Abuse with an Excuse

How Thoughts are Formed:

For how things work, how thoughts are formed in the brain, we have some idea of the materials involved, much detail regarding chemical processes – and a lot of analogies.

In some contexts, the brain has pathways, in the context of depression and addiction, we speak of getting caught on a looping path, or of progressively falling into the same patterns of thought, thought to indicate the overuse of a single “pathway.” I have been trying to use this one lately, I have used it a fair bit, and I wanted to for the current blog, but you can’t prove anything starting with a single dubious analogy, can you, I need to at least diversify, if I can’t transcend it.

In Pinker’s brain science tomes, we have modules, or demons, little portions of thought, an addition demon, a subtraction one, one for fighting and one for flight, one for putting a thing on top of another thing, a lot of multipurpose generic thought segments or components that we string together to make a thought or a sentence or a life. He postulates that we also possess a completely unmoored “universal processing” module by which we are able to reason through new situations that our species has never evolved for, citing mathematics and such as evidence of its existence, but this as well as a million other less universal ones, not instead, I think. Perhaps we are born assuming it’s all the universal one, and perhaps we think much of our ideology comes from there, but I’m here to show a major way that this is not the case, that ideology is more basic, made up of simpler demons, using the modules of the brain in the same way everything else does.

I know Freud and other psychologists have their analogies as well, and some folks assign not only identities within the “personality,” as Freud did, but assign them voices too and speak of internal parliaments, but this is a different breakdown, each voice a whole person and we might still be left wondering how each of their thoughts are formed. It doesn’t map onto Pinker’s modules, which are functions, not whole voices. Too, we may wonder how the “ego,” forms its thoughts, etc. the same way.

I’m sorry – only two, modules and pathways?

“Pathways,” has a quirk, an understood one, I don’t think there is a cursor tracing thoughts from point A to point B, away from one ear and towards the other, if it’s a “path,” it’s not spatial but temporal, chemical processes happening over time to take us from one metaphorical “place,” to another. I think I was wrong to use this model so much, “module,” may serve my purposes better after all, but it isn’t a bit temporal, doesn’t seem to move at all!

Perhaps I will change it up, perhaps I’ll be as generic as possible, but you know what is a module of speech or thought that moves is Dawkins’ “meme,” and perhaps the meme is not the module or the pathway, but the product of that structure? The thing I am trying to name in the brain is the collection of cells and processes that produces a meme, say the addition meme, or the flight meme, or the “maybe it’s behind something,” meme – touch the module, it gives you a meme with which to build your thought or your sentence.

It’s difficult, all these things overlap, the modules analogy I’m making mirrors parts of speech, a sentence is a series of components, subjects and objects and verbs, and a thought is a series of modules or pathways mirroring subjects and objects and verbs. We can say, “the dog chased the cat,” and we have modules or some building block or other of thought for each thing, a brain part or process to match each of “dog,” “chased,” and “cat,” and these units can be refitted for wolves and sheep and even Russia and Crimea – analogies prove the point, that there are forms for things, one size fits all memes that we apply to many things and boiler plating these is how sentences and thoughts are created. Ah, here’s a thought, sometimes when a situation does seem new and we have to choose a meme to understand it, apply existing memes to a new thing, we make a poor choice, and that is not the best or most appropriate module for that situation.

This is the point here, however, so before I launch into it, I’d like to produce an example you already know. You know, so you don’t have to take my word for it.

And why stretch it? I’ve already invoked the dreaded wolves and sheep? – nah, no, that’s too fraught. A simple one – ah, “shark infested waters?” I think a lot of us have heard this one lately, that creatures do not “infest,” their own homes! That perhaps “infestation,” is the wrong meme to apply to this situation. Of course it’s  . . . interested. The person calls that an infestation is trying to say the ocean is their home, but the wrong, interested meme gets past us often enough, doesn’t it?

How Thoughts are Protected:

Or, how language maps to thoughts: the word is not the meme.

The word is the label for the meme, in your language, and in your time and place. A rose by any other name. Every culture with a language that knows a rose has a different word, but the rose – and the mental meme – have their own reality beyond the word, and this is the point, if we re-named the rose something else, the flower and the mental meme would not change. Were we to learn that a rose is in fact not a plant but an alarmingly complicated chameleon, then perhaps the thing and the brain unit for “rose,” would have to change, but it doesn’t work the other way about, the word is only a label for the meme in your brain, which is only some bit of brain language for the object.

This is why new, politically correct language is not a meaningful endeavour: labels are not only not the thing, but they are not even the representation of the thing in your brain, only a label for that and changing the word does not, as we hope, change anything inside the brain, indeed, just as saying it in French would not. This argument goes to identities and genders and everything else we try to fix with new language, but I am not going to iterate all that, I am going to go to what I think is the mother of all the PC language failures, “consequences,” in childrearing, followed by perhaps the father, evolution.

This application of  . . . code, I guess, this level of interpretation protects evolved, inherited memes, after all the brain and the person must function in the absence of language too, the  brain couldn’t maintain anything if it could all simply be talked away. I guess where this is heading is if we want to change anything, we don’t change the part of the code everyone sees but leave the new symbols matched to the same old things, meaning use it in all the same places and sentences as the old word, you take control of the mapping – we don’t ask people who may still think of a shark’s existence as an infestation to learn to say “shark inhabited,” if we know they still want to kill them all, we work to educate, remove the fear, and the language follows. We would locate the error by which this person thinks they own the ocean, correct that, and they will stop saying “infested,” when they realize it’s not their kitchen and sharks are not cockroaches and they would apply a more appropriate meme, shark country, or something.

Again, unless someone has an interest in it, then sharks are cockroaches, or ants?

If you felt you had to be in the ocean, though, and had to be exactly where the sharks are hungriest and most numerous, though, perhaps you would say, “infested.” We apply the meme that brings us results, like survival (I don’t mean survival from sharks so directly, it’s not the sharks made this necessary for you, but your employers, I mean to say, “survival of our employment”). The wrong meme is probably not often an accident; you’d think natural selection would either select an accident or weed those out. It’s a form of tech, or engineering, manipulating this layer of thought and existence to our own ends. But it also keeps us at bay when we try to change language for some social improvement, lets us think we’re changing things while the brain keeps everything running to the evolved status quo.

It’s been a long time since I typed this one, about how we stopped saying “punishments” for children after Dr. Spock and started saying “consequences,” instead, and changed almost nothing, punishment already means consequences, it’s only a little more passively voiced this way, and of course, some huge percentage of people still self report spanking, eighty-five or something. Literally the same hands on the same bottoms, different code symbol, same mental meme, same external world and actions. Gentle parenting would have us move from the cause and artificial effect meme both the words reference and to a different function altogether with no contrived “effect,” at all and then neither word would apply.

A teaching meme, perhaps instead. D’ya think?

New words are a dodge, a trick played on us by our species’ memory, by the bureaucracy of biology, where we simply replace the puppet leader figure and none of the machines of state. We live life, thinking the code is the message, blissfully unaware of the formatting beneath, in the evolved memes.

OK, if that was the mother – fitting, I think – then evolution is perhaps not the father, but the great granddaddy of language to meme failures, at least today.

It doesn’t belong among the origin stories at all.

The Human Nature Meme:

The Human Nature idea, with it’s coresident one of creation, is an extension of to quote an archaic term, Man the Maker, or Bob the Builder, using a too-modern one: there isn’t a thing, you make the thing, now there’s a thing, generally with a made-for purpose. This is what we have applied to our species and to the world, we are here, so perhaps something made us, so perhaps we have a purpose (a single, specific purpose, like an axe) and we were made to be this and so we are this. You make an axe, it’s an axe until someone unmakes it. Tools would seem to be the meme for this single purpose, or “Nature,” idea, the Nature of an axe is such and such, and it goes to, “So Grasshopper, what is the Nature of you?”

This is where I get lost, it has this aspect, for sure, the “Natures,” meme, of inferring a single vector, an essence, a single idea like a tool – but on the other hand, people reference if for anything and everything. This “essence,” apparently has the entire gamut of human behaviour in it, from the best to the worst . . . I can’t square it, clearly, “Natures,” are the wrong meme for a living, complex thing like us. Evolution is much better.

But it’s just a word, a symbol. If we just replace “creation,” and “Human Nature,” with “evolution,” we are not changing anything, even in our minds.

And I’m afraid we do. A lot.

Jeff

April 28th., 2023

New, July, 2024:

I’ve had to delete the rest of this, it was not right, we’re moving on, sorry.

It said creation was the older story and evolution the new one, and we don’t think that anymore, now we think evolution was known and Indigenous and natural forever, and creation stories are the new thing. Much of it would still work in proper context, but that context for me now is Neurotype, and it’s all very different.

So that’s it for now, just the language lesson.

I’ll be looking for more to lose too.

Jeff