To explain: black swans were discovered in Australia. Before that, any reasonable person could assume the all-swans-are-white theory was unassailable. But the sight of just one black swan detonated that theory. Every theory we have about the human world and about the future is vulnerable to the black swan, the unexpected event. We sail in fragile vessels across a raging sea of uncertainty. “The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.”
Shit happens, we just don’t know how and when? Everyone know this right? Well everyone except the experts that work in banks such Bear Stearns, Bradford and Bingley and Northern Rock. They predicated a lot of their investments on the idea that they could calculate the risks in the market and the world at large.
It seems blindingly obvious that humans are imperfect and that any models we will come up with are imperfect as well. So why bet he whole house (or should I say other peoples houses) relying on your imperfect models. I guess if your greedy and stupid you would. So they did, hence the credit crunch, house price crash, recession and who knows even a full scale depression.
The philosopher / trader Nass Nicholas Taleb (together with every 19 year old philosophy undergraduate) understood this and he has written a book about our human falibility when it comes to predicting the future called the Black Swan. It’s named on the fact that people used to use the image of a black swan as a metaphor for the impossible (there are black swans in Australia).
The Times Online has an interview with Taleb. Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom
When the Matrix first came out in the cinemas some people enjoyed the philosophical questions and ideas of the film. Soon essays and books appeared discussing those concepts. It surprised me that so much of what was written focused on the, in my mind, relatively inconsequential questions; to what extent is what we experience ‘real’ and is there such a thing as free will. This is the material of introductory philosophy courses looking to introduce students to Plato and Descartes.
Morpheus : The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.
The advertisements on TV attempt to create associations between certain emotions and products. ‘Buy X to feel Y’ or ‘You can not be happy until you own X’. The world religions have instilled certain kinds of morality which have now been pervasive in our culture for so long that they are taken as given. Politicians keep telling us we live in democracies when it’s hard to reconcile that with what we experience day to day.
It’s scary once you realise how so much we take for granted in life is completely arbitrary and conventional. The great thing is, once you know it’s all a game you can start changing the rules.
Another animation by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, set to a little philosophical musing by Alan Watts.
As you might have noticed I sometimes post about political and economic issues. The reason for this is that I think these are areas where a lot of people are indoctrinated into a particular paradigm and don’t realise that a lot of assumptions they have are not immutable laws of the universe, but are in fact quite arbitrary.
For example, if you’re a little confused about what’s going on with the world economy at the moment then I recommend you watch these excellent videos. Now I don’t know whether it’s all part of some world wide conspiracy as seems to be the conclusion of these videos, but it is still a great introduction into how the banking system works.
I post videos of optical illusions and psychological experiments because it shows the limits of our perception and cognition of the universe. They make you aware that what you see and what is out there in the world is not necessarily the same thing, the map is not the territory as they say. This isn’t limited to material objects. It works just the same for concepts, ideas and beliefs, ways of living and being.
So if you find yourself having a negative emotional reaction to anything you see in these videos or instantly dismissing it as a crack-pot conspiracy theory, please consider that you are unconsciously protecting your current idea of reality. Something which might not be serving your long term best interests.
Oprah Winfrey is a big fan of Eckhart Tolle and she’s doing a series of live web seminars based around the book A New Earth. You can sign up for the seminar for free on Oprah’s web-site or you can watch the videos on YouTube.
I had noticed Eckhart’s books in the shops long before I started reading them. To be honest the covers and titles always turned me off as they seemed really cheesy. I thought the Power of Now was all about ’seizing the day and living for the moment man’ and A New Earth is sub-titled ‘Finding Your Life’s Purpose’. To be honest they seemed like a lot of other generic self-help books.
But I eventually read his books and found them really useful. In a very basic sense Eckhart’s writings are about being aware of your internal dialogue and turning it off, and with being present in the moment. The ideas are similar to Eastern meditation practices, and Eckhart comes at it from a similar spiritual angle. Now I don’t know what people mean by being ’spiritual’, at this point I haven’t had any experience that I would class as spiritual.
But I don’t need to interpret Eckhart’s ideas in a spiritual way for them to be useful to me. I haven’t watched all of these videos, I just don’t have the time right now. But I’ve heard from people that they’ve found these useful and has helped them put some of the more difficult ideas in to practice.
I always love reading crazy theories and have recently heard about something called Bicameralism. Julian Jaynes wrote about his theory in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
The basic ideas is that ancient humans to an extent functioned as ’schizophrenics’ in that they had frequent auditory hallucinations. They literally heard voices speaking to them and interpreted these as the voices of gods.
Julian uses this explain how language and consciousness developed in humans and why early humans really believed that their gods were speaking to them. It’s a fascinating theory that touches on many interests of mine, ancient history, psychology, evolution of humans.
What’s particularly interesting for readers of this site is that it might help to explain how and why hypnosis works. Maybe we were used to taking ‘commands’ from one half of our brain for many thousands of years before both hemispheres started working together.
It’s also interesting that some areas of the brain that deal with language use also help us to recognise and distinguish rhythm. If you know anything about hypnosis you’ll know that speaking in certain rhythms (and listening to repetitive rhythms) has a hypnotic effect. Tribes in Africa engage in dances to rhythmic music for hours in order to go into a trance, and in the west we even have a whole sub-genre of dance music called Trance. This is the reason why for example Richard Bandler does hypnosis work with a musical backing track.
Read more about Bicameralism at Wikipedia: Bicameralism
and
I’ve been reading the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle again and I’m able to notice negative thoughts a lot better recently. These aren’t big negative beliefs rather little agitated or irritated pieces of inner dialogue; ‘Why are those people always like that?’, ‘Why does this always happen?’ So short they’ve usually passed by before I’ve had a chance to notice them. I guess once you’ve noticed the big issues and worked with them it’s time to notice the smaller things and mop them up as well.
Eckhart suggests that you only need to acknowledge the negative thought in order to reduce its power. But I’ve be experimenting with tapping them and the deeper issues behind them. I see them as symptoms of underlying issues.
One of the important skills to learn is this ability to notice negative thought patterns, beliefs and emotions. It’s part of what Magnus calls emotional literacy. It can be challenging because you’ll often hide the things you need to work on from yourself. That’s why most EFT’ers ought to work with fellow tappers to uncover issues lurking in their blind spots. In the mean time emotional literacy can be cultivated by being present in your body as Eckhart describes.
Applying the principles of the Power of Now together with EFT seems to work really well and I recommend you all try it.
I remember being told about the Knowledge Economy in school and that the resources for this economy consist of Data, Knowledge and Information (which I’ll call ‘content’ from now on).
- Data consists of raw symbols that are devoid of meaning.
- Information is what you get when you start to give meaning to the data and the relationships between them.
- Knowledge is the collection of information intended to be useful for a specific purpose.
I realised that there is probably at least another level on top of this and decided to call it wisdom. This is where you have data, information and knowledge and you know what do with it in order to achieve your goal. Wisdom is the ability to interpret content in original ways and separate the useful stuff from the rest. It also allows for someone to question the paradigm in which the content was created and decide whether or not these serve the intended purpose. You can then change the paradigm or look to other paradigms for different perspectives.Sadly for me it turns out I’m not the first one to come up with this idea. A quick search revealed:
Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom
and
Knowledge economy becomes global
Anyway, the high quality problem we’ve created for ourselves is information overload. Too much data, information and knowledge that we are having trouble sifting through.
I think this is where wisdom comes in. It filters what’s useful from what isn’t and presents us with the right course of action to take with the content we have at our disposal. In the business world this role has been filled by consultants whom you pay for advice on a course of action.
Thanks to the internet we have access to consultants and experts on every conceivable subject and we can get a lot of information for free. This is the domain of the blogger who dispenses advice and expertise on their niche subject. The other example of wisdom in action on the internet is the rise of social bookmarking and new aggregation sites such as Digg and Stumble Upon. This is the wisdom of crowds in action, bringing to surface the content it’s users think others will benefit from.
Now I know there are flaws with both of these examples. How do you know that the self-proclaimed expert really is what they say they are? And don’t social bookmarking sites tend to promote content that appeals to the lowest common denominator? Valid concerns of course, but nothing solutions can’t be found for. And at the very least people tend to vote with their feet. If one person or site doesn’t seem to have the necessary wisdom to help users then they’ll find someone or somewhere that does.
I think the Wisdom Economy consists of people adding value to content with their wisdom and being paid for it by clients wanting to save time and money. This will happen either directly through fees or indirectly through advertising.
I sometimes wonder about what led me to my current interests. A lot of it has to do with all the books I’ve read and the films I’ve seen. Sometimes when I’m watching a film like Star Wars I’ll catch a particular scene that must have been one of many little memes that were planted in my mind when I first saw them.
So where did George Lucas get the memes he put in his films? He was inspired by the author Joseph Campbell who wrote a book called the Hero With A Thousand Faces which is about the arch-typical heroes journey. Campbell incorporated amongst other things some of the ideas of Carl Jung who of course had studied Buddhism and Taoism.
So when Yoda starts talking about being a luminous part of the Force and how there is no difference between himself the rock and the X-wing he is levitating, you could say that he’s another link in a chain that goes back thousands of years (at least). Whatever other value these ideas have, we can at least note how sticky they are.
Do you remember the scene where Obi-Wan Kenobi confuses the Storm Troopers by waving his hands and saying: ‘These aren’t the droids you’re looking for’? Well that’s a pattern interrupt. The hypnotherapist Milton Erickson used pattern interrupts to temporarily confuse clients so that they would be momentarily more open to suggestion.
Here’s an explanation of how Derren Brown uses his Force powers for evil and entertainment.
Some people have noted the similarity between the Jedi in Star Wars and the Bene Gesserit in Dune, by Frank Herbert. The Bene Gesserit are a group that posses a skill called ‘The Voice’, which is a particular way of speaking that allows them to strongly influence and sometimes control other people. One of the themes in Dune is how language influences thought and this was inspired by Alfred Korzybski who wrote General Semantics and Science and Sanity, books that were read by Bandler and Grinder, the developers of NLP.