Iconic discourse

I can see a day when text-based communication becomes obsolete. Sentences take too long to process. Images and video clips are more suited to the task. Graphemes will replace phonemes. Graphemes are like logos ..they convey concepts more quickly. All that’s required is a brief sensory flash, which decays rapidly so that the next impression can follow. This allows greater throughput and more rapid exchange of ideas. I believe that the mind of the future will be shaped more by images than words. Mental imagery will occur spontaneously among those who are “tuned-in” ..and will spread through the population like a virus. Viral marketing is already the buzz in advertising. Nobody reads a movie review anymore. They’ve got a buddy, with an iPhone, sitting in the front row at opening night. That way they’re already tuned-in ..receiving the look and feel of a film along with an emoticon that gives it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, before the end of the first scene.

Catastrophe theory

I’m always fascinated by the way people explain events to themselves ..especially when the cause is obscure and not directly observable. In Haiti, for instance, the local population believes that the earthquake was caused by angry mystical entities known as ‘gedes’ ..or spirits of the dead. Evangelical Christians, arriving on the scene, say the earthquake was caused by exactly that kind of superstitious thinking .. if only they had switched their beliefs, none of this would have happened. According to Pat Robertson (no relation) “ ..they made a pact with the devil” when they won independence from the French (and Christian rule) “.. and now they’re paying for it.” No one talks about fault lines or tectonic plates, I guess that sounds way too much like scientific ideology. So now I’m going to say that the mudslides in LA this week were brought about by the kind of decadent behavior LA is known for, and has nothing to do with the fires last summer ..those happened way too long ago.

Integration

Presented at the ~> SB graduate institute

The intellect is much too overrated. It is such a discursive process that it often leads nowhere. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting we abandon it. We still need to take time for planning and strategy..I just don’t think that it needs to take each waking moment of every day. An integrated approach to the psyche recognizes the contributions of both thoughts and feelings.

Feelings contain just as much information as thoughts and ideas. They too are cerebral events. Without the weight of feeling, we would not be able to arrive at a decision to save our life, let alone order food. Without feeling, the intellect would have difficulty deciding where to shop, let alone what to buy. Some feelings are triggered by conditions inside the body; others are evoked by conditions outside. Either way, they all register with the brain in order to be felt. The brain, in turn, redirects our perception to the body ..the same way it localizes the sound of voices in a room. Like ideas ..feelings are trying to tell us something

Feelings are not the past remnants of some primitive ancestry that need to be dismissed for the sake of intellectual attainment. The pathways that carry feeling have enormous bandwidth and widespread distribution throughout the higher centers of the brain. They inform every sensory-cortical event that takes place.

I remember a guest speaker at a graduate seminar I was attending. He was studying the gambler’s fallacy ..and observing how it applies to the population at large. He said that we do not see cause and effect relationships directly (except perhaps on the small scale of a pool table) ..instead we invent stories to explain them to ourselves. The resulting narrative is not an algorithm, it’s more like a heuristic, or ‘rule of thumb’ ..like blowing on a pair of dice before each toss.

I remember an astronomer speaking at a conference. He said that the farther out we look, the more past history we see. He wasn’t only talking about what we see through a telescope. The past history stored in memory gives resonance and meaning to what we see in the present. Since we can’t see around every corner, memory contributes to what we see when we walk down the street. Research in human perception informs us that we don’t see things the way they really are. Interpretation happens way too fast for that, and relies heavily on memory for it's information.

Many people believe that memory works like a camcorder, keeping an accurate record of events. Research, however, shows that this is a misconception. First, our memory would be pretty empty if it weren’t for the emotional-value added to events before they're allowed in. Second, recollection is a process of re-constructing events based on the value they have in the present. Without feelings, we would not have sense enough to know what’s worth storing ..nor the clues we need to re-construct what needs remembering.

One of the things I discovered early in meditation practice is how circuitous my thought processes are. They didn’t follow a ‘linear-narrative’ like I’d imagined. I also saw how much trouble I’d be in if they were the only thing I had to rely on.

Alien discourse

On a ridge top overlooking Los Angeles, a team of alien cryptographers are busy deciphering messages encoded in streams of light that circulate the city at night. I try explaining how those are like transport vessels, indirectly responsible for carrying genetic information from one generation to the next ..and thinking how ‘evolved’ that must’ve sounded. They look at me with undecipherable expressions and I feel deflated ..like they saw right through that attempt at impression-formation. I hear them say it would take as many as four planets to sustain the level of eco-plundering they see. I imagine how threatened they must feel ..like we’re inter-planetary-expansionists or something. I try to explain that we’re really not like that ..we make progress more by stumbling around than by calculation. Another round of indecipherable expressions and I suddenly feel like I just admitted to whatever it was I was trying to deny. I try backing-up to start over again when I realize how pointless that would be ..they communicate telepathically. My thoughts are clearer to them than what I say ..same as my doubts and fears. They don’t need invasive devices to probe my brain ..they’ve got a system of highly evolved sensors doing that.