One of my favorite ‘Tubers is sometimes a potato head, but at least he’s grounded. John Darko is a Brit who lives in a fancy studio in Berlin and is one of the smartest guys with the slickest production in that arcane realm of the audiophile. He’s fairly deeply into EDM and coffee which suggests to me that if he’s married, it ain’t for the kids. So like for most intellectuals, my high regard for him is unadulterated by the layer of brainfog parenthood imposes on the rest of us.
Today he surprised me by revealing a bit of self-knowledge that is redolent of wisdom, and it reminded me of a few interesting things.
Gone Mental
One of my other favorite tubers is Dave Plummer and he’s autistic or some non-zero quantity of autistic behavior. I love his presentations. Crisp, clean, swift and with just the right amount of detail and humor. I wish more smart people communicated like Dave.
If I haven’t said it explicitly before, let me take a moment to give you some fraction of my conception of the idea of multiple intelligences.
Our brains make sense of patterns.
Our brains need to solve problems.
Our minds are conceptual, high level constructs made by our brains.
We maintain our minds.
Our brains do not have a halting problem.
Now there’s a lot of upsides and downsides to these ways of describing intelligence. Let me say that even degradations of these capacities are fairly well understood in our society. After all, we patiently raise children whose minds are incapable of huge areas of human functioning. If children were a threat, we could utterly destroy them. Keep that in mind when I talk more down the line about asymmetrical warfare. Children aren’t necessarily foolish, but when I think of stupid people I think of them as children. But like most sensible fathers, I have patience with my own, not yours. This paragraph is pregnant with unstated implications about social welfare - I’m not saying it, but I’m thinking it.
More to the point of this essay, we have a huge variety of capacities and motivations that get us off our mental toadstools and tuffets into action. Weaker minds may not get off the X soon enough to avoid the spiders (or the spite, or the spitters), but they stumble away even if by reaction to pain. The mind doesn’t halt because of contradictions. It makes justifications for its higher concepts which are not necessarily proper reactions to reality itself. The modern world, which is rotten with overripe concepts, finds blue lined spaces for all of our mental handicaps. Except perhaps of those for defective children. Nobody likes them. Birth defects are, after all, where the word ‘monster’ comes from. So we have more space in the modern world for more kinds of mental defects, even though we don’t let kids go to the corner store much any longer, our society had been more coherent.
BTW, my YouTube diet is a sizable fraction of architectural reviews, and I’ve been binging on ‘mid-centrury modern’ for quite a while now. I think if I were to rename this blog in my dotage, that would be a good title. Lots of transparency, highly functional, minimal ornament, inviting the outside inside, natural materials, squarish. With tatami mats and bonsai, because simple and small is beautiful.
Dave has got mental problems. John has got mental problems. I have mental problems. We all do. But our brains don’t halt because of logical contradictions, so we change our minds. But whatever our minds know, it doesn’t represent reality except for that reptilian mind that takes over when we touch a hot stove. The child doesn’t know how to defy that reality. The adult can use illusions. Wasn’t that a G&R album?
Illusions
One of the ways I try to keep hubris in mind and stick to humility is to recall that we don’t necessarily know when our minds have adapted to drawing straight lines that in reality are not straight. We twist them straight in our conceptual space and we say “It works for me”. Well of course it does. That’s whom you spend most of your time talking to, arguing with and trying to convince: yourself. That’s especially true if you, like I, can remember your dreams. So add this to the theory of mind.
Dreaming is just preparing your mind to accept the impossible. It helps you reinforce what you actually recognize to be real, in reality.
Every morning I wake up with a song in my head. Yesterday it was Show & Tell by Al Wilson. The day before it was Friendship Train by Gladys Knight & the Pips. This morning I made sure I turned on my lofi BGM in order to wash away today’s earworm. I’m sure it wasn’t a bad song, I just needed to get busy paying my rent and other such business.
We are quick to recognize optical illusions. Our ability to make those kinds of decisions are amazingly rapid. I forget where I learned this, but Where’s Waldo to the contrary, human beings are super good at finding an 8 in a sea of 6s. Or this this thing.
It’s not because babies eat meat before they make complete sentences. It’s just an evolutionary artifact that people who study such things know. Despite what Facebook says, you’re not a genius if you can figure that out. Things we have evolved to discover, like to be afraid of glowing eyes in the dark or low loud noises, that’s the difference between amygdala activation and prefrontal cortex + hippocampus. Essentially primal fears vs those triggered by money, status, future prospects. Watching the stock market fall does not give me sweaty palms.
Being drawn to illusions is, I think, more a ‘higher’ brain function. After all, we weren’t subject to Escher memes in the forest primeval.
So there’s something useful and even entertaining about recognizing how we might be fooled. The trick is to be humble enough to know that you’re fooling yourself if you believe it. Your kidding yourself… wait. I think it’s kidding yourself if you don’t believe it. Hmm. Is this prosocial science denialism? Well today’s the day for it.
I’ve buried the lede deeply enough. Let’s go to Darko’s self-awareness. He has made a good rewarding choice in his profession as an audio consultant. Therefore he cannot afford a BMW i7. Society tells us winners should get all kinds of rewards, so notice his reactions.
My interest in Hi-Fi gear means my inability to afford a luxury car is kind of a matter of choice not just income. So in other words I prioritize Hi-Fi gear over cars but I still want that luxury car so now I have to cope with not having the money to buy a luxury car. And I do that by telling myself that all luxury cars are a ripoff. And then sometimes I even write that on car forums so someone will post a photo of their newly bought luxury car and underneath that photo I will write ‘ripoff’.
You’re not alone, brother.
And a little bonus because I don’t have to be logically consistent on April Fools Day. In fact, we celebrate our ability to prank. Now ain’t that something?