, Phillips makes his central point:

You can only understand anything that matters — dreams, neurotic symptoms, literature — by overinterpreting it; by seeing it from different aspects as the product of multiple impulses. Overinterpretation here means not settling for one interpretation, however apparently compelling it is. Indeed, the implication is — and here is Freud’s ongoing suspicion, or ambivalence, about psychoanalysis — that the more persuasive, the more compelling, the more authoritative, the interpretation is, the less credible it is, or should be. The interpretation might be the violent attempt to presume to set a limit where no limit can be set.

Here, the ideological wink at Sontag becomes apparent. Indeed, the Sontag classic would’ve been better titled “Against an Interpretation,” for the essence of her argument is precisely that a single interpretation invariably warps and flattens any text, any experience, any cultural artifact. (How tragicomical to see, then, that a reviewer who complains that Phillips’s writing is too open to interpretation both misses his point and, in doing so, makes it.)

What Phillips is advocating isn’t the wholesale relinquishing of interpretation but the psychological hygiene of inviting multiple interpretations as a way of countering the artificial authority of the superego and loosening its tyrannical grip on our experience of ourselves:

Authority wants to replace the world with itself. Overinterpretation means not being stopped in your tracks by what you are most persuaded by; it means assuming that to believe one interpretation is to radically misunderstand the object one is interpreting, and indeed interpretation itself.

Illustration by Kate Beaton from To Be or Not To Be, a choose-your-own-adventure reimagining of Hamlet

Cuing in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that “genius of self-reproach,” Phillips considers the cowardice of self-criticism:

Tragic heroes always underinterpret, are always emperors of one idea.

[…]

The first quarto of Hamlet has, “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” while the second quarto has, “Thus conscience does make cowards.” If conscience makes cowards of us all, then we are all in the same boat; this is just the way it is. If conscience simply makes cowards we can more easily wonder what else it might be able to make. Either way, and they are clearly different, conscience makes something of us; it is a maker, if not of selves, then of something about selves. It is an internal artist, of a kind… The superego … casts us as certain kinds of character: it, as it were, tells us who we really are. It is an essentialist: it claims to know us in a way that no one else, including ourselves, can ever do. And, like a mad god, it is omniscient: it behaves as if it can predict the future by claiming to know the consequences of our actions (when we know, in a more imaginative part of ourselves, that most actions are morally equivocal, and change over time in our estimation; no apparently self-destructive act is ever only self-destructive; no good is purely and simply that).

Half a century after Eleanor Roosevelt’s memorable admonition that “when you adopt the standards and the values of someone else … you surrender your own integrity [and] become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being,” Phillips urges us to question the superego’s despotic standards:

The superego is the sovereign interpreter… [It] tells us what we take to be the truth about ourselves. Self-criticism, that is to say, is an unforbidden pleasure. We seem to relish the way it makes us suffer [and] take it for granted that each day will bring its necessary quotient of self-disappointment. That every day we will fail to be as good as we should be; but without our being given the resources, the language, to wonder who or what is setting the pace; or where these rather punishing standards come from.

Under this docile surrender to self-criticism, Phillips cautions, our conscience slips into cowardice:

Conscience … it is the part of our mind that makes us lose our minds; the moralist that prevents us from evolving a personal, more complex and subtle morality; that prevents us from finding, by experiment, what may be the limits of our being. So when Richard III says, in the final act of his own play, “O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!”, a radical alternative is being proposed. That conscience makes cowards of us all because it is itself cowardly. We believe in, we identify with, this starkly condemnatory and punitively forbidding part of ourselves; and yet this supposedly authoritative part of ourselves is itself a coward.

The most virulent and culturally contagious form of this cowardice, I would argue, is the resignation of cynicism — a resignation Phillips traces to the punitive system at the root of our culture’s moral framework, in which good behavior is incentivized largely through fear of punishment for bad behavior. This effort to foster the constructive by the destructive, he suggests, ends up turning us on ourselves as our fear of punishment metastasizes into self-criticism. (The cynic bypasses the constructiveness — that is, refuses to do anything about changing a situation for the better — and rushes straight to inflicting punishment, be it by insult or condemnation or that most cowardly and passive-aggressive fusion of the two, the eyeroll.)

Phillips returns to the central paradox, arguing for the importance of overinterpreting our self-critical conscience:

How has it come about that we are so bewitched by our self-hatred, so impressed and credulous in the face of our self-criticism, as unimaginative as it usually is? And why is it akin to a judgement without a jury? A jury, after all, represents some kind of consensus as an alternative to autocracy… We need to be able to tell the difference between useful forms of responsibility taken for acts committed, and the evasions of self-contempt… This doesn’t mean that no one is ever culpable; it means that culpability will always be more complicated than it looks; guilt is always underinterpreted… Self-criticism, when it isn’t useful in the way any self-correcting approach can be, is self-hypnosis. It is judgement as spell, or curse, not as conversation; it is an order, not a negotiation; it is dogma, not overinterpretation.

Our self-criticism, to be sure, couldn’t be entirely eradicated — nor should it, for it is our most essential route-recalculating tool for navigating life. But by nurturing our capacity for multiple interpretations, Phillips suggests, self-criticism can become “less jaded and jading, more imaginative and less spiteful.”

Unforbidden Pleasures is a magnificent read in its entirety, exploring such strands of our psychic complexity as desire, disappointment, indifference, and idealism. Complement this particular portion with Albert Camus on happiness, unhappiness, and our self-imposed prisons, then revisit Phillips on why our capacity for boredom is essential for a full life.

20 FEBRUARY 2020 (Futurism.com)

IT’S LIKE SOMETHING OUT OF A MEDICAL DRAMA.

BY JACOB BANAS

The brain is a delicate instrument. Any neurosurgery risks permanently altering a patient’s cognitive capabilities.

Protecting a patient’s talents during surgery can be a complex task for surgeons — as evidenced by a white-knuckles video shared recently by The Guardian.

In the clip, 53-year-old Dagmar Turner plays sections of compositions by Mahler and Gershwin as surgeons work to remove a tumor from her brain.

Reuters reports that the tumor had been situated close to the area of Turner’s brain responsible for controlling her left hand. Fearing the loss of 40 years of craft, neurosurgeon Keyoumars Ashkan at King’s College Hospital developed a three-step plan — map Turner’s brain, open her skull, and get her to play.

This process, known as intraoperative brain mapping or simply “awake brain surgery,” is used by surgeons when there’s concern about damaging areas of the brain responsible for controlling certain skills. It’s possible in part because there are no pain receptors in the brain.

Despite being literally the plot of an episode of popular TV medical melodrama, Grey’s Anatomy, the process isn’t uncommon. The Mayo Clinic estimates their facility performs over 1,000 such surgeries per year and a cursory YouTube search shows examples of other musicians undergoing similar procedures while playing the violin, guitar, or even a saxophone.

Still, for many medical professionals working in the operating room, this might be an unfamiliar sight.

“This was the first time I’ve had a patient play an instrument,” Ashkan told Reuters. In the end, Ashkan’s team managed to remove 90% of Turner’s tumor without any damage to her motor functions.

“The violin is my passion; I’ve been playing since I was 10 years old,” a grateful Turner told Reuters. “The thought of losing my ability to play was heart-breaking.”

RTERadio1 Posted October 15, 2012. Passengers in Dublin airport’s Terminal 2 got a pleasant surprise on Sunday as the RTÉ Concert Orchestra performed ‘Fanfare For The Common Man’ by Aaron Copland. The Orchestra, conducted by David Brophy, were there to kick off RTÉ Big Music Week 2012.

Ted Wade – Dec 1, 2019 · Medium.com

William James said (1892) we have a “stream of consciousness.” One thought after another. Research agrees that what you think changes rapidly, but you can’t focus your mental attention on more than one thing at a time. However, you are much more than that pitiful conscious trickle; the ocean of information inside you is mostly unconscious.

It’s ridiculous. How can you know yourself when most of your mind is hidden? Why do we even have this distinction between conscious and unconscious? The answer is surprisingly simple, related to how the brain models reality itself.

The Swamp

Here’s your mind. There’s a deep and burbling swamp. Perched above it is a frog on a lily pad. The frog thinks it is the crowned king or queen of the swamp. Whenever a gas bubble or another creature, such as a bug or a turtle, appears above the surface, the frog turns its bulbous gaze upon it and croaks, “I am thinking/seeing that thing.”

The frog-in-swamp is a literary conceit. The foolish frog is consciousness. The swamp is the unconscious mind, a massive, inscrutable entity, large and in charge. Gas bubbles are perceptions, the insubstantial shades of real-world things, made-up and malleable. Other animals are thoughts. They are no more under the frog’s control than the weather. The crowned frog analogy agrees with the findings of the mind sciences, that the conscious self is not in charge; that what we experience is distorted, that our thoughts are dictated, that our decisions are rationalizations for processes that are unconscious, that conscious is slow and unconscious is fast.

The Predictive Brain and Conscious Narrowness

Why can we only attend to one thing at a time, instead of perceiving, all at once, everything going on in our brains? You can talk about “why” in terms of the purposes or advantages of consciousness, and many people have debated this. But let’s ask “why” in the sense of “what stops the entire mind from being conscious?” Is there something inherent in how consciousness comes to be that makes it so … narrow and exclusive?

***I get out of my car on an early-summer Colorado morning, expecting a blast of heat. But sunlight caresses my skin. It’s like learning a new pleasure. I realize that my tips (fingers and toes, nose and earlobes) were cool, but I didn’t know it. As I walk the trail, my focus is on the warming sensation, which lasts — another surprise — for minutes. I am surprised by my surprise.***

There’s a fairly popular theory called the predictive brain, that goes as follows. Your brain models aspects of the reality that is outside of your body and the reality that is inside of your body. The model works by predicting changes in these realities and then adjusting when predictions don’t fit. The math of the theory says it tries to minimize “surprise.” The result is that you survive and, with luck, thrive. The most effective model of reality for a human is one that includes a model of the entity (you!) that is doing the modeling. We develop this self-y part of the model in our early years. It’s what we call our conscious self or ego.

Knowing this, we have one reason for the narrowness of consciousness. At any one time, each of us has things going on that require making choices. The predictive brain can be full of conflicting purposes, needs, and desires. But in a situation of conflict the person, the human organism that is you, can only make one immediate choice from those possible. You, like the frog, can only jump one way or another. So I’m saying: a person’s life is single-threaded, serial like words in a sentence, and therefore so is the self-model.

*** At the mall I turn to speak to my child, who knows that she should stay close in a crowd. She’s nowhere. Adrenalin pours as I scan around, her name rising to my lips. The mini-panic starts to fade once I see her weaving through the clothes racks towards her mother. In those moments I was, as we say, “beside myself.” My train temporarily jumped to another track. My normal self was a ghost on the siding, because I can only be in one state at a time. ***

If you had three eyes and each one saw a different reality, you-the-person would not know which reality to respond to. Even when a person contains multiple selves, as in dissociative personality disorder, only one of those selves is running the reality model at a time. Even when a single self is in deep conflict, it will alternately visit each side of the conflict at different times.

So, because we have only one life to live, then we must have at any instant only one apprehension of that life. That’s why we can only consciously attend to one thing at a time. Right now, my single thread of consciousness sometimes says that this explanation is trivially obvious, and at other times says that it’s important — because it also explains the unconscious.

The Reason for the Unconscious

A model is a simplified representation of something more complicated. So the self-model represents you as a mental organism, but by definition, it is simpler than the entire you. Our model, remember, is also single-threaded which is another simplification. All the parts that are left out of the model are the unconscious parts. Many of them are the automatic bits that run the bodily machine. The left-out parts are unconscious simply because you don’t, and perhaps cannot, model them. That’s the big picture.

Going back to the crowned froggy, we know that mental things (like memories, reflections, emotions, desires, unexpected percepts, and pain) pop in and out of consciousness, sometimes as needed and sometimes when they are unwanted. When they do enter consciousness then they become part of the model. They have to because the model is what lets us behave like a unified person.

As animal awareness evolved, it doubtless included some perceptions and feelings that were important, and therefore conscious, more or less all the time. However, we are often out of touch with these. Our lack of mindfulness might happen because the glaring light of human self-consciousness is so bright that we can’t feel these fundamental things. It’s like the sun blocking our view of the stars. We also repress unpleasant thoughts, banishing them to the unconscious where, figuratively, they plot against us and try to get expressed.

By now it’s a common pop-psychology metaphor that consciousness is a rider on the unconscious elephant. Researchers continue to work on how these two sides of our minds influence each other. If we know more about how it all works, maybe we’ll work it better.

Suppose we had no conscious, first-person self, but we still had these big brains stuffed with what is, currently for us, unconscious: the many semi-independent calculating processes needed to run the body of a big animal and manage long-term social relationships in a complex society. The possibility of such a separation seems absurd, doesn’t it? When we study the social mammals, such as wolves, lions, baboons (R Dunbar, The Social Brain Hypothesis), and elephants, it seems that sociality and self go together.

*** In 1973 a circus elephant named Shirley spent 3 months with an elephant calf named Jenny. Jenny resisted the next twenty years of life as a circus performer. She was then crippled during a failed attempt to use her for breeding. Two more years traveling with a small circus left her unable get in and out of her trailer. Finally she was rescued from an inadequate animal shelter, and taken to an open-country elephant sanctuary in Tennessee.

Twenty years after they first met, Jenny and Shirley reunited at the sanctuary, with instant recognition and “immediate, intense and unforgettable” bonding between the two cripples. They had a connection like mother and daughter for 7 more years. Then one day Jenny went down and could not get up. Unable to get Jenny to rise, Shirley walked away into the woods, staying there until Jenny died, and didn’t eat for two days. ***

The connection of self and sociality suggests that individualism and social interdependence are intertwined. So the study of consciousness, while it might seem esoteric or academic, could be relevant to dealing with our political paralysis. Or, to our underlying, unaccountable mix of cruelty and kindness.Awake & Alive Mind

The science of consciousness

WRITTEN BY

Ted Wade

3 life phases. Monkey sociobiology. Medical data search/AI. Now: the Self, consciousness, & multiplicity of identity. chimerealism.wordpress.com