Publicly recanting my negative views on (some) social networking
{PlaceHolder for full article but here’s summary in less than 140 characters} I realize Twitter can be useful now – I was wrong. There I said it.
Depravity versus Evolution
This is an old debate that a good friend and former colleague @galtenberg agreed we needed to have and the topic has been on my mind the last few days. At the time we were working together, we were weaving together a theory and applications concerning a mechanism of the human mind called resonance, which has not been incorporated into mainstream theories of cognition even now (see for example the disambiguation page on wikipedia below) but I have zero doubt will be in my lifetime as more discoveries are made about it. In general, resonance concerns the interaction of a particular individual’s consciousness with elements of the physical, virtual, or cognitive domains that brings it into an amplified state (which my work seeks to leverage) in a repeatable manner. Note this is specific and tuned to the individual and has other specific criteria which I don’t wish to fully enumerate here save one:
Note there is a deceptive system effect of consciousness which @galtenberg called fascination. I call it deceptive because it cannot be fully depended on save for a data point of an affect. Quite simply, it is when something repeatedly (at least for a period of time) grabs your attention in such a way that it can appear as resonance. Quoting @galtenberg, he expressed two things quite well about its mechanisms:
Fascination can lead to resonance [but not always].
and
Fascination wears off…
In other words, the first quote refers to the fact that fascination can be an early indication or precursor of resonance but it does not imply the latter; hence, why I like to call it a bit deceptive. In fact, we used to call it false resonance at times – it would give a false indication of resonance. Other times, it was an excellent earlier indicator of resonance.
The second quote deals with a quite simple test : If it is in fact merely fascination and not resonance, the brain will give a definitive clue – the sort of magical fascination will begin to fade (unless other mechanisms like an addiction are at play, at which case it will return in a cyclic loop over time) and the fascination will wear off.
This contrast between these two leads to an important question: If one is following what fascinates the brain, will it lead to evolution of consciousness (which Csikszentmihalyi talks at length about) or to depravity? I have asked that lately again because for better or worse I have heard about some quite depraved individuals in the last few months, both in the news as well as personally. One thing is in common in all these cases – they are quite driven by something that fascinates them deeply (my usage of the term here could spark some debate because I am dragging it through the mud perhaps but bear with me) but leads to ultimate depravity and destruction in their life and the lives of others.
It could be easy to label the fascination in all of these cases I am talking about by saying it is driven by some basic human drives – sexual gratification, fear, grief, horror, or morbid curiosity in the specific cases I am thinking of but that is too easy. For instance, during the grieving of my father passing away last year, I had what I would call fascination with one disturbing aspect of his passing but this led me toward discussion with others and ultimate resolution and passing through the grief; however, there was a sort of binary choice – I could have gotten caught in a repeating cycle of going over the same ground over and over without any resolution whatsoever or I could the extra attention to actively work through the challenge I was faced with. I would say that the former approach would have led to depravity. Nonetheless, the fact stands that this fascination was nothing related to resonance – this period is now gone (thank goodness) and did not lead to the phenomena we call resonance.
I don’t have answers at this point (even though we debated it years ago) – that is not the point of this post. I am merely chewing on the question again and offering it up as food for thought for others who may be interested. If you feel like discussing, feel free to comment on this post here on the blog, or on my friendfeed profile when it echoes over there or reply to @joelkotarski at twitter when it echoes over there.
(below is wikipedia disambiguation page embedded for quick reference without leaving the blog post)
I’ve decided to create a stream of consciousness blog
This is my ‘entropic flow’ blog – the other blogs I have all center around certain projects or endeavours I am working on, whilst this one will be about day to day life or thoughts that don’t fit underneath any of these projects. I remember when a friend who was about to start a blog talked to me about the paths one could take in blogging – I said generally you could do the project-focused blog (the ‘it’ or ‘us’ blog), the personal blog (anything about yourself and what is on your mind – the ‘I’ blog), or a general blend of the two. I chose the first but I feel this medium should be as much about inspirations and struggles as about reporting major breakthroughs and goals. The first route loses a sort of human touch.
I chose the name Entropic Flow as sort of a contradiction in terms – Flow is the state of mind described my Csikszentmihalyi and can be attributed to ordered consciousness, while Entropy can be described as lack of or moving away from order. I believe that order can emerge from disorder. Dee Hock coined a term ‘Chaordic’ to describe processes that make a combination of Chaos and Order. Anyway, because life and thoughts don’t always fit inside the line of projects and endeavours, I want the overflow to go here, hence though the thoughts will spill into all kinds of categories and hence appear disorganized, I believe they will emerge into other things.
Actually, this blog was started a long time ago but never syndicated into the PatternSmithing Alliance blogs – it was actually intended to be private, but I have since decided to open it up and start publishing from it as of today. The topics will be quite broad and cross all of my diverse interest areas. As noted, at times the topics may appear entropic but the intention is that these will flow into larger themes (either within the same post or over time as themes develop). Of course, there may be zero audience for these thoughts, in which case the blog becomes a killer diary.