The Theory of Constructed Emotions, Framing, and Rewilding our World – An exploration into Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made, Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant, and Bekoff’s Rewilding Our Hearts
The Nobel poet Derek Walcott said that “Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe … I don’t think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.” What conditions of “awe” would astonish the soul though? Perhaps beauty, the sublime, and wonder would suffice. However, in an acceptance speech for the National Book Award, Rachel Carson shared a parallel sentiment to Walcott that may help uncover this prerequisite: “The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.” The relationship of truth to awe is shared in the Eureka! moment of the scientific discovery but I also think it is what motivates learning and expression in general. Mos Def pulls this idea together for the self in the Black Star album with Talib Kweli: “My narrative expands to explain this existence…” The intertwined self/non-self creation of reality is explored in a new book by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. Barrett is the Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University and has a new book that provides an explanatory eureka moment for me. In How Emotions are Made Barrett develops her Theory of Constructed Emotion - an alternative to the Classical View that emotions happen to you. Instead of “anger” bubbling up from somewhere within your brain due to your neurochemicals reacting to a physical stimulus, the Theory of Constructed Emotion says that you created and continue to create your relationship with the concept of “anger” in concert with your environment, upbringing, and how you see the world through your Social Reality. This is a non-intuitive and contrary idea to how we understand emotions, especially in the Western world. When we feel “anger” it feels like it comes from inside and we respond to it accordingly. But, Barrett says that is only how we experience it because it has been explained that way. Anger seems so universal that it may not be the best example of Barrett's theory. In her book she uses several examples with one of the most powerful being schadenfreude. In the English language there was no word or concept for “pleasure derived from another person's misfortune” and therefore we did not explicitly feel that emotion more than a confused jumble of emotions until the German word was adopted into our language. Now that we have the language, we have the emotion. The constructed social reality relationship literally creates the emotion within us, with our self being an integral co-creator of the emotion but also the social reality. As other examples, Barrett shares the Japanese concept of when someone has done you a favor that you didn’t want from them and which may have caused difficulty from you but you’re required to be grateful anyway. Or, the Spanish concept of feeling sorry for someone else’s misfortune. There are rough emotional translations into English but they are not the same felt emotion as those in the indigenous language. To understand these concepts you have to expend a lot of energy to make several known emotions come together to make that concept make sense. To those who know the emotion concept it is as normal as “happy” or “sad” but for you they are not emotions because you don’t know these emotion concepts. Just as the constructed social reality creates concepts of money or color -and neither money nor color exist in the physical world- emotions exist in our heads through an agreed-upon relationship with the rest of society. Think of the consequences of this theory for processing the firehose of stimuli we experience everyday – some of it very traumatic. The poet and scholar Aime Cesaire developed the concept of Negritude to explain the black experience for exactly this reason. Barrett shares the Philippine concept of enjoying the duty of violence in war for this reason as well. She says that U.S. military personnel experiencing PTSD after returning from war are trying to cope with the contradictory ideas of being proficient with violence during wartime and categorizing this ineffectually when they return. If they had the Philippine concept, she says, they would be able to feel this emotion and therefore process it effectively. George Lakoff, the cognitive scientist who wrote Don’t Think of an Elephant, mentions that in Tahiti there is a high number of suicides. In exploring why, the anthropologist Bob Levy found that the Tahitians have no concept for the emotion of grief and therefore could not process that emotion; it just became a jumble of various and disconnected feelings. Lacking a socially constructed capacity to deal with the psychological effects of loss and deep sadness the Tahitians find solace too often in the only expression that makes the confusion of feelings seem bearable: suicide. Lakoff’s goal in his book is very different from Barrett's goal but the idea of socially constructed truth holds for his ideas of framing. According to Lakoff, “Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world. As a result, they shape the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we act, and what counts as a good or bad outcome of our actions. In politics our frames shape our social policies and the institutions we form to carry out policies. To change our frames is to change all of this. Reframing is social change.” In one of Lakoff’s blog posts he says that “We can see only what our brains will only allow us to understand.” He calls this “hypocognition – the lack of the ideas you need, the lack of a relatively simple fixed frame that can be evoked by a word or two.” Lakoff spends the rest of his powerfully short book creating a how-to manual for political activists in the exercise of reframing. If the world exists through a socially co-constructed emotional activity developing frames with which we see the world through and participate in promulgating, how can we highjack this for the benefit of conservation? If we are to reframe for social change and if we are to create language to reappropriate the emotional experience within our natural world, what words do we create? The poet Robinson Jeffers could only describe the life of the flight of the hawk as Enskyment. Timothy Merton created Hyperobjects to explain Styrofoam and nuclear waste – objects that exist beyond human concepts of space and time. Many writers, from Gary Snyder to Bill Mckibben and more, have pointed out that nature as “out there,” beyond the human world doesn’t exist. Along these lines, Michael Soule, Reed Noss, and others developed the concept of Rewilding to empower ecological restoration. The ecologist Marc Bekoff defines Rewilding as: to make wilder or to make wild once again. He goes on to say that that Rewilding primarily means opening our hearts and minds to others. In his book Rewilding Our Hearts, Bekoff states that rewilding is a conservation strategy utilizing what ecologist Caroline Fraser calls the 3 C’s to conservation: Cores, Corridors, and Carnivores. One of the most ambitious of these 3 C’s projects highlighted in ecologist Cristina Eisenberg’s books is the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. The movie Jaws framed our inherent fears of man-eating monsters and when you think of a shark it is hard not to think of this frame. However, Jeff Corwin and the late Crocodile Hunter realized that the only way to challenge this frame of fear was to create a new frame to inspire beauty, majesty, and compassion of an ancient and magnificent beast. They show that it is the responsibility of the conservationist to actively develop frames with which to construct conservation as the best of humanity: caring, innovative, compassionate, seekers of awe and beauty, goal-driven, and understanding. Criticizing Andre Gide, E.M. Forester asks: “How can I tell you what I think till I see what I say?” Barrett and Lakoff would ask: how can I know what I am until I see the world I exist within? In this new way of understanding emotion, social co-constructed reality, and our re-created environment, the revelatory awe of truth inspires the application of this new theory upon perceiving the world through new eyes. If we are to Rewild our world we need to create the language to do so.
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This week is basically a vocabulary list. I’ve been reading super heavy theory and philosophy and to try and understand even a touch of it I’ve had to crack the digital dictionary. The three vocab words are: supervenience, veridical, and convolve.  Supervenience illustrated. This is not mine. Click on it for the link. Supervenience
“The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” I’m fascinated by this concept. When something occurs at a level greater than it should it seems almost magical. Being a non-magical person I’m searching for something material that explains how this occurs. Some of the better answers I’ve found are housed in chaos theory, through biological and philosophical emergence, and network theory. When looking at network theory and emergence in relation to Socio-Ecological Systems Theory I came across this vocabulary word: supervenience. It looks like convenience and reads like superposition in physics and I guess, in a way, it can be thought of as the combination of the two. Maybe not. The way I’m reading it, you can say that something of a higher level supervenes upon the lower level structures that contributed to that higher level thing’s development. For example, American society can supervene upon an American citizen born and raised in the US. But, it cannot be used to say that the concept of money supervenes on the fibers in a dollar bill. Supervenience doesn’t imbue magical powers into the material components that create it, rather it relates through a feedback loop to the things of the lower levels. I read this as similar to concepts of hegemony, ontological valuing, philosophy of mind, and epigenetics on genomes. As a heuristic I’ve used “piercing the veil” to explain how a singular individual (person, gene, etc.) impacts and effects the system or how the system can impact the singular. There does seem to be a veil though. One person cannot instantly impact and shape society by a youtube video on a whim. That person would need skills, characteristics, or the social environment to make their video pertinent. Similarly, the society has a regular background noise impact upon the individual but rarely does it marshal resources to direct the attention on someone (through positive or negative fame, a rescue effort, or whatever). I think I’m still going to use the veil idea but supervene and subvene are going to be added to how I use it. Maybe instead: “supervene the veil.” Veridical I’m reading a phenomenal book on Framing and the concept of truth is discussed. I will write about another Framing another time – when I understand it enough. But, basically, when a person has to choose between believing a contrary fact or their “frame” of how they see the world, they will choose to keep their frame. The frame means more to their identity than the fact. This develops into what truth means to us or how veridical something is. Veridical is simply defined as truthful, veracious or not illusory. In semantics though it means the environmental context in which something is truthful. Wikipedia Veridical and you can find how formal this concept is. You can veridicality through negation, conditional operators, downward entailment, and many other ways. There are many shades of truth and even more shades of veridicality apparently. Convolve I was talking to my mathematical impresario and engineering wunderkind brother about some minutiae and he used the word “deconvolve.” I stopped him from speaking further and asked what the hell he just said. His answer: well, I know you can convolve something so I just figured you could deconvolve it. Well, what the hell does convolve mean? Apparently, it’s a math thing and my too-smart brother was using it to describe something in normal life. Convolution is when you intertwine two functions to create a third function that is different than either of the two original functions to create a transformation. Unfortunately, I don’t really understand what this means. I looked up Fourier and Laplace transformations and I got lost in the cosine of harmony. However, I do like the metaphor. Like the supervenience above, Convolve and Convolution deal with what happens when two or more parts come together to create something different  So many things. But to manage my ADHD: Raworth's new Planetary Boundaries model, Cave Bears and Fluorescent Minerals, and Telomeres. New Planetary Boundaries Graphic – Doughnut Economics I don’t fully understand this yet but it looks really promising for answering my questions about Socio-Ecological Systems Theory, Planetary Boundaries, and Tragedy of the Commons issues. I just read Monbiot’s review of Raworth’s new book and immediately bought it on Amazon: Doughnut Economics. Also, look up Raworth: (https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/) Cave Bears and Fluorescent Minerals
I visited Clemson’s Botanical Garden Earth Day event yesterday and found the Bob Campbell Geology Museum. In that museum is a bunch of fun stuff but two things in particular caught my eye: a cave bear skull and glowing rocks. First, the cave bear. I am familiar with myths and stories of cave bears (Jean Auel!) and have been completely infatuated with their distant cousins – the North American Short-Faced Bears – but have never seen a cave bear skull. It’s huge. Like, huge huge. Easily twice as big as a modern grizzly but it looks like it was forged from steel and granite. Ursus spelaeus was a monster that died out about 24k years ago (the Short-Faced Bear, 10k years ago) and the depictions and renderings of it are the thing of nightmares.
Second, did you know that rocks can glow? I didn’t. I’ve been to Natural History Museums in every city I’ve travelled to on the globe and have never seen anything like this craziness. A smallish completely dark room with a bunch of rocks and minerals behind glass, lit up by a UV light. And then the rocks started glowing all kinds of crazy colors. It’s an acid trip. As a naturalist, I’ve had problems connecting with constellations, lakes, and geology. There’s something about them that doesn’t click and I don’t know why. But I took another step along the path to geology seeing this exhibit yesterday. According to geology.com/articles/fluorescent-minerals/: “Some minerals have an interesting physical property known as "fluorescence." These minerals have the ability to temporarily absorb a small amount of light and an instant later release a small amount of light of a different wavelength. This change in wavelength causes a temporary color change of the mineral in the eye of a human observer. The color change of fluorescent minerals is most spectacular when they are illuminated in darkness by ultraviolet light (which is not visible to humans) and they release visible light.” Telomeres I’m reading this self-helpy/sciency book about how to stay healthy and happy: The Telomere Effect. Like several other books I’ve read it has its base in something scientific (like self-help books using neurochemicals or quantum physics to explain why and how you can be better…) explaining how to live a more fulfilling life. The science on this one is based on telomeres. I didn’t know what they were before this but it sounded interesting - so why not pick up the book? Getting into it and it reads like a bad self-help book but differently somehow – like they’re trying to be a bad self-help book. You can tell they’re trying to make things anecdotal and related to “real-life” stories. It occurred to me that this is either the lamest book ever or there is something really cool here and they are trying to make it make sense to the general public. I looked into the authors and Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn won the Nobel for her discovery of telomeres and was chastised by the Bush administration for her advocacy of stem cells in modern medicine. These people are geniuses and have found something super important for humanity and are trying to get discovery out of the weird realm of scientific articles and into the hands of everyday folk. I’m halfway through the book but quick synopsis so far:
Instead of the normal 3 Things I learned, I've come across a whole bunch of lists this week for some reason. These lists are random and some come from researching things for school and others come from odd FB posts. They are:
Eric Fromm’s 6 rules of Listening: (https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/04/05/erich-fromm-the-art-of-listening/)
Christopher Hitchens 10 Commandments (http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/christopher-hitchens-revises-the-10-commandments-for-the-21st-century.html) I: Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color. II: Do not ever use people as private property. III: Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations. IV: Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child. V: Do not condemn people for their inborn nature. VI: Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly. VII: Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife. VIII: Turn off that fucking cell phone. IX: Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions. X: Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above. Why we tell stories: (http://bigthink.com/errors-we-live-by/how-stories-configure-human-nature?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#link_time=1489768155) 1. It is in our nature to need stories. We arrive “biologically prepared” for them. They were evolutionarily crucial. We feel and think in story-logic (story-causality configures our reaction-biology). 2. Like our language instinct, a story drive—inborn hunger to hear and make stories—emerges untutored (=“biologically prepared”). 3. “Every culture bathes its children in stories" (to explain how the world works, to educate their emotions). 4. Story patterns are like another layer of grammar—language patterning the character types, plots, and norms important in our culture. 5. Stories free us from the limits of direct experience, delivering feelings we don’t have to “pay for” (~like simulated people-physics experiments). 6. “Stories the world over are almost always about people... with problems.” Story = character(s) + predicament(s) + struggles(s). 7. Story patterns transmit, often tacitly, social rules and norms (e.g., what constitutes violation, or what reactions are expected/approved). 8. The “human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.” We can use logic inside stories better—consider Wason’s Test, ~10% solve it as a logic puzzle, but 70-90% do when it’s presented as a story, involving social-rule cheating. 9. Social-rule monitoring was evolutionarily crucial (“other people are the most important part of our environment”). 10. Social acceptance shaped ancestral survival. Violating social rules could mean exile or exclusion from group benefits (protection, big-game, etc). 11. Darwin saw how biologically active the stories in our social environments are—“Many a Hindoo…has been stirred to the bottom of his soul by [consuming] unclean food.” But if eaten unknowingly, it wouldn’t cause that reaction. 12. The story of the food, not the food itself, causes “soul shaking.” Story-causality triggers our emotional biology (our physiology can interact with stories like they’re real threats). 13. Stories configure the emotional/physiological triggers and reactions expected in our culture (patterns that are like an “emotional grammar”). 14. Any story we tell of our species, any science of human nature, that ignores how important stories are in shaping what and how we think and feel is false. 15. Nature shaped us to be ultra-social (and self-deficient). Hence to care deeply about character and plot. How Denmark is the Happiest country: (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/7-reasons-denmark-is-the-happiest-country-in-the-world-a7331146.html) 1. You’re not to think you are anything special. 2. You’re not to think you are as good as we are. 3. You’re not to think you are smarter than we are. 4. You’re not to convince yourself that you are better than we are. 5. You’re not to think you know more than we do. 6. You’re not to think you are more important than we are. 7. You’re not to think you are good at anything. 8. You’re not to laugh at us. 9. You’re not to think anyone cares about you. 10. You’re not to think you can teach us anything. 4 Ways to Cheer up: (http://bigthink.com/robby-berman/4-things-you-can-do-to-cheer-up-according-to-neuroscience )
(https://www.onnit.com/academy/testosterone-levels-need-know/) 1. Sleep and stress 2. Too much endogenous or exogenous estrogen 3. Take care of blood sugar, insulin, and body fat 4. Inflammatory or immune challenges 5. Nutrient deficiency or inadequacy Wynton Marsalis’s 12 Lessons on how to practice: (http://www.openculture.com/2017/04/wynton-marsalis-gives-12-tips-on-how-to-practice-for-musicians-athletes-or-anyone-who-wants-to-learn-something-new.html)
6 Reasons we Self-Sabotage (http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/health-fitness/mental-health/6-reasons-why-we-self-sabotage?page=1&utm_source=sciam&utm_campaign=sciam) Reason #1: Worth. You feel like you don’t deserve to be successful. Ironically, many strivers work hard and aim high because they’re trying to make up for a sense of inadequacy. But when their hard work and high standards lead to good things—material reward, status, or power—they shoot themselves in the foot. Why? A little concept called cognitive dissonance gives us the answer. Basically, people like to be consistent. Usually, our actions line up with our beliefs and values. But when they don’t, we get uncomfortable and try to line them up again. That’s why if we start to stack up some achievements, but think we’re worthless, incapable, or fill-in-the-blank deficient, we pull the plug to get rid of the dissonance. It feels bad to fail, but not as bad as it does to succeed. Reason #2: Control. It feels better to control your own failure than to let it blindside you. When the possibility of failure is too hot to handle, you take matters into your own hands. Self-sabotage isn’t pretty, but it’s a dignified alternative to spinning out of control. At least when you’re at the helm, going down in flames feels more like a well-controlled burn. Reason #3: Perceived fraudulence. As the stakes get higher and higher—you ascend to ever more rarified levels of education, take on more responsibility at work, or do something that raises your public profile—you feel you only have farther to fall. You think if you call attention to yourself by being successful, it’ll be more likely that you’re called out as a fraud. This is otherwise known as good old impostor syndrome. How does this manifest? You may do as little as possible and hope no one notices. Or you may push hard and go big, but worry you’ll be revealed at any moment. Either way, feeling like a fake is a one-way ticket to procrastination and getting distracted—if you’re faced with a task that makes you feel like a big fat fraud, it’s a lot more appealing to check Twitter, research zucchini spiralizers online, or realize you’ve never made banana bread from scratch and, by gosh, seize the day and do that right now. Reason #4: Familiarity. Again, people like to be consistent. Time and time again, we even choose consistency over happiness. If you’re used to being neglected, abused, ignored, or exploited, it’s oddly comforting to keep putting yourself in that position. You’ve probably been there your whole life, and while you’re not happy, the devil you know is preferable to the devil you don’t. Reason #5: For a handy scapegoat. If things don’t work out (or when they don’t work out, because that’s the only option, right?) we can blame the sabotage instead of ourselves. Of course he left me—we argued all the time. Of course I failed the class—I didn’t start my term paper until the night before. These reasons, while true, are more superficial, and therefore easier to swallow than the deeper reasons we only believe to be true: Of course he left me—the real me is unlovable. Of course I failed the class—I’m incapable of understanding this stuff. Reason #6: Sheer boredom. Once in awhile, we self-sabotage simply to push buttons. We pick a fight, incite drama, get a rush. Of course, this isn’t random--we do all things for a reason. Here, sabotage re-creates a familiar feeling of instability and chaos, plus, if we’re stuck at the bottom, we might as well wield some power while we’re there, right? This week, I learned about Place Bonding, Positive Disintegration, and some Ashi Waza (and they hurt).  Place Bonding
We read an article this week about Place Bonding by Hammitt, Backlund, and Bixler. Everything below is from their article but I didn’t cite it appropriately. The idea they write about is rather intuitive and the reason they wrote it was actually an empirical study seeing whether you could identify place bonding statistically through fishermen at a specific river (you can and they did). But the idea is more interesting to me. Imagine a special place to you, a place that has meaning and a place you continue to go back to or think about if you haven’t been there in a while (Viento y Agua, Morro Bay on the central coast of California, and the southern California art museums are where I’m place bonded to). So, I wrote an outline of the article and I figure it’s easier to just list bullet points as I have here to explain Place Bonding:
Positive Disintegration I’m reading this wild and crazy book right now that could be classified as a self-help book. One of the theories to psychological development that they present is Positive Disintegration – the idea that negative and challenging stimuli are not only opportunities for growth but the only meaningful way for an individual to develop. Similar to place bonding (and all these ideas) this makes sense intuitively but developing a framework around the idea turns it into a tool that can be used to do critical work. In this case the tool is used to do the work of psychotherapy and the gift that it brings is a vocabulary and an affirmation that viewing psychological tension is positive. In fact, it says that if you don’t go through the chaos and anxiety of the challenge you will remain in that same state of what is called Primary Integration. I’ve learned in my classes that we are creatures of habit, seeking out the things that make us safe, remind us of the normal and acceptable, and -while we seek novelty- we want that novelty to be in an appropriate paradigm. The Theory of Positive Disintegration, developed by Kasimierz Dabrowski, says that our personalities must be created (as opposed to given to us), we must have appropriate response to stimuli, anxiety and depression precipitate disintegration, our initial personality must disintegrate, development of personal values and emotional reactions is necessary for developing your personality, emotional reactions guide the person toward personality development, it is critical that the person make existential choices based on what they feel are more in line with their autonomously developed values, and (like an autodidact) autopsychotherapy is necessary. This is huge! Think about how affirming this is if you’ve ever dealt with the darkness of existential challenges. The term disintegration is an interesting one for this usage. When I think of disintegrating I think of falling apart and dissipating. And, in actuality, that is what is happening but it’s not the person that is disintegrating; instead, the prior personality (the behaviors, the emotional strategies that worked for ‘lower’ personality, the personality that was ‘given’ to you) disintegrates. Dabrowski says that most people don’t get out of primary integration because it’s too challenging – we just don’t want to push ourselves out of what’s comfortable. Lastly, for this blog anyway, Dabrowski says that 3 things contribute to a person’s Positive Disintegration: overexcitability (increased neuronal sensitivities), specific abilities and talents, and a strong drive toward autonomous growth. Holy shit! This makes so much sense for so may things. I’m thinking of how this explains Victor Frankl’s and Elie Wiesel’s explanation of how some people could survive the horrors of the holocaust and how others couldn’t. I’m also thinking about the folklore of the mentally disturbed artist: the person that creates new and magnificent ways of seeing the world can only do so because of their highly sensitive personality. The other thing I’m thinking about is how you just meet those people who have more ‘grit’ (this is Angela Duckworth’s term and I highly recommend looking this up too). They are driven by Dabrowski’s third factor of the drive toward individual growth and autonomy. I love this theory. Ashi Waza and a neck crank The last couple weeks in Judo we’ve been learning sweeps. I blew my shoulder out so I’ve been focusing on rolling more but the sweeps are powerful. Specifically, we’ve been learning Kouchi Gari and Ouchi Gari (the small inner reap and the big inner reap) and I got to watch my first legit Judo sparring (they call it Randori) on Friday. It was great watching a bunch of black belts going full throttle like angry water buffaloes. Check out this awesome website: http://judoinfo.com/foot-techniques-ashi-waza/ Instead of working throws, I just rolled with someone super close to my size (a rarity). We ran tried to kill each other for a couple rounds and I mostly lost but I lost better than I had before. On one of my last moves before the final buzzer, I was trying to get a choke that I couldn’t get. So, I took what I learned from Oregon Elite Training and transitioned to a sick neck crank that got me the tap. In life I struggle with spontaneity and adaptation and the same is true in fighting. This neck crank was the exception and I suppose that’s called learning. I was schooled in Adobe Lightroom, have been mystified by Daniel Dennett's Competence without Comprehension, and played with Prepared Learning. Prepared Learning (and Martin Seligman)  I was not planning in putting this rocktacular photo up but once I found it, how could I not? This is Dr. Martin Seligman in full 1970s kit. Anyway, we approached Martin Seligman again in one of my classes to look at positive psychology’s gifts. I’m pretty familiar with positive psychology through all the popular psychology books I’ve read over the past decade or so but it is a different world completely exploring the original works in actual journal articles. Reading Seligman’s articles is a different beast from reading his book Flourish. I love his book. His articles are bananas. I was looking up what he is known for and he did some pivotal work before he stumbled upon positive psychology. Apparently, he helped put together Prepared Learning. This is a wild concept where we are primed to make associations with fear or optimism or taste than other things. The best example is that we can learn to be afraid of snakes as children after only one negative stimuli or event but it might take a lot longer to be conditioned to be afraid of a Power Ranger doll. The idea is that natural environmental threats can flip the switch in our brain faster for a reproductive or general survival reason. The Power Ranger is new and novel and we don’t know how to respond. We have to tap into a cognition (which Kahneman says is very difficult and requires a lot of mental energy and focus to do – so we usually avoid doing so) to categorize the Power Ranger as dangerous, safe, or neutral. This makes a lot of sense intuitively – we evolved to be able to be cautious of snakes and spiders. I don’t know if it scales up but you can think of the cognitive dissonance apparent in why we allow guns, vehicles, and sugar with little to no regulation but have waged a massive genocide against wolves and sharks when the rate of injury and death from both is so unequal.
Competence without Comprehension Daniel Dennett came out with a new book called From Bacteria to Bach and Back and it is an ass-kicker. My favorite of his so far. Dennett is called one of the four horsemen. Along with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, Dennett uses his profound intelligence to explore and explain the mysteries of life. Sidenote: I just learned that there is a fifth member who was supposed to be at the same conference where all of these guys were speaking at and where the label was coined; her name is Ayaan Hirsi Ali and she is a Somali born Dutch-American. I digress: as a philosopher, Dennett’s talent is logical jiu jitsu. As a philosopher of science and neuroscience especially, he digs deep into the big questions of evolution, free will, determinism, consciousness, morality, and language with a technical expertise that is barely understandable by my feeble brain but fascinating nonetheless. I’m trying to make sense of his logic and am not fully there yet but one of his terms is Competence without Comprehension and I love it. It is a powerful shortcut to explain complex concepts. In looking this up, there is not an easy shorthand for it (which makes me think of a rad project) but I did find an awesome blog by a Dutch psychologist. Coert Visser started the blog called Progress-Focused Approach and I love his beliefs: http://www.progressfocused.com/p/some-things-i-believe-and-expect.html Regarding Competence without Comprehension, Visser pulls together the following statements on his site (http://www.progressfocused.com/search?q=+comprehension):
The other powerful example Dennett uses to discuss consciousness emerging from a system: he mentions CERN and how the thousands of scientists need not and indeed cannot explain the entirety of the project they work on yet each of them is creating new knowledge by their skillful and necessary contribution to the whole. Each scientist has extensive competence but only vague comprehension and yet the outcome is elegance. There is strength in this tool to explain systems theories, evolution through natural selection, and the feedback loops involved. Adobe Lightroom I’ve been using Lightroom to edit and collect my photos for two years now. It was recommended by Dave Pirazzi of Colorado Lagoon fame and I took his advice unquestioningly. It was brilliant advice. I am self-taught and youtube-taught. And while I knew I wasn’t using it to the full power and I didn’t understand what a lot of the toggle bars did, I was competent enough to create decent photos. Then I met a photographer Jeff Sarvis who asked me: “But did you know there is a right way to use it, an order in which you’re supposed to use Lightroom?” No, Mr. Sarvis, I did not. He was amazing enough to invite me over to his house for an afternoon and walk me through it. 3 hours and several pages of notes later I was exhausted. I had to eat 2 chocolate chip cookies and have a cup of mate to get my brain functioning again. He taught me so much about it and answered all the questions I didn’t even know I had. For the sake of simplicity I am going to note down the simple steps for a normal photo (not an HDR, a specific touch up, or graphic design project):
Genius. I started a whole new Catalog so I could start fresh with this new information. I am so excited.  !Three revolutionary things! Thought exercises, Gatekeepers, and Prefigurative politics
Thought Exercises For several years, I have had two books follow me around the world (not intelligently – they are fat and heavy books, not good for travelling with): Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett’s Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. I honestly believe that if I was either smart enough to understand these books in full I could run the world. They are remarkable but I feel like I like I need to do a bottle of Adderall with mushrooms to make them make sense. They are dense and not easy but they do give you shortcuts to develop complexity. And, I am not good at creativity or complexity so these are especially hard for me. I realized that this semester my classes have been teaching me thought exercises as well – ones I hope I will remember to use in the future when confronting a challenging problem. The first two I wrote about earlier and involve developing a typology for looking at messy concepts along a spectrum and doing a compare/contrast analysis for looking at the similarities and differences of seemingly like things.The latest exercise was given to me by my advisor to teach me how to create a theme out of messy ideas that don’t fit any logical narrative. Here’s the equation: topic(s)->hybrid theme-> theme. When doing this you want to sketch out three binaries too: intellectual/ emotional, fact/feeling, and tangible/intangible. From here, the endgoal is to answer this question: “When someone hears about my [presentation/paper/whatever] on my topic, what I want them to understand is:” For example, my topic is Rare Species. I listed out all the things in accordance to the binaries and here is what I came up with: Rare Species are distinct, and usually local, genetic singularities that impact global biodiversity in not completely known ways and as a society we don’t fully understand why or how to value them. This may not seem bananas to anyone else but I have been working on rare species for over a decade and this is the best explanation of the problem I have ever developed. I would not have created this if not for the topic/theme exercise. Gatekeepers I have a class that is one of the oddest I’ve ever been involved in. Every Monday morning I meet with about 8 geniuses in wildlife and social science and a professor who was an advisor to the directors of big government agencies and the bloody president. He’s bananas and encourages us to think creatively and challenges our sense of authority. Paradoxically, he is authority and, being at the professional level he was at, was the authority for a lot science decisions in the country. He is aware of this and in his roles as editors of journals and board members of prestigious organizations, he explains that he is a Gatekeeper. The keeper of the gate…of? Well, power. This term is one used in social science research as well and I approached it in my own research when I was not allowed to progress until a Gatekeeper gave his blessing. So what is a Gatekeeper? According to this professor, a Gatekeeper does three things in regards to decisions of power, resources, etc: 1. Control which way something goes 2. Control the speed of the flow of something 3. Control promotion, laurels, awards, etc. An interesting part of being a Gatekeeper is that the flow of resources has to be less than the demand. If a lot of people want something and they have to go through one person, that person has a lot of power and is a big Gatekeeper What does this do? This 1)legitimizes the structure, and it 2) creates a lack of alternative routes. Lastly, my professor asked why do we have Gatekeepers? 1. Keep quality high 2. Establishes normalcy of science (in opposition to revolutionary science – in Kuhnian terms) 3. Concentrates power to a fewer people (this creates order) 4. Influences bias (it can tell you where biases are, where they aren’t or are acceptable to be, and where they shouldn’t be) Prefigurative politics Defined as an effort to live out the vision of a better world while seeking to change it, Prefigurative Politics is a completely new term to me but not at all a new idea. Morally and individually, it makes sense in a “practice what you preach” sort of way. Strategically and socially, it is far more nuanced. While struggling with concepts of egalitarian and peaceful structures both Lenin and Che justified a lot interim chaos and inequity. The conflict they experienced was whether the means would justify the ends and whether the lived hypocrisy could be understood by the broad brush of history. Social scientist Carl Boggs defined the term and explored it in his paper “Marxism, Prefigurative Communism, and the Problem of Worker’s Control.” The paper is heavy and full of powerful yet seemingly antiquated ideas of social structure. For example, I’m currently finishing both Harari’s new book Homo Deus and Rifkin’s Zero Marginal Cost Society and the integration of the economic social structure with 1970’s-era socialism makes no sense according to these authors. They agree with Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants that the society that adapts best is the one that can handle the newest, and inevitable, technology. In a paper looking at the politics of food of all things, we came across this term. Applied to a vegetarian, prefigurative politics is often high on the list of why the vegetarian became a vegetarian. How can they advocate for animal rights and still eat meat? How can they advocate for a healthy environment and still eat meat? They nailed it on the head for me at least (I wrote a whole long personal narrative but it is boring – basically, as an environmentalist I cannot reconcile behaviors of consumer capitalism, religion, or industrial meat eating with what I want for global society). But this is the example of the individual. The next step up from the individual is community and there are several examples including Food Not Bombs offering free meals, the Occupy movement setting up representative democracy, and Black Panthers providing armed security in Oakland in the 70s. The power of prefigurative politics, as I see it, is in modeling a future, in denying our risk aversion, or taking a test-run of what we want. I think it was the anarchists who advocated this. I remember reading Bakhunin in my undergrad and he championed the moral imperative – and, indeed, the lack of any other option – of this. The only challenge I would offer – and I have not read up on the intricacies at all in regards to prefigurative politics – is that there is an ‘emergence’ problem when dealing with feedback systems and large social structures. The end is greater than the sum of the parts and it is hard to scale up without hitting a tipping point where previous actions that worked don’t work anymore. I don’t know if prefigurative politics is necessary in creating a new social structure. You might be able to be a consumer capitalist to walk your way into developing a technologically-based global socialism. You might be able to maintain gender inequity while working to elect a woman or a trans person. Or, related to my work, maybe the answer to saving endangered species is giving them over to agribusiness, mass producing them, and eating them like we do the approximately 1.5 billion cows on the planet.  This week I wrote a bunch of papers and took a mid-term (a non-statistics test in grad school? yes) so my access to completely new thoughts was limited. However, I did learn some things in new ways as I was forced to prove that I know some stuff. Below are my reflections on the 3 Purposes of a Social Scientist, People Can't be Trusted, and the Commons. Also, above is a picture of a Kermit the Frog glass frog discovered in Costa Rica: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/150421-glass-frog-kermit-discovery-animals-science-costa-rica/
3 Purposes of a Social Scientist I know the purpose of science (the systematic pursuit of knowledge), theory (the systematic explanation for the observations that relate to a particular aspect of life), and a hypothesis (a testable expectation about empirical reality that follows from a theory). These usually don’t follow the definitions that a non-scientist use. For example, when a non-scientist says they have a theory, they mean they have an idea. Along those lines, when someone says that Evolution is just a theory that tells me all I need to know about their knowledge of science. They think it is just an idea instead of a rigorous set of explanations that has never been proven wrong according to what it purports to speak to – adaptation by natural selection or genetic drift. A side-note: The Theory of Gravity and the Theory of the Standard Model (of subatomic particle physics) have also never been proven wrong either, only refined, but people have far less of an issue with these and, to me, they are way more insane and counter-intuitive (The sun has a pull on the Earth from millions of miles away with nothing connecting it? The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says that you can measure something perfectly in a place but not at a time or at a time but not place?) Side Side-note: while some of the history has been verified, no aspect of the ontology, epistemology, or phenomenology of any religion has been proven true when held up to a systematic explanation of observations. I digress. These things I’ve known but I am new to what a social scientist is. I had to explain my knowledge of what a social scientist is on my midterm and came across the 3 Purposes of a Social Scientist. These are to 1) Explore (understand through feasibility analyses or developing methods), 2) Describe (through a demographic survey or the U.S. Census), or 3) Explain or Predict ( analyzing the factors of an event or behavior). This is fascinating to me. I’ve always concerned myself with the Explore aspect but have never consciously thought about the Explain or Predict aspect. The Explore part makes sense to me and I think I’ve assumed the Explain part or taken it for granted maybe. For example, Physics is a prediction science but Ecology is not (yet). I can tell you that if I drop a heavy object, it will fall to the ground. However, if I remove a species of tree from a forest or a previously non-invasive non-native species to a habitat, I cannot tell you what will happen – there are a lot variables and stochastic events. Ecology is attempting to become a prediction science and I think it gets there by the Explore part. I’m trying to understand the relationship of the three parts and I’m thinking that a certain level of Explore is needed to get you to an Explain. With Social Science, I cannot tell you how people are going to behave (for some of the same reasons that apply to Ecology) but I can analyze what happens after an event. Maybe enough Exploring gets us to Explaining. Maybe it’s like weather prediction: within certain and small timeframe I can tell you with a percentage of certainty what will happen. I don’t know. Consumers (People) Can’t Be Trusted In my Behavior class we’re reading Consumer.ology by Philip Graves. The book is great. The entire book, in my mind, can be summed up by the Henry Ford quote: If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would’ve said a faster horse. People don’t know what they want, they don’t know they don’t know what they want, they think they know what they want, they get angry when they don’t get what they think they want, when they get what they think they want they get sad, and people can be manipulated to be happy with something they didn’t think they wanted. They want a faster horse but the automobile is ubiquitous and I only see horses in wealthy people’s hands. There are a lot of sociobiological (or evolutionary psychology) reasons for this and they include our cognitive dissonances and theories of mind. We need to believe that we are consciously driving the vehicle that is our body and mind otherwise we go a little insane. We need to believe that our reasons for doing things are our own (and not, say, our friend’s reasons or society’s). We need to believe that when confronted with a series of options we will pick the one that is best according to the information that we have and we will not be swayed by simple things like a smaller left-handed number ($19.99 vs $20.00 – mental number line bias) or choosing the middle of three options (extremeness aversion) or an option only because we’ve heard of it before (the idea of priming) or an option because the last seconds of our time with it were better than the rest (people rated colonoscopies as not unpleasant simply because someone was nice to them at the end of it rather than the beginning – this is peak-end theory). Humans don’t know why they want the things they want but they are very adamant that they do know. Don’t trust humans. The Commons The idea of the commons is basically what my entire life is focused around studying and has been since I was 20. Hardin re-utilized the term Commons in his paper in the 60s and popularized the term “Tragedy of the Commons. Hardin explains the Tragedy thusly: “Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.” I’ve known this Tragedy and Hardin’s paper for a while but have never been forced to look at it closely or develop my own ideas. I submitted a paper this week that created a typology of the commons. I stuck with the physical environment for the purposes of explaining how we manage some commons (fresh water) and how we exploit others (biodiversity). I didn’t wade into the murky waters of cultural commons such as Information (the internet) or shared space (AirBnB, Couchsurfing) but I did write that our global society is shifting what we envision as the commons. I had to do a fair amount of research into opposing ideas (the Law Professor Rose’s Comedy of the Commons), ways to use the new commons (Paul Hawken’s Ecology of Commerce), and new ways to think about commons (Rifkin’s Zero Marginal Cost Society). I’ve got this idea that our society is almost at a sustainable and wealth-generating point. As a meliorist, an optimist, and a humanist I do believe that our society is the best that has ever occurred on the planet according to every metric (compared to previous societies). I also believe that the problems we have are big, getting bigger, and will become world-killer problems. But I also believe that we will either solve them and live in an unprecedented age where disease and want are dissolved for all or we will fail and continue to live not very different from our bronze-age ancestors (the lived experience for almost 2 billion of us right now anyway). These ideas come from David Deutsch’s Beginning of Infinity, Wright’s NonZero, Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature, Kaku’s Physics of the Future, Kardashev’s 3 Types of Civilizations, and other writers (EO Wilson, Harari, and Carroll, mostly). To get to this place requires a shift in thinking about what are our commons, how we engage with the planet’s 9 Boundaries (Stockholm Resilience Center), and how we understand our axiology. This is easily the most intriguing 3Things that I've put together. I learned something super practical in the Delphi Method and Cognitive Reappraisal and I'm taking another stab at Self-Determination Theory because I learned it in a different way from a month ago. Cognitive Reappraisal and Emotional Suppression A game changer. I learned this skill at 27 but didn’t know what it was called and it literally changed my life. The ability think through your emotional reaction basically releases the pressure built up by the emotion. Examples I read about include simply seeing your reflection when wanting to gorge out on a bowl of candy or writing the word ANGER in big letters on a piece of paper when you’re angry. Attaching a cognitively derived thought and action to an emotional reaction will release the power that emotion is bringing to your brain and self. This is probably one of the most important thing I’ve learned in the last 8 years for myself and now I have a label to attach to it and research it more. Here’s a definition of what it is: “Cognitive reappraisal is an emotion regulation strategy that involves changing the trajectory of an emotional response by reinterpreting the meaning of the emotional stimulus. Emotion regulation is defined as follows: "the use of deliberate and effortful processes to change a spontaneous emotional state.” For example, a person may fail a series of tests and think negatively about his or her performance upon first receiving the results. The person revisits his or her emotional response to the situation and later views the results as a way to challenge and better him or herself. This process involves two parts: a) recognition of one’s negative response, and b) reinterpretation of the situation to either reduce the severity of the negative response, or exchange the negative attitude for a more positive attitude. This strategy is one of the three broad categories of coping which include appraisal-focused behavior, problem-focused behavior, and emotion-focused behavior. It differs from the other two methods of coping because it primarily addresses an individual’s perception of a situation, rather than directly altering environmental stressors or emotional responses to those stressors.” The crazy part about this is that we reappraise re-narrate any action or event that occurs anyway – we can’t help it. To make an action or event make sense to the construct of your brain you have to translate it into something that makes sense. You just do this. So, instead of allowing a magical and unknown process occur that does this for you, why not develop a cognitive and thoughtful process to translate that event to benefit your goals of self? Self-Determination Theory Have you ever had a boss tell you to do something you didn’t want to do and then you have to talk yourself into doing it? Has that same boss ever told you you’ll get overtime for it? Or maybe in your performance review – even though it was mostly good- they offered “tangible rewards, threats, deadlines, directives, pressured evaluations, and imposed goals” and all you wanted to do was give them the finger and walk out? Maybe, like me, you have both been that asshole boss and been the employee who walked out and been confused about what is going on? It comes down to the paradoxes of Self-Determination Theory. Self-determination theory (SDT) is a macro theory of human motivation and personality that concerns people's inherent growth tendencies and innate psychological needs. It is concerned with the motivation behind choices people make without external influence and interference. SDT focuses on the degree to which an individual's behavior is self-motivated and self-determined. Here are my bullet points from reading one of the founding articles on it:
 I guess the trick is make the goals of the business become the intrinsic goals of the individual. I don’t know how to do this but if you learn how, let me know. Delphi Method Anyone who has ever been a part of a decision-making process needs to know of the Delphi Process. This is incredible. I swear it would have saved tens of thousands of dollars in planning projects I’ve been involved in if I knew this. Here’s the idea (pay attention to the 3rd step where you anonymize experts’ reflections):  Wikipedia has a long and tedious but good explanation below but basically the Delphi Method gets expert opinion on an idea, anonymizes the comments (thus removing self-censure and unconscious bias in response to others’ ideas), and proceeds with group analysis from there. Here is what Wikipedia has to say:
the Delphi Method is “a structured communication technique or method, originally developed as a systematic, interactive forecasting method which relies on a panel of experts. The experts answer questionnaires in two or more rounds. After each round, a facilitator or change agent provides an anonymous summary of the experts’ forecasts from the previous round as well as the reasons they provided for their judgments. Thus, experts are encouraged to revise their earlier answers in light of the replies of other members of their panel. It is believed that during this process the range of the answers will decrease and the group will converge towards the "correct" answer. Finally, the process is stopped after a predefined stop criterion (e.g. number of rounds, achievement of consensus, stability of results) and the mean or median scores of the final rounds determine the results. Delphi is based on the principle that forecasts (or decisions) from a structured group of individuals are more accurate than those from unstructured groups.” Critical and Sensitive Periods! Poetic Transcription! And Ippon seoi nage! Here are the three things I learned in Grad School this week:  Ippon Seoi Nage
I was going to look into Sovereign Power in Gentrification but I have to write a paper and I know too little about this to delve deep. Instead, I got my ass handed to me last week with the most basic Judo throw, called an Ippon Seoi Nage – or, more simply, a seoi nage (pronounced roughly as: say na gee). After a week of drills with the seoi nage, I pulled two muscles in my quads, rolled an ankle, and landed poorly on my neck. Judo is a lot of fun and I have at least 18 more basic throws to learn but I am inhaling ibuprofen in the process. Critical Periods and Sensitive Periods In class I said: “the most interesting part to me was that if you do not get appropriately socialized at the right ages you lose the ability to socialize appropriately for the rest of your life – if you don’t use it, you literally lose it.” This was in response to a reading called The Nurture Assumption by Harris where she says that peer groups in childhood are more important for a person’s development than a parent’s influence. This idea of being locked in to a lifetime of maladjustment was baffling to me – I had never heard that; it goes against the belief I have that we can reinvent ourselves endlessly. Apparently not. In Developmental Psychology there are these points in our life called Critical Periods and Sensitive Periods and they relate to skill building. Critical periods are necessary and sensitive periods are more extended with less necessity to acquire a skill for use. Some folks say there are no differences between the two and others make more distinctions. According to Wikipedia: “critical period is a maturational stage in the lifespan of an organism during which the nervous system is especially sensitive to certain environmental stimuli. If, for some reason, the organism does not receive the appropriate stimulus during this "critical period" to learn a given skill or trait, it may be difficult, ultimately less successful, or even impossible, to develop some functions later in life. Functions that are indispensable to an organism's survival, such as vision, are particularly likely to develop during critical periods. "Critical period" also relate to ability to acquire first language.” These ideas make more sense to me with ensuring vision kicks in or acquisition of language but it is somewhat scary to me that it applies to socialization, behavior, and psychological development. I suppose that this is what a lot of therapy is based on: reworking maladjusted, learned behaviors as best as possible within the boundaries of your limited self for the best opportunities for success. It means you can’t fix it but you can give yourself healthy coping mechanisms and skills to fight the results of the limitations you have. Damn. Poetic transcription I love poetry. In some ways, I got my undergraduate degree in studying it. But this week we learned Poetic Transcription and it makes me feel icky. The idea is that you create a poem from the data you collect in an interview to pull out the most important aspects in a concise and coherent way. Sidenote: I love poetry but I think the reason it makes me feel like slugs are crawling up my neck is because I hate bad poetry. Like, aesthetically but also somatically repulsed by bad poetry. I don’t know why this is the case but I cringe when hearing someone share a bad poem. And, making a good poem out of someone’s drivel seems difficult. I digress. I see a use for Poetic Transcription for helping to make sense of the chaos of a 90 minute interview. I did this for the first season of Pelecanus and it helped in not only editing our episodes but also in understanding the subject matter better. The idea is create new insight through emotional intertwining of various and sometimes disparate concepts of someone’s interview. |
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