Through the Prism: Exploratory Divination

To gain mastery over reality is to create a mythology worth living for. Your head is the space from which all meaning derives.

I like to let my mind dwell on random thoughts to see what connections they might synthesize. I love this bit of dialogue in one scene from a Battlestar Galactica episode:

You can't hurry her.
You have to absorb her words.
Allow them to caress your associative mind.

Or, something a bit longer that I wrote in a previous post:

In Another Convergence, I wrote, "One of the areas David Brooks explores repeatedly in The Social Animal is non-linear associations and intuitive connections." Here's a good representative quote:

This is a different sort of knowledge. It comes from integrating and synthesizing diverse dynamics. It is produced over time, by an intelligence that is associational--observing closely, imagining loosely, comparing like to unlike and like to like to find harmonies and rhythms in the unfolding of events.

And, as I was typing it just now, as part of my reflection on what this post is and where it's going, I made another association. This time I noticed the word "synthesizing" and recalled something I've thought previously. In Speaking of Supervillians, I wrote that if I could be a superhero my power would be based in my ability to synthesize:

c. Your superhero alter-ego is . . .

The Synthesist
(Bringing together disparate: 1) ideas, to solve problems and mysteries; 2) materials, to address physical issues (MacGyverish); and 3) people, to overcome conflict.)
I was taking a broader view than Brooks does--mostly because I needed to extend the idea into superhero territory and tangible action--but what he describes is certainly a part of what I was trying to get at, one I try to regularly express in my ramblings here. The paragraph that immediately follows the one I quoted above goes on to say, in reference to associational and rational thinking:

The modest person uses both methods, and more besides. The modest person learns not to trust one paradigm. Most of what he knows accumulates through a long and arduous process of wandering.

I love that image of being a knowledge and wisdom wanderer, and he expands the metaphor after introducing it. A wanderer, to me, is an open-minded seeker, which is someone I've always tried to be. Intellectual curiosity combined with an awareness of just how much there is to know and how limited and finite our ability to know--much less actually grasp--all of it really is. The goal really shouldn't be to master knowledge, which is impossible, but to wander through it and glean as much from it as we can.

So I find this article on Shamanism most intriguing.

Masters of Reality

The trances and healing powers of shamans are so widespread that they can be counted a human universal. Why did they evolve?

Whereas many animals use their brains to search in physical space, human minds (and those of some other animals) can search via simulation. That is, the brain can simulate potential future realities. This is possible because brains like ours encode a mental model of the world. By searching inside that mental model, we build narratives that tell us how to get from one place to another. Sometimes we do this backwards, by constructing counterfactual alternatives to explain how, if we had behaved differently, things might have gone. But just as often, we conjure up simulations to better understand how to influence outcomes in the future.

You might get only one chance to decide which house to buy, which partner to marry or what project to invest the next 10 years of your life in. Our brains allow us to solve these problems by projecting ourselves into alternative versions of these potential futures. This is called self-projection, which already starts to hint at the shamanic forces that might lie therein.

Sometimes, however, we don’t even know what we’re looking for. The threat of collective starvation from a bad harvest. The death of a child. The decimation of one’s entire village from a landslide. Such problems unravel the semantic connective tissue that holds reality together. They don’t seem to play by the rules of our past experience. When that happens, humans need a ‘search engine’ that knows how to do what Google cannot: to generate search terms for a problem that they don’t yet fully understand.

When minds can’t find things, they engage with the random. . . .

The mind’s use of randomness is how we think new thoughts and come up with creative solutions to vexing problems. This is an inbuilt feature of minds such as ours, and one we don’t often notice. If you sit quietly and let your mind wander, you can get a glimpse of this randomness at work, as your daydreams put together odd combinations in a kind of Rube Goldberg approach to problem solving.

But we also use randomness more purposefully. For example, when we use practices such as the I Ching or Tarot card readings, we are engaging in a form of exploratory divination.

Such practices have been used for thousands of years to help people understand their problems by confronting them with meaningful but random interpretations. Appropriately used, these methods can help to escape one’s natural biases by being forced to consider alternative hypotheses. These can, upon consideration, lead to new insights, especially in situations where there are no competing solutions.

Shamanism is a form of exploratory divination. . . .

Shamans do this by accessing a particular part of the mind. Through purposeful and yet exploratory investigation, shamans make lucid the mental associations that lurk quietly underneath our understanding of reality. . . .

As a form of exploratory divination, shamanism uses these in-built associations to construct meanings for which the mind has a natural affinity. There is little that is as important as this constructed meaning. Research consistently finds that experiencing a coherent and meaningful life is one of the strongest predictors of our wellbeing. By meaningful, I mean having a story to tell, a higher reason as to why one thing happened and not another. This makes us feel good and helps us to act in ways that are consistent with our higher goals, instead of pursuing more short-term pleasures. . . .

To gain mastery over reality is to create a mythology worth living for. Your head is the space from which all meaning derives. It is the shaman’s role to shine light on that meaning in order, like a wind-up doll, to make you go.

I'm sure this doesn't actually add up to exploratory divination so much as confirmation bias, but I'll use the rest of this space to engage with some random thoughts that have recently caught my interest, intertwined with images I have captured as an expression of this idea:

We crave rich variegations of light. Too much time in one ambience, and we long for something new. Perhaps this explains the sensory ennui of those who live under unchanging skies. The monotony of blank sunny skies or of an endless cloud ceiling deprives us of the visual diversity we desire.

Initially quoted as part of: Our Biggest Failing Is Lack of Compassion for the World, Including Ourselves.

Speaking of exploration . . .

Why You Should Parent Like a Librarian

Librarians don’t tell you what you should be reading, or hover over you to make sure you’re on track. They do, however, stay in the cultural conversation, give you access to a diverse array of material, and help you follow your interests, whatever they might be (say, ventriloquism or taxidermy or record stores in Tokyo).

To parent your children like a librarian, you might display books (or other interesting items) face-out, encourage their curiosities (“If you’re into pinball, you might also like Rube Goldberg machines or the inventions of Galileo”), and make a decision to not answer their every question but instead help them figure out the steps to find the information on their own. Then simply stand back and let them try to figure out how the world works at their own pace.

"Everything just sucks. There are no good decisions, everyone's messed up, and no matter what I do, I risk hurting someone. I thought it was supposed to get better. When does it get better?" . . .

"There's no light at the end of the tunnel."

"That doesn't give me the warm fuzzies."

"It's not supposed to. But that's life. One long tunnel. There are lights along the way. Sometimes they feel spread farther apart than others, but they're there. And when you find one, it's okay to stand under it for a while to catch your breath before marching back into the dark."

"So it never gets better, then?"

"Not the way you think. But walking through a stretch of dark doesn't mean you can't be happy. And if you're lucky, you'll bump into someone willing to walk through the darkness with you." . . .

"Sometimes we walk with people. Other times we carry them."

― Shaun David Hutchinson, The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

Speaking of librarians, we are all about information literacy.

Older People Are Worse Than Young People at Telling Fact From Opinion

On the individual questions, the identification gap was particularly large regarding the nature of the American government and questions about immigration, but there was no statement that younger Americans did not identify with equal or higher accuracy than their elders.

An earlier study by the American Press Institute also found that older Americans were more confident than younger ones in their ability to discern fact from opinion.

The research tacks against the idea that younger people who are extremely online (or “digital savvy,” in Pew’s terms) might be more exposed and/or more susceptible to misinformation. But the real correlation with poor performance is exposure to television news, which has fallen off among young people but remains very high among older people.

Speaking of parenting . . .

Early childhood education yields big benefits — just not the ones you think

So the most important effect from early childhood education may be that these programs are places where parents can leave their children all day, allowing the parents to work a full-time job or pursue higher education.

In other words, early childhood education may change children’s lives not by teaching them things they’ll retain in elementary school, but simply by being in a safe, predictable, and consistent environment for them to play in — and by providing their parents with the stability to get and keep better jobs. . . .

In short, early childhood education programs do have real effects — but these effects likely don’t stem from their merits at educating children. The effects likely come from these programs’ function as child care.

If this is true, it should change how we think about early childhood education. Head Start’s mission statement is to improve school readiness. But school readiness seems to be an area where Head Start doesn’t really matter, while it has lifelong effects in other areas. . . .

There’s actually not much evidence that starting education early makes any difference for children. What there is evidence for is that a safe daycare and a stable home environment make a big difference, and that greater family stability and wealth — which child care enables — produce lasting, positive results.

The sky was as blue as I'd ever seen it. On a day like that, if felt impossible to believe humanity was in danger and the world might ever end. And maybe the world wouldn't ever end. Maybe, instead, humanity would be wiped away and the world would keep going on with its blue skies and boundless oceans. It's not as if the world needed us to keep spinning.

― Shaun David Hutchinson, The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

If you want to wander . . .

What Makes the Flint Hills of Kansas a Sight to See

This might be the most beautiful place in America.

Walk with me.

Walk awhile up and down these Kansas hills, where the tallgrass prairie rolls out deep green on every side, the land rising and falling to a faraway horizon, out to the silent edge of a high, hot sky, the big bluestem and the wild alfalfa and the switchgrass and the Indian grass and the buffalo grass waving and swaying in the wind, gathering in the streambeds where the Eastern red cedar and the cottonwood shadow the springs and seeps, until even your own footsteps sound far away and that abiding green reaches for you and finally, gratefully, you feel yourself dissolving into the immensity of the world. You are taken up, even as you slip away. This landscape is its own poetry, a match for the breadth and reach of your imagination, a wilderness of perfect solitude. There are no politics here, only peace; no sadness, only hope; no doubt, only certainty. Not a house, not a fence, not a single human sign, only you, alone at last and at one with everything. . . .

In early spring, ranchers here burn a regional patchwork of pastureland. Flames 30 feet high! Smoke so thick it closes the interstate! A week or two or three later, those blackened acres come back green and bright as an emerald. The new growth is irresistible to cattle. And for thousands of years before that, to the buffalo. Native people burned the tallgrass too, as an attracter for the elk and bison they hunted. And fire keeps the prairie from being overrun by trees. Back into prehistory, lightning did that work.

So earth, air, fire and water. Two hundred seventy-five million years’ worth of it. Makes it seem simple.

But history is ruffer even than flint. The death and displacement of Native Americans in service of “Manifest Destiny” or free enterprise or private property cannot be ignored. Nor can the environmental costs of development and profit-taking on these last few acres of one of the country’s greatest treasures. This is some of the most contested ground in America. . . .

Speaking of earth and air . . .

Allergies: the scourge of modern life?

As to why there are more food allergies today, nobody knows the precise reason, but experts now believe there are three contributing factors.

The first is the delayed introduction of allergens. For years, throughout the world, allergy specialists had been advising that infants avoid the consumption of potentially allergenic foodstuffs. Not only was this incorrect but it may have played a role in driving the food allergy epidemic that we are seeing today. . . .

The second contributory factor in food allergy (and allergy more generally) involves the human microbiome and the microorganisms that are our “old friends”. The body learns about its environment after it is born by coming into contact with an array of substances, everything from the bacteria we are smothered in as we travel down the birth canal to the breast milk we are fed on. After that, proximity to animals and natural environments makes it more likely that we will be exposed to a wide variety of bacterial life, in the air, on the ground and in our diet. All of these help populate our bodies, but particularly our gut, with microbiota. This is such an important part of being human that microbiota outnumber us within our own bodies: humans are made up of something between 27tn and 37tn cells; but we carry about 100tn of these organisms within us. We are astonishingly complex ecosystems. The “old friends” or hygiene hypothesis postulates that modern life has compromised our microbiome: our immune systems may now incorrectly categorise harmless substances as a threat. . . .

The final, third driver of food allergy, also connected to urban life, is associated with the curious fact that there is an approximate geographical spread of food allergy. Scientists have begun to notice that the prevalence of food allergy has a tendency to align with the geographical availability of sunlight. In a number of papers and studies, Prof Carlos Camargo in the US and Prof Katie Allen and her colleagues in Australia have explored how a lack of exposure to sunlight – and a consequent vitamin D deficiency – can make infants three times more likely to have an egg allergy and a staggering 11 times more likely to have a peanut allergy. . . .

Speaking of earth and life and connections . . .

Meet the Endoterrestrials

A growing number of scientists . . . believe that the Earth’s deep subsurface is brimming with life. By some estimates, this unexplored biosphere may contain anywhere from a tenth to one-half of all living matter on Earth.

Scientists have found microbes living in granite rocks 6,000 feet underground in the Rocky Mountains, and in seafloor sediment buried since the age of the dinosaurs. They have even found tiny animals—worms, shrimp-like arthropods, whiskered rotifers—among the gold deposits of South Africa, 11,000 feet below the surface.

We humans tend to see the world as a solid rock coated with a thin layer of life. But to scientists like Templeton, the planet looks more like a wheel of cheese, one whose thick, leathery rind is perpetually gnawed and fermented by the microbes that inhabit its innards. Those creatures draw nourishment from sources that sound not only inedible, but also intangible: the atomic decay of radioactive elements, the pressure-cooking of rocks as they sink and melt into the Earth’s deep interior—and perhaps even earthquakes. . . .

Oxygen sustains every animal on Earth, from aardvarks to earthworms to jellyfish; our atmosphere and most of our ocean is chock-full of it. But Earth has only been highly oxygenated for a tiny fraction of its history. Even today, vast swaths of our planet’s biosphere have never encountered oxygen. Go more than a few feet into bedrock, and it’s virtually nonexistent. Go anywhere else in the solar system, including places like Mars that might harbor life, and you won’t find it, either. . . .

Even as Onstott awaits those results, he is starting to consider an even more radical possibility: that deep-dwelling microbes don’t just feed off of earthquakes, but might also trigger them. He believes that as microbes attack the iron, manganese, and other elements in the minerals that line the fault, they could weaken the rock—and prime the fault for its next big slip.

Here's the thing about falling in love: It's an illusion. We watch television and movies, we read books, and we see all these examples of how two people meet and fall in love over the course of a couple of hours or a couple of hundred pages, and we think that's how it's supposed to be. But it never is. Not really. Falling in love is about hormones and pheremones and powerful emotions that overwhelm our better judgment. Staying in love requires time and effort and knowledge and trust that has to be earned over the course of lifetimes. Falling in love is the illusion. Staying in love is the real miracle.

― Shaun David Hutchinson, The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

Speaking of love . . .

Simply Having a Gay Straight Alliance Reduces Suicide Risk for All Students

Students in Canadian schools with gay-straight alliances were less likely to be discriminated against, had lower odds of suicidal thoughts and had fewer suicide attempts—regardless of whether they were gay or straight.

A mythology of greater acceptance?

The moment we forget that even the evil among us are still human is the moment we forget that even the most human among us are capable of evil.

― Shaun David Hutchinson, The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

Of course, I do have a predilection for all this thinking . . .

Acting like an extravert has benefits, but not for introverts

For example, regardless of their usual disposition, people tend to report feeling happier and more authentic whenever they are behaving more like an extravert (that is, more sociable, active and assertive). That’s a mere correlation that could be interpreted in different ways. But lab studies have similarly found that prompting people, including introverts, to act more like an extravert makes them feel happier and truer to themselves. . . .

First and unsurprisingly, introverts did not succeed in increasing their extraverted behaviour as much as other participants. And while the introverts in the ‘act like an extravert’ condition did enjoy momentary gains in positive emotion, they did not report this benefit in retrospect at the end of the study. Unlike extraverts, they also did not show momentary gains in authenticity, and in retrospect they reported lower authenticity. The ‘act extraverted’ intervention also appeared to increase introverts’ retrospective fatigue levels and experience of negative emotions.

Jacques-Hamilton and his team said that these were perhaps their most important findings – ‘dispositional introverts may reap fewer wellbeing benefits, and perhaps even incur some wellbeing costs, from acting more extraverted’. They also made an important point that strong introverts might not desire to experience positive emotions as frequently as extraverts.

Somehow, I don't blame him . . .

Scientist in remote Antarctic outpost stabs colleague who told him endings of books he was reading

A scientist in a remote outpost in Antarctica plunged a kitchen knife into his colleague because he was fed up with the man telling him the endings of books, say investigators.

Sergey Savitsky, 55, and Oleg Beloguzov, 52, were avid readers to pass the lonely hours during four harsh years together.

But Savitsky became angry after Beloguzov kept telling him the endings, it is alleged.

It's easy to allow the world to collapse down to our own stories. To see ourselves as the central figure in the only story worth knowing and forget that every person we encounter is living their own, is the center of their own universe. But that's the nature of the human experience.

― Shaun David Hutchinson, The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza