Explanation of Explanation
What is the role of thought? Why do we do it?
Of course, that's an impossibly general and loaded question, and one that can be answered in innumerable ways from differing points of view. The fact of that multiplicity in itself is worthy of contemplation.
Let me enumerate some reasons we think. We think in order to:
1) Solve problems, figure stuff out, get things done, gain an advantage. Do engineering.
2) Communicate. Share information.
3) Lay out options and choose between them.
4) Apply memories, instincts, intuitions, and explanations as templates in planning, predicting, anticipating — to project ourselves into possible futures and rehearse them.
5) Project aspects of reality into abstracted virtual landscapes where simulations can be run, logical and quasilogical rules can be applied, so we can project the results back onto the world.
6) Produce models
7) Churn out a randomized stream of consciousness to create serendipity. That is, to imagine, to create, to test new metaphors.
...
It's fun to try to add more reasons to the list, and to look at ways in which the different versions overlap with each other or account for each other's deficiencies. On the other hand, it is valuable as always to keep in mind that we don't really think for a reason or a set of reasons; we just think. The world is such that thinking happens. To go too far into some sort of deterministic causation here would be tantamount to confusing the map for the territory. Anyway, I have my own two pet roles for thought that are very general and can be applied broadly and complementarily.
We think in order to:
A) Explain, describe, express, understand, justify, sort out — to process experience.
B) Maintain ourselves and expand our influence over others (and ourselves).
The words explain, describe, and express have a special significance in the Joel Nanni universe. It's not unusual for amateur scholars/crackpots such as myself to look to the distant past, to the originators of language, for insights into the deep meaning of their words — meanings whose metaphorical power no longer have any punch — dead metaphors. In that spirit, I have tried to conjure up what those earlier English or Latin or proto Indo-European speakers had in mind when inventing or borrowing the three words above.
And, to me, they all suggest a single metaphor or insight at work in our attempts to process our experience. An important and largely ignored metaphor, I think. They all refer to the idea of undoing the effect that the world has had on us and our state of consciousness.
Picture a self as a bubble or balloon dividing the world into an interior and an exterior. The surface of our experience bubble — our homeostatic steady-state — is made bumpy by events that pelt it from the outside, and there is some sort of imperative to smooth it out, settle it down.
[Is this imperative derived from the laws of physics or from the nature of consciousness? I don't know, both? Perhaps physics is consciousness from the outside looking in. I definitely want to encourge people to think that consciousness and the supposed laws of physics are intimately tied. Behavior is the key word here.]
Ex-plain means to make flat
De-scribe means to unwrite
Ex-press means to take away that which presses upon us or has been impressed upon us.
I sometimes refer to this constellation of amateur etymologies (which, it seems, sharply disagree with the standard etymologies) as the Smoothing Out metaphor. For any self, the process of explaining, describing, and expressing happens automatically. To be conscious of something is to be engaged in this process; that's what the stream of consciousness is. [We can't help engaging in these processes, unless perhaps we are experienced meditators who can bring them to a halt.] According to the bubble model of being I'm referring to here, we have no awareness of an event until it disturbs the bubble (how could we have?) and no conscious experience of it until we begin ex-plaining it -- undoing, negating, or canceling it. That is, it isn't the intrusive event itself that we know about but our reaction to or explanation of its effect on us. Thus, what we know is a sort of reaction or undoing or opposite of what's actually out there — if anything is out there beyond the bubble. This is the epitome of the map-territory distinction — if there is a territory. We are locked in a mental space twice removed from the thing we are contemplating -- the undoing of the effect of the territory. The territory makes a mark on the self as a butt makes an impression on a seat cushion, we automatically endeavor to undo that impression, and then finally see not the butt itself but the image afforded by the explanation of that undoing.
[BTW, its of fundamental importance where consciousness appears in the sequence. I've just hypothesized that the order is 1) disturbance, 2) brute awareness of it or sensitivity to it, 3) Explanation/description/expression of it, 4) consciousness of it. This marks explanation as automatic rather than conscious. Instead, one could easily identify consciousness with sensitivity, and make our explanations more under our conscious control. I'm on the fence. Which doesn't bother me because the sequencing is post hoc -- it all arises mutually/simultaneously]
In addition to these three smoothing-out words, several other important descriptors have a similar orientation or evoke a similar feeling of smoothing out: Justify can mean make even or true (as in justifying a line of text), and true can mean aligned, as in truing a wheel. Justice, fairness, truth all connote evenness and bringing things into balance — Justice, after all, holds a set of scales in her hand. A true statement or a just decision is the one that successfully unruffles the feathers and quiets the inner storm. That is, all of the above words have a kinesthetic quality of smoothing or flattening, of calm, ground state, inertia, equilibrium.
Thus, the language is suggesting (and I am seconding the notion) that Thinking has a homeostatic function and works by canceling out the effect of the outside world. This seems kind of obvious to me, but I can't seem to get anyone else very excited about it. Thinking helps bring us back into balance after a disturbance. It's self-soothing behavior. Explaining is a kind of healing — or healing is a kind of explanation.
Questions and mysteries and annoyances and challenges-to-beliefs and challenges-to-well-being and unsatisfactory exchanges of the day and injuries and events of all kinds unbalance us; they set up vibrations in our bubble like poking a balloon with a stick would. Disturbances are... disturbing and must be dealt with. Answers and explanations and descriptions and expressions and justifications and getting-even and settling scores restore balance, unless they fail to. The perfect explanation for an event, from this particular and passive perspective, would be one which returns us to our previous equilibrium (or, to be more accurate, steady-state) with no side effects for the bubble and no effects on the outside world. Ex-plained and no more. No collateral damage or metal fatigue. But the more realistic scenario, since our explanations are imperfect, is that the new equilibrium accommodates something of the disruptive influence [This is as good a way as any to define memory. Traces of history, of disturbances to the bubble.], and has the side effect of pushing our explanations out into the world where they can wreak havoc of their own on other people's bubbles — as well as our own ultimately. By this latter part, I mean that the action we take to smooth out the bubble, being imperfect, leaves over a little vibration of its own, and that goes out into the universe. More concretely, I might explain to myself the unhappy event of losing my job (the disturbance) by blaming the immigrants (the ex-planation), and hate groups are spawned (the side-effect).
An eye for an eye... is a primitive but excellent way to undo a civil wrong, an equal and opposite reaction.
If the people who created the words explain, describe, express, justify, etc. saw mentation in this way, why have we now lost the sense of our mental activity as smoothing out our experience? Is it because we have been seduced by the success of our ex-planations so that we have begun to take them for something real rather than something metaphorical and instrumental only? Have they become the reality — so it's silly to think of them as un-anything? Are we confusing the map with the territory? Yup, yes, and mm-hmm. We're clinging to the illusion that our perceptions of reality are reality. In particular, the successes of mechanistic scientific thinking have convinced us that our perfect and/or perfectible maps are equivalent to the territory, so the undoing aspect of our thoughts is irrelevant. The earlier view has been superceded by a better one... or not. As our worlds become increasingly "virtual," another layer is being created between us and the territory so that in the course of time this illusion, by my lights, will become harder and harder to see through.
So, taking the smoothing out metaphor seriously changes completely the status of theories and thoughts and explanations. It's not about getting real; it's about getting even. This new view promotes a sort of Kuhnian perspective. What works is all there is to the real truth. Different ideas may work best under different conditions, and the possibility exists that different, even mutually exclusive truths might work equally well. Also what smoothes out well for one person may work more poorly for another. Duh! And what works today may work less well tomorrow. This is relativism is spades! We are free to pick the general disposition and moral stance that inform our version of truth, that undoes what disturbs us. Well, this may be going a bit too far. I don't entirely pick how I feel about things: I don't decide what disturbs me.
Here's a brief mathematical detour that tries to tie all of the above to Fourier analysis. There are more detailed versions of this elsewhere in my essays. For the sake of my story, think of a graph — an undulating magnitude sketched out as a curve on a piece of paper— as the trace left by events, the scribing that our minds must de-scribe, the disturbance on the surface of our bubble. The graph might be thought of as the cross-section of the disturbed bubble. Our task as de-scribers is to bring the graph back down to a disturbance-free horizontal line — y=0. We want to undo as much of the graph as we can by pushing back. If this trace has been created by a regular and lawlike world, there are bound to be patterns to the scribble, patterns that correspond to those laws or somehow encode them. Possessors of knowledge about said laws will have the key to de-scribe or cancel it out it best. This is how it ought to work anyway. There ought to be a one-to-one relationship between the lawlike squiggles and a correct idea of what caused them. Our specialized hammers for whacking out the dents will be precise and do a perfect job, with no side effects, no residual dents, no metal fatigue. That's a good reason to try to figure out those laws of nature.
Here, however, is the surprising mathematical truth. You don't need to know the actual causes of the disturbance to cancel them out beautifully! In general terms (that mathematicians will hate), Fourier's Theorem says that we can approach that perfection of de-scription — y = 0 — without any knowledge of the real laws. We have been given an all-purpose sledgehammer to knock out all dents! Any scribble at all is a simple and easy-to-determine sum of simple sine waves. As long as we understand waves, make excellent measurements, and apply that knowledge with diligence, we can de-scribe anything to any desired degree of perfection (at least within a finite area of applicability).
Step 1: find a sine wave — the so-called fundamental — whose subtraction will leave the graph closest to y=0. Subtract it. We now have a new graph closer to the flat y=0. Step 2: look for a new sine wave of higher frequency but smaller amplitude that does the best job of matching whatever's left. We are guaranteed that this process — carried out in a way proscribed by the theorem — will achieve y=0 in the limit. This is no pie-in-the-sky mathematics, by the way. This one-curve-fits-all is the basis for digital recording, data compression, noise-canceling headphones, all sorts of engineering advances. Since Fourier's time, we've developed other handy curves/hammers — little bell curve blips used to decompose graphs in wavelet theory, etc. It's somewhat important to my later conclusions that there are many, many such all-purpose techniques to undo that graph.
If one buys my de-scription model of consciousness, then the epistemological implications of Fourier's Theorem are HUGE! Perfectly good explanations don't need to reflect anything absolute about that which they are trying to explain.
To review,
1) Events in the greater world or even inside me impinge on my homeostatic bubble, leaving it disturbed, de-formed, and changed.
2) The change signals me to find and implement a wave or series of waves (qua ex-planations) that cancel the change out. Our newly formed image of the outside world is this combination of waves. We are freer to choose between different explanations than one might at first imagine.
3) The implemented wave is my outgoing message to the world which sooner or later impinges on your bubble, and the beat goes on.
In practice, humans can't or don't tend to apply many layers of "overtones" (secondary, tertiary waves) to the fundamental wave, so there's plenty of leftover ripples. In other words, we don't often manage to bring much subtlety to our explanations. I for one am easily confused, so I keep it simple. What I try to do instead of actually dealing with the subtle debris left by my incomplete explanations is remind myself that the debris is still there. That debris also leads to that annoyingly unending stream of consciousness that tries to deal with it — the unresolved issues of the unconscious mind. It's unconscious because it's unexplained, not the other way around. This awareness of the incompleteness of my de-scriptions leads to a degree of self-doubt and skepticism, which of course has both positive and negative aspects. Concerns for another essay.
We all know people who wield a sledgehammer (the wave in my Fourier metaphor)in de-scribing and ex-plaining the things they experience around them -- in terms of, for example, rich people, or poor people, or human nature, or foreigners, or sex drives, Oedipal complexes, genes, Marxian dialectic, clinging, science, universal love, football, God's will, computers, the invisible hand of self-interest, big government, big corporations, the conspiracy of assholes. We all have our own explanatory predilections. The only thing that gives us the right to complain about someone else's Fourier sledgehammers is if 1) scribing remains after they apply theirs and/or 2) there's evidence of side-effects, collateral damage, metal fatigue, a wake, a mess for everyone else to clean up. Well, that's actually plenty to complain about, isn't it.
So what does this Fourier metaphor say about the territory, the real stuff that scribes our graphs in the first place? Are these territories really all about sine waves or Gaussian curves? Are they really about anything (or everything)? There's literally no way of knowing, since knowing, I suspect, is based on nothing but our ability to assess the success of our explanation in smoothing things out and waves or blips will be successful.
These cancellation techniques utilize stock objects like sine waves or Gaussian curves rather than anything directly related to the processes causing the bumps, so does that mean anything about our explanations, aside from their two layers of distance from the impinging outside world? Yes. It points to the ultimate disconnect between maps and territories. Our explanations are fundamentally "made of" stock objects, metaphors, etc. that bear no necessary relationship to that which actually is impinging on our experience bubbles. What's an enlightened philosopher to do? In this particular light, there are a couple of options. 1) Tailor one's explanations to help sledgehammer the world into a more commodious form — that matches one's pre-existing (and relative) idea of the good. 2) Tailor one's explanations to minimize the side effects — use smaller hammers. This latter is the only objective(?) way to judge between various explanations — at least from the yin point of view.
But of course it's okay to have an influence on the world, right? Do I dare to eat a peach, to have an impact on the rest of existence? If I do dare, then I must be willing to face the consequence of acting in the world through my explanations, descriptions, and expressions.
The Other Half of the Story
This version of the MT relationship (which I refer to as the Smoothing Out Metaphor or, sometimes, the Allegory of the Café) puts homeostasis or maintenance in the foreground and indicates that explanations are strictly reactive. My perceived world is one big canceled wave. We further the interests of the self by preserving the self by canceling out the outside world. The effect of these explanations on the outside world is all side effect. All of the foregoing is describing a very yin world. However, there is a corresponding yang version that reverses the orientation, puts those outside effects in the foreground and homeostasis in the background — i.e., as the influence of the self on the self. This complementary version is closer to the modern and scientific view of how things work. Apparently I like making up silly names for these things. I call this yang version Be Like Me. The self desires to be recognized, expand it's influence, reproduce itself, aggrandize itself, take over the world, become corrupted by power. Here the self is more beacon than bubble. We aren't passive reactors; we're wolves on hilltops howling at the Moon, or teenagers perpetually taking selfies. "Here I am! Check me out. Be like me! Succumb to my will! Don't mess with me! I'm establishing my brand. Make way. Like my post. Like me!" This version furthers the interests of the self by creating disturbances to the bubbles of others. As one pushes one's agenda, there are new sorts of disturbances to the bubble (self-caused, internally caused) that need to be dealt with.
A) Be Like Me: Influencing you to be like me has the side-effect of maintaining the self and fighting off changes or challenges to the self. The expression of will also engenders self-preservation.
B) Smoothing Out: Canceling influence coming from the outside has the side-effect of influencing the outside world (through sledgehammer imperfection). The expression of self-preservation, self-maintenance also engenders influence on the world.
My Claim: A and B are alternative descriptions (yang and yin) of the same thing. This will be a new and confusing idea to many people. How can two seemingly opposite descriptions with opposite assumptions and orientations describe the same phenomena and somehow achieve a kind of mathematical equivalence? This is a big old ball of wax for me, but I will touch on it only briefly here. If, as suggested above, there are no correct maps for the territory, only somewhat arbitrary sledgehammer maps based on our various predispositions, then, from an epistemological point of view, possibilities really open up. We are limited to imperfection and ignorance, but at least we are free to choose. We can choose among many interpretations of truth even if we are all working from an agreed upon collection of measurements or facts. Because of my own predispositions, I have wanted to preserve some sort of ultimate version of truth, and here's what I've managed: the set of all possible maps consistent with a set of facts circumscribe (rather than epitomize) the territory. Further, I think I have a way to organize and present this infinite set in an instructive and possibly even useful way (see the Both and Neither diagram or H-Fractal). What I call Assumption Switching is the key to passing between equivalent maps (see The Switches).
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Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly
Man got to ask himself why, why why
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land
Man got to tell himself he understand
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Postscripts
In the world of mathematics and science there are two kinds of quantities —scalars and vectors. When we measure force, we get a number (like 20 pounds) and a direction (like down) — it's a directed quantity. The number is meaningless (or at least ambiguous) without the direction. The directional quality especially comes into play when trying to combine various forces and arrive at a net result. 2 + 2 might equal 1 (4 being the upper limit). A measurement of energy, on the other hand, is just a number (like 3 kilowatt-hours) — it's just a lump. You can combine various types and amounts of energy without regard to form or direction (2 + 2 is always 4). Force is akin to energy — where there's the smoke of force, there's the fire of energy. Force is like directed energy, energy with a purpose, energy put to use.
I claim that information is like energy in this way — a scalar. What is the equivalent of force here? What, if anything, is like directed information. Metaphorically at least, what we're talking about is influence or persuasive information. Information that pushes us in a particular direction or toward a particular decision, that expresses the intentionality of the sender, that can cancel influence of an opposite kind (2 + 2 can equal zero). Energy is to force as information is to influence. Suppose you pick up a book on investing. You might think of it as filled with information, but if something you read in it influences you to buy a particular stock which makes money...or inspires you to blow up the World Trade Center.... Information becomes influence in minds and probably in other places as well.
I would suggest that influence is as fundamental as information, as force and energy are equally fundamental, but it is much harder to bring the information-influence pair into science since intentions-- the directional aspect of influence -- probably aren't directly measurable. A bit of influence is itself made of information but it doesn't equal its information. It has a direction. Information acting on agents. Okay, the world consists of beings and influence, in no particular order. Beings produce influence (in order to affect other beings) and influence makes beings (how?)
I have often marveled at the way zero-energy information can set in motion energetic events. You read a book on engineering (not much energy involved in the transaction, vanishingly little) which inspires you to build rockets that go to the moon, etc. Information can become influence at any time, inside a mind or even not — think of the market threshold that automatically triggers computer programs to sell stocks when it is surpassed, causing a cascade of events culminating in global depression. In any event, there's amazing interplay between information and energy, between influence and force, a kind of complementarity.
Mental energy isn't energetic per se at all. It's about marshaling information to apply influence. See my notes on physical exercise versus mental exercise, physical injury and healing and psychical injury and healing. Information/influence on the inside reflects energy/force on the outside. Consciousness is what the world is like from the inside. Correlates abound
You make a prototype to make a mold to make multiple copies. Interiority is the "dual" of exteriority. An idea or perception about an exterior object is in a way the opposite of the object, it's orthogonal to it, it's everything but it, it's the negative inverse — x=-1/x, solve for x. The map is to the territory as the mold is to the prototype. And with the same purpose, more or less — to make copies. In-formation, in-deed!
imagine a dog in middle of a suburban backyard. It barks. It's saying:
I am here
I don't fear you
Fear me!
This is mine
If you're within the sound of my voice, know that I claim this land for England!
Is anyone there?
Be like me
Imagine a teenager in the middle of a suburban mall. He takes a selfie and posts it to Instagram: He's saying:
I am here
I'm working on my brand
I'm the best me there is
Fear me, follow me
If you're anywhere on Earth, know that I claim this planet for me!
Is anyone there?
Like my image, like me, be like me