Key Takeaways and Points to Ponder about Thinking Itself
It’s been some time since I’ve allowed myself the time to really dig into one of David Amerland ‘s deep Sunday Reads, which is really my loss. Sometimes they don’t resonate as much with me, sometimes I’m just preoccupied with family, work, or other things. But this one touches on one of my favorite set of subjects, “Thinking, Reality, Mental Constructs/Heuristics, etc,” so I had to spend some time with it this evening after a quick run-through this morning. I didn’t have time for all the comments, but perhaps while traveling later this week I’ll be able to come back to them.
I can’t add much of my own right now because there’s so much to process, but there are a few points that really jumped out at me that I would like to emphasize.:
What I could not explain to them, then is the fact that the flow of information we experience is not quite as important as the sequence in which we experience it at …
When every system we can imagine is limited by some arbitrary choice whose unintended consequences (http://goo.gl/PaY7h) we have yet to calculate, much less experience, then every construct we create is governed not by the joining of the dots that make up the picture we look at, but by the details, underpinning it all, which we miss.
So, here we are. Details matter. Knowledge flow is never in real time. Our mental constructs are always approximations that depend upon perception rather than reality. Perception is governed by a ‘global’ as opposed to a ‘local’ picture and it always overlooks details.
The difference between the three constructs mentioned above is also the difference between what is workable in our world and what is sustainable. Most systems and most constructs, even the ones with the grossest approximations are “good enough” to work. If that were not the case it’d be evident pretty quickly. But “working” is not the same as being sustainable. “Working” is governed by our need for immediate, short-term results, predicated upon short-curve processes and short human lifespans. Sustainable is what actually works best for the whole.
As always, thank you for the work you put into creating these thought-provoking essays, David Amerland .
Originally shared by David Amerland
Approximating Reality
In a different life, in what sometimes feels almost a different world, I used to explore, with corporate colleagues, the quality of our corporate communications systems, creating complex philosophical analogies of ‘timeliness’ in our decision making processes that (I am pretty sure) at times must have made them question the sagacity of appointing me to the rank I had.
For me, information flowing through the organization was like lifeblood. When we knew what we knew was key to the quality of the decisions that were being made and my training in flow processes (https://goo.gl/FkPpZJ) and the effort (i.e. energy) required to make them “good enough” was key to our process flows within the organization: http://goo.gl/BsCjqj.
My occasional rants on the subject at steering committee meetings were driven by a painful awareness that everything we had was a construct built out of our perception of reality. The “real picture” we frequently talked about was no more real than say a photograph taken of an event. In the time gap transpiring between the viewing of the photograph and the scene it depicted, reality had changed. And our gaze was no longer upon it.
Well, the business world, during my tenure, did not come crashing down (my fears notwithstanding) and no major issues ever came up which is proof enough that approximations work. My issue, I suppose, had been (is) with what Alan Watts (http://goo.gl/O7nJ) would call “the moment”: https://goo.gl/K9E21v. the instant that we know what we know is not going to be the same at any other moment in space and time.
Why does any of this matter, you will ask (as my colleagues did, back then). What I could not explain to them, then is the fact that the flow of information we experience is not quite as important as the sequence in which we experience it at and that little detail can lead to the construction of alternate worlds, alternate realities, whose likelihood is governed by the quality of our approximations.
This is turning out to be a universal constant (and I was in the thick of the preparations to stave off the catastrophe that the Y2K bug would bring) – http://goo.gl/qabuJF. When every system we can imagine is limited by some arbitrary choice whose unintended consequences (http://goo.gl/PaY7h) we have yet to calculate, much less experience, then every construct we create is governed not by the joining of the dots that make up the picture we look at, but by the details, underpinning it all, which we miss.
This goes deeper than we think. At a personal level there are those of us who go through the world thinking they are made of glass: http://goo.gl/svoQRJ. Their faith in the reality of their experience unshakeable. And there are others who see the world only in two dimensions: http://goo.gl/BrXyy the difference in what they see dictated by the brain’s willingness to “make a choice”. The fact that this changes to 3D, space, literally, opening up for them, later, sometimes due to a movie and at other times due to a thought, suggests that the “choice” the brain makes somewhere is a hidden detail we miss, governed by parameters we have yet to glimpse.
Occasionally, the worlds we create a willfully constructed, verisimilitudes where we go to experience an alternate reality that is governed by laws we can understand and when someone willfully breaks them, we apply corrective ‘justice’ even if that does not make an incredible amount of sense, like when we decide to publicly execute a character representing a player in an entirely man-made world: http://goo.gl/TAsXmf.
Details matter because when threshold cost barriers in actions (i.e. Energy) drop then processes are put in place because of the fact without much thought given to what the change can suddenly lead to. Catherine Crump’s TED Talk on our surveillance society hinges around such ‘small’ details with massive repercussions: http://goo.gl/odNrlW.
The “just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there” moment in her talk finds resonance in another universe, constructed by other realities where, again ‘details’ create, in this case, solutions rather than problems, as Jose Miguel Sokoloff’s TED talk makes abundantly clear: https://goo.gl/g0aaou. To an analyst that looks at data and deconstructs it to the key moments of origins the call to “think local” rather than global: http://goo.gl/ojVQY0 makes perfect sense.
So, here we are. Details matter. Knowledge flow is never in real time. Our mental constructs are always approximations that depend upon perception rather than reality. Perception is governed by a ‘global’ as opposed to a ‘local’ picture and it always overlooks details. The reason all of this is important now is because when we look at something as critical as inequality and compute what we think is there, versus what we want to see there, countered by what actually is there, a radical disconnect emerges: http://goo.gl/uZQxI7.
The difference between the three constructs mentioned above is also the difference between what is workable in our world and what is sustainable. Most systems and most constructs, even the ones with the grossest approximations are “good enough” to work. If that were not the case it’d be evident pretty quickly. But “working” is not the same as being sustainable. “Working” is governed by our need for immediate, short-term results, predicated upon short-curve processes and short human lifespans. Sustainable is what actually works best for the whole.
How do we square this circle? How do we manage, for a moment, to get out of our shoes and actually understand the fallibility of our current mental constructs and then become brave enough to want to try new solutions? Sam Richards (http://goo.gl/p0CAeH) suggests the key ingredient is empathy and we are all capable of it if we really put our minds to it: http://goo.gl/S0pbkI.
With that closes a convoluted, complex, Sunday Read that’s taken us, by deliberate design, through the cross-sections of our society, from the mechanical and digital to the mental, psychological and physical. The bottom line is that the world we think we inhabit is only partially the world we live in. The less willing we are to question and readjust our judgements the greater the gap becomes between the life we think we live and life.
I hope your estimates of how much coffee you’d need today, how many croissants, donuts, cookies and chocolate cake has been “good enough” to at least get you through this Sunday and sustainable enough so you do not constantly have to readjust. Have an awesome Sunday, wherever you are.
PS. You can now also subscribe to the Sunday Read collection: https://goo.gl/ffP6p8 and never miss a single one of these. 🙂