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The Associative Universe
Any time your brain encounters novel signals from your nervous system it creates a learning moment. It does this by flash-freezing everything occurring during the learning moment: including emotional states, thought patterns, configurations of objects and actors, etc. It seems to store these things in what I’ve come to think of as symbolic keyword clusters. To quote Jacques Vallee, UFO researcher and computer scientist:
Time and space may be convenient notions for plotting the progress of a locomotive, but they are completely useless for locating information…. What modern computer scientists have now recognized is that ordering by time and space is the worst possible way to store data. In a large computer-based information system, no attempt is made to place related records in sequential physical locations. It is much more convenient to sprinkle the records throughout storage as they arrive, and to construct an algorithm for retrieval based on some type of keyword…..
If there is no time dimension as we usually assume there is, we may be traversing events by association. Modern computers retrieve information associatively. You “evoke” the desired records by using keywords, words of power: you request the intersection of “microwave” and “headache” and you find 20 articles you never suspected existed. Perhaps I had unconsciously posted such a request on some psychic bulletin board with the keyword “Melchizedek.” If we live in the associative universe of the software scientist rather than the sequential universe of the space-time physicist, then miracles are no longer irrational events.
Vallee’s description “explains” not only synchronicities but also deja vu… To give a more practical example: the other day I was walking along with a friend and we saw an empty banana peel on the ground. I immediately made the associative statement of how surreal it would be to see an old banana peel on the ground, but with an empty corncob inside of it.
It was only later that I realized the root of this association: on the street by my house an empty corncob has been laying by the sidewalk in an almost identical relative position when you walk by as the banana peel was vis a vis the passing observer.
So what my brain did was correlate the two instances together because of (1) the similarity of the two visual stimuli, and (2) the conceptual linkage between the two of Food, Discarded. These two events existed separately in space and time, but to the functioning of the brain that bears little importance. It instead made associative/symbolic linkages and hyper-linked the two moments into one surrealist meta-event.
This is, in essence, what is happening to you all the time. New stimuli are being hyper-linked to old stimuli to save computation power. When no existing stimuli matches the criteria, a new learning moment is created by flash-freezing all sensory input.
These flash-frozen moments then become the basis for new associative symbolic chains later on. Another simple practical example: a friend of mine is afraid of bees. Talking through it, he realized that the genesis of this fear lies in an event in his past: seeing a skinned bear which had been hunted and was now covered in bees. His brain fused the terror and trauma of discovery of the violent death state of the skinned bear with the spatially-temporally juxtaposed stimulus of the bees. Based on his experiences, it seems that the way through phobias is to uncover these original flash-frozen learning moments upon which later associative chains have been founded and to re-wire them consciously. In his case, we started with looking at dead bees on the ground, and having him become aware of his feeling reactions in a controlled safe environment. It’s not something you can do all at once, but have to do gradually daily.
Speaking of which, I will come back and develop this theme in greater detail over the coming days. There are a number of topics which interlock in an important way which I am trying to figure out the most useful and effective configuration to communicate with other people.
August 13th, 2007 at 1:37 am
[…] So where do irrational assumptions come from? I wrote about this earlier: they come from the organizational system applied by your brain whenever you are confronted with a novel learning moment. That is, when you encounter stimuli you haven’t encountered before. […]
August 14th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
Another great post Tim, you seem to be on a very fruitful train of thought at the moment. Looks like some of the Eastern texts that you have been looking at recently are starting to bear fruition.
Ideas of non attachment in some of the previous posts.
Hey just remember with the way of the Samurai stuff that it could all just be about those in power in Feudal japan giving young men a reason to die for the warlord/Emperor , therefore increasing his power. Like indoctrinating fundamentalist fighters and suicide bombers.
Like to see where your train of thought develops from this post onwards.
August 14th, 2007 at 7:38 pm
It could be, but it is not.
August 14th, 2007 at 8:22 pm
Yet this stuff was evoked for that reason to get the kamikaze and other Japanese fighters to take on suicide missions in WW2
August 14th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
Of course. But is a suicide run any less beautiful than the literature of the Samurai? No, both are amazing. To dedicate and give your life so completely and directly is an astonishing feat of human existence: to overcome all fears and passions and rush headlong into the fray of simply living!
August 14th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
I see your point, and at one level it certainly makes sense. I see that as an analogy for living, without and attachment to life itself it makes you as an individual very strong.
However i still have something inside that doesn’t agree with people being used as pawns to make rich powerful wankers even more rich and powerful, fueled by the blood of their programmed robots.
Making it beautiful and poetic (or noble or just) is just another way for them to get people to adopt the ideology.
August 14th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
That, I believe, was the essence of Nietzche’s argument against Christianity as a slave religion, used to keep them dumb and happy. By so looking into that question though, Nietzche opened himself to the core experience of Christ Superman.
Then he died in a gutter of syphilis. Just one of many ways to live one’s life, all equally valid. What’s the matter here is the appreciation of one’s own suffering and perception of injustice. These are right feelings to have. They make the mortal moral. The mortal becomes immoral when you remove the “T” of the cross, and immortal when you add it back in.
I’m not making any “point” and there are no levels. This isn’t a video game. This is life and it is happening to all of us all the time and right now. And you can choose how you want to experience it.
No, it smashes the idea that you need to be an individual. In self-mastery, you master the Self until it vanishes in smoke.
Stop. Look only at this statement. It doesn’t matter what you disagree with. It matters that you see you have something inside of you that doesn’t agree. Something is out of harmony. I hereby prescribe reading the Bagavad Gita all in one dose, and then read it again until you get it. I heard Gandhi used to read it in prison and it gave him strength. I can see why.
August 14th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
Tim, from the outset I must say that I am enjoying this more active mode of discussion that is going on here at the moment. Now back to business…..
Of course something is out of harmony, something is out of harmony in everybody, all of the time. You are a dynamic system. I agree that the most important thing is that people realize the elements that make them up, can identify them and then work out if they want to keep or reject that element.
I don’t see it as “best practice” to in hammer all of your internal states/programing into harmony…. Isn’t pain beautiful, Don’t u need friction to start a fire. I think there needs to be some element of pain and internal conflict in order to motivate people.
Life isn’t a video game, its all in how you perceive and react to events as they occur around. Its one moment after another.
Why does the self need to vanish into smoke.. who wins when the self vanishes. The self is the core of you. Believe me i have been down this road.
Self mastery is a fantastic thing, mastering anything for the sake of mastery gives untold synergistic benefits.
This is a point. Rewrite the sentence. Both the suicide run and the literature of the of the samurai are beautiful and amazing
August 14th, 2007 at 11:49 pm
This is an assumption.
This is an observable and more importantly actionable fact.
Pain is beautiful, but that doesn’t mean I want to feel it. I don’t *want* to get punched in the face. But when it happens to me as a result of the choices I have made (stepping into the boxing ring, etc), then I ought not to run from it. I played several chess games today where I tried to only attack and not concern myself with defense. I lost more quickly and learned more quickly.
Why?
No, it’s just one moment. And yes, I *am* trying to be difficult. It’s boxing. It’s chess. I am pushing you around the board, around the ring.
It does not “need” to…
Again, this is an assumption, not a fact. You can’t show me your “self”
What did the sign say to the traveler?
August 15th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
Yes but a workable one. If people where in harmony modern society would cease to exist as we know it. There would be no reason for people to buy things, strive for the notion of progress, numb themselves with entertainment. Look around, look inside yourself. There are new units of information with their own agendas being introduced into your mind space every day cajoling you into a disharmonious state. Advertising, religious texts, personal development, fiction.
This is the dynamic system that I was talking about, the fact that you are a conglomeration of competing mental entities, and if you look for the true self in there you can’t find it. It is observable and actionable, because once you understand it you understand yourself and others in a whole new light.
Here we go back to the ideas of Buddhism. The Buddha taught that suffering comes from craving and ignorance. Attachment to the world. There is suffering (pain) because you see things that you don’t have and you want them. Or you have an experience and you want to re-create it exactly so you try over and over again.
BUT.. how can you live in the modern world, be motivated to pursue goals that enrich you as a person, give you money that allows you to have some sort of social interaction with other human being etc.. if you don’t have this suffering. This craving is motivation. That is unless you are willing to give it all away.
How many “spiritual seekers” have wrestled with that one over the years.
The ignorance part is about not seeing the world as it really is.
Yes that’s cool. There should be more of this on every site, including this one. Let’s put on the gloves and get to some insight.
Got me on that one. I don’t think anyone can actually locate their self, if they have on at all. But i think that it is important for people to keep some level of differentiation in their personality, some sense of me-ness.
I’ll tell you what the sign said, the sign said “KEEP ON MOVING”
AND
“We are all trying to find truth in man made fantasies”