2021 05 03 - lydgate/mindmeld GitHub Wiki

An attempt to bring a few threads together, triggered by audiofile of aha moment here (insert audiofile... but still trying):

• Started with BK's gorgeous audio: Heidegger's ready-to-hand vs present-at-hand shows how tools become embodied extensions whose functions we don't ever question... until they don't function and only then do we and can we examine their properties (at individual level) -> Althusser's ideologies impose "Obviousnesses" in that they constrain perception/beliefs/cultural constructions and we cannot see these constraints (at societal level) -> Kuhn's "normal" science impose what can be and is theorized/studied by scientists, until crisis -> more generally, and universally: all ideologies are of the same nature as all technology -> BUT, during crisis, at the individual, societal, and science-specific-paradigm levels, "out-of-sync loners" (Tarnita) or "degenerates" (Nietzsche's The necessity of "degenerates") are absolutely necessary because they make the entire system more resilient
  • At all system levels:
    • Friston's predictive inference process explains system properties at all levels and explain (in part) the development, stability, and constraining powers of idealogies and other obviousnesses at all levels:
      • priors are possibly an instantiation of obnviousnesses; they constrain what can be perceived and acted upon; priors set the initial conditions, upon which the whole system is sensitive
      • incremental updating of priors is done slowly, heavily biased by those priors
        • see also Vygotsky's ZPD
        • memory research on biased recall
      • to break down the occlusion of these obviousnesses, there's a necessary process of forgetting, in order for genuine novel solutions / nation-states / scientific paradigms to emerge nonlinearly
      • forgetting is necessary for learning to occur (or insights to emerge)
        • see also neural pruning
        • personality development and cascading constraints
        • Gopnik's two types of consciousness: child = explore; adult = exploit
        • IG: Note: clarify these examples, given they happen at different time scales and so possibly conflate concepts
      • forgetting relates critically to stability-plasticity dilemma; that stability-plasticity tension and its breaking in favour of plasticity at certain junctures of the system's development a phase transition
    • during a phase transition (crisis/high instability), the system is more open to small perturbations that, through positive feedback, can have a disproportionate impact and trigger emergent novelty
    • these small perturbations work like inoculation processes (Nietzsche explicitly makes this analogy) in that they infiltrate the system and make the whole more resilient over time
    • characteristic perturbations include the properties of out-of-sync loners/degenerates who have been ostracized, diminished or otherwise devalued, up to just before the phase transition
  • Given nonlinear dynamical systems principles, there should be at least some strong explanatory power in these connected system processes, and maybe even some predictive power. Phase transitions at the individual level (e.g., adolescence), societal level (e.g., the collapse of the Roman Empire), and in terms of changing scientific paradigms (e.g., Einstein's Theory of Relativity), should have characteristic precursors that can be tracked: increases in variability, flip-flopping between new and "regressive" ideas quickly and unpredictably, "degenerates" (for individuals, this may be in the form of beliefs, values, biological shifts; for societies/science these may be rogue philosophers, violent protest movements)
• Extensions and further examples of the "obviousness" principle and its constraining powers:
  • David Foster Wallace's This is Water speech: We don't "see" or perceive the water we swim in (fish); we live/breath that system and cannot perceive its characteristics; its obviousness occludes: https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
  • The separate and unitary nature of the self: starting at birth, through non-verbal, then verbal socialization, we learn to understand ourselves as separate ("forgetting" our co-created state of union with the mother; see Klein, Trevarthon); we also learn to understand our own consciousness as supposedly unitary and coherent
  • The domestication of populations through slavery/colonialism (at societal level) and the taming of the individual mind through internalization of authority voices (by the church, teachers, parents) are some of the processes by which the "obvious" contexts develop
    • for the individual, for example, authority figures and, increasingly, media function from birth to build what becomes, by 4-5 years old, the "obvious" that goes unquestioned in the form of handed down internalized standards, scripts, and "master narratives" (see Granic et al, 2020 in Psychological Inquiry: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1047840X.2020.1820214)
  • Poetry functions to break down patterned ways of thinking and either create new forms of knowing altogether (Sidney's A Defense of Poetry) or to instigate a process of defamiliarization (Shklovsky's idea that "the goal of art" is ostrananie; see Bryan's tweet and Tolstoy)
    • examples of poems that explicitly take on this construction and deconstruction:

[ ] IG: in 2021 05 03 update all points with links, dev psych writing, and summaries of relevant zettels so entry is internally coherent within MM (get rid of red links)