Psychology

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Mind your vectors and terms of address

I’m writing this on my mini laptop computer again, because even though I find the extra weight of carrying it mildly annoying at the end of the day, at least sometimes the irritation of trying to write using my stupid smartphone is worse.

Although, since those two versions of me exist at different times, it’s hard to weigh their degrees of perceived irritation against each other.  In the morning, if I’m using my thumbs to try to type on a diminutive screen in a fashion that could be easily predicted to lead to some manner of repetitive stress injury, its all too natural for the “me” of that moment to hate the “me” of the previous evening who elected not to bring the laptop computer back with him.

But the “me” of the evening, when faced with the minor extra effort of the mini laptop, can feel very much overwhelmed and exhausted and think that the “me” of the following morning won’t find the process of writing using the smartphone particularly difficult.

The human consciousness clearly doesn’t have one, singular, constant terminal drive or goal as an imagined artificial general intelligence might.  I suppose one might think that the drive “to stay alive” would count as an ironically designated terminal goal, but that’s clearly not an accurate interpretation of the situation.

Not only are some people quite self-destructive and even actively suicidal—which you might credibly dismiss as dysfunction, not the lack of a dedicated system, though I think that would be imprecise—but there’s no good way to think that such a specific drive could evolve.  Evolution is blind to “death” as a concept or force, except as a failure, an accident, a lack, whatever you want to call it.

Before humans, as far as we can tell, no creature on Earth had a concept of “death” as the cessation of the biological processes of an individual organism.  Instead, there are proxies, such as the drive to avoid pain, and the related strong sensation of fear relating to danger and so on.

Similarly, there is no drive “to reproduce” in human (or other animal) minds.  Teens going through puberty don’t start feeling the literal desire to replicate their DNA in other bodies.  Instead, proxies for reproduction evolved, urges and drives that tended to lead to increased chances of reproduction, such as dominance hierarchy drives and displays in social primates such as humans, sexual attraction, and—of course—the pleasure of sex itself, with the reward-based drive to have it as often as feasible (with other inputs adjusting the strength of that drive and causing it to manifest differently in the two biological sexes and at different times and places).

The human brain—like probably all the other adequately complex brains on Earth—is a mélange of modules, with varying drives and processes that have evolved in parallel and sometimes independently, and also developed ways of interacting with each other.  Of course, at the root are the automatic drives that are all but undeniable—the respiratory drive, the thermoregulation drive, and so on.

There are even drives that are neurological in a broad sense, but that are so fundamental that they cannot be interdicted by the rest of the nervous system, only adjusted—I’m thinking here mainly of the heartbeat, the driver of which is in the sino-atrial* node and the Purkinje system of the heart, which is sort of a cross between muscle and nerve tissue.

The upshot is, if you ever feel that you’re “of two minds” on some particular subject, you’re probably not just speaking metaphorically, whether you know it or not.  Your final actions are produced by what I see as the final vector sum (and it can be quite small in the end or it can be huge in magnitude and surprising in direction) of all the drives or “pressures” in the brain that have any effect on decisions about behavior.  Then the action caused by the final behavior feeds back on the system**, changing the lengths and directions of some (perhaps sometimes all) of the contributing vectors, causing changes in the inputs and thus changes in the final vector sum of behavior.  Lather, rinse, repeat as needed, ad nauseam if not actually ad infinitum.

Please don’t imagine this as the sum of physical vectors in real spacetime.  The number of possible dimensions of such mental/neurological vectors is huge.  For all I know, there might even be spinors and tensors and matrices involved, but I don’t think those are necessary for my vague model.  “Simple” higher dimensional vectors probably do the trick.

What a curious set of things about which to write that was!  I had originally intended to start this post with some version of The Simpsons’ “Hi, everybody!”  “Hi, Dr. Nick!” exchanges, perhaps then noting that I could change “Dr. Nick” to “Dr. Robert” and thus reference both The Simpsons and the Beatles at the same time.

But then I might have noted that, although the Beatles song is so titled, “Dr. Robert” is not the way anyone has ever referred to me in actual practice.  It would be, honestly, a little weird for someone to refer to their physician as, for instance, “Dr. Joe” or “Dr. Judy” or whatever, certainly in our culture.

Mind you, there was that tendency for a while (it may still be prevalent) to have kids speak to adults such as teachers and daycare workers and people of that sort using their “title” and then their “given name”, such as “Miss Barbara” or “Mister Jimmy”.  I have always thought that was weird.  I mean, just imagine someone trying to address a certain prominent fictional character as “Dr. Hannibal”.

Alas, that all ended up being a discussion not worth having, except as an afterthought.  Though it’s debatable whether any discussion at all is actually worth having—including the discussion about whether any discussion is worth having.

You all can discuss that if you want; feel free to use the comments below, and to share this post to your social media platforms or what have you.  When you do discuss it, remember to define your terms ahead of time, and stick to them rigorously—i.e., the meaning of “discussion”, and of “worth”, and so on—so that you decrease your chances of getting involved in semantic games and misunderstandings and sophistry.

Whatever you choose to do, please try to have a good day.

*The “sino* in that term relates to its location in what’s called the sinus of the heart, and the “i” in it is a long “i”; it has nothing to do with China, though an identical prefix is sometimes used to mean “related to China”, but in this case with a sort of short “i” sound…or, really, a long “e” sound.

**And there are surely numerous other feedback loops all along the way affecting many, or perhaps all, of the vectors.

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Don’t be afraid of “scare quotes”; they are–as am I–here to “help”

It’s Friday at last, the last day of a work week that has lasted at least 12 days already (subjectively speaking).  I am not working tomorrow, so there will be no blog post made again until Monday, barring‒as must always be the case‒the unforeseen.

I will try to remember to send myself the audio files for my last two audio blogs‒or perhaps it was three‒to turn into “videos” over the weekend.  I haven’t downloaded clipchamp or whatever it is to my home computer, but it should be no more difficult to do there than it was at work.  Of course, I may not do that, so don’t make any plans that depend upon my doing it‒goodness knows what such plans might be.

I’m not sure if anyone really likes those “video” versions of my audio blogs or is just as happy with the plain audio.  I’ve noted before that storage on YouTube is functionally limitless (as opposed to WordPress) but if I’m loading them here first, anyway, that’s a moot point at best.

You may have noticed that I tend to put quotation marks around the word “video” when I refer to the above, because though technically they are indeed video files, the visual portion is just a static image.  I’m a big fan of so-called scare quotes.  I think we should use them far more often than we do.  People often arrogate terms to themselves, or use epithets against others, as a means of manipulation, as if invoking some sequence of letters or sounds causes a thing actually to be the case, and I think it’s important to point out when one is unconvinced that the term is being used properly or accurately.

Perhaps the most prominent and pointed such ill-use might be regarding “progressives” and “conservatives”.  Both groups inherited the terms from people who came before, and who perhaps more accurately embodied the general meanings of the words, but they are now simply camouflage uniforms, at least in many cases.  You can call yourself a “freedom fighter” if you want, but using that term doesn’t mean you’re not a terrorist or that you’re actually interested in any legitimate form of freedom.

Of course, real conservatives and progressives being at hostile odds with one another doesn’t make much sense if one is considering the usual meanings of the terms rather than claiming them as team names in some tribal contest of primate dominance.  It makes sense to conserve those things in a society that are effective, that have been tested by time and found to be useful, but it’s just as reasonable that everyone should want to make actual progress whenever possible, to improve life and prosperity for everyone as much as is feasible.

The real, useful discussion would be about which things are working well and should be conserved, and which things require improvement and how to go about it.  There will be substantial disagreement on such questions, of course, and part of the discussion must always be how to decide what best to keep as it is and what is the most fruitful area in which to improve things

People of good will‒who do not think in terms of “us” versus “them” but in terms of usefulness and effectiveness and trying to get the best outcome for as big an “us” as possible‒can work in ways that will be beneficial by whatever measures one might want to use, keeping in mind always that all conclusions are in principle provisional and all processes and people are fallible, but that all problems are in principal soluble.

I’m not sure humans are clever enough primates to achieve such matters for long.  They seem to devolve so readily into conflicting tribes.  I guess this makes sense given the ancestral environment, with groups of only on the order of perhaps about 150 people living together.  But there’s no good excuse for not recognizing that tribal modes cannot function ideally in a setting in which 8 billion people are interacting in a massive and incredibly productive and complex economy and polity.  At higher levels of complexity, newer “rules” are going to tend to be required.

Humans aren’t necessarily all that good at adjusting to such things, though.  I often think that it will require a new and ongoing external threat, such as a supervillain or an alien invasion, to bring humanity together in total.  I’ve often been tempted to volunteer myself for the position, since humanity really can be contemptible and infuriating to me.

It’s not that humans are worse than the other life forms on Earth; I don’t think they are.  Life in general is frequently vicious and cruel and wretched, with all living things riding the knife edge of death and extinction much, perhaps most, of the time.  Nature’s equilibria are not achieved by some beautiful, fairy tale cooperation and self-restraint between forest creatures or what have you.  Equilibria are maintained by disease and death, by starvation and predation.  Agent Smith was just wrong, dead wrong, in his assessment of life’s tendency to form such natural equilibria.  He was too generous in his assessment of non-human forms of life.

Humans, however, are more competent than other animals.  They are also the only ones even capable of seriously planning ahead to strike a flexible and ever-changing balance between conservatism and progress.  It’s that they so often fail even to try to rise above their lizard-monkey minds that is so infuriating, and they themselves are among the worst of their victims.

Sometimes I think just wiping them all out would be a kindness‒not to the rest of the living world, which is certainly no more admirable or worthy of kindness than humans, but to humans themselves.  After all, if a function in time is always negative, then integrating the area “under” the curve will always yield a negative, and a permanent regression to zero would be a gain.  Maybe the universe, or at least the Earth, would be kinder in aggregate if it were sterile.

It’s food for thought, at least, and it is tempting.  What do you all think?  I’m not asking what you feel.  I hate feelings*.  But when you are as close to dispassionate and disinterested as you can make yourself, what do you think?  Does the human race (and by reflection, life itself) require an enemy to bring out its best?  If so, does it not then “deserve” that enemy?  And if it cannot defeat that enemy, does it not “deserve” to be destroyed?

I suspect that might be the case.

*Ha ha, that’s a little joke.