Cereal Update

Rice Chex are downhill, but Corn Chex are absolutely killing it. So corny!

Subject Time is NOT Time!

Yesterday, I wrote about a quandry:

When I listen to an actual piano smash, and pick out, say, "Ode to Joy", that happens over time. I can effortlessly speed it up or slow it down (which I suspect is a clue!), but the experience doesn't download instantly; it plays out internally over time, just as if the notes were individually played rather than tuned/framed. And if time exists, then change does happen, which unravels the whole observation and re-burdens us with the kludge that is time. It's a problem!

Can subjective shifts be construed as taking place outside time? Is time necessarily object-related? I suspect I need real math and physics to pin this down (or, perhaps, another few years stewing on the issue).

Time passes while you're thinking, for sure. Cognition is a physical process, involving chemical reactions and energy. But perceptual framing happens behind cognition. It's deeper. There's no judgement or calculation or tabulation or taxonomy involved. It's an utterly neutral shifting of the focus of attention. Does it happen in time?

I was just being dumb (it happens a lot).

Perceptual framing is instant. It can expand from microbe to Milky Way without the slightest latency. Whenever there is latency (e.g. reframing from Depressed Rumination World back to Worldworld...or from Worldworld to Absolute Reality - aka enlightenment), it's just because certain framings/tunings become habitual, making alternatives slow-budging. But once we do make the flip, it always happens instantly.

The instant-on solidity of framing is seen by considering the optical illusion below. You can see either faces or a chalice, but not both simultaneously. A given framing is quite solid - the possible framings never interact with each other. Until we relax ("let go"!) enough to develop easier control of the reframing, one or the other image might stubbornly endure. But the transition, when it happens, is instant, no? No fade, no blur. If you'll pay careful attention, you'll notice that the reframing is positively otherworldly. It's not like thought, it's not like a movie edit...it's not quite like anything else.

The optical illusion is like a fragmentary piano smash. The options (in this case, only two) pre-exist, and perceptual framing "in here" makes a choice, yielding the impression of change "out there".

Since there's no latency, even at vast scale, perceptual framing happens faster than light speed. This means it's outside time - indeed, outside this universe, whose rules preclude anything faster than light. And this checks out. If framing "traverses" (for lack of a better term) the multiverse, it must occur beyond all worlds (for a personal sense of this beyond-ness, consider, once again, The Fan).

Reframing happens outside time, because time is a concept deduced from Worldworld in order to describe Worldworld. Framing is beyond concept, and beyond worlds. It's a neutral shutter, and shutter speed "in here" does not/can not correlate with time passage as we conceive it "out there" (which is, for instance, why we can effortlessly speed up or slow down the tempo of "Ode to Joy" within a piano smash).


Not perfect, but close....


A year later, I connected it to epiphany and inspiration.

Clarification

A new footer was added to this morning's posting, fwiw.

Is Subject Time Still Time?

I'm badly stuck. The issue will only be intelligible for those who've slogged through The Visualization Fallacy, Visualization Fallacy Redux, and Visualization and Parallel Universes...


If the universe is a piano smash (defined here), with all possibilities presently available for perceptual framing, and the impression of change and movement is created by the tunings of attention ("in here") rather than by actual dynamic movements of things ("out there"), that means time is merely a kludge - just another Worldworld conceptualization. If nothing moves or changes, and all dynamism is an impression of shifting focus, then time doesn't exist. Things need to move/change along a time axis for time to exist, but a static piano smash is timeless.

So time is an artifact of confusing inner reframing with an impression of dynamism. Among other things, this solves the problem that no human has ever experienced the slightest taste of past or future. As countless sages have observed (in various phrasings), it's all a big "Now". The piano smash model embraces the primacy of present presence.

However, when I listen to an actual piano smash, and pick out, say, "Ode to Joy", that happens over time. I can effortlessly speed it up or slow it down (which I suspect is a clue!), but the experience doesn't download instantly; it plays out internally over time, just as if the notes were individually played rather than tuned/framed. And if time exists, then change does happen, which unravels the whole observation and re-burdens us with the kludge that is time. It's a problem!

Can subjective shifts be construed as taking place outside time? Is time necessarily object-related? I suspect I need real math and physics to pin this down (or, perhaps, another few years stewing on the issue).

Does anyone know? Does anyone know anyone (e.g. a theoretical physicist) who'd know?


Time passes while you're thinking, for sure. Cognition is a physical process, involving chemical reactions and energy. But perceptual framing happens behind cognition. It's deeper. There's no judgement or calculation or tabulation or taxonomy involved. It's an utterly neutral shifting of the focus of attention. Does it happen in time?


Next in this series: "Subject Time is NOT Time!"

Endlessly Reverberating Patronization

I walk into a Hispanic or Latino restaurant. I speak decent Spanish, and my order demonstrates that I know the cuisine (see the "Ice Breaker" headers in my app, "Eat Everywhere"). I'm friendly and engaging, and it's clear that I'm familiar with their culture. And, obviously, I'm, like, there, downing the rice and beans or whatever like a champ. Not bologna sandwiches. And the waiter/manager/owner, with whom I've developed a rapport, baits me with an anti-immigrant statement. Not quite testing to see how I'll respond, but just as a wee bit of patronizing ugliness.

This has happened twice now. The first time, I cringed in horror and hastily disavowed any such sentiment on my end. This is an unfamiliar scenario for me. As someone who's misunderstood 1,000 times/hour, I've lost all interest in huffy disavowals. Whatever you're concluding about me is likely wrong, but completely fine by me. But this time I went through the rigamarole, and it worked, and the worker started (hilariously) skewering "el cerdo" (the pig) of a president and his bigoted supporters.

Gratuitous disclaimer: I am outraged by how immigrants have been made to feel by our government's statements and actions. The abuses and affronts are entirely real, and dig deep. I support full amnesty, open immigration, and am pro-immigrant in almost every respect. I do whatever I can to make immigrants feel comfortable and respected (while also understanding that the assimilation process isn't - and probably needn't be - perfectly gentle and nurturing). As someone who's lived, worked, loved, and hung out with more legal and illegal immigrants than anyone I know, I completely understand why they're freaked out right now.

But I don't feel I should need to disavow the cerdo. I certainly didn't need my Muslim friends and neighbors to state their disapproval of Al-Qaeda. If we all must disavow awful behavior by those who look like us, that's some messed up onus placement! In a civilized society, we ought to assume we're all decent people unless proven otherwise. Especially when chatting in Spanish as I keenly devour the hipper dishes of your cuisine. If every member of a group is assumed to typify that group's worst members, doesn't that validate Trump's characterization of Mexicans as criminals and rapists? Doesn't it validate the whole damned thing?

Same with black people. As I once wrote, I talk like a jazz musician....though I no longer look like one. And nearly every black person I meet gives me The Look: here's another damned white guy patronizing me. It's given me such a complex that I usually make an effort to talk the whitest of whitey white when I meet black people (say a hardy hello to Morris Morrisblatt CPA!). I do Richard Pryor's imitation of white people. It makes things go smoother. But it's sickeningly crazy. It's profiling. It's stereotyping. My skin color doesn't tell you who I am, nor my background nor motivations. You know nothing about me, so why snap to conclusions? Doing so represents a far worse sort of patronization (and, yes, I'm aware that my whiter-than-white shtick is counter-counter-patronization, though entirely self-deprecating and harmless). 

When a group feels misconstrued via caricature, their impulse, as they strain for justice and clarity, is generally to reciprocate. They caricature back, seemingly aiming for a zero sum re: justice and clarity. I just don't get it. Will we human beings ever learn to react to extremism with enlightened moderation rather than with reciprocal extremism?

Next time I'm baited into revealing my stupendously-well-concealed anti-immigrant bigotry, I'm going to take the person at face value. What? You don't like immigrants? Bring me the damned check, I'm out of here, and not coming back.


There is a solution. It's out there, and billions profess to admire it. Maybe one day....

"Cornered Rat" Report #9

Tuesday, February 6, 2018: The phrase "cornered rat" finds 92,800 google search results, a 12% increase over last week's 83,200.


All "Cornered Rat" postings in reverse chronological order

Visualization and Parallel Universes

This is a follow up to two recent postings: The Visualization Fallacy and Visualization Fallacy Redux.

It might seem like I use this Slog to explain things to readers. I do not. I use it to explain things to myself. As I write, connections are made and insights arise. It's discovery, not explication. I step out of the way.

I started my "Visualization Fallacy" posting to describe an interesting fallacy I'd noticed, and, as I wrote, it kept expanding until I realized it had become a sort of cosmology. I'm still rereading those postings to come more fully to terms with them.

Slog reader Paul Trapani kindly left some comments on the first installment, prompting me to expand and clarify. Our dialog deserves its own entry, so here's a lightly edited version. It will read like gobbledygook unless you quickly review the previous two postings first.

Take it away, Paul....


Paul Trapani said...
Some interesting and thought-provoking stuff. I'm still pondering the parallel universe aspect, though. As an analogy, I think it's great, but not sure about actually shifting to a parallel universe. Whenever I think of parallel worlds I'm OK on the theoretical aspect of it - in that these are all hypothetical worlds that could occur after a given point - but not sure about their "existence" in the same way that our world exists. Or maybe they do exist but are inaccessible to us. Of course I get the point that trying to say "our world" is also illusive, as there are billions of "our worlds".


Jim Leff said...
"Existence" is the trickiest word in all existence. In fact, my whole piece (at least the voluminous italicized digression) is an argument that we project even the world we consider the most existent of all. We project and inhabit this world of symbols, shortcuts, and generalizations, hardly investing the least attention/focus into what actually Is. Not one of us lives even 1% of our time in what we generally term "the real world". We languish in Worldworld!

(Extra snaky digression: we can't truly exist in any given World, anyway - not any of them. No one has ever lived in "A World". You're not in a world now; you're in a chair, reading a screen, and your world, for the moment, ends there - and even that chair, per previous argument, is a symbol, not an actual aggregation of matter. We only live in the slice of a given World that we frame our attention around. It's ALL framing! All the way down!)

Our world radically changes - qualitatively and quantitatively - depending on how we internally frame it. You can't say it doesn't. Sure, it's assumed by human beings that there's reality and then there's imagination, but I defy you to find any demarcation point in light of the above. All there is is framing. Attention pivots, zooms, and retracts in a highly creative infinity of moves (though we get stuck in a few habitual ones). That's what gives rise to the impression of movement, time, and rich manifestation amid what's actually a piano smash*. In other words, possibilities are apparent and available if you merely reframe your attention.

* - A "piano smash" is when you sit at a piano and use both forearms to mash down all the notes. If you do so, and keep holding all the keys down (or pushing the sustain pedal), you'll hear every note at once...and you can use your attention to pick out melodies. Any and every melody, really, and harmony, too. All of music is encoded and present in a piano smash, and you can create the illusion of dynamic movement by reframing your internal attention. It is my belief that the universe is a piano smash, with all possibilities present and available for framing, and that internal framing creates the impression of all dynamic movement and change.

Our infinite framing latitude obviously offers infinite universes. It's especially clear given that the universe you and I inhabit is almost entirely abstracted/symbolized/generalized, and so untethered in reality that computers (which are GOOD at working with symbols!) can't begin to parse it. We've framed this apparent universe, in a quite obvious way. Depressives, cut off from the world and infinitely mulling in their dark internal realms, create a different universe via different framing. Forgetting you're in a movie theater is yet another. This is what humans do: reframe and immerse in order to shift realities.

You have created Worldworld via your framing. And you've seen that the world (even what you think of as "external", which is merely signals registering through slits in your head) changes radically depending on your framing. Framing is obviously the paramount factor.

The fact that nobody talks about framing is a clue that it's paramount. They also never talk much about the non-moving part: the presence that's always peered out from your eyes (call it "True Nature" or "Pure Awareness" or "Witness", but shmancy terms are unnecessary). The things that matter are the least discussed.


Paul Trapani said...
Thanks that was helpful, particularly "piano smash." I was considering parallel universes to be like isolated parallel lines never touching, so I looked at it as if I was in World X and then somehow would move to World Y. It makes more sense as a cacophony of possibilities, with attention reframing onto a specific one.


Jim Leff said...
========
"I was considering parallel universes like isolated parallel lines never touching"

========
You may be experiencing the visualization fallacy I was discussing in the first place! :)

But, really, the "isolated parallel lines" thing works just as well. It's as good a metaphor as any. It isn't incompatible with piano smash.

With a piano smash, you tune your attention here or there. Nobody has bandwidth to experience the entirety at once (remember how the world contracts into your screen and, maybe, your partial, mostly abstract chair). This "tuning" is what I'm calling reframing.

You can describe the tuning as attention directed to isolated parallel lines, or to elements within a disorganized cacophony. The structure doesn't matter. We're talking about infinity, so any manifestation is not only possible but compulsory. The tuning itself is the interesting part, the rest is just the infinitude of yadda-yadda. The important thing is the scanner, not the scanned.

Resist the impulse to pay attention to the sexier, more dynamic, objects. What's way more interesting (though utterly un-verbalizable) is subject. The Tuner.

The thing that doesn't make sense in multiverses is the notion of "going somewhere". "Traveling to a new world", etc. It's pretty juvenile. Sure, we're talking about worlds, which we associate with a round globe thing. But whatever heaven and hell are, or Earth/Paul-23398 is, you sure as heck don't travel to get there. Nor do we pack our lunch and venture to Worldworld, nor to our dream world, nor to Depressive Obsession World nor to the town of Deadwood. It's a flip of one's attention; a tuning to a different note. That's the sweet spot. The crux is the subjectivity of it.

So, cacophony or parallel lines or whatever...it doesn't matter. But the one element you can absolutely rule out is the thing most people can't shake (due to Visualization Fallacy): of it being about GOING somewhere. Of a PLACE. There's no place but "here" (or, per the cliche, "Wherever you go, there you are"). Our here-ness is the only solidity amid the kaleidoscope of infinite manifestation.

For a helpful metaphor of the banal simplicity of the actual point of tuning - the eternally here-present pole star around which the infinitude of manifestation roils, and the nowhere/everywhere from which disembodied Subject selects, frames, identifies itself with, and inhabits Object - see "The Fan"


Next in this series: Is Subject Time Still Time?

If you enjoyed this discussion of cosmology, you might want to consider my theology.

Asked and Answered

In this morning's posting, "The Strategized Life", I asked a question that I later remembered having previously answered. Have a look at the updated footnote, or else go directly to the referenced posting from last year (which is actually one of my favorites).

The Strategized Life

Last week in Dallas, I was invited to choose a car from the rental company's row. As usual, I took a full 10 minutes to go from car to car, checking mileage. The vehicles ranged from 32,000 miles to one with only 540, still retaining new car smell. Obviously, I drove out with the latter. Score!

Others choose on the basis of brand (as if all options within a given class on a rental lot aren't more or less equivalent) or color, or simply jump into the first car they see. These people experience the junky alignment and creepy off-ness normally associated with rental cars. Sometimes I feel like the only one applying strategy to my decisions.

But here's the thing: If other people are so non-strategic, why don't I find life a smoother, easier experience? Shouldn't I be winning? Whenever I see someone walk around a parking lot without paying attention to back-up lights, or dehydrating to lose weight, or ordering Domino's delivery when they live across the street from DiFara Pizza (I've actually seen this), I wonder why I'm not emperor of the frickin' world


Update: Hmm. I forgot that I already answered this.

Mr. Rogers

Tom Hanks will star in an upcoming Mr. Rogers biopic. Variety reports:

The film is inspired by a real-life friendship between Fred Rogers and award-winning journalist Tom Junod. In the story, a cynical journalist begrudgingly accepts an assignment to write a profile piece on the beloved icon and finds his perspective on life transformed.

Here's the original profile Junod wrote on Mr. Rogers, and it's near-perfect and a must-read. Here is the Emmy speech mentioned in the article.

The following won't be useful to you until you've finished the article. It's some perspective on the whole "grace" thing that Rogers pursues with such overwhelming zest.

There are two prongs to spirituality*: fire and silence. Both terms have hordes of equivalents, depending on one's tradition ("fire" might also be called spirit, holy ghost, bhakti, tummo, kundalini, Shakti, etc.; silence can be called emptiness, stillness, peace, communion, Shiva, etc.). If you get out of balance with one prong, you naturally find yourself craving the other.

* - A paradox, given that spirituality is all about unity....but in this realm one soon learns to tolerate and even enjoy paradoxes.

We all love Mr. Rogers. I idolize him. I never liked him as a kid, though. He was way too much of a wet noodle. And here's the thing: it's true; he was a wet noodle. One can be as kind, thoughtful, wise, and respectful as a Fred Rogers without noodling out. Noodliness is not inevitable among saints, who can be quite hot and firey. The hot-headed ones often crave cooling silence. Rogers was the other extreme, which is why he seemed so hellbent (poor choice of words) on acquiring grace* with which to fire up and dry out.

Grace, of course, means other things, as well - most frequently a spontaneous and apparently unearned experience of revelation or communion; what doctors term "idiopathic".

It's revealing that Rogers is quoted as feeling that "he gets it from God, through man." People awash with spiritual heat don't feel that way. They source it from within, and gift it outward (the Mavlevi Sufis believe man serves as a transformer, moderating and directing extreme heavenly energies for Earthly purpose). Just consider this: if grace comes from people, why wasn't Rogers gifting it rather than seeking it? Generous to his core (the gift of his silence elevated the entire country by a notch or two), he'd certainly have showered it forth if he could have. But it simply wasn't his to give.

Different spiritual practices and traditions often stress one prong over the other. Rogers was an ordained minister in the United Presbyterian Church, which is about as silent as it gets. You won't see much in the way of hollering holy-roller preachers or parishioners thrashing around in spiritual passion and speaking in tongues among Presbyterians. On the other hand, it must be noted that if you're going to overdo one prong or the other, it's better to go to excess with silence (I speak from difficult experience).

The thing we loved about Rogers was his silence. The thing we mocked him for was his lack of fire. The two are not unrelated, and this article shows that he spent much time and effort seeking balance. I wish he could have had a brief chat with someone from a more fiery tradition. There were things he could have done to self-balance, without disrespecting his faith. As-is, he's both a saint and a cautionary tale.


My previous posting on Mr. Rogers