Ideacrank.net

I am here, I am no one else. I have an image of myself, but I am aware that it is not entirely accurate to who I really am. I have been fortunate enough to have humiliated myself in public enough times that I know the image I would like to see as myself (intelligent, funny, agile, wry, charming, etc..) conflicts with all the memories of being clumsy, foolish, dull and oblivious. I sometimes forget about the unfavorable memories for a while and begin ascending to a proud sense of self, only to be reminded of my other qualities by tripping over myself or saying something profoundly stupid. I can see a fragmented selection of images I have of myself. When I’m doubtful, brought low, the image of the oaf dominates. Mostly, I’m in the middle, though, and when I am thinking about it, as I am now, I can see both halves neutrally.

I am also aware of the images other people have of me. Each person, in interacting with me has some form of an image, greatly influence by the amount of time and the type of interaction that took place. There is a guy, for instance, who knows me as the clumsy jerk who spilled a Guiness on him in a Glasgow bar early into his night of drinking a couple of years ago. It may be completely forgotten now, but I have an image of him as well, cursing and wiping his shirt and pants, then storming off. A slightly more in depth image I have is one of the guy who laughed at the situation and bought me a rum & coke. On the other end of the range numbering in thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of people who have some image of me, there are my closest friends and family, who have a much more complex construction of who I am, having spent much more time with me, having seen me in many more states.

I would say that I have the most complete image of myself, but collectively, there is very likely a more complete image from all of the people I’ve met. They see me when I’m not paying attention to myself, and they remember the things I can’t. All the people who have seen me asleep. The business men staring at me when I woke up after sleeping at the Golden’s Bridge train station overnight, having missed the last train. The people who knew me before I knew myself. Mom, Dad, my brother. They saw me as a baby, a toddler. I remember a handful of things from before I was six, but my mother says she has dreams about me as a baby still. Isn’t that me, as well? Or am I only the image I have of myself? What I can say is that I am an idea, huge, fragmented and selective. I am an idea to myself and an idea to lots of people, though not usually one invoked by anyone other than the people close to me. Is that the extent to me, though? What about the impact I have? Am I also my imprint?

Unfinished image, self

Definition: Heating steel to, and holding at a suitable temperature, followed by relatively slow cooling. The purpose of annealing may be to remove stresses, to soften the steel, to improve machinability, to improve cold working properties, to obtain a desired structure. The annealing process usually involves allowing the steel to cool slowly in the furnace.

Daniel Dennett makes some good analogies using annealing in “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” and reading them sent me reeling with tangents.

It is a great metaphor that can be applied to all sorts of things.  The repeated expansion and contraction of

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Uncategorized

Perhaps I got a little too vague in the scattered man post. I’ll try to restate somethings.

I can accept either a dualist or materialist view of what is at the base of thought, but the most basic level I can achieve is the idea of these things. Until I am able to carry around a hand held brain scan, I won’t be able to watch myself think.

I am still a materialist, but I don’t think that the most vital endeavour is too isolate thought to neural firing (though it is fascinating), nor do I think discovering that all thought is purely material will degrade the value of thought (or undermine cultural morals, as some declare in response to materialist viewpoints). Rather, such an understanding of how neurons and thought work is a representation, a linguistic explanation for what is perceived to be happening, no different in type to a belief that the brain is simply a vehicle for a soul, or that we are iterations of an all encompassing, great entity. These are representations used to describe a perception, just as saying “I see something,” represents the actual experience.

So, at this point we can all be different in our equal way.  Everything is thought at the most basic level.  The world is flat in the eyes of a diminishing handful of people, and that is a single, valid perception of reality.  Atheists see their own reality, as do Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Capitalists, Communists, and act accordingly.  What reality is could be described in a similar way to how the character Leibniz describes paintings of London in Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver:

..Viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way,’ Leibniz said. ‘Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle – all on the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe – for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient.’”

A mass, multi-perspective view of the medium in which we interact, reality being our canvas.  There is no overarching viewpoint that is more correct, though many, most people accept their view to be the most true, rather, many billions of angles, some intersecting and some completely separate and uninformed of each other.

It would seem, then, that if no one is truly right, that it is fairly impossible to qualify an interpretation. And technically, this is accurate, but there are a few assumptions that can be made looking at interpretation this way. which do allow for some qualifying.  The world is ‘real’, or, at least, to whatever extent, we interact with it. We exist in some way as material things milling about in the space around us.  Many people believe there is existence outside of this, whether it is life after death or another plane of consciousness, and many believe they’ve accessed these places.  For those people, their interpretation of this life is greatly influenced and altered.  Daniel Dennett gave an excellent TED talk that includes this sort of example.  Some people are compelled to end their existence here in order to reach whatever is next (suicide bombers, for example), and others curb their actions and decisions based on something else they believe exists afterward (‘sin leads to hell’).

more soon

From the view, however, that these are ideological constructions,

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Unfinished

Rereading some of the things I’ve previously written always carries some discomfort. I don’t always agree with the way I’ve written something. It is a bit like running fingers over sanded wood. Awkward phrasing and disagreeable use of wording snare and splinter. The self-critical section of my psyche throws up responses of disdain, and at worst, disgust. How I am feeling greatly determines how I react. I occasionally go through doubtful times, and in response, think that my writing is either vague or trite. At other times, I estimate that I am doing something not a lot of people my age do. I’m trying to tackle some ideas that a lot of people don’t bother to think about. I’m not formally educated in the areas I’m interested in, but I have a good, general grasp on a lot of the topics, at least in my mind, which I am trying to lay out in words here.

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Unfinished

One of the goals I have for writing here is to lay out a description of some of the activity I encounter in my mind. This is a process of unraveling a lot of stuff I think about, and as I am scattered, I ramble. That is something I did always love about essay writing though; the essays I enjoyed writing the most were those that started in one direction and arrived somewhere completely different. I had mentioned before that I don’t always know what side I’m on when writing, which is why a thesis often comes last. I would rather ask a question in the beginning, and have the essay be the process of answering it, including all the mental steps. Essentially, I would eventually like to be able to write in a way that allows a reader to not just be convinced through a series of soundly argued points, but to follow the process through which those points developed.

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Rambling is something I often do, but it is a necessary part of that process. The key, I think, would be to find a good medium, a controlled ramble. Indirectly approach topics through sidesteps.

Unfinished

An issue I am encountering while writing for this blog is the concern of repetition. If I ramble and touch on a couple of topics in one post, I’m not entirely sure about how to approach those topics again without seeming to repeat what I just said. I can use links, but this isn’t so clear cut and organized. I do want to eventually establish a more clear system of topics.

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Ideacrank Development, Unfinished

I don’t always know where to go when I write. There are generally two ways a written piece can go for me.

In the first direction, I begin to write by taking some time to lay a first good sentence. I consider it very important, because it is the anchor to which the rest of my written thoughts are attached. A successful first sentence opens a couple of doors, usually less than three. I can go in only a few coherent directions, and that first sentence acts as a limiter, building some necessary boundaries for the writing. I can’t abruptly start talking about how loud the radiators are in my apartment without veering in a confusing way away from what the topic is I am writing about. So, the first sentence funnels thought. Then I have to invoke some aesthetic rules to make sure the string of sentences I am writing flows in a usually unnoticeable, but nice sounding way. Avoid repetition of words (for instance, “I can/I can’t” are now locked away from use in this paragraph, as I’ve used them to their quota), vary sentence length and reading breaks. This narrows down the direction further. A paragraph begins to form in my head and it becomes a process of filling in the detail and then figuring out an acceptable transition point to the next paragraph.

In the other direction, I launch into a topic direction, and feel the flow of words relatively unbroken. Direction forms more spontaneously, as I draw from concepts I consider related. I really like plowing through a paragraph, laying out words at a good pace, but I tend to run into a snare part of the way through. I begin to lose track of where I want to go with the writing. Writing for myself, I don’t really care. I can follow my own train of thought pretty well, even returning to writing from many years ago (there is actually a cut off though, where I start to sense a disconnect with what I had been thinking).  For writing intended to be read, it is not as simple.  I lose track of my direction, and as a result, eventually face too many options.  If I don’t have an initial, anchored topic, I can ramble myself into a place that starts to make less sense, because I go to far in a direction that loses touch with what I originally wrote about.

The most frequent result of the latter is that I stop midway through a paragraph, not knowing how to continue.  There may be many ways I could continue, but not a clear way to eventually land at any one point.  I might start writing about describing my own thoughts, and find I have walked into a different topic, unable to return to the original subject.

I don’t consider the unfinished writing to be a failure, but a broken direction or draft, to be finished later.  I usually like what I was writing about, and so I won’t get rid of it, at least not immediately.  Instead of keeping the unfinished writing unseen, I am going to post a lot of it.  I’ll add a tag and a note to them to mark them unfinished, and hopefully get back to them at a later date.

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Creativite Processes, Ideacrank Development, Unfinished

I work at a clothing retail store (policy forbids me from identifying which). Today, at work, I was approached by a man who immediately identified himself as an American living in France. He had an issue with the amount of clothing in the store, expressing frustration about the difficulty in finding a plain tee shirt. In helping him, I found that his problems extended past clothes, in a seemingly fluid way, to America in general. He was very upset and more than happy to explain to me the sundry issues with the country, only, he had a lot of difficulty articulating any of it.

“This health care problem.. its ridiculous.. everyone talking about it, but no one wants to reasonably discuss it.. Che.. Che Guevara, he, his revolution.. that’s why Cuba has such a good healthcare system. No one sees it!”

I spent a half dozen minutes talking with him as I helped him find shirts and listened and remained professional, in my role, though I was eager to talk more with him. I wanted to hear his opinion but I also realized something in listening and politely deflecting any position on the subjects he was talking about: there was a disconnect between what was happening in his head and what was spoken. Jumps were occurring in his logic that were not being expressed in his speech and I was fascinated because I see the same problem with my own speech and writing. My mind launches forward in a non-linguistic way that I understand, but to put the same to words requires a long, relatively slow churning out of successive steps. Detail is especially vital if I expect anyone to understand it besides myself, and I’ll have to ask you to excuse me if I get too vague, because that is a problem I’ve been told I have. I want to attempt to describe thought and mental processes, and I’ve found it to be fairly difficult to do. I will try to narrow the jumps, though. An idea is an imaginary thing, a word that we use frequently as a placemark of something we can’t sense, but can be aware of. You are thinking right now, and you know it. But what is it that is actually going on?

The dualist would describe something that ended with a connection to some immaterial thing, a soul or spirit, which is producing some amount of the content of thought. The materialist would respond, stating that we are a collection of neurons, synapses firing in network, and that our thought, all of our emotion is the product of chemical mixtures interacting with complex, organic systems.

Both sides can produce some wonderful imagery. Imagining the dualist perspective, my mind pulls up european paintings from the late middle ages, where the action of God is depicted as a golden line descending from out of view directly to the person of focus, only this line extends from the brain to whereever immaterial things are (the image doesn’t make much sense.. immaterial things don’t have place, there would be no where for the line to go, but it is a quick impression thrown together in immediate reaction). The materialist image borrows from science shows and documentaries. 3d models of long, narrow then bulbous and tentacle laden neurons in a dark blue, highlighted with moving gold filaments representing synapse firing, the gold traveling through the neuron, ringed around its narrow section. Brain scans of grey and red, mapped images of neural connections.

I am simplifying both materialism and dualism, and it is worth noting that there are many, many subsets of beliefs, it is just that most can easily be sorted into these two umbrella concepts. I like thinking about the possibility of either, if only for the imaginary exercise.

Dualism seems to be less for me, as for the most part, it suggests that there is some point where the questions about how the brain works, how thought works, comes to a stop, unless we start thinking about how the soul works or we’re talking about a particular type of dualism, where all thought relies on material, brain activity, except for a small portion, such as identity (the “my body is material, but I am not,” view).

Materialism would be my only other choice, and while I do already accept that I am made up of organic molecules (except the sucralose from the milkshake I had), and have no hang ups with the concept that consciousness and intelligence can generate out of non-conscious material, I do have one dilemma keeping me from the full fledged materialist insignia: the image I use to understand what materialism is, the neurons in a dim light one, is just that: an image. I can’t see the activity that occurs in my head as I can see the material I manipulate with my hands. The actual material isn’t tangible. I have to use an image, generated from the material mind I am imagining in order to grasp the concept and utilize it.

Here is where I stand, then: while I accept my mind to be, at its fundamental level, material, I cannot conceive that unless I utilize ideas. I can’t conceive of anything, actually, without the manipulation of ideas. Dualism and materialism both attempt to carve out the foundation of what it is to be conscious beings, but I am only able to go as far as thoughts about those things.

More later, I am tired.

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So I am going to slowly build the walls around this thing that I am seeking, and the best way to do that is to start giving definition to the words I’m going to be playing around with.  An image of hands, sifting through dry sand, brushing it away and grasping at something not fully visible, comes to mind.  I think it is because I’ve been thinking about building sandcastles with my Dad and brother today.

Anyway, a quick definition: an “agency enabling idea” is something that you are exposed to that brings about a greater awareness.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be an awareness of self, but rather, can be a sort of ‘wider-angle view’ of where you are, what you are doing, what your plans are, etc.. It could have an immediate impact, or it might be a component or prestructure to a higher level of awareness.

An example.  Sometime during the last summers of high school, I gained a bit of fleeting agency that still comes back occasionally.  Probably from a mix of listening to the World/Inferno Friendship Society‘s romantic, dangerous, transient lyrics and the intensity I felt spending warm days and late nights with friends, I remember standing at the guardrail of a neighborhood street laid against a steep incline sometime just before sunrise, and realizing that the way I felt was temporary.  It wasn’t long before it would get cold again, it would be sooner that I would forget about being so aware of my situation and return to just living and reacting, and that further away, I would change drastically and may not recognize who I was.  I did make a mental note to myself to remember the moment, and I still do.  Actually, I’ve come to the same thoughts about once a year since then, taking note of the person I am at that moment, and realizing that I’ve changed and that I will continue to.  A combination of chance events and encounters brought about conscious thinking for a couple of minutes.  Because of that thinking though, I still occasionally come to a similar awareness.  Experience brought on a concept that, now committed to memory, is triggered periodically.  There is now an agency enabling memory, floating around in me, that is triggered during a train of thought.  Sometimes it is invoked directly, as it is now, writing about it, and sometimes it is brought out unexpectedly.

I’ll think of other, broader and clearer examples later.

Agency Enabling Ideas, Definition

That the narrator, myself, isn’t necessarily the author caused me, the author, to be a bit apprehensive about using a blog.  I initially intended to post individual pages for each piece of writing, but the ease of use of WordPress was very attractive.  I do still intend to use separate pages for some things, but I did realize that there is a value in this method and format.  As I stated in the About page, a blog is not how I want all of the writing on this site to be interpretted, but the medium does serve useful functions.  A blog does have a certain level of accountability, pressing against what I posited in the disclaimer about the disconnect between narrator and author.  I am still feeling out the edges of where I want representation and when I don’t.  There is a precedent for bloggers to be held to what they say.  I would like to reserve the right to change my mind, or to argue something I don’t necessarily agree with.

One thing I do intend to do is customize this page.  The previously formatted themes are very nice and all, but I would rather have my own lay out.  Building a theme from scratch is on my list of things to do.

Ideacrank Development