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Fractals, turtles, and lying eyes

Today’s words are fractals, turtles and lying eyes. Let’s see what we can do with these.

Fractal

Here’s the first two sentences of the Wikipedia entry for “fractals”:

In mathematics, a fractal is a subset of a Euclidean space for which the Hausdorff dimension strictly exceeds the topological dimension. Fractals appear the same at different levels, as illustrated in successive magnifications of the Mandelbrot set.

Got that? Fractals, like so much in math, are utterly cool…and mostly beyond my ability to understand in anything other than the most superficial level. For the purposes of this post, though, we’re going to think of fractals as a pattern that recurs at multiple levels: from the large to the tiny. Why and how isn’t something to worry about right now — just the idea of recursive repetition from the tiny to the large. And just to set your mind at ease: no, “recursive” and “repetition” are not identical concepts. Recursive means to define a thing in terms of itself, while repetition is the carrying of a pattern across time and/or space. Tricky things, words.

“Mod” by kevin dooley is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Turtles

So, that’s fractals. What about turtles? Turtles amble in to the post with the phrase “turtles all the way down.” This is where we connect fractals to belief. “Turtles all the way down” is what results when a mischievous 4-y.o. is put into a blender with a pompous priest: the fractal question of “but why” linked to doctrine. The expression apparently originates from beliefs about the earth. What supports the earth? Well, the earth has nine corners that hold up the heavens, and each corner rests on the back of an elephant. And what supports the elephants? Why, the elephants stand on the back of a turtle. And what supports the turtle? Why, another turtle. And what does that turtle stand on? Well, another turtle… And so it goes – turtles all the way down the teleological rabbit hole. A free-floating, authoritative assertion of scales, carapace and reptilian eyes. Maybe the reptilian overlords conspiracy theory is correct after all. Or dinosaurs did drown in the flood of Genesis. It’s like the internal logic of a dream, a language of pure emotion overlaid and painted with the imagery of our internal eye.

However, I am going to suggest that there is a deeper significance here – that our beliefs are…well, not “nothing more” than fractals, but rather are constructed at a profoundly deep level. So much so, that as with turtles all the way down, our psychological living (which is the only living any of us know), is constructed on beliefs that are constructed on beliefs that are constructed on beliefs, …all the way down. It’s not that there is no “there, there” when it comes to belief, but rather that all we are is belief, and that this goes all the way down, all the way up, all the way back, and all the way forward. It’s more than just the narrative constructions of doctrine – those delivered stories that make us smile in disbelief. Those we mostly grow out of, or as the famous quote from 1^stCorinthian puts it:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

The point I’d like to make here is that putting away “childish things” is not as easy as all that, and the reason is that there is never any “putting away.” That is not how the mind works, and more to the point, that is not what a mind is. Each of us are turtles all the way down. Put aside one turtle, and there are infinite more chomping away, carapace to plastron, one supporting the other. The “I” never separates itself from its own construction, and here’s where the final phrase comes in: “lyin’ eyes.”

Taking a rest from supporting all of your fake news

“Lyin’ Eyes”

A man is caught in bed with another woman; a group of thieves are caught rustling cattle; a man sees his sweetheart with another man; an actress jokes about her age – and the common refrain is some version of “who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes.” As blatantly, absurdly, gutsy, and desperately as this phrase is, there is no getting away from its nugget of truth. When CAN you trust your eyes? Or to put it differently, does perception feed up facts that are “out there” or does it construct beliefs of what is “out there.” Because let’s face it, if you are going to put aside childish things and embrace the truer, authoritative, responsible, practical beliefs of adulthood, there is the assumption that one can be distinguished from the other – that eyes don’t lie, and that perception and its echoes (i.e., memories) are the bedrock of our truth.

But of course eyes do lie. In fact, they do nothing but lie day in and day out. The psychological science on this couldn’t be any clearer. The processes of perception don’t relay reality to us, but rather construct a reality for us. These perceptual beliefs might have utility, but they are still beliefs, which isn’t to say that these “lies” constructed by our perceptions are “wrong.” It’s simply a matter of mechanism. Let’s see if we can’t untangle this.

The dress

A few years ago in 2015 a meme swept through the internet that involved a photo of a dress. Here is the photo:

And here’s the question that accompanies the photo: what color is the dress? If you are like me, and approximately 60% of viewers, you answered something along the lines of “gold and ivory.” If you are like the other approximately 30% of viewers, though, you answered “blue and black.” Which is correct? Well, the actual dress is indeed blue and black. Here’s a photo of it:

No question there, right? Blue and black, which means that all of you that see it as “gold and ivory” in the first photo are wrong. Wrong or lying. The dress is blue and black, after all. If you were being interrogated by the police, maybe you’d be indicted for perjury. Locked away for spreading falsehoods. A public menace.

But of course, the dress in the first image IS “gold and ivory.” That is what I see, and I can’t unsee it. You can tell me that you see blue and black all you want, but it makes no difference. This I/eye that is me sees what it sees.

Thankfully, science being science can offer up a belief-preserver of sorts. Here is a wonderful deconstruction of what is going on with “the dress.” And here is a write up of that deconstruction written for a more general audience. Basically, the way that we perceive color depends on many contextual variables that our brains filter and interpret in various ways. For example, did you know that the light of mid-day contains more blue in it than the light of, say, morning? Our brains filter that information out in order to keep colors constant. Or take shadow. If an object is back-lit and in shadow, our brains take that information into account in order to provide us with a perception of color. Mid-day or morning, back-lit or front-lit, our brain maintains for us the red of the apple. So, let’s get back to the dress. Is it in shadow or not? Is it mid-day or not? These are some of the questions that our brain is asking, whether we realize it or not, and the assumed answers change the psychological filters that are slotted into place in order to provide us with the belief that the dress is either blue/black or gold/ivory. Our brains even factor in whether most of our visual experience occurs in the morning (e.g., if you are an early riser) or late in the evening (i.e., a night owl). The former are biased to see the dress as gold/ivory, while the latter are biased to see the dress as blue/black.

It just so happens that the photo of the dress cleverly provides multiple, ambiguous perspectives embedded within its static field. In a sense, it is no different from a Necker cube. There is no cube, just as really there is no dress, just wavelengths of light differentially absorbed and reflected. But we see a cube, and not only that, but we see two potential cubes – the image rebounding from one to the other, depending on our point of reference.

I can’t emphasize enough, either, that there is no choice here. There’s no “putting aside the childish gold/ivory” of the dress for the truer, more adult blue/black of the dress, any more than one can put aside the filled in blindspot that sits a little off to the left and right of our eye’s field of vision. Yes, we see a complete field of vision and do not see the empty holes where our optic bundles exit the back of our retinas. Those empty holes are there, but our brains fill them in for us, providing us with a belief in a complete image. Or take the vision so many of us have experienced of a huge moon sitting just at the horizon. That is what we see, even if we know that the size of the moon does not change as it traverses the sky. Magnification of the atmosphere? No, not at all. Once again our brains are using assumptions to construct a visual reality – a set of beliefs about how distance and size are related to one another. On the back of our retinas the projected image of the moon is the same, whether on the horizon or overhead, and yet what we see in our mind’s I/eye differs. This so-called moon illusion, is related conceptually to many illusions, one of which I’ve tried to create below. Both cylinders are the same size, but our brains make one appear slightly bigger.

An even simpler version can be found here, and is called the Ponzo illusion. Two objects, both the same size, and yet our mind offers them up as different. This is a difference predicated on assumptions, on beliefs offered up at the very start of our interaction with reality. There is no escaping these beliefs, nor are these beliefs of perception the bottom. They, themselves, are constructed by processes that are constructed by processes that are constructed by processes…. and on down it goes.

It reminds me of a quote from Graham Swift’s Waterland. Waterland is a meditation on history and memory – their tributaries, swamps, and recursive repetitions. Here is the protagonist, a high school history teacher, relating the ambiguities of the French Revolution and dealing with a student who wants facts.

“So where does it lie, this revolution? Is it merely a term of convenience? Does it really lie in some impenetrable mesh of circumstances too complex for definition? It’s a curious thing, Price, but the more you try to dissect events, the more you lose hold of them – the more they seem to have occurred largely in people’s imagination …’

‘Should we be writing this down, sir? The French Revolution never really happened. It only happened in the imagination.’

Laughter.

‘Don’t be literal, Price.’

…

‘I’m speculating, it’s true, Price. But we’re all free to interpret.’

‘You mean, so we can find whatever meaning we like in history?”

I’m taking that from my digital version of the book, but it’s right at the end of Chapter 14. The quote nicely summarizes the point of this particular blog post, and really the series of posts that I’ve made so far. A psyche is a constructed thing — processes strung together across history, and this “I” that each of us inhabits is a unique, particular and utterly confounded thing. A thing to hold lightly. A thing to hold humbly. Because just like there is no French Revolution, not really, there is no “I” beyond the confluence of processes that temporarily uphold it. And yet, just as the horrors of revolution emerged from processes of belief, so too do our own beliefs emerge from their own hidden furnaces.

*****

I don’t want to end so heavily, though, so here’s a personal story to close out this post. It’s a story about belief and perception.

When I was a kid, growing up in the South, I went to a school that required all seventh graders to take “bible.” Our teacher was nicknamed “Yo” by all the students at the school. Yo Strang. Yo was one of the kindest souls I’ve ever met. A prisoner of war during WW II, he wore a heavy coat even on the hottest of days. The rumor was that it had something to do with the suffering that he had seen and experienced as a P.O.W. Yo was totally devoted to the kids in his classroom. Whether they were drawing pictures of penises in their notes or grade-anxiously writing down every word, Yo always projected a simple goodness.

Anyways, the seat that I sat in during Yo’s bible class was right next to a bulletin board. On the bulletin board was a cut-out clipping from a newspaper with a caption that read something like: “Photographer takes photo of wooded scene only to discover the miraculous face of Jesus looking back.” The paper was yellowed, and the photo was in black and white. As a kid in a bible class, I sat next to this photo for most of our journey through the Old Testament, and all I saw was a photo of a some trees and snow. Jacob fighting the angel? Trees and snow. Moses up on Mount Sinai? Trees and snow. David having a husband killed so that he could sleep with his wife? Trees and snow. I wasn’t particularly devout in my thinking about Christianity, but I was a bit concerned that here I was with a 99.4 average in the class, but I couldn’t make out the face of Jesus in a newspaper photo. Finally, I asked one of my friends about the photo. They pointed to one blotch after another, “Here’s the beard. Here’s the eyes,…”

and the face popped out.

A bit anti-climatic, actually, even then. Anyone who has looked at clouds in the sky knows that we “see” objects that aren’t there. A dragon. A train. And when it comes to faces, well, we see faces everywhere. Mars. Queen Elizabeth’s hair. The side of a mountain (until recently). In fact, “seeing” or “hearing” specific objects or words in an ambiguous sensory environment is so common that psychologists have a word for it: pareidolia. The basic idea isn’t so complicated: when you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Or in other words, when you are so used to interpreting particular combinations of stimuli in a particular way, that’s the way you’ll tend to interpret new combinations.

By the way, if you are curious about where the word pareidolia comes from, it’s a combination of greek bits. Para (“before”) combined with eídōlon, which means “image” or “representation.” So the word means a sort of pre-representation of what is actually there. An image of expectation, rather than an image of reality. The large moon on the horizon, or the gold/ivory dress. Like I say, it’s turtles all the way down.

Chattanooga Sabbatical: start of fall

Perhaps you believe in God

Perhaps you believe in God. You believe that global warming is happening and open to human agency. You believe that hard work pays off, that you are more valuable than at least some other people. Or perhaps not. Perhaps you believe that everyone else has their act together, and you do not. You believe that your spouse is cheating on you, and you believe that your boss is out to get you fired. You believe that music is soul, or that there is such a thing as a justified murder, or that vaccines are dangerous or unholy or life-saving. We could go on…and on, and on. We have beliefs about proper clothing, about racial groups, about inanimate objects. We have perceptions of belief that we hold as “true”; we have perceptions of belief that we hold as functionally “true” – that in the absence of the belief particular outcomes would not happen. For instance, if I believe that the child is capable, that belief makes future outcomes by the child more likely. Conversely, if I believe that the child is incapable, then my belief tilts the child’s behavior in a different direction. In both cases our belief would be “justified” and “true.” After all, I knew all along that child was no good, and look, she turned out that way!

I always knew that’s where she was headed

This idea that our beliefs actively impact the world — that they reverberate outward and affect others — is not a new thing to psychologists. William James, who arguably was the father of U.S. psychology, wrote an essay entitled “The Will to Believe,” in which he allowed for unanchored belief. It’s a complex essay. One that requires a careful reading in order to unpack the many points that James is attempting to articulate. For instance here he is stating as obvious that everyone essentially believes in what is useful for them to believe (within the unique, specific needs or their life):

As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use. Clifford’s cosmic emotions find no use for Christian feelings. Huxley belabors the bishops because there is no use for sacerdotalism in his scheme of life. Newman, on the contrary, goes over to Romanism, and finds all sorts of reasons good for staying there, because a priestly system is for him an organic need and delight. Why do so few ‘scientists’ even look at the evidence for telepathy, so called? Because they think, as a leading biologist, now dead, once said to me, that even if such a thing were true, scientists ought to band together to keep it suppressed and concealed. It would undo the uniformity of Nature and all sorts of other things without which scientists cannot carry on their pursuits.

Keep in mind that James is expressing his thoughts from a mind that did not know cars or television, and which had developed through a period of time in which the ghosts of hundreds of thousands of Americans, dead from the Civil War, haunted the social fabric that had been left behind. Within in that context James’ essay takes on a new urgency. Given the scars of those horrors, given the unrelenting “march of technology and industry” (and yes the sciences of which he was a part) what can be held on to? James’ answer is a generous and humble one. One that defends an individual’s unique feelings, as well as the careful accumulation of authoritative evidence. He writes:

A whole train of passengers (individually brave enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if he makes a movement of resistance, he will be shot before any one else backs him up. If we believed that the whole car-full would rise at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never even be attempted. There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the ‘lowest kind of immorality ‘ into which a thinking being can fall.

Two Experiments

Whether one accepts James’ defense of “faith” is beside the point (and I wouldn’t term it a defense so much as an allowance). Psychologists have enough science behind them to show that beliefs are not neutral things. They actively impact and shape the world of not only our own perceptions but those of others, as well — ants and termites busily at work in a psyche’s foundations

Let me describe two classic examples.

Rosenthal and Fode, 1963

The first used rats, but really it used undergraduate students. The students were in a psychology laboratory class, and as part of the class they were assigned the task of training rats to run a T-maze. In a T-maze, an animal scurries down a runway, and then is presented with a single choice: go to one arm (painted white) or go to the other (painted gray). One of these will contain food. Give the rat enough experience, and they’ll figure the choice out. In order to “know” that their rats were figuring out which choice led to food, the students tracked the number of “correct” responses the rats made and also the amount of time it took the rats to make their choices.

The reason why this experiment is famous, though, is because the researchers, Rosenthal and Fode, introduced a very simple manipulation. The students were told at the start of the training that one set of rats were “maze bright.” These rats were “known” to solve mazes quickly. The students were also told that another set of rats were “maze dull,” i.e., had been bred such that they were slow learners in mazes. Sure enough, the average performance of the two groups showed clear differences. The only problem with these results is that there was no such thing as “maze bright” and “maze dull” rats. All of the rats had been selected at random, divided into two groups, which were labeled by Rosenthal and Fode (for the unwitting students) as “maze bright” and “maze dull.”

Loftus and Palmer, 1974

Now, its doubtful that the rats in the Rosenthal and Fode experiment came to see themselves as either “smart” or “dull.” All we can say is that instilling a belief in the trainer impacted the behavior of their subjects (rats). That said, psychologists do know that beliefs are directly shaped by experience, and we can point to many, many examples. For example, here is one that falls under the category of “false memories.”

False memories are subjective memories for events, objects, words, etc., that can objectively be shown to never have occurred. There are reasons to use the word “memory” rather than the word “belief,” but for our purposes I am going to conflate the two. A memory is a particular sort of belief about the past. To be more specific, let’s restrict ourselves to what are termed “declarative memories.” These are memories for events that we can verbally describe. Crudely, they are the normative memories that most people think of when they use the word “memories.” However, like I say, we can reasonably consider declarative memories as a belief about an event that took place in the past. It’s the classic “I know what I heard, because I’m the one that heard it.”

Taken from Loftus and Palmer (1974). Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction:
An Example of the Interaction Between Languageand Memory. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 13(5), 585-589. Notice how the words influence reported perception.

For this experiment, the researchers Loftus and Palmer had college-age subjects watch videos of traffic accidents. They were then asked to rate the speed of one of the cars when it __________ into the other car. The clever bit, or if you are a lawyer, the leading question bit, involved the word that was slotted into the blank. For some subjects the word was “hit.” For others it was “smashed.” For others it was “bumped.” And so on. All in all, Loftus and Palmer used five different words. What they found was that the word influenced the speed ratings. “I know what I saw, because I saw it!” Except in this case, it was more “I know what I saw, because you asked me to see it.”

Now, reporting different speeds based on particular questions isn’t necessarily evidence of a false memory. We’ve all had the experience of “going along” with another person’s opinion, even when our own opinion is different. “Doesn’t that sweater look good on him?” “Sure!” So, students asked to rate the speed of a car after a “crash” might rate the speed higher than after a “bump” merely to please the person asking the question – the authority figure / experimenter. In order to deal with this problem, Loftus and Palmer conducted another experiment.

Once again students watched a car accident. 1/3 of the student were asked how fast the cars were going when they “hit” each other. 1/3 were asked how fast the cars were going when they “crashed into” each other. 1/3 were not asked any questions at all. Finally, a week later, the students were brought back to the lab and asked 10 questions about the video they had watched the previous week. One question was “Did you see any broken glass? Yes or No” More subjects reported seeing broken glass when the cars had “crashed into” one another (16/50), rather than “hit” one another (7/43) or when no question had been asked (6/44). Just to complete the scene, in the objective reality of the actual video, there was no broken glass evident.

James was right, then. Beliefs are not neutral things that have been constructed by our history. Yes, they have been constructed. But, they also construct. They change the landscape of our experience, and in so doing, alter the potentials of that experience for both “good” or “bad.”

Look! There is a psyche peering out of these foundations.

This post has been an especially long one, and believe it or not, we are just getting started on unpacking some of the currents – the river that William James called the “stream of consciousness.” There is just one more construct that I want to quickly introduce, though, because it actually pops up from time to time in the current cultural zeitgeist. It’s a construct that is deeply connected with the topic of beliefs: their origins and their shapings. The construct is gaslighting.

Gaslighting

Gaslighting is a colloquial term that refers to a form of psychological manipulation in which a targeted victim is led to doubt their own perceptions and beliefs. Up becomes down. Down becomes up. Memory can’t be trusted. Previously trusted sources of information and validation are doubted or removed. The stress of uncertainty is alleviated by a “supplier” who just so happens to be the manipulator. In the end the victim is so hollowed of agency and psychological certitude that they spiral into despair, depression, and madness. That is the dramatic read, and it’s not a bad place to start because the term “gaslighting” originates from a stage play and then movie, “Gas Light.”

Gaslighting is not a joke for individuals who have experienced its effects. At the same time, it is important to be aware that from a certain perspective “gaslighting” is what the world does to all of us in the construction of our psyche. Illusions, false beliefs, emotional assumptions, phylogenetic beliefs (i.e., cognitive “reflexes”) sprout within all of us, vines planted and spreading like southern kudzu. These processes are normal, true, but we ignore the malleability of our beliefs at our own peril. Victims of gaslighting could be any of us, just as the victims of a scam could be any of us.

“PICT0013”by The_Doodler is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

(modified from the original)

So, to wrap up this post, I’d simply like to point out three common techniques of gaslighting. I’m doing so in the same manner as Screwtape from C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters. Yes, do think about the current political situation in the U.S. with its proclamations of “fake news.” But also realize that we all engage in “manipulations” of belief so some small extent. Sometimes without realizing it. Sometimes with cause. Sometimes for selfish reasons. Sometimes for what we would like to think of as positive reasons. With that said, if you wanted to start upping your game into the political big leagues three guidelines from a “gaslighters handbook” might look something like this (and remember, there are many more than just three):

Establish confusion as to what qualifies as evidence! Trusted sources of information must be discredited or at the very least established as no different from any other source of information. Yes, it’s a long-standing newspaper, but it’s run by a bunch of liberals. Yes, they are your priest, but haven’t you read that priests are pedophiles? By the way, your parents called to check in on you. Are they ever going to let you be your own adult? And, I don’t know, they just seem to have it in for me. Easy peasy. While you’re at it. Reify, reify, reify. A reaction is never a natural result of the environment you’ve created. It’s because they distrustful or prone to depression. Bonus points for turning that characterization into a fixed “personality trait” that your target begins to accept about themselves!
Create distress, but do be sure to become the immediate solution to that distress. Chaos is your special sauce! Unpredictably trigger arguments! Publicly humiliate, if you have to. Just be sure to quickly follow this up with a way of releasing the stress that you’ve caused. Maybe it involves an abject “apology.” Maybe it involves producing a “plan” for both of you to fix the relationship. Maybe it involves wild “make-up sex.” Be creative! But be sure that you are central to the solution to the mess you’ve created, and bonus points if your “solution” subtly interacts with point number 1. “I hate that I get so angry, but maybe it has to do with the fact that I feel unwelcomed by your family. I think maybe it’s because I’m always so honest.”
Make yourself the center of attention! You can’t have your target’s attention wandering out of your control. Attention is a limited resource, so fill that sucker up with your shenanigans. Remember, there is no such thing as bad publicity, when it comes to your target’s attentional audience. Text. Create a scene. Demand gifts. Act helpless. Show up on their doorstep. Call their parents. Your goal is that of any advertiser: crowd out all other brands! Like the hypnotist, you need their identity to be wearied out and replaced by your own. Good luck!!

It’s a bit ironic

It’s a bit ironic that walking along the sidewalks this morning, I looked up to see a sign advertising the Chattanooga Design Studio. A wide crosswalk. A few homeless. Young couples Sunday sleepy, and then I was walking through the old Read House building where a Gospel Breakfast was taking place. Design. Beliefs. The Bible Belt. That’s as good a place to start this post as any, and what’s a belt for but to hold up a pair of trousers? And what are a pair of trousers but beliefs with which we clothe portions of our being?

First though, a mea culpa. I didn’t *plan* on blog posts that would end up going on and on about design, history, contingencies, or words-as-objects, and yet here I am. There’s another bit of irony for us, though. Planning…or lack thereof, and design. Sometimes the plan only emerges from the doing, and so there is hope that some sense will emerge – sense or hot mess.

“Pollock”by Piutus is licensed under CC BY 2.0

So, in my last post I suggested that our psyche is a designed thing. Indirectly, to be sure, but the idea is in there. The logic goes like this: all objects have a history, history is the accumulated processes that led to the object existing – some might go so far as to add “…and provided its purpose,” but let’s not go there just yet. Words are objects as much as can openers or bible belts – objects shaped by the happenstance of their histories. The same, though goes for our psyche. It’s an object, too. One that we happen to inhabit, and one that sticks to the skin like a wet shirt on some days, but nonetheless, an object. And if we want to talk about the history of a psyche, well, what we are talking about is the science of psychology.

Psychology is a science. I think anyone reading this knows that, but I’d like to take a moment to make sure that we all know what a science is, exactly, because to put it bluntly, science is a process for designing beliefs. A cabinet maker designs and crafts cabinets. A tailor designs and creates clothing. Scientists design and create beliefs. Particular sort of beliefs, to be sure, but beliefs, nonetheless, that emerge from the contingencies of their craft.

Now, science isn’t the only process for designing beliefs. There are lots of others. Let me give you an example.

Gone Phishin’

About three months ago I was targeted by a phishing exploit. I received an email that seemed to be from my Department Chair, and the whole thing went like this:

“Hi. Sorry. I’m in a meeting. Could you do me a favor?” “Sure. I’m not available until 10:00, but can help out then.” “I’ll still be in the meeting.” “No problem. How can I help?”

At this point I received a message asking if I could go get a gift card for $500, write down its code, and email it back. To my credit, when I read the ask for a gift card, I became suspicious. However, NOT to my credit, this suspicion didn’t immediately kick in. It took a moment to wade through a variety of other beliefs. There was the irritation about the presumption of being asked to do such a strange favor (“The favor is for me to get a gift card?!”) There was the self-criticism for having agreed to do the “favor” in the first place (“How could you be such a sap?”). At the same time there was a bit of ego patting related to being “the person” that my chair was turning to for a favor. Yeah, I wanted to believe that I was the type of person that others could count on.

All of those thoughts and emotions were triggered and played themselves out over 10s of seconds, and only then, did another belief begin to arise. “Wait. Am I being played?” This belief then led me to check the real email address of the sender. My mail client only showed a name as the originating email. But my chair’s name had been spoofed, so that hers was the name displayed on the “From” line of the email. Digging out the actual email address, though, provided the evidence I needed to realize that the emails were coming from a stranger. Who exactly I was communicating with, I have no idea. Only that they were trying to take advantage of the way that I construct my beliefs about the world, and that for a moment, it had worked. I had been led to believe that I was communicating with a particular person.

Sadly, these experiences with scammers are becoming more and more frequent. Buttons pushed. Psychological dials turned. And out pops a belief.

Here’s another one, which isn’t all that different from the frequent phone calls some of us get from the “IRS” telling us that we have urgent back payments to make.

Your in trouble, but we can get you out of it. Just provide your password, and everything will be a-ok!!

Now of course, as long as we aren’t the one who fell for the scam, it can be tempting to mock those that did. “OMG, how could someone fall for that!? What idiots!!” For that matter, let’s throw in the belief that a race of reptiles is secretly running the world, that the Denver airport is the nexus of a New World Order, or that Jimi Hendrix made a pact with the devil that allowed him to play the guitar in the way that he did. [Head palm] How can anyone be so stupid?

It reminds me of one of the great smack downs in literature, a fantastic scene in Hamlet in which Hamlet tears into the puffed up, suck-ups Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me. You would seem to know my stops. You would pluck out the heart of my mystery. You would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass. And there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak? ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.

“Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.” Take that scam artists, fake news, conspiracy peddlers, propagandists, and politicians. You won’t fool us.

And yet…

… we all do have beliefs, and our beliefs do come from somewhere. Most of us would claim that our beliefs, unlike so many others, are grounded in evidence. Except that what qualifies as evidence never gets much examining and our belief about ourselves being guided by evidence also doesn’t get much questioning. Hamlet believes that he cannot be played upon like a pipe, and yet there are many instances in which he is played. He believes that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are merely playing at being his friends. He believes that his Uncle murdered his father, he believes that others have tried to play upon his love for Ophelia in order to pump him for information, and he believes that Ophelia allowed herself to be so used. In other words, Hamlet swims in currents of beliefs that have been triggered by processes of some sort while mocking the processes that would have him embrace particular beliefs. In another part of the play he spits out, “Seems madam? Nay, it is; I know not “seems,” as if to say, “everyone else’s beliefs are wrong, but not mine. Mine are capital-T true.”

Imagine that each lit node is a belief that is currently “turned on” by the circumstances of experience

If we take a moment, it is relatively easy to become aware of at least some of the processes that design our beliefs. In other words, to become aware of the manner in which all of us are “played like a pipe.” The preacher stands before the congregation and states that god is love and we accept this statement because the preacher is an authority figure. He stands alone before a group, with the other group members apparently attentive. He often is positioned above everyone else and wears robes that indicate a particular status and area of expertise. He is a particular age, has a particular color of skin, way of arranging his hair, and uses terms and phrases that make sense because they are said with inflections that we hear as conviction or urgency. Most of us, if we take a moment to reflect on our own thinking, would recognize that all of these “triggers” construct a potential belief that “here is a person that I can trust and whose own beliefs I will use to guide my own.”

This says nothing about the rightness or wrongness of the beliefs, by the way. That’s not something I care to get into. The important point for right now is to simply recognize that beliefs don’t just spontaneously occur. They are built from particular processes that act on all of us. It is these processes that scam artists conduct like an orchestra. It is these processes that build up, brick-by-brick, the conspiracy theories that haunt the internet. But really, these histories of belief are ubiquitous. They lead the child to blame themself for their parent’s divorce. They haunt the teen who looks in the mirror with self-disgust. They spur the athlete to run just one more lap. The bonds of trust and friendship that make our day-to-day living more meaningful and the superiority complex of the psychopath – all are the clothing of belief.

I’ll get back to the particular sorts of beliefs that science constructs, but I think maybe I’ll sit with beliefs just a bit longer. For example, it is a common misconception that beliefs are “stated things” – a sort of creed or set of values to which we pledge allegiance. For a psychologist, that statement is true: creeds and values are beliefs, but not all beliefs are explicitly stated things. In the same way that a dinner jacket is only one category of clothing, creeds and values are only one category of belief. There are many other types that emerge from the factories of our psyche’s design. Perhaps we keep them hidden, and speak them only to ourselves, but perhaps not, because we don’t have the words to speak them. Yes, some beliefs reside within the realm of words. Others might more accurately be said to lie within the body: emotional beliefs, reflexive beliefs. We also have what we might as well term perceptual beliefs: beliefs that give us, for example, the meaning in a visual scene. And finally, when beliefs are combined with judgments of value, then we have moral beliefs that guide us to approach, avoid, defend and eliminate – sometimes others, but yes, sometimes ourselves.

“Kayaker at Great Falls, VA”by pthread1981 is licensed under CC BY 2.0
(Cropped)

So sure, all of us are being played, day in and day out. We have all, at least on occasion been led to believe whatever it is that we believe. We’d like to think that we’re the one doing the designing, but at best we participating in design processes that shape our psychology. Even if you are convinced that you base your living on evidence, think of all the “evidence” you never have the opportunity to experience. The saying, “He was born on third base, and believes he hit a triple” emerges, after all, from a narrow read of the evidence – the narrow slice that a single consciousness inhabits — and the goal is to become aware of history, explicitly choose from the objects it offers, and consciously project the meaning that they offer into the future. That’s the goal.

Chattanooga Sabbatical: end of summer

All objects have history

All objects have history, and that goes for words and thoughts and the pile of can openers sitting on a shelf at Target. Of course, objects are only the surface of underlying processes. We see the can opener, but not the processes that molded, shaped, assembled and transported it into our slice of consciousness. Similarly, we encounter a word – hear it, use it – mostly without thought, or if we do give it thought, it’s kind of like this:

Design (n): “A plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, or other object before it is made.”

Or my favorite:

“Purpose or planning that exists behind an action, fact, or object.” “Origin: late middle english from latin designare”

We can then go to find out that the latin designare was used in various ways so that it might be closer to “indicate,” “show,” “point out,” or “designate.” In other words, we end up with something that resembles a genealogical tree, with words sprouting off from one another across time, and it’s the words that we see / hear, just like it is the leaves of a tree and the shade of their canopy that we notice on a hot day.

But like I say, objects – and words are objects – are only the surface of underlying processes. They point elsewhere. Or to use some academic jargon, words are signs, which is just a fancy way of saying that words are “stand ins” for other things – the understudy that gets called up when the original actor comes down with strep throat. However, I’m not referring to that kind of “stand in.” Rather, I’d like us to take just a moment to think about how words are the bubbling output of something hidden. The social interactions across generations; the reverberations of a voice echoed within a womb; the pruned and flowering of an associative network of neurons within a nervous system.

In other words, we’re back to the tree metaphor that once led to designare and spread outward to “designate,” “indicate,” “point out,” and “design.” Each of these a specimen pinned under the glass to be cataloged and characterized. There are other things that could be noticed, though. Like, why did this tree of words grow in this particular way? Why did others take the form that they did? Why did that shoot emerge when it did, and why did that lineage seem to stop growing when it did?

This is a roundabout way to say that history is process, and it is process that throws and churns up the objects that inhabit our living. The poetry that we hear and the ears with which we hear it. The opportunities that we perceive and the mind that perceives them. The emotions that drift across our awareness, and the behaviors that emerge from their approach and departure. And yes, the can opener that sits on a shelf at a local Target. All are objects of history, which is to say that all are designed and open to change.

In psychology we call these historical processes contingencies, and maybe I’ll get around to writing about contingencies more explicitly some day. For right now, though, I’d like to stay focused on the idea of “design.” Because one way to think about contingencies is that they are the processes that mold our awareness, behavior, and all of the objects (animals, plants, roads, cars,…) with which we coexist. This design – or shaping in the psychological lingo — is happening whether we realize it or not, and I think I’d like to spend a bit of time writing about it. Indirectly at first, and then maybe a bit more directly. The idea is to spend some time thinking about a psyche – its habits, emotions, assumptions, self-talk, memories, i.e., all of the psyche’s production – as “stuff” that is available to notions of design.

Maybe. After all, this blog is an experiment.

Let me wrap up this post by quickly describing two stories: one famous and one personal, both of which relate to design. The first is a famous quote by the English theologian and writer, William Paley taken from his book Natural Theology.

“Let’s say you’re walking around and you find a watch on the ground. As you examine it, you marvel at the intricately complex interweaving of its parts, a means to an end. Surely you wouldn’t think this marvel would have come about by itself. The watch must have a maker. Just as the watch has such complex means to an end, so does nature to a much greater extent. Just look at the complexity of the human eye. Thus we must conclude that nature has a maker too.”

A form must have a maker…or at least a process that makes

This quote from over 200 years ago, is an example of what is known as the “intelligent design” approach to understanding the forms of our existence. If you look back up at our dictionary definition of “design,” you immediately see where the quote is coming from: “Purpose or planning that exists behind an action, fact, or object.” In other words the notion of design is closely associated with notions of purpose. If an object is designed, then the object has purpose (and conversely, if a behavior seems to have purpose, then it must be designed). Paley wasn’t the first person to suggest that design implied the workings of a deity; in more ancient times, for example, the Pythagoreans pointed to mathematical regularities as evidence of divine creation. Furthermore, more recently, the notion of design and purpose has been co-opted by evolutionary theorists through assumptions of optimality. The idea is that the processes of design that exist in the natural world will produce forms that optimally solve particular problems. That is their purpose. So, whereas someone like Paley might look at the fin of a shark and inquire as to its divine purpose, an evolutionary theorist would look at the same fin and inquire as to the problem it has been optimized to solve.

Anyway, I’m bringing up Paley and “intelligent design” not to critique their ideas, but to simply point out that there is a long pedigree behind notions of history as process, and process as design. For some, that design (and therefore that history) is ipso facto evidence of a creator, and we, as elements of that creator’s design, possess purpose. For others, that design is evidence of a variety of scientific processes that reside under the umbrella of evolutionary theory.

Let’s get off the high horse, though. Blog post #2 and we’re already re-litigating the Scopes trial. What does design mean on a personal level? The answer to that question might take quite a few blog posts. To start an answer to that question, let me tell a story from when I was a kid.

Growing up in southeastern Tennessee with three brothers, my parents were keen on getting us outdoors. For family vacations we camped, went to beaches and canoed. When I got older canoeing turned into white water kayaking, and to this day I love the sound and rush of white water. But it wasn’t always this way. In fact, when I was a kid, canoeing was a bit terrifying! You see, when we went canoeing it was my dad with my oldest brother and me, and it was my mom with my other two brothers. The river of choice was a nearby class 2/3 river named the Hiwassee, and from the perspective of a young boy, inevitably bad things happened when our boats set out on that river. Boats flipped sending sputtering and gasping bodies downstream. Boats flipped pinning sputtering and gasping bodies against rocks. Boats flipped stranding sputtering and gasping bodies on small islands (only to be found much later in the day). It didn’t help that one of the more intense stretches of the river was named the Devil’s Shoal.

“File:Hiwasseerivermap.png”by Kmusser is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5

Anyway, as you can imagine the anxiety would build as the cars with their canoes strapped to their roofs bumped up the gravel road to the put-in. My poor oldest brother developed a genuine phobia.

All of this changed though, one day when a family friend of my parents took me down the river. His name was Dr. Collins, and in my experience he was a kind man, one who would join my father to coach a motley crew of a baseball team one year. On this trip down the Hiwassee he asked me join him in his canoe, and as we paddled and slid down the river, he talked. See the way the river looks there? It means this. Feel the way the boat is being tugged? Look at how the current is filling in behind that rock. See the deep rise of those waves? Hear that rush? …The entire trip down, Dr. Collins urged me to notice bits of the Hiwassee river in a way that I hadn’t before, and in noticing the river became process. There was no overcoming the river and its devil, but there was a way to find purpose within its signs – to design an awareness and set of behaviors that turned anxiety and terror into a sort of collaborative appreciation.

The paddler spoke to the river and the river answered back.

***

What I’m Listening To: The New Mastersounds

Jazzy / Bluesy / Funk at its best. If this music doesn’t make you happy, I don’t know what will. Saw this band perform live in Atlanta at Terminal West. So incredibly tight with rhythm handoffs and musical swagger, and so incredibly loose with their absence of overly scripted patter. If you have a chance to see them live, do yourself a favor and take it!

Something that got me thinking: Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is an interview with Terri Gross mostly about Coate’s new novel The Water Dancer. Coates is incredibly articulate and refreshingly blunt. His points about wanting to write a pulpy / adventure story that didn’t involve the vengeance constructs that are typical of the genre was interesting to me, especially given something like “Django Unchained,” which is a fantasy of pure vengeance. Coates’ angle is that vengeance wasn’t something “socially allowed” in African American history the way it has been in White history. Vengeance was typically and dominantly inflicted on blacks. Coates also raises the idea that the notion of “courage” within an African American pulp narrative would necessarily be different from the mainstream because of the manner in which the individual relates to the social system. I can’t do his ideas justice, though, so listen to the interview!…and then think about what the average superhero movie is saying, exactly.

It’s not that I’m a luddite

It’s not that I’m a luddite. I mean, how can I be with a new blog that is hosted on some computer (or computers) humming away in god knows where? Words brought to you by wires, protocols, and billions of switches clicking away in just the right patterns. Global supply chains of designers, programmers, drivers, and factory workers. It’s more an issue of agency or complacency or simple curiousity.

You see, I left Facebook a few years ago in a fit of disgust. Disgust with the habits of communication that the social media ecosystem seemed to reinforce. Disgust with myself for falling into outrage-neediness cycles. Disgust with Facebook for so clearly representing a form of digital strip mining. It’s called “data mining” for a reason, and just as every unfettered extraction enterprise seems to leave behind swaths of barrenness, it’s no wonder that unregulated data mining might do the same thing. Only the “environmental impact” is harder to pinpoint when it comes to social media…or when it comes to a digital environment in which “free” really hides a quid pro quo in which a service is provided in return for the personal. That data is the coal seam, the oil field, the undeveloped land, and apps and web sites and devices are the drills, the explosives, and the ever more efficient tools for extracting the limited resource of a user’s living.

“NewmontTours_MNApril2016_AB-29” *by MinesCERSE is licensed under* CC BY 2.0 . Cropped from original

The gut feeling I had when I dropped Facebook, and began to examine my use of digital tools and media in general, was mainly that we were all being played for chumps. We did not own what we were posting on social media sites. We might delete photos and posts, but Facebook didn’t. We might forget the multitude of clicks made during a nostalgia-fueled binge of vicarious “lives,” but the swarm of apps surrounding us didn’t. Like the pens of a factory farm, the data was sorted, packed and fed onto the conveyor belts – the end result not much different from the cellophane covered cut of meat we find in the grocery store.

That was my gut feeling, at any rate, and admittedly, I’m not going to presume that it applies to everyone. It could simply be a generational thing, or an age-related thing. Motivations change with age, and my two twenty-something daughters seem to have a much more utilitarian and healthily cavalier attitude towards digital technology.

Let’s stick with the metaphor of a feedlot. It’s not that I’m opposed to eating meat, it’s more that I am uncomfortable with the dominant system that produces meat. An attitude towards living creatures framed by the cells of a spreadsheet, units of efficiency, and narrow metrics of productivity. And that unease extends to the cognitive, behavioral, and moral habits that develop when one exists within such a system. As a psychologist who studies habit formation and adaptive behavior, I’m well aware of how beliefs and behaviors are shaped by the environment. How stated values can be at odds with behavior, and how habits can sneak up on us.

But there are other approaches, and this blog is an attempt to establish my own approach. If I’m going to post photos for the benefit of family and friends, I want it done on my own terms (to the degree that this is possible on a “world wide web”). If I’m going to spend time thinking through an idea, I want to have and to take the time to fumble around until something emerges that feels right. No fishing for “likes” or “thumbs” or “hitting the subscribe button.” No “branding” or zingers that are supposed to “prove” my superiority over another. The attempt is to create a space that is mine and which I will choose to share with others.

Let’s see where this goes.