¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 I follow the “news” because it is the most interesting, intricate, insight inducing, puzzling, etc. NARRATIVE every being “composed”. Often it is Theater of the Absurd, or a nail-biting horror story, or an intriguing mystery, or a report of a new scientific discovery or tale of human awesomeness, etc. Everything we encounter in fiction is happening on Earth today. Most experiences reverberate in my knowledge structure, opening channels for potential insights (Piaget’s accommodations).
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 I also generalize “news” to be everything NEW in all media (selected for relevance for the “NU”). My weekly skimming of the journal SCIENCE is “news”, as are arcane postings on The Internet. I daily scan many curations. Of significance are the frequent posting by Giorgio Bertini in Learning Change. I skim all the abstracts, that number in the hundreds, and peek at a few of the documents. Some docs are years, even decades old, but new to me. I follow about a dozen curators. This activity adds to my positive IGNORANCE (knowing OF what I don’t yet know or comprehend, or can’t yet do or appreciate).
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 NEWS is my access window to reality, and the wider I cast my net the more comprehensive my reality will be. Also, what I read and hear I acknowledge are only REPORTS, sems (semiotic structures). They exist for others to observe. Their “truth” is another ball game.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 The insight I had that prompted this essay, added a GLAD insight to what I had initially seen as a long train of SAD stories in the news. Many persons are highly energetic and strongly dedicated to make change – even if it is to return to a mythical past or to change things in ways I strongly disapprove. Supporters of Trump and Sanders, ISIS fighters and refugees from Syria, entrepreneurs and artists, LGBT activists and anti-abortion protesters – all are ACTING consistent with their own inner reality – but really ACTING. People are Moving.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 In My Analysis, our challenge today is not for good over evil. I don’t blame anyone, or any belief, or population for our difficulties. Humankind is experiencing “emerging pains“, that has put us at risk. Contrary to popular belief (not assertively challenged by science) babies, as they develop into adults, don’t chose who they will become. Nature/Nurture is a complex, intricate dance. “Conscious Agency” plays a role, but not as many want to believe. Given all factors, most (if not all) responses to stimuli are strongly determined by the whole state of the person at that moment. Where we humans have agency is what we can creatively do (& think) that is not a response to stimuli. Our mind/brain continues to process on it own, independent of stimuli. We day-dream and night-dream. Creative ideas emerge from non-conscious processes, as evidenced by insights. We slowly enable to emerge (not create by conscious will) a self/agent that will be part of our decision-making. But, at the moment of each decision, our self/agent is also responding deterministically. Yet, the “nature” of each self/agent is highly determined by the person’s environment and patterns of nurturing. Our agency can tune the development of our self/agent, but always within constraints of our environments. Many persons’ development results in warped configurations that can perform acts many classify as “evil”.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 Much of the time I am successful in distancing myself from the narrative; my not being a part of the story – as if by an ET, an Explorer from Time, a nu et, a nuet.
“Larry”, a biological being, hosts an emergent information pattern, an inner-woven-private-world, called “nuet”. Larry’sBrain is analogous to a musical orchestra with nuet analogous to the many compositions that can be played. However, nuet-the-music can influence changes in Larry’sBrain-the-orchestra. “Scores” for earlier nuet musical themes are also stored in Larry, sometimes erroneously called “memories”.
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 With my lack of visual imagery I can read and think about the most horrendous happenings without feeling the emotions. This leads me to seek sufficient positives in our futures commensurate with the extreme negatives of our contemporary challenges. Often I find myself taking an anthropological or psychoanalytical perspective on a slice of history in the making. I could do this with any video, but I must set priorities.
¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 I also can let myself feel the emotions of suffering or joy, oppression or discovery. With my long future conceptualizing I don’t feel pressure for any immediate decisions or events. The future will be different-in-details depending on who is elected president this November 2016, but I don’t see any specific event being a total game changer. POTUS doesn’t have the power many wish he had; or others claim he has. I once read a letter to a POTUS asking him to prohibit tornados.
¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 From my perspective, humankind is deep into chaos – with much less order than we think. However, our human propensity is to project order on our all experience. Much of our psychological dysfunction today may be due to a deeper awareness of our cognitive dissonance.
¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 I can experience immediate emotional reaction to news events, such as learning the fact that there are no grocery stores in Flint, and only one school nurse for their entire public educational system – which effects me more (by its implications) that learning that over 6,000 children were harmed for their lifetime by greedy psychopaths.
The experiential content for belief in conscious self-freewill is a useful fiction of a being living in an external world of things and other beings. This phenomenological belief or neural-molecular representation serves as the REGULATOR (in Ross Ashbey’s Good Regulator Theorem) for the longer-term organism-environment interactive dance. This apparent demotion of the free conscious self, if examined carefully, will actually give the individual human person much greater agency, and solves our paradox of why different humans can exhibit such different behavior in similar circumstances – that raises the question: whose reality is really real?
¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 Putting on the GLAD GLASSES watching the news is uplifting. People being moved to make a difference in THEIR private worlds. L. Ron Hubbard (founder of Scientology) and Charles Manson (my having recently listened their bios) had (from my perspective) highly warped worlds. I would take measures to stop persons with such warped worlds from acting on others in the context of their private worlds. Yet, one can appreciate the energy and insight they applied to “advance” in their worlds.
¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 If I lived in a world where I believed that human souls incarnated in newly fertilized human eggs, and that every soul was sacred – abortion would be the murder of souls and I might rightly take action to save them from murderers.
ASIDE: I have always wondered why, in the abortion debate, it is never pointed out that LIFE IS NOT CREATED either at conception or birth. LIFE CONTINUES AT CONCEPTION, two living cells merge and continue to live. If we believed that all eggs and sperms hosted souls, then we would have to work hard to preserve all eggs and sperms, and the excess of sperms over eggs would cause an ethical dilemma. continued…
¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 If, in your private world (that you access in your brain as context for all you experience and do) you truly believe that Obama is everything your trusted friends and information sources say he is, then you would be right to work hard to defeat him, and be fearful of what he is doing and what Hillary may do.
¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 Since no one has access to an objective reality, we need to create a process by which we can chose a best reality context for societal decisions. What we have was more than adequate for life in tribal times, even during glaciation and the melt floods after. The complexities of post-tribal humanity call for the abandonment of an objective reality model for humankind. We can continue with objective models for physical, chemical, and biological reality. What this might entail is a topic for another series of essays, some of which are in this blog.
¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 There is much more to consider on this issue – if we should even label it? It is a piece of an emergent puzzle, whose shape has no meaning other than how it fits with the shapes of other puzzle pieces. Larry/nuet is being pulled in multiple directions at this moment; towards many other puzzle pieces that surround this piece. The shapes of the puzzle pieces change as the whole puzzle emerges, including this piece. And, we must distinguish between two puzzles. One, the collection of sems (e.g. text docs) and Two: the conceptual scheme propensities they project [this last sentence is sending me off into another wild direction.]
The total independence of the pattern on the puzzle’s completed surface and the pattern of the shapes making up the puzzle pieces is an interesting phenomenon. In what sense might our cutting up reality into words be like the shape of puzzle pieces? How would we view a completed puzzle if the cuts between pieces were lit up brightly, to even dominate the view? We can also look at our documents and messages as puzzle pieces.
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