Oh Boy! Whoooooo!: Notes From Seattle #7

Yeah so I have been doing quite a lot of writing lately. And serious writing too. Once I learned that I got this barista job I went off and started doing all kinds of different things. I wrote that post on military history yesterday that I found really interesting and fun to write. Then before that I wrote on mindfulness and thinking about time, and I wrote about creativity, and the freedom I felt from being employed.

Also I have been drinking a ton of coffee the last two mornings. I'm watching my aunts dogs for her so I have a very sort of chill space in her house right now. No one is here and so I can just drink lots of coffee and listen to loud music and do all this writing. But man, totally tweaking a bit.

After Tuesday I'll hear from Elliott Bay Book Company and I'll know if I got that job. So after Tuesday I think I'll start looking for apartments. Cause then I'll know where my work commute will be to and what to think about all that. So yeah interesting stuff. This weekend is a bit of a hiatus, a break, a relax. Just because I don't need to be searching super hard for jobs or anything like that. But yeah finding an apartment, that will be interesting stuff. Gotta find something cheap and not horrible. I imagine I will be able to do that. But man, all this life stuff is so damn weird right now. But thats okay.

I've been reading John Searle's book called Making The Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization which has been totally fascinating. Really interesting stuff. Something that is just like boom so hard to really grasp in its entirety. He is getting quite sophisticated with what he is doing. He is trying to explain how human institutional reality all comes down to the ability of language to declare something and then bring it into being because it has been declared. Status function declarations, as he says. I will have to do some writing on it in the future.

But for right now the major project that I am working on is an essay called 'The Genealogy of the Modern Mind: History, Theory of Mind, and Self-Directed Neuroplasticity'. I think it makes sense but it is really a challenge right now. Just because I have the parts lined up and I'm going through them, but it is really hard for me to hold the whole thing in my mind at once. I suspect that when I finish the whole thing I'll be able to state more clearly what the hell is going on with it. But right now I'm still in the thick of it and don't really grasp what I'm doing. But I will hopefully.

Other than that I have other things I could read and write. But I'm too caffeinated right now, I'm not sure what to do. Oh well.

The Macro and the Micro Perpsectives of Military History: The Social System and the Individual Under Stress

This doesn't necessarily even need to be a long or elaborate post. The bottom line is that I am rediscovering military history as a major interest of mine. I majored in military history as an undergraduate. I encountered a great professor who equipped me with a brand new set of skills to help me read non-fiction. So when I finished up undergrad I went wild and started reading a ton of non-fiction.

I've been reading lots of philosophy of mind, lots of neuroscience related stuff, a bit of stuff about physics, a bit of stuff about Buddhist mindfulness, a bit of this and that. I have been reading a wide variety of different things since I graduated. Most of them not pertaining to military history.

Then when I read Foucault's Discipline & Punish I was compelled to return to it. Foucault's interest in war and militaries during that period of his work was new to me. I wasn't aware that he was writing so explicitly about war. So when I read D&P I was really surprised to see all these references to war and militaries. I now feel that it is something I may need to pursue more seriously.

I find it interesting to think about how most people think of military history. Many people have told me that they assume I would 1. love to watch the history channel, 2. hold conservative political views, 3. generally be a meathead or a war lover.

But military history is such a dynamic field and has the potential to illuminate so many different aspects of the world. War is so central to everything that has happened in history. What is this bad rap that military history has? Why is it a marginalized field? Well, since the military is an exclusive institution, it seems that the study of war and military institutions also became an exclusive field. It was something that was written by military men for military men.

But in this writing I'm going to explore something different. I'm going to explore two different ways that military history can provide a more general perspective on social life. First I'm going to talk about the macro perspective that military history can provide, the way that it can give us greater insight into society at large. Then I'm going to talk about the micro perspective it can give us on individual lives, how it can help us understand the nature of life and decision making on the individual level. The macro and the micro perspectives of military history. In both instances military history allows us to see how both society and individuals respond to stress.

Often I read things about how extreme cases can provide insight into normal cases. How damaged brains provide us clues about normal brains. And in this case I want to talk about how the extremes of war and military institutions can provide us with insight into normal social life. Looking at war to understand peace. Looking at battle to understand normal decision making.

The Macro Perspective of Military History: War and Society Under Stress

So the basic idea in this section is that by studying war we can gain insight into how society functions in general. War is often followed by great periods of social change. When war breaks out commonly accepted social categories are shaken up, and in the aftermath people may have a greater perspective on their place within the nation. I am going to explore this in two parts. These two parts actually correspond to some of the experiences I had with the relationship between war and social change. First, I'm going to talk about my senior thesis project which was on this issue of the relationship between war and social change. Second, I'm going to talk about a sociology of war class I took that clarified this relationship between war and social change. The first part, my senior project was more about the how of war and social change, while this course made me understand the why of war and social change. In other words, my project looked at a historical example and the particular changes that resulted, while this course looked at the overarching causality of war and social change.

So, my senior thesis project was the first time that I pushed myself to think about the relationship between war and social change. My paper was called "Intersections of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the American Occupation of Germany After World War II." The general premise was that WWII and the occupation caused a great upheaval in these categories of race, gender, and sexuality. The war and the occupation caused these categories to transform and I was examining how individuals expressed this reconfiguration of these categories. I focused closely on the way that race served as a focal point for the categories of gender and sexuality. My thinking got a bit clumsy because I was treating German and Jewish identity as if it were a race. But I believe this is somewhat appropriate because in the wake of WWII the German people were used to thinking of themselves as a race of sorts. So, the notions of race and nationalism became a little bit tangled in my analysis.

But in any case, I handled the whole thing by looking at three different racial/national groups, and then two subsets within each group. I looked primarily at American soldiers, German civilians, and Jewish displaced person. In this categories I looked at black and white American soldiers, German men and women, and Jewish men and women. In each case I found that race/national identity almost always served as a focal point for conceptions of gender and sexuality. So that for American soldiers gender roles and sexual standards were different for black and white soldiers. For German civilians both men and women established their sense of gender and sexuality in relation to their German identity. And for Jewish displaced persons both men and women thought of their gender and sexuality in relation to their sense of Jewishness. I'm going to post this paper on this blog soon. But this is a very cursory summary of what I did.

The point of it all was to examine the way that war and trauma forced people to reconceptualize social classifications. This was something that I ended up doing on my own with very little real direction. My research was all over the place, totally scattered. All I knew was that I was doing a project on the occupation. But then I also happened to be taking sociology of sexuality at the same time. So, I ended up doing this project and managed to combine my interests in military history and social classifications.

I ended up stumbling on this idea that war is a major catalyst for social transformation. That by studying war we can gain certain insights into peacetime relations. If peace is relatively stable, and classifications change gradually, then how are we to understand that stability? Well, I'm proposing that war shows us ways that things have changed, ways that things have been violently changed and transformed. These violent transformations caused by war then gel in peacetime. So, this project led me to suspect that if we study war we can gain insight into the nature of peace. As my professor said, military history shows the system under stress. It shows how classifications and individual change when put to the test of war. It shows how peacetime conceptions were forged in war.

While I had these more general ideas about war and social change, I was only grounded in a particular instance. I was looking at how it happened in post-war Germany. I didn't have much of a sense of causation, I had very little sense of why war was doing this to social classifications.

Then I took a class called sociology of war and I met an interesting professor who gave me some insights into why war would cause such great social upheaval. His work was centered around the relationship between war, citizenship, and social inequality. He was trying answer questions like, Why does war cause individuals to fight for more equality? Why does war often serve as a catalyst for greater awareness of social inequality?

The answer revolves around the relationship between national equality and forms of inequality that are lesser than the nation. When war breaks out almost every member of society is told that they must make the ultimate sacrifice for the nation. Men must fight, women must contribute, so on. Individuals, however, are still segregated by classifications that are secondary to nationhood. Black soldiers in WWII, for example, were told they had to fight for freedom and democracy, but were still placed in segregated units and given unequal pay. The same can be said for women, they were told to sacrifice for the nation, but still received worse treatment than men.

So when you call people to war on the basis of nationhood and then treat people unequally based on other classifications (such as race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.) you make these other forms of inequality pretty apparent. When you tell people that they are nationally equal they are going to notice inequality in these other areas. Fascinating stuff. Makes me think state service might be a good thing because it would give people more knowledge of inequality and thus might lead to greater equality.

In any case, my senior project and this course convinced me of at least one thing: If you want to figure out why the current social order exists in the current way that it does, take a look at the last major war and see how it upset and reconfigured the social order. If we look at war we can a very meaningful macro perspective on social process, and why they are the way they are.

I've also had this stuff confirmed by Foucault's work on military history that I have been reading. He talks about 'politics as the continuation of war by other means'. The basic idea being that politics, peacetime politics, is nothing more than a way of maintaining the social order that was established by the last major war. Same conclusion: if you want to understand the current social order check out the last major war and see what it established, and if that is indeed why things are in their current state. A friend pointed out that Germany and Japan are not on the UN security council due to WWII. So much of what is happening now is because of the fall out of WWII. Our political climate is perhaps just the continuation of what was established by WWII. But I shouldn't be too careless making big statements like that.

So much for the macro perspective of military history. The point is that by looking at the history of war we see society under stress and we can gain some insight into why it is the way it is.

Let me now turn to the micro perspective.

The Micro Perspective of Military History: War and the Individual Under Stress

In this section I'm exploring the same basic idea: That studying the history of war and military institutions can provide insights into normal life. By observing society and the individual under the stress of war we can learn some things about how life works in general. In particular, I am curious about how studying the process of decision making in war can prompt insights about decision making in daily life. This is something that my favorite professor turned me onto with his work on philosophy of war.

My professor was doing work on a very well known book by Carl von Clausewitz called On War. The book is essentially an attempt to teach individuals how to use history to teach themselves how to exercise better judgment during wartime. Clausewitz is someone I have written and thought quite a lot about. But I'll briefly rehash some major points.

Clausewitz wanted to find a way to make a general theory of war that would be pedagogically useful for officers and high-commanders. Clausewitz also believed, however, that war was too complex of a process for theory to function in the positivist sense of prescription and prediction. That is to say that war is far too complex for theory to fulfill the role that it typically has in the natural sciences. It must, rather, service as an aid to judgment and creative problem solving.

And this is where we can gain some insight into individual decision making by looking at decision making in war. Clausewitz believed that the complex nature of war meant that rationality and language could not be the primary means of reaching a decision in war. War was just far too large, too complex, too full of incomplete information and contingencies to be handled by logical thought. Clausewitz agreed with Napoleon when he said that Newton himself would cower in front of the equations that military decision making would demand. Moreover, it has been argued that Clausewitz actually predicted non-linearity, and believed that war could simply not be broken down into straight forward mathematical or logical propositions. I wonder if that has anything to do with quantum physics.

Anyways, because war cannot be handled by language and reason, the question becomes: How do these great commanders do it, then? Clearly military geniuses are capable of arriving at brilliant and decisive decisions about these complex situations, so how is it done?

The short answer is intuition. Clausewitz called it 'genius' and described it with a french phrase Coup d'oeil which means 'stroke of the eye' In any case, the bottom line is that complex decisions have to be made by a sort of unconscious decision making process. Clausewitz believed you had to rely on the deeper parts of the mind that were capable of making sense of these enormously complex situations. Most importantly, a commander has to be able to make a clear articulable decision, and to be able to maintain his faith in himself. He cannot falter in his decision. He just has to give the order and trust himself.

Once we identify intuition as the central method of decision making in war, the question becomes: How do we train intuition? The short answer is experience. Experience can give you the comfort that you need to be able to act intuitively and creatively in spite of danger and uncertainty.

But what if there is no experience to be had? What if there is a long peace? Well Clausewitz believed that historical study could provide an adequate substitute for experience if need be. He believed that if theory were used to expand conventional historical narratives that individuals could engage in a critical study of past command decision making experiences. By critically exploring and expanding historical narratives with the aid of theory, individuals could expose their mind to many of the intellectual and emotional difficulties that high command would offer.

I won't go much further into Clausewitz. My post of 4/30/10 offers a similar and more detailed treatment of Clausewitz, and all of this is essentially summarized from Jon Sumida's Decoding Clausewitz and my own experience with reading On War.

I more so want to reflect on the general lessons that this has to offer for us. How does this help us think about decision making in life in general? Four points. First, decision making is more often a function of intuition than anything else. Second, experience is the number one way that intuition can be improved. Third, history (and other humanities/social sciences) can provide something like a synthetic experience that can aid in the education of intuitive judgment. Fourth, the theoretical/experiential lessons gained from historical study (or from any social study) are not to be applied rigidly, but are to be used as an aid to creative judgment.

First point, intuition is the best way to make decisions both in war and daily life. In my daily life I really believe that I operate on the intuitive level. I think that I often am acting unreflectively and am going with my gut. There typically just isn't enough time to think about these things. You just have to react in most social situations. Whether it is conversation, customer service, or whatever, intuition has to be the driving force. In my recent essay called On Creativity I touched on some of this stuff, and only now am I seeing the clear connection to intuition and Clausewitz's discussion of it. To think that we are rational beings is a mistake, I think. I feel more intuitive, I feel less reflective, I feel less robotic than that makes it seems like we should be.

Second point, just like war, experience with life improves intuition. It doesn't seem like intuition gets improved in other ways except through experience. I became more creative at conversation and customer service once I got more experience with it. I didn't become more comfortable with a lot of things, and doing them intuitively, until I had experience with them. Experience is such a great teacher, and also such a treat to engage in. Experience is so much fun, and we learn so much from it. We can only become more intuitive if we gain lots of experience. We need to be intuitive, so we need to get lots of experiences.

Third point, just like with war, history and the humanities can provide synthetic experience. I really believe that fiction and the humanities can make people very good intuitive decision makers and generally very sensitive people. I think that this is because history, fiction, philosophy, etc., can all provide a taste of other people's experiences. I think we can gain a synthetic experience that can help us improve our intuition from these disciplines. We can read novels and feel all kinds of weird emotions and experiences, I think we can read history and feel for other people's troubles. And I think all of that is useful because it can improve our intuitive judgment in daily life. If you doubt the imagination's ability to provide something like experience then look into what Alvin Goldman calls the 'Enactment-imagination'. Or check out my essay of 4/30/10. It seems well documented that the imagination can have a substantial effect on the brain that would improve intuitive judgment by providing us with a synthetic experience.

Last point, that the insight of the application of theory to war is applicable to the rest of social life; we can't rigidly apply theoretical ideas to social life, we have to use them as aids to creative judgment. The social sciences, the humanities, it all is saturated with theory of sorts. But a loose theory. The best way to use this theory would be to use it 1. to help us study the humanities with greater efficacy, and 2. to instill it in our minds as a sort of unconscious tool kit that would aid in intuitive judgment. Theory becomes a guide to our education and also a guide to our decision making. Theory cannot be rigidly applied to any aspect of the social world, it can only help us be more creative, it can only help us exercise our intuitive judgment in new ways.

Conclusion

I like the way this essay turned out. I think I gave an interesting account of how military history offers general insights into the social world at large, both in war and peace. On the macro level we can use war to understand why the social order exists the way it does, why war changes things, and how politics works to keep those changes implemented. On the micro level we can use military history to understand that decision must be intuitive, that it must be improved by experience, that the humanities can improve judgment through synthetic experience, and that theory must be a loose set of principles that aid in creative judgment. I think that all of these insights are really helpful, and it shocks me how fruitful of a field military history seems to be. I believe that this micro perspective, these insights into the nature of decision making and education, are extremely important. I think we need to start integrating these kinds of insights into our daily thinking. We need to recognize that military history can teach us a lot about how social decisions are made and how we can learn to make more creative social decisions. I think that by checking out society and the individual under stress we can learn a lot about how the social world functions. Cause really, is war not human beings in their most intense social environment? Does military history not provide a perspective on society and individuals who have been pushed to the maximum degree? Can you imagine a more extreme social environment that offers insights into the general social environment? To me this seems like the best use of military history. To offer insights into the world at large. But I am an amateur and don't mean to make such bold statements. But I'm just so curious about this field these days. I'm really reconnecting with it intellectually.

The Challenge of Being Mindful About Thoughts of the Past and Future

This post feels very interesting to me and I've been thinking about this for a good while now. Lazily, day-dreamily, casually, I've been thinking about it. Mindfulness has become an increasingly important theme for me. The importance of paying attention has been reaffirmed for me by many disciplines. Buddhism, neuroplasticity, history, planning, living. All of it seems to revolve around this idea of mindfulness, of paying attention to the present moment and my experiences in the present moment. Paying attention paying attention paying attention. Being in the present moment with an awareness of yourself, your thoughts, your feelings, and your experiences.

This idea of being grounded in the present moment, however, seems to become a challenge when I think about time. How is it that I can be mindful and still study history? History requires me by its very nature to think of the past, to remove myself from the present moment, so how can I do both? How is it that I can plan for the future and still be mindful? Planning is inevitable, I have to plan for the future, I have to push myself to imagine the future, so how do I be mindful about that? How do I reconcile the idea of being grounded in the present with the fact that thinking about the past and the future is inevitable and necessary?

Interestingly, I think that simulation theory of mind actually provides an answer, or the inklings of an answer. The basic idea is that even though we are thinking about the past and the future, it is still something that is happening in the present moment, and therefore something that we can still be mindful about. In some ways I feel like I am picking up on my post of 4/6/10 called 'Planning and Remembering: Imagining the Self in Different Times and False Memories'. So I will be referring to these processes as planning and remembering. But right now my goal is to reconcile the need for planning and remembering with my interest in mindfulness. My hope is to reconcile mindfulness and planning/remembering by specifying that these processes of planning and remembering are simulative, and thus clarifying that they are defined by their place in the present moment, and are thus subject to mindfulness. So let me move on to their simulative nature in general.

Thoughts of Other Times as Contemporary Simulations

Well first I would like to talk about memory as a process of mental simulation of the past. My stance is very much influenced by R.G. Collingwood's philosophy of history. Since memory is essentially a sort of personal history that is accomplished only from experience, I think it resembles historical thinking enough to make Collingwood relevant.

So Collingwood believes that historical thinking is something that always happens in the present moment. Even though we are thinking of the past, trying to remember the past, it is still something that is happening in the present moment. This is what led Collingwood to conclude that all history is the reenactment of past thought in the mind of the historian. He discusses Croce and his claim that all history is 'contemporary history'. History, above all, is a way of thinking, and the crucial point is that it always happens in the present moment. When we think of the past we are simply attempting to recreate those thoughts now. So historical thinking is still an exercise in present thought, a contemporary mental exercise.

The parallel to memory is fairly obvious to me. If we are remembering something, if were are trying to relive an old moment or thought, we are not actually going to that time. We are simply rethinking those thoughts or experiences right now, in the contemporary. Steven Rose, a neuroscientist, claimed that memory was an active and simulative process. I believe Alvin Goldman says something similar? I forget. But in any case, Rose says that anytime we have a memory we actively recreate it. We do not just passively explore the past through memory, we actively build a narrative of the past. Every time we have a memory we change it, we make it different. This is because memory, just like historical thinking, is always a contemporary process. It is always happening right now, in the present. Just because it is thought of the past it is still thought that takes place in the present. Memory will always take place in the present, will always be colored by our present frame of mind, and is thus always happening right now.

Now I believe that this can also be extended to planning and thoughts of the future. Although our thoughts are of the future, we are trying to plan or anticipate the future, it is also a contemporary exercise. Our mind is still working in the present moment to try and anticipate the future. It is merely a hypothetical simulation of a possible future. So it is still, therefore, contemporary. It is still happening in the present moment.

By clarifying that both remembering and planning are simulative exercises that resemble Collingwood and Croce's ideas I can now reconcile them with mindfulness. In order to be mindful about thoughts of the past and future I simply need to recognize their contemporary nature. Even though my mind is in a sense 'extending itself into different times' it is in reality always located in the present. So it is quite alright that my mind naturally drifts towards the past and the future, it is fine that I think temporally like this. But I just have to remember that they are still happening right now. I can be mindful about these things, I can still pay attention to them, just so long as I recognize that they are right here in the present moment.

I am not quite sure how to articulate this conclusion more clearly. But for me this is enough for now. Remembering and planning will always be things that I do in the present moment. I simply need to recognize that they are simply contemporary simulations of an imagined past and an imagined future. Because they are contemporary they can therefore be observed mindfully. I can wonder why my present frame of mind is inclining me to remember or plan in these certain ways.

In conclusion, thinking of different times is indeed compatible with mindful observation of the present. I simply have to recognize that remembering and planning are contemporary exercises that are enacted as forms of simulation.

Original Notes of 6/20/10

Reflect on your post on planning and remembering. Thknk about how you have made decisions that involve flash imaginings of the past and future. Think about locking the door when ROb went out first. Think about parking closer to Rob so Efron could have a spot. Think about feeling the water bottle cap on your leg and imagining it falling based on a noise in the car. I had to make sense of the evidence (the sound), but the lid hand't fallen.

Think about Humphrey and the development of a cerebral feedback loop that accounts for time by projecting.

On Creativity

To me creativity seems to be such a general phenomenon. It seems to be something that permeates all life, all decision making, all language. It is not born in someone, as a friend tried to tell me. I am starting to suspect it is universal and pervasive, as Chomsky argued. I want my life to be creative all the time. I want all of my words and all of my actions to be creative. I want every decision to be creative.

So that is what this is about. I'm going to explore this idea of creativity and talk about how I relate to it in general. First I just want to talk about Chomsky for a second and how he thinks it is universal. Then I'll talk about conversation and the creativity that is involved with that. Then I'll go into my experiences with customer service and the sorts of creativity I see in those situations. Then I want to reflect briefly on my writing and how I associate it with creativity. Then I'll talk about empathy, and the importance of creativity and empathy. Then as a closing note I want to touch on my most serious concern: How society prevents us from being creative by saturating our minds with theory-theory.

Chomsky on Language and Creativity

So a little while I read a transcript of The Chomsky-Foucault Debate. A fascinating event in 1971 when Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky met in the Netherlands to debate the question of whether or not there was such a thing as human nature or not. Interesting debate. Foucault is skeptical of the idea of human nature, and regards it more as a form of knowledge that has been utilized at certain historical moments to regulate and create certain types of power relations. Chomsky, on the other hand, at the time at least, believed that there must be something to human nature. His work on linguistics was his primary point for this claim. He argued that because the human brain possesses a 'universal grammar' that all languages rely on, then there must be a sort of human nature that extends beyond language and into other realms of human life. I wish I were more familiar with this idea of universal grammar, and I imagine/hope I will be in the future, but basically the idea is that humans have a sort underlying set of rules that govern our use of language. Let me quote wikipedia cause they word it better: Universal Grammar asserts that the human brain "contains a limited set of rules for organizing language. In turn, there is an assumption that all languages have a common structural basis." But anyways, let me get back to Chomsky and creativity.

Chomsky believed that because all human brains have this underlying capacity for speech, it must be a part of our nature. It must be human nature to express ourselves with language. Chomsky says that it is amazing that children can hear all these words, never be explicitly taught, and can then learn to use and recombine all these words into entirely novel new phrases. He says that every single day we all use language to produce brand new sentences that we have never heard before. Basically, that the use of language is inherently creative. That human capacity for language implies that all human beings have a proclivity for creativity.

All language as creativity? I suppose hearing Chomsky say this was really interesting to me. It is the basis, roughly, for much of what I am about to say.

Creativity and Conversation

So if language inherently involves creativity, then how do we need to think of conversation? Well, let me just say, personally, that for a long time conversation baffled me. I was always struck with the fear of 'I don't know what to say', or 'I won't know what to say'. I seemed to have this idea that conversation had to be something that was planned, structured, made sense, or had to be thought about. But no, that is not the case it turns out. Conversation has to be spontaneous.

In other words, conversation cannot be planned or anticipated because it has to be creative. This was such a crucial lesson for me to learn. To understand that I don't need to know what I'm going to say when I enter a conversation. That I just need to be relaxed and go with the flow. All reminds me so much of Clausewitz, and becoming comfortable so that your intuition can guide your decision making. Conversation is nothing but lots of tiny intuitive decisions.

So it is always interesting to think about how I still think about impending conversations. I still run miniature simulations in my mind of what we might talk about, what we might do. I still build little scripts to try and help myself work. But the bottom line is that those scripts can never be relied on, they have to be used as fodder for creativity. You have to learn to use things like scripts or principles in creative ways at the actual moment of conversation. Sounds awfully zen, and awfully Clausewitz.

But these scripts that I build, that I bet other people build too, and that society builds for us, I know that they can sometimes get in the way. Thus my paralysis at conversation at earlier points in my life. I wanted to know how it would go. I had all these ideas of how it should go. All these ideas of what I should be talking about. We are just flooded with shoulds. and I think that these get in the way of creativity. Further, I identify this idea of shoulds with mental models and tacit theory. At the end of this I am going to have a section on this, on how we need to overcome mental models and tacit theory in order to be creative. Onward to customer service.

Creativity and Customer Service

I think my experience with customer service jobs has also prompted me to think about creativity. Customer service is just such a unique environment that it requires a certain amount of creativity. Especially when I interview and people ask me about what I do in customer service situations I realize how loose it has to be, how creative it has to be. People ask me, what do you do? And I have to tell them that I don't know exactly what I do. But that I deal with each person as an individual. I have a sort of basic set of strategies I can use, I can ask them if they have seen this product here before, when it was, how long ago it was, what it was like, etc.. But there is never any way to rigidly apply those strategies. You have to run with that person in the moment, you have to read their mood and handle it appropriately. Customer service takes sensitivity and creativity. I think I wrote about this in my blog on customer service. But there is no denying for me that it feels like a very dynamic and creative thing. I won't go on about this for too long. Basically customer service is a specific variety of conversation, and therefore still requires creativity.

Creativity and My Writing

My writing is also something that is very interesting to think about in terms of creativity. For one thing I am not writing fiction or poetry and so it is sometimes hard for me to say precisely how my writing is creative. But I think that my thoughts on my life, on other people's lives, on empathy, on lots of things is indeed creative. I think I have lots of ideas and I've never seen them presented in quite the way that I think of them. I definitely think my writing is creative.

And my friend commented that creativity can be a harsh mistress. And I thin he means how it comes in fits and bursts sometimes. Sometimes I want so badly to write something and it just won't come out. I want to tackle a problem and I just don't know how. Then all of a sudden BOOM I UNDERSTAND. And then I write it in a flash. It is a strange process. My aunt described it as going deeper into a tunnel in which you don't know what lies ahead. David Shields says that essaying is a verb, it is exploring through writing. I feel like I am essaying right now, almost all the time. Sometimes I have a vague sense of where I am going, but the tunnel has a lot of dark corners, if you catch my drift. Whenever I write I think I am exploring myself, exploring my thoughts on the world. I think that I am trying to write creative non-fiction, like Shields. But that is enough. On to empathy.

Creativity and Empathy

I am saving this one for second to last because I think it is so important. I think that empathy is the best way to really understand people. But I don't think it is easy. I don't think that it can happen as automatically as I would like. Mirror neurons exist, so I know that it does happen automatically with certain things, on those basic levels of facial expressions and emotions. But when it comes to more complex situations, when it comes to odd social situations, I think it requires a bit of creativity. I think that this applies both to empathizing with other people and empathizing with ourselves.

Here I want to talk about empathy with other people and the creativity it requires. I think it is very easy to run the standard scripts that let us blame people. I think it is easy to say that criminals are irrational fools, that people who are bad drivers are idiots who weren't paying attention, that people who disagree with us are ignorant, so on. I think that this is just far too lazy and inadequate. People don't just do things because they are idiots. People often have very difficult circumstances that compel them to do things. Life is hard, and we can't just act like people have every choose all the time. People struggle. Decisions are made with incomplete information and with very limited experience.

Perhaps those people driving poorly are having a heart attack, or a plain old really bad day. Maybe those criminals were born into a world that you haven't even taken the time to imagine. Maybe they have been told that crime and drugs was the way to go, maybe they have only seen people who have taken those paths. Maybe we need to take the time to creatively imagine what would compel someone to act that way. Maybe we shouldn't just write them off because we are lazy.

We need to start associating empathy with creativity.

This is something I've written a lot about. My essay of 6/13/10 and also my post of 7/11/10 I talked about creative empathy, and in particular my idea of 'forgiving everyone for everything'. At least conceptually, we should try and find a way that we can come to peace with other people's behavior. Yeah, sure it is upsetting. People do such terrible things. Do we just want to write them off as stupid? Or do we want to take the time to try, really try and imagine a situation that could be compelling that behavior. Choice is overrated. We need to grapple with determinism, at least on the level of empathy. Try to feel for these people that have done these things you don't like. Really try to imagine their situations. It is so hard to really do. But try to empathize with everyone. Don't just explain their behavior away with stupidity or ignorance. Try to feel for a life that is so radically different that it compels someone to do it.

How creative is your empathy? How far are you willing to take it? How far can your mind go outside of itself? How potent is your imagination? What kinds of things can you forgive? What kinds of things can you understand? What kind of pain are you incapable of empathizing with?

I have really been on this message for a few years now. That empathy requires creativity, and that we need to try and forgive everyone for everything. One major reason is that I want to forgive myself.

I have done things that I regret. Said mean things or done hurtful things. And yeah, I can write it off on stupidity, or something like that. But I think that is inadequate. I want to understand myself and why I did what I did. Let me give a mundane example. I was out with a friend, we were talking about how we slept in. He said that it would be easy for him at 6pm to say "Oh man why did I sleep in I should have gotten up and done other stuff." But the bottom line is that during that moment in bed he was tired, he didn't have anything to do, and he needed the sleep. Basically, it is easy to project views from the present moment onto your past self. It is so easy to think, OH WHY DIDN'T I JUST DO THAT! Well the bottom line is that you were in a totally different frame of mind. And I think time is better spent trying to understand that frame of mind that you had at the time. It is better to empathize with past actions than to judge them. Because if you take the time, if you exert the creative energy, turns out your past actions may be more intelligible than you think. Even if they were mistakes, even if they were painful, try to understand.

Interestingly, I think all of this is about historical thinking. It is about not letting present views interfere with your ability to understand past thought and action. I think that empathy is historical thinking. Collingwood said all knowledge of mind is historical. We need to learn to think historically so we can be more empathic people. We need to learn to think creatively about empathy. We need to learn to inhibit our perspective so we can more readily take on the perspectives of others. We need to forgive ourselves. We need to forgive others. We need to learn to be creative with our sense of empathy so that we can do this.

Lastly, I want to briefly explore some ways that I think we are discouraged from empathizing.

Tacit Theory and Mental Models as Impediments to Creativity

I think the main thing getting in the way of empathy is the plethora of 'shoulds' that we encounter in society. On television, in advertising, in books, in movies, in our daily lives, we are so often told how things should be. We see so many representations of social life that it is so easy to internalize those messages. I used to find myself paralyzed by the idea that my interactions wouldn't fit in with the norm, the shoulds, the scripts. These scripts are such bs though. Life never goes like movies, never goes like tv shows or books. Life is so much more dynamic than that. But to me it seems like these cultural representations that they come to substitute for our actual experience.

Oscar Wilde said that art doesn't imitate life, but that life imitates art. I think he meant that representation tends to structure our lives. Once we see something represented in a certain way it becomes difficult to shake it, it becomes a part of the way we think about life. I think in our culture we are saturated with representations of how life 'should' or can be. I think it can be hard to escape these representations and that people just sort of run these scripts, they run these theories, they run these models. Their minds revolve around these already worn paths, these already worn neural circuits. We need new scripts. We need new models.

Basically, I identify all this with some technical terms from philosophy of mind and the neurosciences. Philosophy of mind has a school called theory-theory, where philosophers believe that we understand people by using unconscious mental theories, we infer from these tacit theories. I believe that this does happen, but I believe our society has created rigid theories about bodies and races and interactions. I think people rely on these tacit theories too much and that we lose our creativity. We no longer have creative conversations because we just run the scripts. Well, there are tons of creative conversations going on out there, don't get me wrong. I just think we run the risk of being overrun by these tacit theories that we get from society. Another term is mental models. Neuroscientists believe that the brain models the world and uses these models to predict things and people. Same thing, we have models that are too rigid and we have to overcome them to be creative. We need to shake this idea that the world is the way we are told. The media has given us a distorted model, and distorted theories.

Anyways, I just think that creativity can be hard because we are saturated with representations of 'shoulds'. We don't explore new ways of thinking because we are so overrun with other ways of thinking. These scripts cant work in the real world.

The world of human affairs has to be handled by creative decision making. We need to be creative with language, creative with our conversations, with our jobs, with our writing, and most importantly with empathy. We need to look out for oversimplified representations of social interactions that encourage us to think reductively and uncreatively about life and people.

Perhaps this post is ranty. But I think creativity is all pervasive, and I think we need to recognize how our creativity is being stifled by social representations, and we need to take control and be more creative, all the time.

I also think that identity and creativity should have a close relationship. But I didn't think of that until later and don't want to add to this.

Oh! The Freedom! Notes From Seattle #6

So I have a sense of freedom right now because I managed to land a job as a barista. University of Washington's University Book Store has a cafe, and that cafe interviewed me and gave me a barista job. I told them I would take the job. I'm starting on September 7th.

It is also curious because I am waiting to hear from Elliott Bay Book Company as well. That one may be more desirable just because it is located in Capitol Hill, and I want to live in Capitol Hill. So it would be nice to live and work in the same neighborhood. But either way it doesn't matter if Elliott Bay takes me or not because I have this other job locked up. But I probably would take Elliott Bay if they offer me the job. I will just have to wait until Tuesday and see.

But the best part of this all is the freedom I now feel to read and write. I can read and write whatever I want now. Before I was offered this job I was still doing some reading and writing. I managed to finish my Society's Implicit War essays, I managed to finish some books, but I always felt a little guilty. I always felt like, 'man I shouldn't be wasting time on this I should be looking for a job'. But now I have a job lined up and I can do all the reading and writing I want. That is what I care the most about. I only want a job so I can do my own work whenever I want.

Also I went out with friends last night and had a great time. Just was excited to be out and almost employed and stuff. But man I spent too much money yesterday. I splurged on books and then ate out and just spent too much money. But oh well. I will start reigning that in, for sure. Need to. But also I will be working soon and can afford it right now. But still. Don't like seeing how much money I have spent. But whatever.

In any case, this is about my reading and writing. I bought three books that excite me: The Shallows, Reading in the Brain, and Virus of the Mind. All about culture and neuroplasticity. Good stuff.

And I am currently working on three writing projects. Three different problems/essays. One I accidentally published before I finished, and will be the first thing I finished. It is called On Creativity. I like having short titles, and creativity fascinates me. The next shorter one is on mindfulness and the fact that I still have to think about the past and the future. So how am I supposed to stay in the present moment if I have to think about other times? Frankly, I think simulation theory of mind has some nice tentative answers for me, so I'll be exploring that. Then the last one is a much larger project that is gonna be a real challenge. My pretentious title is 'The Genealogy of the Modern Mind'. I am trying to articulate some connections between history, theory of mind, and neuroplasticity. That is actually the subtitle. 'History, Theory of Mind, and Self-Directed Neuroplasticity'. I think it is gonna be really specifying the pragmatics of some of my ideas, especially this idea on intellectual insurgency that I just articulated at the end of my SIW essays. Anyways, I'm free to do all of this now. And I plan on doing it.

Today was Sunday: Notes From Seattle #5

So today was indeed Sunday. I slept a bit later then I would have liked. But my aunt told me that I was probably tired and needed the rest. My feet are starting to heal so that is good. I had some blisters from walking all over Seattle in bad shoes.

Yesterday I was taking a bus back home after hanging out with some friends and had an interesting experience. I got on a bus that I thought was going to be going further down the U-district that it actually did. Then it made a turn somewhere and ended up taking me into downtown Seattle. At first I had no idea what was going on. Thought it was going to take me to the bottom of the district. So I decided to stay on the bus and see what would happen. I thought it would reconnect with the U-district at some point, and then it didn't. So I had to get off and turn around and get going the other way. I made it home, but it took about an hour or sos of a diversion. A nice guy talked to me for a minute and explained to me which bus to get on, etc.. It all worked out no problem. But getting lost is perhaps mentally draining.

But the day before that was actually pretty pleasant. A nice day all around. What did I do? Well, I'm trying to recall. Oh yeah, thats right. I looked at yesterdays blog and remembered. I bought a few pairs of pants and other stuff.

After I did that, though, I met up with my friend and we ate some mediocre mexican food. Had a beer at happy hour. A pint of bud light for 2.50. Lol. Not the best beer, I found it funny for some reason. Not sure why. But I had a good time talking with my friend. We talked about interesting politics, China. He is more informed on some stuff than I am. So that was good.

Then we met up with our other friend and I had my first journey into Cowen park. Really pretty park, really nice park. It was nice to walk around it for a minute and check out the nice nature scenes.

Then after the park I decided to catch a bus. That was when my bus adventure went awry.

Then I hung out at home and went to sleep.

Today when I woke up the first thing I did was start working on my next essay that I am working on. It is really gonna be a challenge though. Really gonna push me hard to articulate some connections that I know exist between authors, but that I can't articulate yet. Tough stuff.

I also feel compelled to work on an essay that has been sitting around as just a draft for a while now. On mindfulness and time. I think I stumbled on some answers in my mind. But I also think that it is gonna be difficult. I need to think about it. I need to do other things. I don't know if I can produce a substantial essay right now. Feel tired. I don't mean right now as in tonight. But right now as in within the next couple days. Well, actually, I did write the two introductory paragraphs to this essay I'm calling 'The Genealogy of the Modern Mind: History, Theory of Mind, and Self-Directed Neuroplasiticity'. As usual, I am dealing with things that are far beyond me, and which I am in no way qualified to tackle. But so fucking what? Do I care? Nope.

It is a good exercise, and I think I made some interesting connections last night in my mind that I needed to make in order to write this essay. I had an epiphany of sorts. I use that word with a bit of self-consciousness, just because me and my aunt had a discussion about the word epiphany, its connotations, its etymology. But yeah. I have some major stuff to write on this genealogy of the mind business.

This essay on mindfulness will also be interesting too, but will be shorter, less elaborate. I think it is interesting because it was prompted by my own experience, but an acquaintances writing made me think of it. The basic problem is that mindfulness in general is about staying grounded in the present moment. Yet so much of life is about 1. reflecting on the past and 2. planning for the future. So if so much of life is about thinking about different times, then how is that compatible with mindfulness? Well, I think Collingwood and Croce (who I unfortunately haven't read) have some answers. Namely, that historical thinking (and perhaps therefore future thinking?) is always 'contemporary'. Meaning it is happening right now. Thought about the past is always happening in our present mind, just as thought about the future is also happening in our present mind. So perhaps mindfulness can be compatible with these things because we could still be mindful that our thoughts of the past and future are still occurring in the present. I think this makes sense, but I want to explore this at greater length.

But I don't want to write anymore right now. I want to get back on the job hunting wagon tomorrow. Over and out.

Rabble Rabble Rabble, and My Next Project?

So today was a pretty good day. I bought three pairs of pants. That is nice. Need some new pants so I can hopefully look good for my interview with the Elliott Bay Book Company. What a delightful job that would be. What a nice place it would be to work. Then I could get an apartment in Capitol Hill and live totally close to work and feel good about all that stuff.

But I am also in a sort of interesting frame of mind from having finished my 'Society's Implicit War' essays. In sum total all six essays total 143 pages. I am glad that I ended up publishing them serially. I think it helped me segment the work on them.

The whole project took about 2-3 months from reading Discipline & Punish to the writing of the essays. I read D&P from May to June. Then finished the outline on June 13th or so. Then finished the writing a few days ago. So it was about a month total of writing in fits and bursts. It was fascinating because it coincided with my move to Seattle. I'm not reeling from them as hard as I've reeled from some of my other large writing, like 4/30 and 6/13. But it is still something that I'll have to figure out how it sits in my mind exactly.

I am pleased to have reconnected my thinking with military history. Pleased that Foucault had such a strong interest in war at one point. I also finished reading the Society Must Be Defended lectures that he gave from 75-76, just before D&P was published. Gives me even more understanding of how it is that Foucault thought about war. Good stuff. War and politics. Politics and war. What the heck is up with those things? Hopefully I will continue to think about them.

I think so. I recently bought John Gray's Enlightenment's Wake. John Gray is an exciting thinker to me. I look forward to reading more stuff by him. Interesting to be exploring some political philosophy that is anti-liberal. Not that I believe it, but I def need to explore it.

But my next writing project, I think, is going to be an essay called 'The Genealogy of the Modern Mind'. In these SIW essays I was able to explore some interesting connections between Foucault's work and simulation theory of mind. Also, the element of neuroplasticity that I explored has some interesting bearing on this new essay. The general idea is to pick up with Foucault and Nietzsche and try to use history to expose precisely what is going on with us. But for me I see philosophy of mind as such a central thing. I also see history as a fundamental part of philosophy of mind. And based on all that I have read about neuroplasticity it seems like history would have to be a fundamental part of philosophy of mind. If brains are plastic then our brains are totally different from brains that existed in the past. So, it seems like philosophy of mind has to be an incomplete and practical project, just like Foucault's genealogy of the modern subject. Because the brain is plastic a philosophy or theory of mind has to be an open and continuous project that can never be predictive or prescriptive. Theory of mind, just like Foucault and Clausewitz's 'theories', must be considered a tool kit of sorts that can enable mindfulness. Yikes. This essay could be super potent. I need to note this stuff now in that in the works blog. ONWARDS.