First of all, I consider existence in general (and by extension, my existence) to be a joy. Not that I think it's always pleasant, much less for everyone -- but certainly that I think there's very much worthwhile to do, think, perceive, and experience.
Life is an utterly precious thing.
Whenever I pause for a moment to consider what it means to be a person in reality, it is sometimes almost too awesome to bear.
Like I almost want to crawl under a blanket or table or something and let in little bits of it come in one micron at a time, through interlaced fingers.
I can do certain things: art, a bit of writing. I'm not bad at math. I've always loved science.
Other people I know can do different things, and I have no doubt those things hold as much joy and value for them as my preferred things do for me.
I don't understand first-hand what it's like to really enjoy baseball, for instance, but I would not begrudge someone else their love of it, or the associations it lights up in their brain.
Anyway, though, there's a fear I have. I don't know if I've ever put it into words before. But it's based in both (a) some things that have happened to me, and (b) some things I've seen happen to other people.
And that is basically the phenomenon where someone is very obviously (to me, at least) doing and/or saying things that speak very much to the validity of his/her experience of existence, but who is in turn being accused of emptiness.
There are some things I've come to be able to articulate.
But I couldn't always articulate these things.
And I wasn't any emptier then than I am now.
I've also seen other people, who perhaps aren't articulating certain things in ways easily recognized by their peers (or by anyone), but who nonetheless are very clearly responding to things around them and having inner experiences.
I am talking here about various different kinds of people: autistic, nonautistic. Verbose and taciturn. Old and young. Different people get thought of as empty for different reasons.
With me, it seems to (at least in some cases) be a matter of insufficient patience.
I know I am Real and not empty.
But there are people who've said: oh, tell us what you think. Communicate. Please. We'll be here if you need someone to listen.
Only they don't actually listen (or read).
Instead, they tell me to just tell them something verbally (instead of writing it).
Or they tell me they don't want to read something so long.
Or they don't respond at all.
I've read a lot of people's writing.
I regularly read a lot of people's writing.
Some conversations I'm okay stepping into, but others I'm not. Others I'm leery about because of the degree to which, even when I generally like and respect those involved, there's a tendency to want to shove people into categories that make them easy to dismiss.
This is not to say that everything has genuine substance. There are definitely some cases in which this isn't true. Advertising is a good place to find a whole lot of nothing: I mean, what does "Made With 100% Juice" actually tell anyone?
Also: some really destructive patterns I've come to recognize, and I try to avoid getting into altercations with people exhibiting them. There are also some things that bother, scare, or just plain repulse me ("pickup artistry" is one of these things; it makes my skin crawl).
But: I tend to think that, perhaps to a fault, people trying to communicate about certain subjects (especially those pertaining to figuring out how reality works) all have something to say.
If not with their words, with how they experience life. Which can't always be seen from the outside, especially not immediately.
Hence, I give a lot of people a lot of "benefit of the doubt".
Overall, when it doesn't seem like someone's trying to push a weird agenda I can recognize, I at least make an attempt to get to know over time what they might be getting at.
This has, more than once, put me in the bizarre position of seeing two people each accusing the other of "not saying anything"/"having nothing to say", when from where I sit, they're both saying something.
It may not be something I agree with, but it's definitely not nothing.
And frankly it worries me that this happens as often as it does.
I do have a lot of hope for the future and willingness to work toward a good future -- but I think that in order for a good future to actually come into being, we shouldn't be so quick to presume someone else is empty just because we can't understand what they're saying. Or to presume we do understand what they are saying and that there simply isn't anything there.
Because even though there are cases where people are just spouting fluff, I don't think that's the usual case. And I would much rather risk being wrong or looking silly than risk doing something that essentially works toward erasing someone.
20 comments:
Heh, that last part reminds me of certain heated exchanges on "Overcoming Bias".
What worries me is that smart people who should know better might be particularly quick to dismiss someone as "empty" only because the other person has a different way of comunicating things.
Overconfidence about your intellectual ability and pride are not good companions to an open mind.
Thanks Anne for another excellent post, insightful and clearly heartfelt.
I read all your posts and often feel an urge to respond out of affinity, but but usually realize there's very little I would challenge or add.
This particular post, however, rings so clearly, and applies so broadly, to so much of what passes for "intellectual discussion" on the Internet that I feel moved to respond.
It's easy to see that many posts on the Internet are expressions of the primal primate drive for social status -- dominance, challenge, demonstrations of loyalty to the in-group -- the same old chest-thumping, just dressed up and sent as text.
It's easy to see that some posts manifest mere mental masturbation, a pleasurable outlet for the poster perhaps, but contributing little to the larger community.
But what to make of a post that appears devoid of meaning, empty of content, despite obvious indications of intelligent structure at multiple levels?
Well, it's easy to say it has no content, and thereby preserve and protect the status quo, and that is often what happens. And sadly, it tends to end there, as nuance and subtlety are the first to go, especially within the severely constrained bandwidth of textual discourse on the Internet.
[I considered expanding on the foregoing, using some of the many examples at hand from the recent political campaign, but perhaps this
pointer suffices.]
But my key point is this:
Consider how common, and easy it is that we argue over the apparent meaning of a sample of another's words, when the real challenge, and opportunity, is in realizing that the words, although only probabilistic, indirect and partial observations of evidence, necessarily support a much more complex likelihood function representing the true nature of the other.
How common, and self-reinforcing it is, that we tend to take the easy way to increasing coherence by reducing our context of consideration, discarding that which apparently makes no sense.
How common, and comforting it is to seek security, when all we've ever had is potential for growth.
Thanks again, Anne, for your many thoughtful and authentic posts. I hope to see you at Convergence08 this weekend.
When I was younger, I used to spend a lot of time in bed mentally reviewing everything that happened that day, that had happened, and how it connected to my past and my feelings.
I felt very guilty that so much was happening and that I didn't properly acknowledge and think and feel about it.
Very thoughtful and interesting post - has got me thinking.
someday - if you have plenty of time (it is a long book) you might find the novel, 'Infinite Jest' (by David Foster Wallace) interesting. It touches some of the themes you explored in your post.
thanks again for posting your thoughts.
brainhealthhacks.com
Life is awesome. Sometimes I too feel like it is unbearably awesome. I think about how much I love Joe, M and my family and the thought is almost so painful. Or I experience something wonderful and I just melt. You know?
Karolina said:
Heh, that last part reminds me of certain heated exchanges on "Overcoming Bias".
I've been seeing stuff like that in multiple places, for years. And not even just on the Internet. It seems to be a pattern, and it's one that bothers me rather a lot. I mean, yes, there are some ideas/notions I refuse to entertain on principle (i.e., if someone starts telling me I need to read "The Bell Curve" so I can learn "the truth" about race, I am perfectly comfortable presuming that person's views to be idiotically racist) but those ideas/notions really are pretty few and far between.
What worries me is that smart people who should know better might be particularly quick to dismiss someone as "empty" only because the other person has a different way of comunicating things.
Yeah, exactly. But it's hard to even argue that because the other person will often start going on about how you're "just trying to be politically correct", or that you're claiming "all views are equally valid". Which simply isn't true, in either case. I've not yet figure out a way around that. :/
Overconfidence about your intellectual ability and pride are not good companions to an open mind.
Well, I am cautious about upholding "openmindedness" as a virtue, but to a point I definitely think this is true. It is hard, though, (I think) to get a realistic sense of one's own intellectual ability. I appreciate that, but I wish more people would think about how hard that is before moving toward possible overconfidence. Also, IMO, one of the biggest problems in certain intellectual circles right now is a kind of pervasive ignorance regarding privilege and its effects. E.g., I come across a considerable amount of writing by people who seem convinced that people who are very highly privileged (i.e., benefitting in many ways from advantages they were essentially born into) are actually successful primarily due to their own effort/intelligence.
And sure, for some that could be true, but I am really irritated by the sentiments I keep coming across that seem convinced that acknowledging privilege effects would be tantamount to presuming effort was meaningless. Whereas personally I don't see why different people's life situations couldn't be attributable to all kinds of things, both related and not related to individual effort. I know I (for instance) got through school partly on account of working hard.
But I also had a lot of advantages, including access to affortable public universities, access to public transit, some amount of accommodations for disability-related stuff, and parents who helped me out tremendously with planning and logistics while I was in school.
And all those factors sort of mixed together in ways that I'd be at a loss to separate out neatly.
The only thing I know is that if even one of those things hadn't existed, I might not have been able to finish college.
Heck, I know people who didn't finish college because of lack of certain kinds of support, or because they weren't as lucky as I was in certain areas -- NOT because they were somehow less ambitious or willing to try things. That wouldn't (and didn't) make their effort, or anyone's effort, meaningless or pointless, but it does indicate that effort is only a part of a much larger picture.
Jef said:
It's easy to see that many posts on the Internet are expressions of the primal primate drive for social status -- dominance, challenge, demonstrations of loyalty to the in-group -- the same old chest-thumping, just dressed up and sent as text.
Yep. Scary, isn't it?
But what to make of a post that appears devoid of meaning, empty of content, despite obvious indications of intelligent structure at multiple levels?
Well, it's easy to say it has no content, and thereby preserve and protect the status quo, and that is often what happens. And sadly, it tends to end there, as nuance and subtlety are the first to go, especially within the severely constrained bandwidth of textual discourse on the Internet.
The thing I've always tended to do is read a lot of what someone writes over a period of time. I've found that whatever the bandwidth limitations of individual writings, so long as a person can write (which is normally the case for people who participate in forums and mailing lists, etc.), a clearer picture of what they're about will come into focus once I've digested a lot of what they've written.
That doesn't mean I always eventually understand everyone -- there are some people whose writing I only understand about half the time, if that, and others whose stuff I pretty much go into knowing I'm going to need to read it 5 - 10 times before it starts to make sense. And there are people whose style I simply can't parse. But I don't presume that my inability to parse something gives me a pass to declare it content-void.
I will occasionally deem some things content-void -- there are some very "markety" types of writing that really do come across as basically empty, and designed to poke at particular buttons in people's brains. But usually I'm more apt to just call something wrong (or destructive) when I see that kind of thing than suggest there's nothing to it.
Consider how common, and easy it is that we argue over the apparent meaning of a sample of another's words, when the real challenge, and opportunity, is in realizing that the words, although only probabilistic, indirect and partial observations of evidence, necessarily support a much more complex likelihood function representing the true nature of the other.
OK, I did have to read that several times but it does make sense to me. I'm often frustrated with the way people treat words as if they were solid objects like rocks, for which the goal is figuring out what another person's pile of rocks empirically looks like. When in fact, the context is SO important, and individual quirks and internal variables so influential as to what words actually come out. This is not to say that words cannot have relatively concrete meanings -- but it is to say that people aren't best understood by figuring on some perfect lexicon you can find somewhere and compare their statements to.
I hope to see you at Convergence08 this weekend.
I'm not planning on attending Convergence08, actually. Lately I've really just needed weekends for recharging my brain from (and for) work, and while that means I might still be pretty lively online, I'm sort of taking a break for a while from anything conferencey until things settle down a bit.
outlawpoet said:
When I was younger, I used to spend a lot of time in bed mentally reviewing everything that happened that day, that had happened, and how it connected to my past and my feelings.
Heck I still do that a lot. Always difficult to shut the brain off at night.
I felt very guilty that so much was happening and that I didn't properly acknowledge and think and feel about it.
Oh yeah. That's sort of one of my weird motivations for wanting extended longevity -- more time to process reality!
Ward: Thanks for the book recommendation, and you're welcome. This post sort of occurred to me when I was really sleepy last night so I am surprised it came out as coherent as it (apparently) did.
I mean, yes, there are some ideas/notions I refuse to entertain on principle
Unfortunately, reality is under no obligation to conform to your principles, and this attitude can be expected to lead to false beliefs. Not that I agree with The Bell Curve in particular (nor do I know more than a trivial amount about it), but if its arguments were true, why shouldn't you believe them to be true?
Marla said:
Life is awesome. Sometimes I too feel like it is unbearably awesome. I think about how much I love Joe, M and my family and the thought is almost so painful. Or I experience something wonderful and I just melt. You know?
Yes, I do know! To quote Joanna Newsom (a singer/harpist I like a lot but who definitely tends to polarize people along the "wow that's beautiful" and "oh lord my ears!" lines), I am quite familiar with the sense of being "dumbstruck with the sweetness of being." :D
I suspect that underconfidence in one's own intellectual ability can also lead to closed-mindedness, in the form of too rapidly dismissing strong but complex arguments for beliefs that are rejected by most people or experts.
outlawpoet: I frequently find that feeling paralyzing - it produces a sense of obligation to read every article on the front page of Google News, or whatever. Does anyone else have difficulty with this?
Anne said: I mean, yes, there are some ideas/notions I refuse to entertain on principle
Nick Tarleton said:
Unfortunately, reality is under no obligation to conform to your principles, and this attitude can be expected to lead to false beliefs. Not that I agree with The Bell Curve in particular (nor do I know more than a trivial amount about it), but if its arguments were true, why shouldn't you believe them to be true?
Oh geez. Looks like a bit of poor vocabulary choice on my part. When I said "on principle", I did not mean "I plan to believe this regardless of what the evidence says". But I realize how it could have been taken that way, and I don't fault you for your caveat.
What I did mean was, I've done enough reading and research, and seen enough stuff in real life, to have a certain (high) degree of confidence that some notions are too flawed and based on unwarranted premises to bother taking seriously. I put "scientific racism" (or its current repackaging under the term "race realism") under the same heading as I put things like Young Earth Creationism, solipsism, and "what if we're all just brains in jars?" scenarios.
In other words, while I do tend to study things in pretty fine-grained detail before making judgments about them, I also employ what Carl Sagan referred to as my "baloney detection kit". I've developed particular critical thinking skills over time, and I've also got some built-in tools for seeing assumptions a lot of people miss. So in addition to just taking in information, I use certain cognitive faculties to determine (sometimes, when it comes to specific subjects or patterns) that I am probably right in dismissing a particular notion I come across.
But: I realize that that probably didn't come through via the phrase "in principle". So, sorry about that.
Nick Tarleton said:
I frequently find that feeling paralyzing - it produces a sense of obligation to read every article on the front page of Google News, or whatever. Does anyone else have difficulty with this?
Yep. It's almost...crushing at times the sheer amount of stuff I know is going on. I am always trying to balance between working on stuff I am interested in/good at, with keeping in mind that the world is a lot bigger than me and my projects, and that so much is actually inter-dependent. Weirdly enough, it was getting interested in longevity that led to my actually getting interested in other issues (like poverty, social justice, etc.) -- I found that the more I looked, the more stuff I found that was in some way connected to what I was trying to do, and realized that even if I wanted to focus in particular on certain projects I really had to acknowledge other stuff going on as well.
But it's still kind of paralyzing, as you say.
this is very interesting =) I enjoyed reading this.
> > . . . [I]t produces a sense of obligation to
> > read every article on the front page of
> > Google News, or whatever. Does anyone
> > else have difficulty with this?
>
> Yep. It's almost...crushing at times the
> sheer amount of stuff I know is going on.
I, on the other hand, am (perhaps irresponsibly) happy to blow off most of what's going on, most of the time.
One delightful difference between now and once upon a time (pre-Web, anyway) is that lots of things are **archived** for easy access whenever one is inclined to get around to them. Movies, TV shows, and yes, newspaper and magazine articles.
When I was growing up, life was much more synchronous -- you had to keep up with what was happening **now**, grab it when you had the chance. If you wanted to see Star Trek, you tuned in when it was on. Or you waited for the re-run next summer. Or you simply missed it (presumably forever). Same with movies, newspaper articles, magazines, SF paperbacks. (You could see old newspaper or magazine articles on microfilm if you happened to have access to a good university library, but that was pretty exotic.)
What a luxury to have any out-of-print book almost instantly accessible via Amazon, or almost any TV series on You Tube (or on DVD -- available, again, via Amazon). Not to mention that the kind of information instantly available via Wikipedia might once have necessitated a (quite possibly fruitless) trip to a specialized library.
I take full advantage of the perks of an asynchronous life! (And I don't even have a TiVO. Well, I sort of do -- I have an OnAir GT USB box to watch HDTV on one of my PCs, and I could use the digital video recorder software that comes with that, but I've never bothered.)
It's somewhat hard even for me to recreate the feeling of what life was like when, for example, _The Fellowship of the Ring_ came out in the American Ace paperback edition in 1964, and it was a **major project** to find a library somewhere (in whatever cities one [or one's father] had access to) to maybe get a peek at the original hardcover edition without having to wait for the rest of the trilogy in paperback. (That hope came to nothing -- it was long out of print, nobody had it, nobody had even **heard** of it.)
That kind of world is probably simply unimaginable to someone of, say, Anne's generation.
That's odd, because I am from Anne's generation and everything you write about how things used to work makes sense to me. That's how things were until I was almost an adult. I think you might be putting the prevalence of this instantly-accessible stuff a little earlier than it actually happened.
ballastexistenz said: ...everything you [jimf] write about how things used to work makes sense to me. That's how things were until I was almost an adult.
Same here actually. The amount of information I have access to now, and the speed with which I can access it, is astronomical now as compared to when I was growing up. When I was a child and teenager I spent a lot of time in libraries and that was my main means of getting information about the world outside my local area, and about various subjects of interest. I even used those big microfilm/microfiche machines when I was in high school to access old magazine and newspaper articles.
It wasn't until I was around 19 that I had something resembling semi-regular Internet access. And that was also about the same time when it started to dawn on me just how big the world was.
AnneC wrote:
> The amount of information I have access to
> now, and the speed with which I can
> access it, is astronomical now as
> compared to when I was growing up.
You know, there's another thing connected with all this -- the **isolation** we all experienced in the pre-Web days. This was not an altogether bad thing -- it gave one a strong sense of the uniqueness of one's own tastes.
When I discovered Tolkien, for example (though the fact that _Fellowship_ was in the paperback stand at the local supermarket in the summer of '65 must have meant that **somebody** else in the neighborhood must also have been reading it) I was, for many years, the only person I knew who knew about him. It was a big deal to me when, four years later, a youngish teacher in my high school mentioned that she was also a fan, and introduced me to the existence of the Tolkien Society of America.
Similarly with Star Trek -- I didn't know a lot of Star Trek fans back then.
These two cultural icons are so ubiquitous nowadays, with a whole universe of fandom a mouse-click away, that it seems almost inconceivable that one could spend years **not knowing** anybody else who liked those things. But that's the way it was.
There were other things -- I remember one Saturday afternoon sometime around 1962 catching, quite by accident (on our black-and-white TV), a chunk of the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet. I was instantly hooked, of course, though I didn't get to see the end because my father soon came in and pre-empted the TV set (the only one in the house) for a ballgame he wanted to watch. I'd never heard of that movie, and I was extremely excited to encounter a Bantam paperback novelization of it at the home of a 7th-grade friend: fortunately, he was willing to lend me the book, which I devoured. I didn't get to see any more of the movie until years later, when it was on TV again one weekend, and **that** viewing was almost cancelled because I was dragged along that day to visit an aunt and uncle. My parents sternly warned me **not** to expect to be able to monopolize the TV set there, though I did anyway of course, and was able to see a bit more of the movie that time (though still not the whole thing, as I recall).
There's another thing that kids did back when I was one, in the days when seeing a movie or TV show one wanted to see was catch-as-catch-can -- something I suspect may be a bit of a lost art. If you missed a show you wanted to see, it was nice to know somebody who had seen it and was capable of telling you the story skillfully enough to be an at least minimally satisfying substitute. You expected your amateur minstrel to take the time to make the telling good, and not to skip over anything! (I can just imagine what the response to such a request would be these days -- "hey, whatsa matter, you've never heard of YouTube?"). I can still remember one of the guys in the neighborhood performing this service for me after I missed catching the 1960 The Time Machine at the local theater. He kind of swallowed his L's, so "Morlocks" came out more like "Mowwocks". They come out at night, you know, those Mowwocks.
I dunno. I wouldn't want to go back to that world, but I am conscious that something was lost in spite of all that was gained.
Joy of existence often requires being empty.
Consider the immediate states, such as gazing deeply into a Beloved's eyes, or something of transcendent beauty, such as a truly beautiful sunrise or sunset.
I love these words by Shakespeare in "Much Ado About Nothing": Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy if I could say how much.
One of the clearest symptoms of such a state is ineffability. When words give way to silence, the threshold of ec stasis is about to be crossed.
Other poets and musicians which bring about such state for me are Rumi, Kabir and Mahler.
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