Part 2: From The Drawing Board: Reflections on Mind and Ideas

Part I. From The Drawing Board
I have taken the liberty of organizing the following series of ideas skeletally in the belief that a covering of stylistic flesh would only obscure them. It is my intention that further exposition follow rather than precede these points in the manner if not the substance of mathematical axioms preceding the proof.

1) Ideas, Ideals, and ideologies (III) are the active agents of human minds. They exhibit complex dynamics, and they incorporate judgments.
1a) Minds cannot be isolated, or inoculated, against III activity; minds are open nodes in the web of the noösphere, just as synapses are in the brain.
1b) Generally speaking, at any given instant, stimulated sensory receptors and internal regulatory signals are feeding information into the central nervous system through afferent pathways; information is being interpreted and organized within and between the various brain and CNS subsystems; and both responsive and initiatory signaling is occurring through efferent pathways of externalization, or expression. This, in conjunction with points one and two, above, suggests that III activity may be described in similar terms: ideas, ideals, and ideologies (III) are entering, interacting within, and being expressed from the human mind at all times.

2) The vehicles of ideas, ideals, and ideologies in mind and in transmission, are languages and images. All that is perceived in sound and image is significatory of ideas, ideals, and ideologies. All things are both source and repository of III signification. To the mind, the universe is “ideoactive” (coinage, as in radioactive).
2a) No ideas, ideals, or ideologies may be justifiably taken as a normative basis from which to judge other ideas; therefore, truth is relative. Truth is determined and judgments are rendered relative to the idea, ideal, or ideology that stands in the context-specific role of paradigm, or codec.
2b) Metaphorically, a paradigm is the world view beheld through a specific reference frame. A frame of reference is a boundary that, very much like the pupil and iris of the eye, dilates and constricts with the perceptual and analytical focusing of the mind. The boundary of the frame is terministic.
2c) Binary determinations, such as in-group / out-group boundaries, are determined by the frame of reference. The frame itself is the boundary.

3) The perception of interrelatedness, an adjunct of the relevant frame of reference, creates the identification: “this is a system.”
3a) Systems are entities the existence of which occurs in distinct phases along a potentially infinite regression-progression in magnitude. This engenders the perception of the analytical nesting of systems.
3b) Nested systems compose complex dynamic systems from which wholes, such as the human mind, and cultures, are emergent.
3c) Systems at every order of magnitude manifest emergent agendas that do not necessarily coincide with the interests of the superordinate systems that comprise them or the subordinate systems that compose them.

4) Cultures are codecs of universal signification and interpretation. They are dynamic systems of ideas, ideals, and ideologies that conventionalize signification and interpretation for a human collectivity, or community.
4a) The minds of the global human population are organized into disparate communities by numerous cultures. Cultures are capable of reproduction by copying themselves from mind to mind through the vehicles of encoding, decoding, and transmission: linguistic and imagistic signification.
4b) Cultures manifest agendas that are distinct from the interests of 1) individual hosts; 2) other cultures; and 3) the species as a whole.
4c) A hero is an avatar of a given cultural paradigm. Both hero and audience are avatars of a single cultural paradigm, and hero-celebration is one common means of enculturation and social communion.
4d) The culture organizing the authorial mind provides the codec of rationalization that structures a text.

5) Psychic bifurcation—a branching of mind from a state of unconscious unity with the world to one of conscious duality—is the original binary disjunctive that posits mind in opposition to body. Psychic bifurcation rends irremediably the primordial unity of mind and body, and the primordial unity of the human animal and the natural world.
5a) Psychic bifurcation drives into psychic being (as idea, ideal, or ideology) an idealized world that is held superior to the real world—each facet of the real world being positioned as the negative moiety of a binary that creates its own ideal opposite by disjunctive psychic ontogenesis.
5b) The gap between idealizations and actual physical reality demands logically that all things be plastic; that all things be capable of transformation from their real state to their ideal state. Human lives, bodies, hearts, and minds, are all, by the force of this logic, capable of willful, guided transformation from real to ideal states just as all ideals are seen as being capable of realization. Plasticity demands striving in order to effect change from real, or actual, to ideal, and from the negative pole to the positive pole of every binary; thus, human life is characterized by striving, not primordial contentment.
5c) Life is conceptualized as a transitional phase between actual and ideal states in a zone of transformation occupied by plans and projects, missions and quests, programs and designs, journeys and metamorphoses.
5d) Emotions saturate ideals, making them powerful behavioral heuristics and self-justifying goals. Emotions (e.g., hope), as washes of slow neurotransmitters bathing WTFT neural nets, invariably terminate higher-order reflection.

6) Textual and actual characters and motives subsume to archetypes. Motives arise from small functions of the animal (e.g., to satisfy lust, or hunger), from higher-order functions such as culture (e.g., to prove the mettle of a cultural array in the figure of an indomitable hero), or from yet higher-order functions of the species (e.g., to comprehend the ecology of the planet, or the means to end world suffering).


Part II. Back to the Temple of Apollo
We have been told for centuries to know ourselves, and this we certainly try to do. It might be accurately said that this has been the preoccupation of the mind since the dawn of consciousness. So much has been said and done in the interest of knowing ourselves that only the very grandest of metaphors may be employed to give a sense of it: oceans and mountains of words, images, and deeds have been made in the attempt to fill that particular gap in our understanding; and if it were a problem amenable to quantitative solutions, self-knowledge would be something that we possessed in droves.
But these ideas are like the chemical elements of the periodic table; their relations run the full gamut from amity through neutrality to enmity. Many such ideas not only fail to align with others, they are capable of mutually assured destruction. The result is a taxonomy of theories and explanations of who we are—as a species, as culturally-aligned tribes, and as individuals in isolation—none of which is definitive, yet all of which may reflect with an acceptable degree of fidelity facets of truth.

Knowing yourself, of course, means much more than knowing your given name, the name of the place at which your mother gave birth to you, or your likes and dislikes. The knowing of oneself encompasses the knowing of the entire species. All humans share the same ancestors, the same evolutionary history and experience, and 99.9% of the same DNA; thus, we all share virtually identical bodies and central nervous systems. With 99.9% of the same physical equipment as one another, and virtually the same cultural codecs, how different can individuals be?

Sadly, the differences can be lethal.

There would seem to be some grand advantage to ignoring our massive similarities in favor of exaggerating our minor differences since cultures do all that they can to ruthlessly destroy each other. And perhaps that is it: cultures rive the collective human community into warring tribes at the least opportunity. Cultures constrict the human frame of reference down to individuals and communities in order to “out-group” (coinage, as verb) other cultures so that they may be exterminated without triggering moral, or emotional, alarms.

Surely, then, in our minds and not in our physical organs is to be found the essential and defining difference between individual Homo sapiens.

Ambrose Bierce wrote:
MIND. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

Futility, with all due respect to Bierce, has rarely been potent enough to withstand the washes of slow and other neurotransmitters in the brain to which we refer colloquially as hope, or desire. We have learned considerably more about the brain—if not the mind—since Bierce wrote those words in 1911.

I am sure that for each person, the sense of certainty (those slow neurotransmitters, again) in self-knowledge will vary. Probably for some, the image of their face reflected in a mirror is self-knowledge enough. And, after all, only the brain knows what it means to know anything anyway. Toying with Cartesian circularity, we may conclude that “I know that I know; therefore, I know what it means to know.” Or, something like that.

I don't buy that. For me to know myself, it is necessary that I know how the brain systems work, how the mind emerges from them, and how it organizes itself; and not only that, but what, if anything at all, accounts for individual differences between people, and importantly, whether those differences are real or substantial enough to justify celebration. I do not sing along with Whitman of the hallowed self; on the contrary, I am inclined to think that he carried cocaine in his pockets or had a brain that manufactured and distributed dopamine with profligate excess.

It seems clear to me that all of the members of any given tribe share the same ideological complex which organizes their minds and aligns their identities. These ideologies give internal structure to the minds that host them. Some of the ideologies that inhabit a given mind are shared with other minds whereby these minds compose some identifiable group, a community that in turn identifies its constituents. Like signification, it is a circular process of identification. These groups may then be seen as one system. The same mind will contain other ideologies that form the basis of social communion and group identity in common with other minds; thus composing other communities.

It strikes me that people are almost completely unaware of, or are unwilling to admit of, these facts; that people—their consciousness concentrated within their self-construct as votary within shrine—remain oblivious to the fact that minds are colonized by ideas, ideals, and ideologies. I have seen that people are puppets dangling from the strings of the various ideologies that compose their minds—that human beings are performances of those ideas, ideals, and ideologies. It would seem, therefore, that we can never know ourselves as individuals, but only as avatars.

Is it even possible to become conscious of the ideas, ideals, and ideologies that are the puppet-masters behind the curtains of the performance that is one's life? Or, is consciousness restricted to seeing only the curtains that conceal them, or only the facades they present? Is consciousness only capable of seeing the inside of its own autobiographical gallery—the inside of its self-constructed shrine of self-identification? Have I become lost in a room full of metaphors?

The difficulties to be encountered in answering these questions are formidable. For one, the mind idealizes as a matter of reflex, and its idealizations are charged with emotions so strong that they beggar the notion of free will, let alone the notion of objective consciousness. When consciousness becomes self-aware, is it not reflexively idealizing the operative ideologies that have created it?

To say that consciousness is or may be aware of the ideas, ideals, and ideologies that compose and animate the self while simultaneously idealizing them and preserving them in the amber of emotion. . .does such a statement hold intelligible meaning for anyone who should read it? Do we, writer and reader, share a mutual understanding of these concepts and terms? Do we even share a sense of the relevance or importance of these matters?

In my efforts to “know myself” and the world, I need to use language and imagery in ways that facilitate my understanding; but in my efforts to be understood by an audience of non-self persons, I must do the exact opposite. This necessitates a “return to the world”—the “tenth bull” of Zen Master Kakuan's Oxherding Pictures. But, like Irving's Rip van Winkle, the world and “the very character of the people seem[ed] changed” from what I knew before my “search for the bull” began: “—everything was strange. His mind now misgave him; he began to doubt whether both he and the world around him were not bewitched” (Irving, Sketch Book, 37).

In another of my Rip van Winkle lessons: People share a language; yet they don't. Languages like English are systems so vast that individual minds cannot wholly contain them. People, by dint of effort alone, increase their command of language beyond the practical working minimum that they acquire throughout the years of their early development. In fact, it is this practical working minimum that is the only expanse of language that may be presumed to be shared by all members of that language community. To use language that derives from outside that range in speech or writing is to invite out-group identification, socially punitive naming, and even ostracism.

The whole of a language like English may be viewed as a large set that in turn may be seen to encompass a great number of subsets, each differently oriented with respect to its language set, subject matters, frames of reference, world views, and value systems. Minds subscribe to these structures, identify with them, are identified by them, and become invested in them to the extent that they will take offense on behalf of that community and fight in its ostensible defense. Does this complex of behaviors “ring a bell” of familiarity? It is, as we have repeatedly asserted, a matter of ideology.
It behooves one to know as well as possible the full nature of the ideology that rules each specific one of these domains, just as it behooves the traveler to know and to abide by the complete ideological complex of a place, a people, or a nation that is to be encountered personally.

Stepping back from ideologies and the real communities they manifest, how is it that writing these words created, in my mind at least, an audience—an imaginary community—as if by magical conjuration? (see Drawing Board Point 5a in Part I. psychic ontogenesis.) Language, one of the two vehicles of ideas, ideals, and ideologies, arises as a facet of the binary: Language / Audience. Conceptually, the one cannot exist without the other. That is to say, in my mind, as language is formulated, so is audience; albeit, a phantom audience peopled only by consciousness itself. The mind crafts a facade, or hangs a mask, over the sheer abstraction that is consciousness—its true audience—because it insists upon envisioning that audience as a real entity in the image of an imagined collectivity of fellow tribe-members.

Whether an essay will ever have a comprehending audience is something an author can never know.


Part III. Nested Systems

As mentioned on the drawing board in point three, systems comprise subsystems which, in turn, comprise subsystems, and this principle holds through a potentially infinite regression. In the opposite direction, this principle holds through a potentially infinite progression as simple units become associated in simple systems which compose larger more complex systems which compose still larger systems. Systems are perceived whatever the order of analysis applied as a corollary of the frame of reference.

The hypothetical author imagines “the” audience in a purely mental act unconstrained by the physical presence of an actual audience. The authorial mind envisions (Point 5a, —psychic ontogenesis) a boundary between the large system it construes to be the “mass audience” for a given subject matter, and its “set” of all possible constituent subsystems, or “niche audiences.” By increasing the magnification, the authorial mind may focus upon one such subsystem, or niche audience, and find that it, too, in its order of magnitude exists as a large system, or mass audience, comprising its own set of component subsystems, or niche audiences. If the authorial mind were to decrease analytical magnitude instead, the initial mass audience would shift to become one constituent subsystem, or niche audience, of a superordinate larger system. Adaptation of the authorial mind to one specific community demands an accurate and realistic conception of the entire continuum, not only the culture and language of the chosen frame of reference, or niche community. It is very much as if the authorial mind were preparing for immersion in a foreign land and culture: a case in which success depends upon thorough and authentic assimilation to the language and culture of that community. If the authorial mind in question is not native to that language and culture—in this case, the chosen audience—then assimilation to it requires the programmed metamorphosis of self. (see Drawing Board Point 5b —plasticity).

As the frame of reference is broadened to encompass all of the niche communities, the specifics and particularities of each specialization disappear into the matrix of the mass community. Only what is common to all of them survives the shift. It is much like the paradigm shift that occurs in the view of astronauts who look back at the surface of the earth as they ascend: they literally “zoom out,” decreasing magnification as distance increases, until their frame of reference includes the entire planet in space; coarse features of continents, oceans, and atmosphere remaining visible while all fine features are lost to view. Astronauts refer to this life-changing experience as the “overview effect.” For them, the unparalleled frame of reference that encompasses an overview of the planet makes indistinct all of the boundaries and differences that occupy people on the surface. Only what is common to all, and all in common, remains important.

For the authorial mind contemplating an audience, the same effect obtains. The would-be author must, in mind, experience the overview effect with regard to one audience/community by zooming in to a close study of the subordinate niche communities and zooming out to the superordinate mass community. Ultimately, the scrutiny should yield a clear understanding of the coarse features that remain common across all of the niche communities. Nations are the foundational communities underlying every one of the audiences that exist within their cultural and linguistic boundaries, and they, too, must be studied via the application of overview analysis.