Meaning of Meaning

How does one arrive at what something means? Is it

• the end of a causal chain
• is it a sensation, a sense of understanding, a neurochemistry
• an assignment of value / importance / cause to a phenomenon
• a gestalt that is a combination of the above items

There are reports that moments of great insight, mushroom experiences generate this great sense of meaningfulness to existence. That meaningfulness seems to be an upper left quadrant experience. And does that imply that even though we cognitively tend to think of meaning as being absolute, it is almost always relative - to us, our neurochemistry, our ontologies, .... ??

Geometry of Mind

Our "minds" live in a "spatial" geometry with multiple dimensions. Here are some possible dimensions that need to be narrowed down to a smaller subset which are orthogonal to each other.

• Time dimension - whether the past, present, or future are focal point
• Sense of Humanity - are humans part of nature or outside of nature. An aspect of that is the specialness scale - how special does one think one is. An example is the gorilla beating his chest proclaiming  is special status in the nature of things.
• Meaning / meaningless scale - how much meaning does existence have ?
• Identity dimension / circle - what is included self, family, tribe, ethnicity, nation, planet, consciousness, existence.
• Belief binding strength, e.g., binding strength to a meaning.
• Optimism / pessimism

Add to these dimensions the four quadrants from Wilber's model to begin to capture some more of the complexity of geometry of mind. For example, deep meaning is an upper left quadrant experience. The value of this deep meaning is / can be disputed by the upper right quadrant.

These dimensions are an initial list that needs more pondering as to what are really side effects and what are "real" dimensions. And are there yet other dimensions / factors of which these dimensions are  a side effect. There is Wilber's notion of agency/communion and dissolution/transcendence as four drives of holons. Do these dimensions actually account for the list above as side effects? Needs a bit more thought and perhaps some simulations to verify.

Communication across Ontological Complexity

The general response to complexity beyond the capacity of one's neurology seems to be some degree of discomfort. This may lead to frustration and potentially some degree of anger. The response then is to direct these emotions at the bringer of complexity. So any messenger who brings us a degree of complexity that is beyond our capability is shot ( in a manner of speaking ). Hence, beware of being the messenger of messages that discomfort a neurology.

And of course, one way of coping with any degree of complexity is to have a belief system with an "alpha(s)" who is trusted to take care of any complexity. These alphas can be chosen, self appointed, gurus, or deities of various forms.

A Geometry of Being

A friend sent us an article by Helena Norberg-Hodge on the culture of Ladakh and its evolution from pre exposure to modern culture to the present and its continuing development.

Helena's perspective and work is wonderful both in its spirit and its breadth and depth. It also reminded me of a model about competence. In any context that we survive in, we adapt and develop some level of unconscious competence through that adaptation. As the context changes, we need to adapt again. Now arises the issue of what attributes we keep from our previous adaptation. Specially since we are often not consciously aware of what is truly of value in our adaptation. So, we have the opportunity to become more conscious about our previous adaptation as a way to decide what we need to keep and what we need to change. And in our adaptation to the new context we are also developing unconscious competence to the new environment. This process of adaptation is also evolving for us. We are becoming more conscious and intentional about how we adapt and what we adapt to and in what manner. And, of course, we are limited by our abilities and our capabilities in fully understanding this mystery of which we are a part.

These notions still feel a bit embyronic at this point. They need a bit more development.

Community - Up the Spiral

With the current set of political movements and voices, it seems like large, vocal, and visible groups form around simplistic, divisive, religious, selfish, ... models of "reality". These criteria tend to be mostly from the lower levels of the spiral dynamics model. There don't seem to be such groupings arising around criteria from the "higher" levels of development. Criteria from the higher levels would be items like sustainability, fairness, equity, justice, diversity, balance, ...   What is going on?

One aspect of development is an increasing capability to handle and deal with more complexity. As a metaphorical example, more complex life forms are more fragile and fall apart more easily. At the simpler levels of complexity capability, simple criteria are strong attractors ( grouping principle ). At more developed levels, there are more attractors and perspectives about the precedence of those attractors. In addition, the more complex criteria tend to be further away in time. And they tend not to have easily perceivable and tangible correlates. And that makes it difficult to get groups to coalesce around these attractors.

Minimum Wage vs Living Wage

Who gets first dibs on the food? The alphas, generally.  The rest of the troupe gets the scraps. And depending on the contextual mode (feast / famine), the troupe is kept hungry (and in thrall to the alphas) and awaiting the next set of left overs. Minimum wage is the same pattern to keep the troupe in thrall and working hard for the left overs. This has the added benefit of keeping them too busy to cause problems for the alphas. Good design (from the alpha perspective).

There is also a grouping dynamic that arises with this strategy. The non-alphas group around the alphas for the next left overs. This is probably a much safer mode than going out on their own for a potentially dangerous activity of gathering food.

Patterns - the easy and the hard

Our neurologies are, in one perspective, categorizers. We categorize all our our perceptions / stimuli - good, bad, tree, apple, ....  We code these categories somehow in our representational systems. The way we encode then allows / disallows the perception of patterns in our perceptual field. For example, if we encode objects by color, then we may see "reds" as a pattern. Group dress codes can be by color, form, function, ...  And we see the patterns of dress and then associate other attributes and criteria with those patterns.

It seems like a number of people encode behaviors with their feelings / emotions about the behavior. And if that same feeling is not present, they don't see the pattern in the behavior. For example, a number of people say that they would not repeat the behaviors of their parents. However, that is exactly what  they do and at the same time deny that is what they are doing. To the external observer, the pattern may be obvious. Why is it not so to the perpetrator of that behavior?  It seems like the dynamic may be that they have encoded the feelings associated with the behavior and that is what they are basing their denial on.  The feelings that they had when the parents did that behavior are very different from the feelings that they have when they are doing that behavior. Obviously the feelings of the receiver are different from those of the transmitter of the behavior.

This then leads us to the more general observation that  the encoding of experience is critical in whether  or not we are able to perceive patterns in our experience. The ability to detect patterns is probably critical both to our development / evolution as well as our continuing survival. Here we can see  that the  famous adage: "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it", or its original version: "Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it", are only part of the dynamic. How we encode what we experience and learn can obscure or allow us to see the patterns. And whether we can perceive these patterns or not can then determine whether we repeat them or not.

I guess I need to review all my learnings and perhaps recode them?

Lying - a different perspective

In a number of instances where one notices that a person is lying and he/she would have to be mentally deficient not to know that they are lying - what is going on? One sees similar behavior with children. They will  deny what they have just done - like eat chocolate. Seems like a similar pattern. And the question again arises what is going on? The dominant model so far has been that "lying" is happening and the person needs to be corrected, shown the light, punished, ....

However, this accepted model assumes that there is clear logical cognition going on and there is deliberate misstatement of the fact.

Another way to think about what is going on is that a person is maintaining a certain "state of being" in their neurochemistry. Facts and truth are irrelevant. The neurochemistry will process the situation and state whatever would  maintain that state of being. Issues of truth or falsity are not relevant to that neurochemistry.

In the situation with a child denying having eaten chocolate with chocolate  on their face, the child may see the response on the questioners face or the expected response and then generate the statement that would keep them "safe" / "right" with the questioner.

The question then arises, what percentage of lying incidents are deliberate misstatements and what are neurochemical set point maintenance strategies?