Journey to the Abstract

This concept is related to the other persons’ superego and self definition. This perfectly ties in to the way they interpret you. The diagram below shows the perception filter. It is still a big simplification, but it is a good aid for imagination.

Lets say this represents your own image of yourself.
Each slider could represent

• How you see an aspect/concept of yourself
• The importance you give to something. Now the scale for each one could be infinite

Now there could be infinite such sliders. Each one could have infinite scales. You may consider yourself a musician if you make a play and create a certain quality of tunes. But who defines quality? Its society.

If you meet a new person who says “You’re no good. Its nowhere close to the level of Jimi Hendrix or Mozart” many different reactions can arise depending on how you perceive the other person.

• If he is really extraordinary, then the question is can he help you achieve a higher level? If yes, then you would respond favorably because although he has increased the scale of the musician slider, he can take you higher.
• If he is as good as you but has set astronomical standards for himself and has greatly increased the scale of your slider. His being hard on himself also imposes some hardness on you. 

1. But you take on some level of discomfort if he is willing to include you in his striving (Assuming he wishes to strive)
2. If his interests are in different areas, and he is personally not interested in advancing himself in this area then you just interpret him as being a bit harsh and develop a bit of repulsion.

• Last case is when, he is no good in that area, is not interested in pursuing anything, but still has set astronomical standards and belittles everyone, then the guy is interpreted as a total kill joy, jerk and a high degree of repulsion ensues. He not only belittles your position by greatly increasing the scale of the slider but also has no interest in that area itself and does not consider that important. He is simply denying/depriving you the pleasure of feeling special. Its like he has hit your self image from being outside it like shooting an arrow into a person from a castle window vantage point. The usual reaction after this is to get preoccupied with some way of paying this person back his insult.

The entire society is man’s collective attempt to create order and is always constantly challenged by chaos…

What is the thing we take for most granted? Probably the air we breathe?What if we were grateful for every breath? Wouldn’t it give us the highest sensitivity for the sublime feeling of satisfaction?

The whole sense of meaning/experience is completely unique to each individual and in a way all are equivalent.

Each dominant emotion in humans is countered by its dual in others. The question is will black or white win? But nothing can win in a sense because they depend on each other. One implies the other so they are one.

Pure concepts are imaginary and too simplistic to actually exist.

If you want to maximize pleasure in a relationship, both the parties should have the same intensity of interest for the same. Not like one is interested in maximizing the relationship pleasure and the other is interested in his/her work life.

Judging anything requires you to have a rubric in your mind at another level. These rubrics are known only to the individual judging can be deduced by observing his judgements.

Playing with meaning is the greatest power. It changes the entire life of the person. Like the movie inception which implants an idea which changes that person completely in his time dimension.

Knowledge or knowing something, understanding something happens the moment there is synchronicity of neurons. The more synchronicity, the more the feeling of understanding.

There is a plethora of things not included in this definition. Lets compare this to an ecologist who studies the bird, its habitat, its food, hunting patterns, sleeping patterns, its skeletal structure, physical characteristics like color, weight, feather texture, its odor etc. How would you suppose the ecologist would define it? He would probably write 2-3 books about the bird.

But even this definition albeit millions of times more detailed is still no match for what the bird ‘Actually IS’ across time. Firstly, it is impossible to know the subjective experience of the bird or what is feels like for the bird from moment to moment. Secondly, the ecologist can only study one thing at a time. While studying the food habits of the bird, he might have missed some biological changes the bird underwent because he cannot conduct biological experiments simultaneously. Now, you might say there are sophisticated computers that monitor 100s of aspects simultaneously 24×7. The information would be collected no doubt but who will make sense of this information.

That is the same as our brain just processing 1 billionth on sensory input at a time. Now this same brain would attempt to understand this information serially going through one aspect at a time. By then the changes across the other 99 parameters have been missed. Now if he moves to the 2nd aspect, again he’ll miss out on 99 parameters including the 1st one which might change again during that interval. Even if 1000 people are studying it and supercomputer gathers data about 1000 characteristics, its still no match.

Firstly, are there only 1000 characteristics, characteristics may differ at different levels too. At one level, you may have order and have chaos at another level of magnification. For example a woven mat or human skin may appear to be great order in its cell arrangement or warp and woof. But on magnification of 100x, things look super messy, if we further magnify 10000X again everything may look beautifully ordered. How many such magnification levels are you going to monitor? what about each atom in this bird? What about smaller particles like quarks and the ultimate strings and ALLLLL of the levels inbetween?

What about the format of this information received? (Human beings can process images faster than numbers or words) Should it be just a readout of numerical values? Some sort of abstractions like graphs which would again involve A LOT OF approximations because the graph needs to be quantized into a range that an average human can easily understand?

What is the resolution of monitoring in time? Is it a billionth of a second, trillionth? Lastly, the BIGGEST BIGGEST bottleneck in this system, are 1000 people enough to make sense of this even if they are working 24×7 for 10 years? (Considering all human limitations, our working memory can hold only 9 objects on an average, we read left to right and average reading speed is 300wpm)

Broader questions:

Now what about the unknowable subjective experience? What if there is information in other planes that neither we nor our instruments can detect? What about how the bird relates to everything else in the ecology? How would we know if the bird has extra sensory perception since everything we are recording is within the scope of our 5 senses. Can there be parallel universes overlapped with ours and the bird interacts with both simultaneously? What about the time before the bird was born? What was its nature at that time? What was the bird a million years ago? (The supercomputers are only digging out patterns for 10 years). How would the most intelligent man in the world fit into this picture?

FINALLY, we can study the patterns of things till our senses peel off, use any amount of technology etc, but no matter how many patterns we find, the unchanging essence of the thing is UNKNOWABLE and this is what is REAL REALITY. Our concepts are therefore just extreme simplifications and extreme tunnel vision when we think at this height.

Now what do we mean by understanding something? What is knowledge in this picture? When faced with an infinity, how much ever we know, we still don’t see any end? Its almost like we are always in the center no matter what we do. That is why generally adults after a certain age close up most of their perception into a small set of rigid beliefs which are assumptions simply set in stone and live their entire life from this perception goggles. This can get rid of the discomfort that comes with ‘Not knowing’. within this perception goggles they see ‘knowledge’ and think its real. In an adult consciousness, each person is doing that, so each one considers different things as knowledge depending on the structure of these assumptions. So what we call as knowledge is just a subjective feeling we get in the absence of contrary evidence to our beliefs. A person may think he knows all that there is to life. Another person may think he knows nothing. There is nothing intrinsic about our conventional definition of knowledge. But when we extrapolate this to ultimate knowledge then we see that every single thing in this world is actually unknowable.

Maybe neuroticism is as much there in me as it is in other people. Maybe my neuroticism is against order, tunnel vision, low altitude pictures, ignorance and in favor of all inclusive views, holistic approaches and expansion. Most other people like the illusory order, would prefer to not even know about it and would like to think that life is just about that and follow specific paths for solving their problems or seeking what they THINK they need without questioning assumptions. Usually I convince myself of my intelligence and that I am at a much higher plane of understanding, integration and reasoning.

But if I think more deeply, I am struck by more fundamental questions. Is my obsession with this just another form of neuroticism that is there in others? In other words, is the essence of it the same? Is it like the different between a child pursuing a particular toy and me pursuing ultimate knowledge and understanding? Are both seeking and therefore the same in essence but just a redirected primary force? More simply, I wonder if my neuroticism for seeking the highest pictures only puts me at a disadvantage in society while a person who plays by society’s rules simply gets both recognition and the same personal satisfaction I get while receiving a truth. But then, I think this is again a simplification. The meaning I get from finding truths that are profound, far out from conventional society and a crack into the matrix is only possible because society exists in this manner. Similarly, a person who plays by all the rules in society and gets their recognition can do this only because there are people who don’t get the same rewards and therefore that is the basis of his achievement. Secondly, pleasures cannot be compared in intensity. They need to be compared in subjective meaning. I can record a high dopamine level in my brain, but that is meaningful only if I have a recent memory of a low dopamine level. If it was always high then that is totally meaningless to me. I can read or see people who are less fortunate and feel good but how different is that from me looking at people with a very naive beliefs on life? The highs are quite equivalent. Suffering creates  meaning to seek comfort. Unrest creates meaning for seeking peace. Finding a job for my roommate is highly meaningful because of his financial constraint, but for me the same does not invoke this level of desire because my money situation is quite stable. So from his perspective, I may be very lucky but I do not enjoy his sense of meaning and purpose in this department.

They are even open to only certain views that anyways take them forward in the same directions. But to think of it every single person in the world is unique, even from a scientific standpoint, every single cell and its arrangements are different with trillions of cell combinations. This is also visible in subtle daily experience. However, the catch is things are not totally randomized. There is order probably equal to chaos or they may work in functions of time which are not available to you this moment. Also, the definition of duality, being implies non being even if it is 100 years away. Presence implies non-presence, form implies void and void implies form. Our deep desire to be free is because we are stuck. In other words, all of us are operating in the same continuum, and it is maybe this realization that creates compassion. All experiences too in that case operate in the same continuum. To be truly free implies operating at a framework beyond these dualities.

It is impossible to describe this using language. The dictionary too defines words by using words. In other words the whole world of words is a synthetic layer of reality pointing to the this notion of concepts which are again generalizations and abstractions of what we experience with our 5 senses. Each concept is defined by its dual existing, heat cold, dark bright etc. and one simply cannot exist without the other. Concepts are attempts to grasp the form and behavior of entities based on observing patterns over a period of time.

The 1st block: Represents our entire mental activity in terms of its biochemical and electrical activity. It is a snapshot of the entire experience continuum of an individual. I have shown it symbolically using colors because there can be infinite combinations of various colors, saturation, contrast and opacity. This could be symbolically linked to everything we experience in a moment. Now not all of this is conscious, for example, if you do not think about your toe, you do not even know its there. There is this spotlight of conscious attention shown as the circle.

Then 2nd block: The conscious attention captures the spotlight of raw conscious experience. The raw experience keeps changing with time. The spotlight moves around in whatever regions it can quickly scan and stores a slice in immediate memory. Now, this raw input stored in the immediate memory is too complex and dynamic in its raw form. In order to create a stable graspable entity it is therefore simplified and quantized with the aid of the long term conceptual memory bank. Now, this new entity is more stable and can be grasped onto. How well you accomplish these steps depends on your awareness and attention.

In the 3rd block: Here we need to convert this raw feeling into words. The level of detail you put into this stage depends upon your vocabulary. Vocabulary in this analogy could be equated to a color palette. If your vocabulary is limited its like using a 1000 color palette. If it is extensive, it is maybe like using a 10000 color palette. Therefore another level of simplification happens here.The input that was grasped is approximated to its nearest colors and put into the language semantics framework. This stage also including serialization of the whole information. Its similar to trying to explain a picture in words. 

The 4th block: Finally how we speak the words out depends on our speech abilities i.e. have we learned to manipulate the vocal cord and tongue in sync.

Now, these blocks are connected by linkages which are bidirectional i.e. if you say the word dog in your mind, the corresponding conceptual feelings associated with the dog will show up and accordingly change your biochemistry. Also in the case of memory, its similar to wax. The memory impressions during a day also serve as filters during the extraction of meaning.

As we grow older, our memory accumulates more and more and therefore the initial thrill and wonder is lost. Memory seems to be the enemy of wonder. After a point, it becomes very difficult to find brand new experiences which are yet to be encoded into memory. As an explorer myself, I often see first hand  the cycles of my passions i.e how they rise and diminish or keep shifting. I have intensely explored philosophy to study the basis of knowledge or experience itself. The interesting conclusion I have reached is that, life is mystery and it is this mystery that gives us meaning or anything that we can ever care about. The Japanese too have identified a concept called Yugen: Subtle yet profound mysteries. In fact these cycles indicate that learning is as important as unlearning OR remembering is as important as forgetting for they both symbiotically give definition to each other.

Our serial processing minds in language can process so little of what is going on since everything is dynamically changing. There is infinite breath and infinite depth. If you decide to direct your attention on a specific area, you would know its patterns from a certain depth, however a zillion other things have changed at the same time. If the move this concentrated attention to something else then again you former object would change without your awareness on it. This is the problem with our serial operation of the mind, as a result of which we can greatly distort reality.

The trickiest part is how can we understand all the relationships and patterns when everything is happening at once, with a serial processing mind in terms of language. It seems exactly like the blind man exploring an elephant. That too, you are tied to the extent of your vocabulary. Each word too can mean different things for different people. Even if you understand something profoundly and put it across in the best possible way, will you reader understand what you exactly meant?. Say I use the word “clear headed”. Now wont this mean totally different things to different people.

While talking to people, very little of what they mean is in their words. Their meaning needs to be holistically understood. I wonder if all the complicated talk that we do in our daily life, is like endlessly modifying the finger which is pointing to the moon, with the moon being what we actually want. In other words, we are endlessly playing with representations and symbols but not directly looking at what we really want. Its like a synthetic layer obscuring us from seeing the truth. We take terribly circuitous routes and get only a fraction of what we expected or we simply totally miss it. All our motivations could be examined in this light.

When we are thinking to ourselves, why do we words? Why can’t we think at a more symbolic level say with images or feelings. Maybe, we do this for social convenience. Is it because if we store everything verbally, then retrieval is much faster in societal environments since it is stored in a directly usable form? It seems obvious that higher forms of thought would be in the form of feelings and images since they can convey a lot more than a series of words arranged using grammar rules. Have you ever tried to write down what you experienced in a dream? Its extremely difficult because everything is rewired. While noting dreams down, I often need to use a lot of simplifications and often this greatly reduces the meaning of the dream for other people reading it. It could however serve as a cue to remind you of the experience itself in its raw form.

Another very intriguing aspect is how we literally talk to ourselves and tell ourselves what we should do or what decision to take. Why should we talk within ourselves like there is a separate entity inside us telling us in language what to do. Its almost like a big time trick played on us. People consider losing this verbal inner voice as a form of regression. I think its more like claiming back your original power which was totally lost by this trick which was played on us.

This whole thing is like a very interesting puzzle. Even I have this inner verbal voice inside me and for practical purposes, I treat that as me. But whenever I think about it, it seems absurd.Where is the real me? How can I remove this obscuration? Funnily and tragically, society generally firmly believes that “You only know something if you can put it in words”.