The Mind and other Incipient Ecologies
When I was in high-school I had a ton of anxiety and was uncertain about most things, so I did like ~muhboi~ Descartes and stripped my beliefs to the bare “I think therefore I am” and went from there, maybe I’d finally be sure about some things. I don’t recall the whole process but in retrospect I felt very postmodern.
Later I read some Camus followed by a
David Foster Wallace interview
and suddenly I understood that although nothing means anything intrinsically, we’re all better off being nice and finding meaning in each other.
Lately, I mostly think in interacting systems, emergent properties (like the survival of the fittest [or more accurately the dying of the unfit]), and try to formalize things/compress knowledge.
It feels good, and actually feels like I understand a lot more than before, even despite mistrusting the validity of my thought more often. I’m struggling to find a balance between poetry and rigor.
On one hand, I’m trying to better trust my intuitions. On the other, these are just learned heuristics with varying degrees of certainty. Knowing well that it’s all too easy to lower standards in order to make a puzzle piece fit neatly, (the most vivid example being how easy it is to come up with a plausible evopsych argument) I start questioning how one might calibrate between nonsense and likely good open minded hypotheses about the nature of things.
What I invariably think about when evopsych comes up.
My current world model is centered around a hard core of science and mathematics surrounded by a gooey crown of theories and intuition (kind of like personalities in this article ). Inside that hard core, is (by epistemological necessity) yet another ball of goo (that might one day envelop everything else). This more or less represents the axioms of mathematics, the uncertainty surrounding the incompatibility between physical theories, and the incomprehensible recursion of human condition. The ungrounded central beliefs on which our collective understanding of the world rests.
Primordial goo! Brimming with possibility.
I don’t like it, but I need this outer goo for the kind of broad, general insight I’m after. The type of scientific rigor that would make my points unquestionable is intractable in useful time. I’m not trying to solve life and the universe, but I am definitely after a rough pirate’s map of it, or at least a somewhat magnetized compass.
To keep scouting ahead, we need to prioritize the most viscous goo available (the ideas most likely to be factual). Lindy things, like tradition, old sayings, and ancient wisdom might be forms of goo (in that they’re not explicitly grounded in empiric evidence) but they are some of the thickest goo available, because they’ve been empirically tested implicitly by time, and can serve as proxy “intellectual bedrock” provided you can weed out the ones that have recently been rendered invalid by the exponentially frequent tectonic shifts of the information age. That the fast changing nature of the present renders much of the value of popular sayings and religious wisdom useless is a great topic on its own and one that isn’t as straightforward as it might seem, discrediting valuable spiritual teachings along with the chaff.
Speaking of chaff, I’ve been separating a lot of wheat from it for the past few years and I’m not even close to being close to being done(and again, wonder if it’s not just turtles of abstraction all the way down), but the nomadic ideas in my brain are starting to settle the land and farm a bit, at least until the next mindquake. Maybe it’s time to develop some primitive mental institutions to keep anarchy at bay. No courts, or banks, or anything too fancy, it’s not quite a city yet. Some rituals, a bit of accounting, and a regular council in the form of a journal entry should be enough for now.
May 21, 2019