Tag: worldviews

Why Fish Don’t Know They’re Wet

~ cafebedouin

You know that David Foster Wallace speech about fish? Two young fish swimming along, older fish passes and says “Morning boys, how’s the water?” The young fish swim on, then one turns to the other: “What the hell is water?”

That’s the point. We don’t notice what we’re swimming in.

The Furniture We Sit In

Think about chairs. If you grew up sitting in chairs, you probably can’t comfortably squat all the way down with your feet flat on the ground. Try it right now. Most Americans can’t do it—our hips and ankles don’t have that range anymore.

But people in many Asian countries can squat like that easily. They didn’t sit in chairs as much growing up, so their bodies kept that mobility.

The chair didn’t reveal “the natural way to sit.” It created a way to sit, and then our bodies adapted to it. We lost other ways of sitting without noticing.

Stories and language work the same way. They’re like furniture for our minds.

Mental Furniture

The stories you grow up hearing shape what thoughts seem natural and what thoughts seem strange or even impossible.

If you grow up hearing stories where the hero goes on a journey, faces challenges, and comes back changed—you’ll expect your own life to work that way. When something bad happens, you might think “this is my challenge, I’ll grow from this.” That’s not wrong, but it’s not the only way to think.

Other cultures tell different stories:

  • Some stories teach “be clever and survive” instead of “face your fears and grow”
  • Some teach “keep the group happy” instead of “discover who you really are”
  • Some teach “things go in cycles” instead of “you’re on a journey forward”

None of these is more true than the others. They’re just different furniture. They each let you sit in some positions comfortably while making other positions hard or impossible.

Reality Tunnels

Writer Robert Anton Wilson called this your “reality tunnel”—the lens made of your beliefs, language, and experiences that shapes what you can see. He was right that we’re all looking through tunnels, not at raw reality.

Wilson believed you could learn to switch between different reality tunnels—adopt a completely different way of seeing for a while, then switch to another one. Try thinking like a conspiracy theorist for a week, then like a scientist, then like a mystic.

He wasn’t completely wrong. But switching tunnels isn’t as easy as Wilson sometimes made it sound. It’s more like switching languages—you need immersion, practice, and maintenance, or you just end up back in your native tunnel when things get difficult.

Why This Matters

When you only have one kind of mental furniture, you think that’s just how thinking works. Like those fish who don’t know they’re in water.

But when you realize stories and language are furniture—not reality—you get some important abilities:

First: You notice when your furniture isn’t working. Sometimes you face a problem where thinking “I need to grow from this challenge” actually makes things worse. Maybe you just need to be clever and get through it. Or maybe you need to stop focusing on yourself and think about the group. Your usual way of thinking might be the wrong tool for this specific situation.

Second: You can learn to use different tools. Not perfectly—that takes years of practice, like learning a new language. But you can borrow techniques.

Want to think more tactically? Read trickster stories—the wise fool who outsmarts powerful people through wit rather than strength.

Want to notice how groups work? Pay attention to stories that focus on harmony and relationships instead of individual heroes.

Want to see patterns instead of progress? Look at stories where things cycle and repeat instead of moving forward to an ending.

Third: No framework gets to be the boss. This is where it gets interesting. Once you see that all frameworks are furniture, none of them can claim to be “reality itself.” They’re all tools.

Think about how cleanliness norms work in Japan. There’s no cleanliness police enforcing the rules. People maintain incredibly high standards because they value the outcome. The structure is real and binding, but not coercive.

Your mental frameworks can work the same way. You choose which ones to use based on what you value and what works, not because any of them is “the truth.” That’s a kind of mental anarchism—no imposed authority telling you how you must think, but still having structure because you value what it enables.

The Hard Part

Here’s what most people don’t want to hear: different frameworks sometimes genuinely conflict. There’s no way to make them all fit together nicely.

An anthropologist once read Shakespeare’s Hamlet to a tribe. The tribesmen thought Hamlet’s uncle marrying his mother was perfectly reasonable, and Hamlet’s reaction seemed childish. They weren’t offering “an alternative interpretation.” From their framework, the Western reading was simply wrong.

This creates real tension. You can’t be “in” two incompatible frameworks at once. You have to actually pick, at least for that moment. And when you’re stressed or in crisis, you’ll probably default back to your native framework—the one you grew up with.

The question is whether you can recover perspective afterward: “That framework felt like reality in the moment, but it doesn’t own reality.”

The Practical Part

You probably can’t completely change your mental furniture. That would be like growing up again in a different culture. It would take years of immersion in situations where a different framework actually matters—where there are real consequences for not using it.

But you can do three things:

Stay aware that you’re sitting in furniture, not on the ground. Notice when your usual way of thinking is just one option, not the truth.

Borrow strategically from other frameworks for specific situations. Use a different mental model, tell yourself a different kind of story about what’s happening, ask different questions. Not because the new furniture is better, but because sometimes it gives you a view you couldn’t see from your regular chair.

Accept the tension when frameworks conflict. Don’t try to force them into a neat synthesis. Real anarchism isn’t chaos—it’s having structure without letting any structure claim ultimate authority. You maintain your primary way of thinking because you value what it enables, not because it’s “true.” And you accept that other frameworks might be genuinely incompatible with yours, with no neutral way to resolve it.

The Bottom Line

We all swim in water—language, stories, ways of thinking that feel natural but are actually learned. The point isn’t to get out of the water. You can’t.

The point is to notice it’s there. To see that your framework is a way, not the way. To choose which furniture to sit in based on what you value and what the situation demands, not because someone told you that’s reality.

That’s harder than it sounds. When things get tough, your native framework will reassert itself and feel like the only truth. But if you can recover perspective afterward—if you can remember that you were sitting in furniture, not touching the ground—you’ve gained something real.

It’s a kind of freedom. Not the easy freedom of “believe whatever you want.” The harder freedom of “no framework owns you, but you still need frameworks to function.”

That’s not much. But it’s something. And it beats being the fish who never even knew there was water.

Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens

~ cafebedouin ~ 4 Comments

“Abstract

Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. We review three types of cognitive strategies for implementing critical ignoring: self-nudging, in which one ignores temptations by removing them from one’s digital environments; lateral reading, in which one vets information by leaving the source and verifying its credibility elsewhere online; and the do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which advises one to not reward malicious actors with attention. We argue that these strategies implementing critical ignoring should be part of school curricula on digital information literacy. Teaching the competence of critical ignoring requires a paradigm shift in educators’ thinking, from a sole focus on the power and promise of paying close attention to an additional emphasis on the power of ignoring. Encouraging students and other online users to embrace critical ignoring can empower them to shield themselves from the excesses, traps, and information disorders of today’s attention economy.”

Anastasia Kozyreva, et al. “Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens.”
Current Directions in Psychological Science 0 10.1177/09637214221121570-

After some reflection, this is obviously true. Just as obviously, it lends itself to the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people with low ability to critically ignore, do the exact opposite, where they focus on “attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content” and choose to critically ignore content that would help with changing one’s worldview to something that is more adaptive.

Once you start thinking about it, and looking for these kinds of behaviors, it becomes a new lens to which to look at a lot of the features of our society. The preoccupation with sports, for instance, is focusing on attention grabbing content with little value. It’s true of conspiracy theories, fundamentalism and the beliefs of fanatics everywhere. Moreover, if we look to our own behavior, there are many areas where we do this ourselves. Is a preoccupation with storytelling in “cinema” really different than a preoccupation with sport? What, then, is of real value?

The inescapable conclusion is that vast majority of our activity and attention is spent on things we should be critically ignoring. The hard question: what should we be paying attention to?

How to Admit You’re Wrong

~ cafebedouin

Related to yesterday’s post, where the ideas are of a piece:

“Kathryn Schulz loosely defines being wrong “as a deviation from external reality, or an internal upheaval in what we believe” — with the caveat that wrongness is too vast to fit neatly into either category….

…“We’re highly motivated to reduce that uncertainty,” Fetterman says. “Oftentimes, the most common way that people get rid of it is by rejecting the new information or creating a new cognition that basically gets rid of it. Not too often do we actually change our thoughts or behaviors in order to align with the new information.” This can look like only taking in information that confirms already held beliefs, justifying the belief, or denying anything that contradicts their beliefs. “The motivation to reduce that dissonance leads us to even double down or to come back even stronger with our beliefs,” Fetterman says…

…“Over time, fact after fact after fact will start to erode people’s beliefs away.”

To come to these realizations, Brown says we have to be open to the fact that we’re capable of making errors and setting our ego aside to accept we live in a world where we’ve faltered or have changed our minds in some way. In fact, Fetterman says, just accepting our own mistakes can allow us to be more open to being wrong.

It’s natural to get defensive or provide excuses for why you were wrong, but “these strategies for deflecting responsibility for our errors stand in the way of a better, more productive relationship to wrongness,” Schulz writes. To admit erroneousness without excuse — to simply state, “I was wrong” — is a skill, Brown says. “It probably is going to come out more as an explanation of why they were doing what they were doing,” Brown says. But with time and practice, we can come to recognize our mistakes without explaining them. The key is to consistently own up to our mistakes as soon as we realize we’re wrong.”

–Allie Volpe, “How to admit you’re wrong.” vox.com. July 13, 2022.

In the context of “the free energy principle”, you can eliminate “surprise” by not acknowledging it. But, the irony is that you set yourself up to be “surprised” time and time again until you recognize the surprise. Being wrong works they same way and is related. Acknowledging where we are wrong and where our worldview is off and leads to surprise helps us to correct our mental model of the world into a better form. But, if we are deceiving ourselves in the interest of protecting our ego, we set ourselves up for more surprise and more wrongness.

The Free Energy Principle, Minimizing Surprise

~ cafebedouin ~ 1 Comment

“The concept of free energy itself comes from physics, which means it’s difficult to explain precisely without wading into mathematical formulas. In a sense that’s what makes it powerful: It isn’t a merely rhetorical concept. It’s a measurable quantity that can be modeled, using much the same math that Friston has used to interpret brain images to such world-­changing effect. But if you translate the concept from math into English, here’s roughly what you get: Free energy is the difference between the states you expect to be in and the states your sensors tell you that you are in. Or, to put it another way, when you are minimizing free energy, you are minimizing surprise.

According to Friston, any biological system that resists a tendency to disorder and dissolution will adhere to the free energy principle—whether it’s a protozoan or a pro basketball team.

A single-celled organism has the same imperative to reduce surprise that a brain does.”

-Shaun Raviv, “The Genius Neuroscientist Who Might Hold the Key to True AI.” Wired. November 13, 2018.

I found this article about Karl Friston really insightful. It has revealed a long-standing difference between my spouse and I that I never really knew how to talk about before.

My wife has a task focus. She has a list. She is working through her list. Delays are something to be avoided, and exploring any aspect of something that is not immediately solving her problem is wasted time, from her perspective.

As one might be able to tell from the content of this blog, I do not tend to focus on task or particular problems. I’m more interested in understanding how things work, finding edge cases and generally, just trying new ways of doing things to see what happens. It helps me to make a better mental model or a worldview for interpreting the world. It is not time efficient, but over time, it does help me to solve problems faster because I have a better understanding of how things work under different conditions.

It’s clear that focusing on efficiency and maximizing value tend to drive us into task focus. If we have slack, then we can use the second model or exploration to expand our understanding.

But, I think there are habits of thought at play too. If you are in an environment where you are keeping track of your time, say you a in a large law firm that bills every 15 minutes or less of your time, then your ability to switch into exploratory mode might atrophy.

It probably works the other way too. Explorers aren’t time efficient until they have sufficient experience to outperform taskers, which takes time to acquire.

There’s also the point that this might not apply across the board. For example, I might be a technology explorer. But, I might be less of an explorer when it comes to interior decoration, do-it-yourself home repair or other topics. Same is probably true of everyone.

But, I still think this is an interesting idea to have in our toolbox for understanding the world.

The Understructure of Thought

~ cafebedouin

Language imposes limitations. When we reason, we use language, whether symbolic or natural. But, our understanding, or, perhaps it is better to talk about it as an intuition, runs deeper than our reason.

A common example can be found in a terms like “creepy”, “janky”, etc. We use these terms when there is uncertainty, when something is unreliable or unpredictable. The “creepy” guy on the bus is one that could possibly do something unexpected and unwanted. The “janky” piece of equipment will fail when it is needed. But, if we were certain, if we were able to reason that this person or piece of equipment were bad in some way, we would move toward judgment. This person is a bad person and must be avoided. This equipment is faulty; it must be replaced. The creepy and janky imply that we aren’t certain, but we know more than our reason can tell.

Of course, some of what makes up our intuition is a worldview, which is faulty. For example, people will look for information that confirms their bias, such as using the “precautionary principle” with respect to vaccines due to some rationale, such as an untested vaccine platform or antibody enhanced infection. However, the precautionary principle has a bias, against the new.

There are other principles. You could also use a decision-making model that looks at a decision in terms of risk/benefit. But, this also has a bias. Being able to assess risk and benefits means you have relevant experience that allows for making a risk/benefit assessment. But, it is useless where we have no experience.

Another would be focusing on signal-noise ratio for processing information. High signal means you have a lot of precision in what you hear, but it also implies that you may be missing signal. When you’ve attenuated what you are listening to down to a level that screens out most noise, you are also likely screening out signal. Perhaps that lost signal makes a difference in judgment? High signal implies a value judgment based on prior experience. It implies a level on confirmation bias.

You could probably think of many different ways of thinking about information and making decisions, and most of them would favor the status quo. So, perhaps, one way to break the tendency is to look for ways of making decisions that favor options with more unknowns, where it is difficult to make an assessment based on our prior experience. Experience forms the understructure of our thought. Broadening our experience helps us change our thinking from the ground up. More experience inables more variability in our intuitions, which in turn change our more formal, “rational” thoughts.

World Views & Alternative Realities

~ cafebedouin

I keep seeing a disconnect between how I view and how other people view the world. For example, there are members of Republican Party in the state and local governments that think that the coronavirus pandemic is largely over and that we are about to see a huge economic resurgence that is going to sweep President Trump, and by extension the Republican Party into office.

Another is the speed in which a vaccine will be produced for the pandemic. The historical rate for vaccines is roughly ten years. The fastest it has ever been done is for Ebola, which still took five years. However, there are people that think that a coronavirus vaccine will be available inside of one year, in addition to those that think is is gone already.

I, on the other hand, think that the pandemic will last two years, at minimum. We may have a few treatments that reduce the severity at some point in the disease progression, but it’ll cut the infection fatality rate from 1% to no less than 0.5%. And while it continues, there is going to be Great Depression impacts on the economies of the vast majority of the world’s economies, >90%. Obviously, this has important implications in the upcoming U.S. Presidential elections. With one view, Trump has re-election in the bag. In my view, he’s already toast.

We have roughly six months, and we will see whose world view was the correct one.

Horses, Not Zebras

~ cafebedouin

“‘If you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras,’ Mom liked to say, drawing from her wisdom as an emergency-room nurse that cautioned against wild medical diagnoses…

But I wonder — in our walling off what we can talk about and what we cannot, in our work to accept each other despite our conflicting views of the world and how to live in it, in deciding who we talk to and who we write off — how can we move forward together and fast enough to heal ourselves, our communities, this planet? Because that is what we are losing in the fractures.”

-Anjoli Roy, “My Brown Dad Voted For Trump.” LongReads.com, November 2019.

Book Review: Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson

~ cafebedouin

tl;dr: The eight-circuit model of consciousness: survival, emotions, reason, society/reproduction, body connection, imprint selection, connecting to life, and connecting to everything. If this all sounds like some New Age bullshit to you, then you might want to try some of the exercizes at the back of each chapter, e.g., “Try living a whole week with the program: ‘Everybody likes me and tries to help me achieve all my goals.'” Watch how your expectation shapes reality.

The framework of Prometheus Rising is Timothy Leary’s eight-circuit model of consciousness. In Robert Anton Wilson’s (RAW) telling, most people are robots that are dominated by one of the first four circuits of consciousness. They are ruled either by survival and comfort, their emotions, reason or the drive to reproduce and shape society.

Within circuits of consciousness, there are largely random imprints that shape their expression. For example, people that were enculturated as children and now belong to one of the top four religions – whether Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist – are often going to have a default emotional and rational style shaped by their religion. Or, people that grow up in circumstances of poverty or during a time like the Great Depression are going to have a greater focus on survival than people that didn’t. Other examples could include how our first sexual experience or relationship tends to define what turns us on or mate selection later in life. Similarly, our home life as a child tends to shape whether we want to recreate it or its opposite as adults.

He suggests that humanity is on the cusp of breaking free of the constraints of the space-time continuum. Scientific breakthroughs making immortality possible and enable the exploration and colonizing of interstellar space are going to radically change our mental models. And, this change in constraints is going to require reprogramming our minds to higher levels of consciousness, beyond the first four.

The fifth level of consciousness is a freedom from the compulsions of the first four circuits, where they are recognized as largely random imprints. In this state, we reconnect with our bodies. Freed from the demands of our imprints, we generally experience a sense of well-being.

The six level of consciousness, according to RAW, enables us to reprogram our random imprints. We are free to recognize the influence of our early poverty and decide that wealth and power, which both aid survival, isn’t as important to us. Or, we can decide to break with the model of relationships we have seen throughout our lives, and we can choose new imprints, e.g., to be polyamorous or bisexual. For rationalists, there is the opportunity to come to terms with how limited the tool of rationality is and how frequently it is used in the service of our drives for survival, for our emotions and for our social needs.

The seventh level of consciousness is to tap into our being at the DNA-level, where we come to terms with how we as individuals fit into the grand sweep of human history and how we fit into larger schemes of life on this planet and in the universe. Carl Jung’s collective unconscious, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Over-Soul, the Hindu atman, the Rastafarian I-and-I, the Baul Moner Manush (the person of the heart), the Quaker Light Within, and so forth seem like shades of this idea of how we connect with other humans, other sentient beings and the divine spirit of Life to transcend ourselves.

The eighth level of consciousness is to tap into the quantum entanglement of everything with everything else. It transcends the limitations of mere life and connects all to all.

Throughout the book, RAW’s primary project is not to lay out this framework clearly as I have done here, much of which is filtered through my own mind and not using examples from his book. His project seems to be primarily opening people up to the possibility of taking these ideas seriously. At the end of each chapter, he has a series of “exercizes”, which seem to be chosen primarily to give people practice in seeing the limitations in their worldview and in changing it.

This points to a key insight. It is impossible to tell people anything. You can talk about reality-tunnels and discuss theoretical frameworks like the eight-circuit model of consciousness, but it is difficult to make these ideas real. Ultimately, people have trouble accepting different worldviews than their own or that their outlook on life might be largely random and/or limited.

Most of us are getting on with the business of survival. We are subject to the vagaries of our emotions. We pretend that our rationality isn’t largely just rationalizations. And, we are subject to the demands of instinct, such as when biological clocks drive us to reproduce. Acknowledging these facts is difficult for most of us.

But, this fact is precisely why a book like Prometheus Rising can be so useful. There are other worlds, other ways of being. But, if we are only interested in the world we are in and the way we are, we are unable to see them. The expectations of the world shape us, and we, in turn, shape the world with our expectations. The central idea of this book is: Isn’t it worth the effort to change our expectations and get into a mental space where we are in control and can transcend our circumstances and our personal history?

Changing Reality Tunnels

~ cafebedouin ~ 2 Comments

Open Question: How does one cultivate the skill of evaluating our world view, assessing its strengths and weaknesses, and changing it when our situation changes?

“Every kind of ignorance in the world all results from not realizing that our perceptions are gambles. We believe what we see and then we believe our interpretation of it, we don’t even know we are making an interpretation most of the time. We think this is reality.”

—Robert Anton Wilson

“Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in — the one that we think is reality.”

—Alan Kay

Yesterday’s The Cost of the Club discussion starting me thinking about reality tunnels. Reality tunnels can shape not only how we view the world but also how we view ourselves, and vice versa.

If you identify with a political party, then how you view the world is shaped by this identification. It may be impossible to see the limitation of the field of view because you do not have a point of comparison.

Like depth perception, you have to have a slightly different frame of reference in order to see into three dimensions. Without a second frame, it can be difficult to judge certain qualities in our environment, such as distance.

And, we can extend this analogy. Add in space and time as proxies for our geography and our historical moment and we can try to adopt different frames of reference to look at our own and other times. This gives us increased flexibility in outlook, and perhaps, we can cultivate a sense of their strengths and limitations.

For example, in the current moment, we like to imagine that the mind is like a computer, subject to programming. Before computers, minds were compared to locomotives, houses, gardens, sponges and so forth. All of them provide some insight into how to think about our minds, but none of them are true. All of them have limitations.

Whatever else it is like, the mind is like a filter, taking in all the overwhelming information of our sense experience and trying to narrow it down to some desirable essence that helps us to live. This essence can change depending on our circumstances. The needs of civilians living in a town torn apart by civil war are different from the needs of military prisoners of war living in captivity. Princesses need a different way of interpreting the world than does the cook preparing her meals, even though they both ostensibly live in the same environment.

The ability to adapt to our environment and cultivate mental models that help us to survive in them is a great gift. But, it is also a great gift to be aware of their limitations and learn to be able to change them at will, when circumstances change.

How does one improve this skill? It’s a good question. I’m thinking that a good place to start might be with Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. It seems to be part of a larger question of: how do create an environment for yourself and others that is conducive to human flourishing? The ideas of Extropianism and their principles, particularly the other books in their recommended books near the bottom of the page might be a useful place to start.

Openness & Discernment

~ cafebedouin

“The undiscerning mind is like the root of the tree, it absorbs equally everything it touches, even the poison that would kill it.”

—Kung Fu (television series)

Recently, I got into an online discussion where someone was trying to convince me that I should listen to some podcast that explained some current conspiracy related to the United States government. I told them that I was not interested.

Then, they encouraged me to have an open mind and listen to both sides of the argument. They also claimed to listen to the “other” side and offered as evidence that they watched CNN.

It’s a strange perspective. The reality is that there are an infinite number of sides. Our perspective is shaped by our lives, and by virtue of that, all of them are unique. We lose this uniqueness when we try to narrow and conform our view to just two possibilities.

Of course, it is important to keep an open mind and to be open to new perspectives. But, it is equally as important to screen your influences. Obviously, if you are screening your influences to limit them to perspectives close to yours or to just two, you are creating a filter bubble (or two) and are losing out on all the variety and opportunities for growth that exist in the world.

But, on the other hand, some ideas are simply bad and do not lead to growth, except in reaction. After getting the basic idea behind notions of racial superiority and judging it bad, it is unnecessary to evaluate every instance of this phenomena. Whether it is Christian Identity in the United States, Hindu Nationalism, notions of the “Original Black Man” and so forth, these ideas are about building a sense of self-worth from one’s racial identity.

Taking pride in being a part of a race is just as much of a part of racism as being prejudiced against people because of their race. One feeds into the other, the yin/yang that perpetuates itself through the generations and forms in and out groups.

It may be that there is a place for this type of thinking in a world with a history of subjugation, such as colonialism and slavery. It may, in some instances, serve as a corrective that at some point is no longer is necessary. Like women only transportation or classrooms, once society has progressed enough these measures can be dispensed with in order to transition to full equality. Although, they can also be obstacles to this kind of progression.

“Separate but equal” systems tend to perpetuate themselves and the very systems of subordination they are trying to address. Similarly, lifting up a race by focusing on the good qualities of the “race” has a similar effect. It is a dangerous crutch, and for me personally, racial identity is not an idea that would be a good lens for viewing the world. No amount of additional information is going to change my mind on this topic. This is a kind of virus meme, and it would cause an illness of character.

It is important to find our own path in this life, and it is impossible to do that if we allow every influence into our mind. Not being discriminating about our influences turns the pure water of our unmediated experience that we can use to live a unique life of meaning into a sewer of preconceived notions. It’s another form of colonization, just of the mind.

To paraphrase the great sage, George Clinton, “You got to free your mind, and your ass will follow.” There is no greater freedom than to choose what is good for you and to limit your exposure to the bad. The trick is not to think the new or different is bad.