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| Yayoi Kusama's: Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity. |
Most of us are looking for truth with a capital T. Scientists,
mathematicians, religious scholars and practitioners, philosophers, professional
and recreational, examine the world physically, theoretically, socially and
psychically, with at times pathological zeal, on different scales with
different tools, adding to the cumulative, imperfect mass of human knowledge.
Our truths[i]
define reality, finding them changes our worlds and reaffirming them keeps them
in orbit. Truths are the touch points in our personal narratives and support
everything we’ve ever been proud of, ever loved or had faith in. Truths help us
tell the story of where we’ve been and where we’ll go next, as individuals and
a species. Medical truths keep us safe and healthy. With conviction, we look to
the heavens and feel heavy with grace, we predict electron orbitals and
describe celestial mechanics. Truth can be powerfully attractive and equally
repulsive.
It’s impractical to deny truth. Even firm relativists, who refute the
existence of all but subjective truth, would be pained to dispute that humans
need water to survive and live in groups, and that when you’ve got two apples
and another two fall on your head, you have four. A religious fundamentalist
may pronounce a lack of faith in certain scientific statutes but it’s likely
both he and the relativist go to the hospital when injured, drive in cars over
bridges, fly in planes 30,000 ft above the ground and use cell phones that
bounce signals off orbiting satellites.1
What objective truth is, whether or not we can know it, and how, is likely
an unanswerable epistemological quandary with a phantasmagoria of distracting
arguments, distracting, in this case, from the much more exciting premise that
we all choose our truth. Selection of truth limits reality. Possibility is
superseded by the constraints of a singular life. Although we have great
potential for change and growth, we bind ourselves, accept silent impediments
and actively self-limit.
David Foster Wallace, in a speech delivered to the 05’ graduating class
at Kenyon College, arguably the most self-reflectively didactic of his published
works, said:
The only thing that's capital-T True is that you
get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide
what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's true. In the
day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is
no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is
what to worship.
It’s a beautiful thing, consistent with his genius, that DFW chose on this
panoramic, emotionally illimitable setting to remind these young people, each a
distinct patchwork of learning and ignorance and old enough to know it, of the
power of choice in prescribing reality and to be aware of the limiting effects
of knowing and unconscious decisions.
Foster Wallace’s commencement speech refers mainly to normative social and
psychological beliefs, but it seems just, facing the gargantuan range of human behavior:
Tibetan contemplatives, Nazis, Gurus and followers, luddites,
furries, child geniuses, technophile hackers who consume Mountain
Dew in 12oz breaths between screen time, bouts of polyphasic sleep and the
practice of Jediism… It seems just, as what can be known, felt and
produced by human beings approaches infinity, that we ask questions about
limits. How do most of us negotiate lives within a narrow standard deviation of
the typical? What limits us?
Our regression to a behavioral mean is a complex interconnected process that
involves the physical world, body, brain, mind and groups of minds.
All of the matter and energy we see and measure is subject to physical laws,
with solid Wikipedia articles, and (if you’ve got problems with the standard model or want to make arguments involving special relativity or divine
providence, please, comment) the upshot is that these essential limiting
forces act on all of us and everything we know, and, an inert variable is a
constant, overlookable in a discussion of the borders of human potential.
Our terrestrial environment, the geological, thermal, chemical,
topographical and atmospheric conditions of the planet we live on, presents
barriers, dotted lines around our lives. Physical obstructions allowed for phenotypic
phylogenesis, the development of different languages and myriad cultural
distinctions. But physical limits were more present in the past. It would seem from
sustained cross-cultural observation that human history is increasingly a
narrative of a species reshaping its environment to suit its needs. Ancient peoples
journeyed across vast oceans in wooden canoes, domesticated animals and carved niches
in inhospitable places.
Today, telephones, radios, air travel and the internet have mitigated the
effects of physical boundaries, but perhaps not as comprehensively as we’d
imagine. A research study conducted by Samuel Arbesman for The Atlantic Cities in collaboration
with MIT and AT&T suggests (via analysis of multiple points of
connectedness: communication, movement, regional lexical and cultural features)
that to a noticeable degree our geography continues to restrain us. Arbesman
writes: “Despite all the technology at our disposal, in many ways we are still
products of place.”
Being a product of place means that where we live, despite superhighways and
supersonic jets, puts fairly solid walls around the cultural package that
includes our given language, ethics, pastimes, the food we eat, the sights,
sounds and smells that remain in our memories and constitute reality.
Language is one of the most significant cultural bequests. Although we think
of language, particularly written language, as a uniquely human development,
evolutionary biologist Mark Changizi, pulling from evidence presented in his
books The Visual Revolution and
Harnessed argues that:
Writing was culturally selected to look in
fundamental respects like nature, just the look our evolutionarily illiterate
visual system is highly competent at processing. Writing doesn't have a brain
instinct so much as a nature instinct.
Changizi believes the same is true of music, that both are sourced from the
natural world, that by harnessing
instinctual responses to sights and sounds found in nature, human culture has, in
essence, preempted evolution. We’ve developed tools that exploit our biology,
expanding our cognitive abilities, allowing us to reshape our surroundings and
forget the source of the written symbols and evocative melodies we fill our
days with.
It’s not surprising that we’d forget. The truth is hidden in the past. We
remember and study this phenomenon perhaps only because we write – a behavior
performed as it is because we inhabit the bodies we do.
Humans are terrestrial creatures that breathe earth’s atmosphere and eat its
flora and fauna, we reproduce sexually, we have forward-facing eyes, heads, shoulders, knees and toes. We’re
born into this form and we spend our earthly lives in a single body.
It’s bizarre, if you think about it – the development of our form can be
traced through variations and adaptations in living phylogenic neighbors and
the fossil record but it’s equally novel for each new soul born into it. Perhaps
this is why when we inhale certain naturally occurring chemicals we end up
having extended discussions about what we’d do if we had wings or tails, or
staring incredulously, and repeating: “Man, my hands are crazy! Look at them.
Look at my hands!!” Some of us think this way without chemical assistance.
Our bodies, essentially dictated by our genomic structure, restrict us. For
the moment, the trippy, sci fi medical tech that could change this is out of
reach for most of us. Here, rhetorically, genes are the laws of physics for the
body: constant elements of the algorithm describing human limits. We can
augment genetic limits with reductive thinking about anatomy. It’s easy to
oversimplify bodies. But we shouldn’t.
Definitions of normality vary across cultures and change over time – a lesser
documented, quicker, social analog of anatomical evolution. Most anatomical
categories are arbitrary constructions, difficult to quantify when looked at
closely. Even designations as seemingly fundamental as male and female become less distinct2 if broken down into
measurable parts. Categories are constructed. We are not the Vitruvian Man.
Get out of here, Hugh Jackman. You’re
messing mup y point.3
Stridency over anatomical divisions is overtly tendentious – and limiting –
in the face of two previously mentioned conditions: new technologies and our
inclination to reshape our environments and ourselves. We’ve overcome our illiterate
visual systems, we live with cerebral shunts and pins in our femurs, and
futurists like Ray Kurzweil believe that advanced technologies will soon
be integrated so completely with biology that the next stage of human evolution
will occur in tandem with machines and machine intelligence. Kurzweil’s beliefs
are considered extreme, most colleagues express doubt about his reasoning
vectors and/or deterministic conclusions but the man’s an undeniable genius, a
sort of prophet, and not entirely unconvincing for those willing to consider
the uncomfortable.
Many are unwilling and this is troublesome. Individuals who talk about AI,
singularities, nanotechnology and off-planet colonies are called eccentrics and
heckled, to their faces sometimes. Environmentalism is easy. Preserve our
planet. Sustain human intelligence, as it is, the dominant form of intelligence
on our world. Don’t think too closely about the idea that the physical form of
our bodies is neither stable nor definitive. Meet speculation with truculence.
Bodies change slowly, technology could accelerate the process, but consciousness
(of our bodies and ourselves) can be altered in as quickly as one moment
flowing into the next. Through continuous endogenous and exogenous mind-body
feedback, consciousness develops in the body, one body, born in one place and
time, and nests in the brain.
What goes on between our ears probably limits us most and we know more about
the brain than ever. Smart people working in swanky labs spit out wild sounding
terms like: Neocortex, Dentate Gyrus, PKMzeta
and neural correlates of consciousness.
Neuroscience is in an interesting place right now, philosophically. Our
knowledge is ballooning asymmetrically. We can use voltage-sensitive dye to
study neural-dynamics with millisecond resolution in brain slices pre and post
bidirectional variations in external conditions. We’ve uncovered a chemicalthat inhibits the formation of new memories but we can’t trace a thought in
the brain. We know a lot of the what
and significantly less about the why
and how.
This is not an excuse to deny evidence or ignore findings. There’s a lot we
do understand (we’re all probably grateful for the Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s
meds our parents and grandparents take) even if hypotheses are tested and
confirmed with staggering ranges of uncertainty and results are impactful on
microscopic scales, if we’re paying attention, they make fantastic jumping off
points for non-scientists to pose gnomic assertions like what follows.
Healthy brains change and are marked by an inability to process big numbers.
These are anecdotal and experimental truths, with interdisciplinary support
from the neurological, mathematic and political experts in segments two and
three of this Radiolab episode4. Fifteen
point seven trillion, a recent estimate for the national debt, is an
unfathomable number. We’ve seen patients live normal lives after radical
hemispherectomies and neuroplasticity remains a hooded figure of surprise and
delight. Neural processes are dynamic and although we’re capable of storing an
uncountable volume of information, we’re not good at consciously evaluating or
recalling large numbers or large amounts of data. Our brains balance storing
and accessing massive amounts of networked data with deriving meaning out of
the information we possess. Perceived meaning, feedback from the body and
repeated behaviors alter our neurochemistry. In combination, these two truths can
explain our most profound forays into the infinite and our everyday, piddling
mediocrities.
Our brains have been like this forever, well… a long time, perhaps making it
possible for us to develop pleasure responses to growth, to the awareness of
formed connections, ultimately, putatively, to learning. Apart from the hedonistic
family, the feeling of comprehension, if successfully reinforced, is one of the
truly numinous pleasures of man.
New research 5 suggests that a cause
of depression may be a lack of new cell growth in the brain. Clinical
depression is a psychosocial, neurochemical disorder and a
psychopharmacological hot zone linked to addiction, anxiety, eating disorders, insomnia
and various other transient dangers of the mind. There’s no umbrella
explanation for depression. It’s commonly attributed to an imbalance of
neurotransmitters and receptors, particularly those linked to pleasure responses: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin.
If the new theory has legs, it implies that depression is limitation in
cause and effect. It’s certainly concurrent with reports of the experience of
depression and adjacent conditions like addiction. Either neural growth dwindles
and we’re diagnosable or it’s restricted to harmful networks and we learn
ourselves into a corner with self-destructive behavior until our neurochemistry
adapts and our condition becomes pathological, leaving us with a rarely
euphoric, sometimes comforting, largely painful, somnambulistic illness. Growth
doesn’t have to be positive. Pathology becoming pleasantly familiar to the
point that it feels easier to live with a limiting (but not life-threatening6) problem than face the uncountable
possibilities of a life without the crutch of disorder is blue business.
This is one in a cornucopia of unconfirmed neuropsychological
postulates. Neuroscience has a lot of theories. But ask one of the big
questions you’ll almost always get a line like: “the underlying local dynamics
are not understood.7”
One paradoxical circumstance of our current science is that while we look
for truth about the brain, we are unable to see truth in the brain.
Most of what we know isn’t demonstrable, neurochemically. Sum double digit
numbers, solve a quadratic equation, play virtuoso cello, recite every U.S.
capital city in reverse alphabetical order, love one particular man or woman
deeply for fifty years – none of these things are measurable with present tools
on existing scales. The information is everywhere and nowhere in the brain, and
body, coursing through our somatic souls, lost in seemingly infinite
biochemical and electrical interactions. Without measurement science is lost. Right
now, measuring the limits of our brains is an intractable problem.
Science may not be great at defining human limits, but society is.
The socio-cultural medium surrounds us from birth to death, extending
into our deepest trenches and to the top of our skyscrapers, telling us how to
speak, think, and good and bad ways to behave.
Groups enact laws, religious and civil, and constituent
members adhere, assume roles and tell personal identity narratives. All
cultures perform specific limiting functions – not because our base nature
requires suppression or a transcendent connective aura impels cooperation. Man
isn’t inherently good or evil but inherently, wonderfully, different.
The infinite (rather, some incalculably large finite number
of) variations of human born into the spectacular theater of this planet gifted
with moderate-to-severe innumeracy and dynamic neural systems are compelled to
move and act and grow, but to do so in a manageable way – a way our brains can
follow.
Making sense of reality is a process of recognition, acceptance
and negation. With complexity, and an unfathomable quantity of variables, we
limit, as social creatures, working, playing, exploring, learning and limiting…
together.
Of course, there are explanations beyond the neurological for
limitation, specialization and agreement bias, and why these things were
important on the African plain and remain so on the floor of a suburban city
hall meeting.
Evolutionary biologists like Changizi argue that in spite
of our most eccentric behaviors (Jeddiism) we are fundamentally biological
survival machines, adapted to survive and reproduce. Living in groups increases
our chances of both. Developing proficiency in an occupation increases value to
the group, and normative behavior promotes trust and trustworthiness, essential
for social exchange, heightening the probability that an individual will to continue
to exist within that group and contribute to it’s success.
An interesting corollary – agreement with the norm is typically
accentuated in our most vulnerable stages of life, as children are just
developing in the social universe and as the elderly advance in it there is
less evidence of deviant behavior. Kids push, sure, but it’s more of a test to define
limits than blow break them, until puberty.
Even deviance has been collectivized in discrete deviant
communities (furries) with separate flavors of laws and limitations; they
typically frown on harm, physical or metaphysical – remember, submissive
S&Mers get pleasure from those whippings – and in most cases, discounting respective
peculiarities, live lives not unrecognizable from the majority of society.
Common social agreement behaviors activate the same
neurotransmitters (dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin) mentioned earlier as factors
related to depression, anxiety, etc. For example, something as simple as a hug
releases oxytocin in the brain, so does orgasm. Some attribute this post
copulative chemical flush with the development of attachment and romantic love,
enabling us to limit ourselves to one sexual partner long enough to produce and
hopefully raise a child.
But it doesn’t always go that way. With (nearly) infinite
possibilities, there are extremes.
Psychology has a lot of names for abnormal states: from
extreme shyness to agoraphobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder
and paranoid schizophrenia. (For fun, I took three different autism quotient
exams and scored a bottom-border Asperger’s number on each, but I self-identify
as a high-functioning addictive personality with control issues and mild
episodic mania and depression – maybe I just drink a lot of coffee and get sad
sometimes?)
Severe, genetic neurochemical imbalances and disorders
exist, acute environmental trauma can mess you up, but frequently,
psychological pathology is a reaction to cultural pathology.
If a mind is unwell, it’s likely a socio-cultural sickness is
also present. When there are conflicts between the group and group members, if
an internal or external locus of control is weakened, idiosyncrasies can develop
into disorders.
This is one way social normalizing can be dangerous. If we’re
operating with socially inherited internalized biases – what Foster Wallace
calls “the default setting” and Dan Ariely calls “intuition” – especially if we’re
unaware of them, individuals within parent groups can be adversely affected. We
see the predominance of certain psychosocial conditions in similar
socio-cultural settings and others manifested at specific times; i.e.
alcoholism and drug abuse more frequently in lower income communities and
eating disorders in young females in the developed world.
The encouraging thing about psychology8
is that it’s a practice based on the premise that these conditions can be cured,
with traditional talking therapy and/or behavioral reconditioning. “Normal”
self-limiting and probably even extremely self-destructive behavior is
treatable. You can heal, but you have to know what you want to heal to. You
have to choose. There are no atheists.
There are many, many literary parables structured around an
individual bracing himself against the weight of society out of youthful
petulance, Manichean goodness or the fight for personal liberty. In A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
Joyce’s fictional reputed alter ego Stephen Dedalus says:
When the soul of a man is born in
this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk
to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.
In some cases the struggles of these heroes are rewarded, painted nobly,
even in tragedy, and in others are revealed to be solipsistic folly. Often though,
as is Stephen’s experience, the protagonist learns that his relationship the
society he clashes against is more complicated than he originally assumed.
Society is not an unmovable burden that we need to throw down, we’re part of
it, it is us and we’re mutable. In most places, on most graphs, human beings
seem to be moving toward more open societies, accepting of a broader range of
typicality and friendlier toward the narrow periphery. Slow motion is better
than no motion. There are no atheists and anarchy remains an ideal. We all
choose, and sometimes amazing things can come from constraints. Limits can be
facilitators. Dedication and practice yield virtuosity. Proficiency bears
neuro-physical and social fruit. We don’t get a Gretzky or a Beethoven without
cultural norms and individual proclivities.
Individual and group specialization is fine, sometimes good,
possibly inevitable – righteousness is dangerous. If righteousness is removed,
acceptance and change are feasible, potentially pain-free and a future riven by
conflicts fought in defense of societal or personal truths can be avoided. Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and ecclesiastical scholar who fought against, was
imprisoned and finally executed by the Nazis, has some beautiful work on this
subject.
In his Letters andPapers from Prison, Bonhoeffer talks about religionless belief,
suggesting that humans have no essential need for (divine, ineffable,
infallible, righteous) authority to coexist on this earth – in spirit, support for
bias sensitivity, maybe an argument for liberal arts degrees (maybe the only
one) and for equal and un-propagandized education, definitely for freedom of
access to information, for vagabond traveling through foreign places, scholarly
cross-cultural study, for self-doubt and self-love.
We’re constrained by the laws of physics, our bodies, brains
and cultures but most pertinently by our own choices. Discussing free will for
John Horgan’s Scientific American blog, Cross Check, neuroscientist,
Francis Crick collaborator and consciousness hunter Cristof Koch
proposes: “What remains, though, is that I am the principal actor in my life,
so I better take responsibility for my actions.”
Regardless of the neurological parameters of free will, a
nexus of personal control can prevent individuals from doing harm to themselves
or others. But, the self isn’t god. Culture isn’t god. God isn’t god. Nothing
(that we can cross-culturally prove yet) is god.9
We can both love our choices and question them rigorously. We can recall the
techniques we used as children to test and understand the limits around us,
picking and choosing our truths freely. Baring righteousness, being mindful
that societal ills can throw us off-balance and remembering that we can change,
individuals and groups can move toward tolerance.
At the end of the Kenyon College speech David Forster
Wallace warns his young audience to be justly questioning of biases and reminds
them to wear the colors of their beliefs proudly, because, in paraphrase, this
is it, folks, this is the stage.
Killing the infinite, accepting limitations, may be part of
the contemporary human condition, but if we go just one step further than DFW, offer
an open, evaluative method for determining truths, we give our people, young
and old, truths that feel just a little bit truer and limits that feel a lot
less limiting.
*This is the full version of the article. It's also posted in readable chunks.
[i]
True: in accordance with transcendent or empirical reality.
1
Alternately, a physicist might turn the spiritual for assistance solving an
equation.
3
I chose Mr. Jackman because the Vitruvian Man is a man, and in my experience,
the Broadway Wolverine seems to appeal (greatly) to most groups physically
attracted to men.
4
Jonah Lehrer, Steve Strogatz and Elkhonon Goldberg
5
Presented at the Proceedings of the National academy of sciences of the United
States of America
6
Please, if you’re considering harming yourself or others, seek assistance.
Obviously, this is serious.
7
I honestly can’t recall if this line was extracted or generalized from any
number of peer-reviewed articles. I apologize in the event of infringement.
8 Encouraging, as contrasted with the
nagging odor emanating from the social sciences that comes from the fact that
many conclusions appear both intuitive and circumstantial – an underwhelming
combination, festering into a distinct aroma of rationalizing bullshit.
9
Also included in this list is science: Science isn’t god. The idea of
discussing and reviewing information like physicists do is so seductive.
Certain real things in human experience (and the physical world) may not be
measurable. We need to embrace fallibility. Uncertainty. I think we can trust
empiricism if we can learn to walk away in frustration. Still, it seems unfair
that a tool so wonderful should be insufficient for understanding us.
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