Filter Bubbles

::wipes dust off of blog::

Wow, sorry for the absence. I keep feeling like I want to write, but don't. I've been too busy working (12 days straight!), plus two classes and in my off-time, just consuming too much media to produce any of my own; a serious problem, but the product of low energy. Part of it, too, is a sort of depression. I think I may be having inklings of a midlife crisis here. Nothing full blown, but it's there.

One thing is that I'm getting to the age where I'm beginning to realize that my life is not going to be some epic thing, I'm probably not going to change the world, write the next great novel, do anything seriously earth shattering. Youth has that boundless optimism, but experience comes along and proves it wrong. I am an ordinary man, not some maverick, not likely to be a creative genius or do anything too amazing. I am likely to be one of the nameless massmen of the dustbin of history, who did nothing more noteworthy than to simply struggle to stay alive until he died, forgotten. It's kind of a disturbing notion to accept.

Plus, I'm starting to realize just how self-centered my life is. I've been stressing for more than a decade about what I'm to do with myself, both big stuff and little stuff. What to study, what career to choose, which trail to hike, which book to read, TV show to watch, etc etc. I've talked plenty about ego on here, but it's becoming distressingly clear just how caught up I am in myself. My life has become a sort of monument to my self. Here I read all these books, trying to learn things that have no actual application except to aggrandize my own self-image as a know-it-all. I live for myself, which is to live for nothing at all, yet I don't know how to get out of it. I feel I've gone too far that I've forgotten how to get back.

Partly, the problem is that my love of knowledge has become a sort of addiction to information. I remember back in the day, between 18 and 21, discovering Eastern religions, waking up to the political world (9/11 was my coming of age in that respect), learning about Peak Oil, inklings of cultural collapse, and all that stuff. It was like a punch in the face, everything seemed to open up and be illuminated. But the glow has worn off. I keep hoping that the next beautiful idea will change my life. Yet, it has largely devolved into a pointless addiction. The internet is especially bad for this. I can lose hours on Wikipedia without realizing it, following links. It is no different with books, though. And it's all a reflection of my own selfish interests.

I recently watched a debate on PBS, a show called Intelligence Squared, debating this proposition: The internet is closing our minds (podcast here). Interesting debate. I fell toward the "pro" position, though with some reservations. It seems to me (and those arguing the "pro" position) that often the internet becomes sort of a hall of mirrors, a giant narcissistic image of the self. Do we not more often search out things we agree with? I never go to FOX news website, but have often gone to places such as CommonDreams, alternative news and information. People filter their own information intake in this way.

Furthermore, there are filter bubbles (a TED video, whose speaker was also in the I2 debate), thanks to the "personalization" of Google and social media. Google tracks the sort of stuff you search, builds up a sort of database or rubric, then when you search something new, guesses at the sorts of websites you want to see. A liberal and a conservative will get different results when they search "Obama," the latter getting more stuff slanted towards the birther "debate" and Obamacare. Up to 60% of first-page links on a Google search will be personalized this way. Yet it is not generally known among internet users that this is going on, because you have to put two computers side by side to see the differences.

Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter can be bad in this way too, or worse. They are watching what you're watching, and helping tailor your internet experience. But basing the future on the past, so to speak, is idiotic. It is probably more important that we don't just keep plodding down the tracks of our old ideologies, but that we are exposed to new ideas.

Of course, you can still find anything on the internet, read any viewpoint you want, and expose yourself to all kinds of new ideas. And it is a wonderful way for people to connect. Atheists used to be all alone, usually; but now, they can get online, meet whole forums full of other atheists, and not feel so isolated. People into paleo-skills can find people with like interests and tons of resources to further their skill set. It's pretty amazing, really.

But this was my reservation against being on the "pro" side; basically the internet isn't closing the American mind, certain web companies are. Filter bubbles do exist, yet they aren't absolute. This is my experience. I've learned tons from the internet, though I also admit that I tend to gloss over dissenting viewpoints, often dismissing them out of hand as closed-minded conservative shills for big business. I read some of them, and enjoy a good debate, but I don't always have the time or inclination. And like any human, I prefer to have agreement than dissent. And with all the trolls and flamers out there on the interwebs, a good serious debate can be hard to come by, and the comment threads under an article are not conducive to anything but making quick sniping comments. It's just not the right format.

In the end, the "pro" position won. It was an good debate, proven by the fact that at the end I was less sure of my position than at the beginning; but I'm not sure it deserves the status of being called "Oxford style" debate. I feel that at Oxford, the debaters would present more clearly, define the question and their terms more strictly and explicitly, and be less informal. But it would be great to see political candidates debate that way.

Inward to the Center

The number of man was said to be six, because man was created on the sixth day, after the whole physical world had been made; it is out of that world he was created. And any point in the physical world can be described by using the six directions: up, down, left, right, front, back. In mathematics they use the x, y, and z axes and it’s the same thing. But six is not the "final" or holy number, seven is; seven points towards God. The seventh is his day. But why? Because there is a seventh direction in addition to the six. For lack of a better term I call it “inward,” but you have to be careful here. if you walk into a room, inwards towards the center, you are still moving in one or more of the six directions, say, diagonally forward and a little to one side. What I’m talking about is something else, something, you might say, that is outside of three dimensional space.

Here is what I mean, a particularly fitting example. A doctor conducting brain surgery can look through his patient’s brain for a lifetime and never find a thought, never see an emotion. He can go up, down, left, right, backwards and forwards through all that brain tissue but he will always miss it. Often when surgeries like that are done, the patient is awake and aware, as they use only local anesthetics. This way they can prod around and get a response from the patient, and thus know what brain centers they’re prodding, and thus not cut the wrong part. Those reactions would seem to confirm the doctor’s prejudice, that all existence is contained in what I’m calling the six directions. That is, all that exists is the material, physical universe, and nothing else; he sees all behavior as caused mechanistically by the brain’s machinery, which he can himself affect by poking it.

Yet, if this were so, why can’t he find, in all that neural wiring, in all those electrochemical impulses, a single thought, a single bit of meaning? He has ignored the seventh direction, the inwards. Living is an inside job, you have to get into it. The doctor, of course, being alive and sentient, knows this at some level but has trained himself to not see it; he wears the self-imposed blinders of his scientific profession.

Is this really all there is to the mind?

It works as far as it goes, of course. Modern medicine can do things almost unimaginable a century or two ago; the same with science in general— its principles are for the most part sound. But there is a flaw in the scientific philosophy of materialism. The scientist, when he hears me say “get into it,” might assume I mean to keep analyzing, that is, “cutting apart.” He thinks that he can understand the mind via dissection, that by breaking a thing open, he will find the center. But all he is doing is following the six. You cannot get to the inside from the outside, so to speak; you cannot find the center by using the outer directions, because the center I’ve been discussing is not in the physical world as such. All one ever gets by cutting is more outsides.

You cannot dissect a brain and find a thought; all you will find is an electrical signal passing along a chain of neurons. I don’t deny that reality, but that is the “outwards” aspect of thought. We know that there is an “inwards” aspect to it as well, the meaning, the subjective experience. It seems to be a sort of duality, but I think it is only a duality when seen from outside, from the objective point of view, which is a fantasy.

Consider how unusual an idea objectivity is. Here are we, come from the same stuff as the rest of the universe—which is true whatever your philosophical camp: strict biblical creationism, a looser theistic or pantheistic creationism, or a purely scientific cosmology—here are we, clay of the earth, dust of the stars, totally dependent on the air, the earth, water, space, other living beings… and we claim to stand somehow apart, somehow neutral, somehow isolated from the rest of creation. Really, the only big leap in all of this is the line we’ve drawn between ourself and everything else; that is the hallucination.

The point is, if we first claim objectivity, then try to discover the secrets of the universe, we will be eluded, because we are trying to divorce ourselves from creation, and thus actually move away from truth. We are trying to be pure observers, forgetting we are pure participants; and that it is only because we are participants that we are even able to observe; the “observer” is there only because there is a living body that is totally connected with the greater universe. You see, subjectivity comes before objectivity; the center is the starting point for the six outward moves. Or more accurately, they occur or arise together-- you cant have one without the other.

Calm and clear in the center

When you are observing from the status of participant, you gain true understanding. Otherwise all the science in the world is just a catalog of facts that don’t really go together in a truly meaningful way. Trivia. If you want to know what a thing is, observation alone will suffice; but what really is the point of that? That just yields a sort of dictionary. No one wants to read a dictionary, you want to read an adventure, a romance, or even a self-help book. You have to participate in the creation to understand what it means. And what this all means is that the center, the “inwards” is not a place so much as a way of being.

The “inwards” is like the still point around which a wheel or a planet turns, steady and unmoving and not even composed of the stuff of the world, not something you can hold in your hand; yet all the while absolutely integral for all movement, for all being. It is around this seeming emptiness that the whole thing revolves. It doesn't move, and so all movement is. And thus the metaphor: God rested on the seventh day.

Mind vs Matter?

What is a thought? What is consciousness? Where does meaning come from? How do you go from an electrical burst in a neural chain to a subjective sense of a thought? Science won't answer these. Every human, even the scientists, have emotions and thoughts, but of course, no one has ever seen them. At best they have seen readings on a chart during a brain scan, or maybe the neurotransmitters that supposedly cause them. If they were to watch a brain in action, somehow watching a thought course through the nerves, all they'd see is electricity. Because they cannot physically "see" the subjective part of thought (the meaning, the consciousness), they are forced to call it nonexistent. Seriously, in psychology, consciousness is considered a hallucination caused by the electrochemical reactions taking place within and between neurons. Ridiculous, right?

I had to stop studying psychology because of bullshit like that. I've always been interested in this stuff, and it's probably why I picked such an unlikely major for an eco-freak like me. But when I found such things as self, consciousness, and the nature of thought totally glossed over in a few sentences, I was aghast! This is the very foundation, ignored. These are the questions asked by mankind since the beginning, and it was swept under the rug, presumably because it's too hard to study.

It comes down to a split between mind and body. Descartes drew the line sharply, and shaped the philosophy of science ever since. He said that nothing of the mind is in matter, and nothing of matter is in the mind; they are completely seperate. This sort of split has defined scientific worldview, the division between subjective and objective reality. Science chose to study the "matter" end of things, leaving the Church "mind," (aka the soul) and thus today science is mired in "objective reality." It tries to be totally empirical, that is, limiting itself only to what can be preceived by the senses (and their technological extensions), and what can be repeatably tested. Its worldview now says that we are all physical machines, acting according to universal laws, in a universe that is stupid. Everything is deterministic, and they tack consciousness on at the end, as something that came somehow out of the material world at the last minute. But how does consciousness come from non-conscious matter? That would be getting something from nothing.

Now, things like ESP, precognition, out-of-body experiences, and spiritual healing (to say nothing of dream states, trances, and the placebo effect) keep coming along. And every time they do, they are ruled out of the discussion in the same dogmatic way that the Catholic Church did to science back when it was starting out. No one can question that these things are experienced. The data, the anecdotal evidence, just keeps coming in. We know from "the inside" that we are not mere machines, that thought, emotion, consciousness are more than molecular reactions, they in fact are the center of our existence. And while Quantum Physics itself has disproven the deterministic nature of the universe and the nonexistance of objectivity, the massive implications are not being followed through on. Science is being extremely remiss in not investigating it seriously. It claims an open mind, but that claim has become a lie.

The main point here is that there is a disconnect. Every scientist must realize that science only exists because we can think, and because there are meanings in those thoughts. Science is, after all, an intellectual activity. But they declare thought and meaning off-limits, or even call them delusions! They call it superstition, or junk data, or write it off as a hallucination (which is a very derrogatory word when used this way). How can science ever be a coherent worldview if it cuts off the very part of the world that gives it birth? Isn't it clear that we can be objective only because we are first and foremost subjective beings? Objectivity is a learned way of thinking.

As it stands, we are stuck between the religious and scientific worldviews. We must either choose the dogmatic religions, which often won't look beyond their scriptures to see the real world, or with fuzzy, nebulous spirituality that is lost with its head in the clouds; or we must choose a science that however throrough it seems, and however illuminating its theories are, still fails to be something to live by, and fails to recognize what makes us truly human. Here, instead of the clouds, science has its head in the sand. Now, I like science and feel it has gotten closer than any other system to a true understanding of the universe. To see it still fall so vastly short of that understanding is perhaps what drives me to write this.

A cohesive, accurate worldview, this is the goal. The gap between spirituality and science must be bridged. We can no longer compartmentalize morals, ethics, value, feeling, and intuition away from what science calls "the real world," which it claims to describe Science cannot make that claim until it accepts that compartment, that half of the human being, which everyone knows exists. No more amputated science, no more amputated spirituality.

Science must remove its blinders, and begin making an honest, unbiased study of inner space if we are to survive as a species. We've mastered the atom; but can we master the mind that has mastered that atom?