Another cryptic clip from my personal journal: .
To make feeling alone (all-one) be a comfortable space, be a courteous guest in one's own strange body and in the presence of the strange bodies of even closest friends, being gently curious about them, realizing that everything "I" think about myself or them is a fantasy construction for predicting what I or they might feel or do next.
Another cryptic clip from my personal journal:
We are built of predictive fantasies at every level of our being - from single cells up through transient professional identities that seamlessly feedback down into and vitalize the physical body and nervous system that sustains them. We make each identity for ourselves by inferring what models are being performed by others, hopefully not doing total mimesis of one style, but rather cutting and pasting to come up with our own ‘unique’ personas.
Scanning back through previous MindBlog posts, I came across the following paragraph what I wrote and posted on 7/24/24. I like it, and decided to post it again:
Machinery here, pushing down keys of another machine, generating words, just like a human does. Much simpler than pretending to be one. Just nerves, muscles, and energy fluxes in and out. Curatorial rather than aspirational. Cooperating with other similar machines to make larger ensembles more effective at survival and replication. Generating a word cloud stored in higher brain areas to fabricate the value, purpose, and meaning myths that sometimes strengthen and sometimes diminish the downstairs animal presence generating them.
A Wall Street Journal article recently pointed me to two websites using AI to estimate one's biological age. So....I took a selfie of my 82 year old face with my iPhone to get novoslabs.com's and facialage.com's estimates that I am 63 and 67 years old, respectively! Now, two weeks later, I have asked my stable of bots (GPT 4o, Perplexity, etc) for other vendors providing the same service and found four more sites to try. Here are the reactions of all six sites to a further selfie I just took with my iPhone:
https://novoslabs.com/faceage/#test reported the same result, facial age 63 years old, , in reaction to the new picture, and also reported Eye Age (54 years), Eye Bags (72/100) and Facial Wrinkles (18/100)
https://www.facialage.com/ reported 66 years old, close to the 67 years old estimate of the previous selfie
reports from other apps:
https://age.toolpie.com/ 66 years old
https://faceagecalculator.com/ 51 years old
https://howolddoyoulook.com/ 58 years old
https://www.howolddoilook.io/ 29 years old
All of the 60-something estimates feel in the right ball park, but heading below that gets into fantasy territory.
-Being a calm space in which nothing can hurry
-An animal body that pretends to be human
-Dissociating from the word cloud and emotional reactivities of self and other selves.
-A courteous guest in one’s own body and when with others, owning one’s own experience and letting others own theirs.
-Favoring reflectivity over reactivity, caressing novelty
-Clinging to nothing, the current self being a passing fantasy
-Letting each moment be what it is, not what it should be
-A blip in the flow of cosmic time
I want to pass on a clip from the epilogue of Jim Holt's 2012 book "Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story" in which he describes his attending a small ninetieth birthday celebration for Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) the . The master made the following brief comments:
“Montaigne,” he begins, “said that aging diminishes us each day in a way that, when death finally arrives, it takes away only a quarter or half the man. But Montaigne only lived to be fifty-nine, so he could have no idea of the extreme old age I find myself in today” - which, he adds, was one of the “most curious surprises of my existence.” He says he feels like a “shattered hologram” that has lost its unity but that still retains an image of the whole self.
This is not the speech we were expecting. It is intimate, it is about death.
Lévi-Strauss goes on to talk about the “dialogue” between the eroded self he has become - le moi réel - and the ideal self that coexists with it - le moi métonymique. The latter, planning ambitious new intellectual projects, says to the former, “You must continue.” But the former replies, “That’s your business - only you can see things whole.” Lévi-Strauss then thanks those of us assembled for helping him silence this futile dialogue and allowing his two selves to “coincide” again for a moment - “although,” he adds, “I am well aware that le moi réel will continue to sink toward its ultimate dissolution.”
In the beginning was the cosmos, fundamentally as incomprehensible to our human brains as quantum chemistry is to a dog’s brain.
What
our human brains can understand is that our ultimate emergence from
countless generations of less complex organisms can be largely explained
by a simple mechanism that tests the reproductive fitness of varying
replicants.
Systems that try to
predict the future and dictate whether to go for it or scram - from the
chemotaxis of bacteria to the predictive processing of our humans brains
- have proved to be more likely to survive and propagate.
Modern neuroscience has proved that our experienced perceptions of sensing and acting are these predictions. They are fantasies, or illusions, as is our sense of having a self with agency that experiences value, purpose, and meaning. Everything we do and experience is in the service of reducing surprises by fulling these fantasies. An array of neuroendocrine mechanisms have evolved to support this process because it forms the bedrock of human culture and language.
We
are as gods, who invent ourselves and our cultures through impersonal
emergent processes rising from our biological substrate.
Personal
and social dysfunctions can sometimes be addressed by insight into this
process, as when interoceptive awareness of the settings of our
autonomic nervous system's axes of arousal, valence, and agency allows
us to dial them to more life sustaining values and better regulate our
well-being in each instance of the present.
We can distinguish this autonomic substrate from the linguistic cultural overlay it it generates, and allow the latter to be viewed in a more objective light. This is a deconstruction that permits us to not only let awareness rest closer to the 'engine room' or 'original mind' underlying its transient reactive products, but also to derive from this open awareness the kind of succor or equanimity we once found in the imagined stability of an external world.
(The above is MindBlog's 10/25/23 post, repeated here and given a new title.)