Confessions of a mask

The theory of self-deception was foreshadowed by the sociologist Erving Goffman in his 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, which disputed the romantic notion that behind the masks we show other people is the one true self. No, said Goffman; it's masks all the way down. Many discoveries in the ensuing decades have borne him out.

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, p264

Confessions of the Masks

I went back to England for three weeks and saw some people - groups and individuals - that I hadn't seen for some time, plus I met some new people entirely out of context, no others, places or roles to be influenced by. It was interesting how old patterns remained, and how new ones were so easily established, but only with entirely new people.

For example, there was one friend who I hadn't seen for 11 years. Back then I used to drink a lot, and especially with this guy. Now I know was a little nervous about meeting him again, as there was history and events, and also I'd been traveling and hadn't eaten anything all day. Still, I drank three pints without pausing for breath, and things were much the same as before, albeit overlaid on certain aspects of my more recent default self [better health and posture, less uncertainty about my place in the world, the general palliative effects of recent history and events]. But mainly that newer at-home-alone self was watching, half detached, at the improv performance another part of me was giving, running on sense memories and the cues that this guy was sending out, no doubt also slipping back into an older [i.e. younger] version of himself. If we'd had more time together things would no doubt have settled down to some more nuanced state, but to get the whole thing done in six hours was a shock to the system, an experience of time travel.

The next night I met someone I'd never met before, and remained lucid and ran through all the charming tricks of my current mask. An automatic performance, one that felt no more or less natural than the night before, but overall better, because there was minimal alcohol and no history to either dwell on or consciously avoid. It made me want to go back and meet people I haven't seen since childhood and then test what the automatic feelings and actions would be, but I don't keep in touch with many people from my past, and none from before university.

The next day it all came together, the past and present modes of being , but I ate something wrong, or got too cold, or was given something bad to smoke, and my system rebelled. I had a great time, but everything inside me broke. [Oddly enough, almost exactly the same thing happened in about the same circumstances two nights ago in a KTV. Everything I've ever learned I had to learn the hard way, many times, and this lesson appears to take some time to master]

The point is that there's no real, authentic self inside me. In addition to all the socially constructed masks that I can adopt without even thinking about it, there's the self-conscious self I slip into when alone and thinking about me, me, me. But that's not the last word, no more real than the others, as it evolves stochastically with events inside and outside. There's nothing to lament in this. Having no one self to hold on to makes dying seem trivial [now, but probably not later] - nothing I can pin down will be lost, just things in the minds of others. I'm not there and never was.

Unattached: the same in heat and cold

I love the man who hates not nor exults, who mourns not nor desires...and who remains unmoved who is the same to friend and foe, [the same] whether he is respected or despised, the same in heat and cold, in pleasure and in pain, who has put away attachment and remains unmoved by praise or blame...contended with whatever comes his way.

Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, quoted on p77 The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt

What would such a person be like? Ram Dass [born Richard Alpert, clip below] has a line about working with dying AIDS patients and keeping himself balanced between the extremes of hope and hopelessness, and managing to get off on the bad ends by seeing everything. I summarize it badly, but essentially he's rewired himself, or allowed the wiring to come loose. Now I can see the appeal of this, in theory and in practice, and it's obviously also an aim, but there is a wondering about how relationships run when you reach this state of non-attachment. Moreover, non-attachment in this field has never been a problem for me, and another aim is to become more attached, as a game, to try on the mask of a truly social animal, find out if it can be done this late in the day. Either way, some rewiring needs to be done, and the trick is in beating yourself, judo style, defeating bad arguments and practices with their own force, so that when they rush at you - thwump! - you end up unharmed on the other side, the strong and bad things overcome.

Here's a story about a time I failed to do this. When I was in London earlier this month I was very cold and felt genuine discomfort. Southern Taiwan has a warm climate - it's tropical -, and I like the weather here very much. I was walking with a friend in London and I would freeze up, shaking, meaning that every 15 minutes or so we had to duck into a bar or someplace and allow my body to reach an acceptable temperature. All this would've been fine, but we weren't really in the condition to be hiding out among people, and I was drawing attention, so we kept on the streets.

My friend tried to get me to change my thermoception submodality. I got down to the condition where I could understand that hot and cold are only physical sensations, that it should be possible to mess with my own responses to such stimuli. I got down to the freezing cold being an abstract notion that could be turned around in my head and viewed dispassionately, like a 3D model of a virus. For a short time I flipped my response to the input from discomfort to comfort, and the harsh cold was interpreted as pleasure, and I could see that the colder I got, the more pleasurable it would be. But very soon the cold came back as cold itself and pain, and a fear that if I kept fooling with my reactions then real damage could be done to my system. That night, probably unrelated, I was very sick in my hotel room.

It was an interesting experience, and going down into rewiring myself I understood extreme S&M practices, how an intensity of feeling could be opened up this way that the more well-used routes cannot offer. Pain leaves a more lasting impression than pleasure, because the consequences are generally so much more significant. If you can exploit the first to trigger the latter, there's whole new lands of delight to be discovered, [in theory].

But then I thought...what's the point? I enjoy living inside my conventional reality, all the more so because I know how fragile it is and how easily I could wreck the controls and cause all kinds of imbalances. I don't want to end up either freezing to death or getting off on genital mutilation.

I'm pretty sure the body is wiser than the mind, and the unconscious is smarter than the self. Anything that has been built up, hard wired over millions of years is to be trusted over something you learned in an afternoon. Still, because I'm idiot a guiding principle is still to tinker, hack the system, see what's possible, f*** up, and then reset most things to default.

Richard Alpert

Related post: The same life as Napoleon [The perils of extreme kicks]

Trivial, unconscious

The cafe scene from If... [some nudity]

...evolution consists of an infinitude of trivial, unconscious events...

Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire, p xv

A box from Amazon the other day to ease the apprehension about the next eight weeks full of classes and proofreading ahead of my 'last day', August 8th. Among the things inside were the Criterion disks for If... and The Botany of Desire, subtitled a plant's eye view of the world. The line above jumped out at the start. Pollan's writing about his attraction to one kind of potato, and making the link to bees and flowers, but I thought straight away about the trivial, unconscious reasons to be attracted to someone, and about the trivial ways of getting pregnant and entering the future flow of evolution. One (un)lucky orgasm and that's a whole new roll of the genetic die cast.

I think I'm lucky that I've never become a father, and that Yuki also doesn't want kids. I think I'd be a terrible father, and I'd resent the time and energy a child would take from me. My students disagree, adding that a mixed-race baby would be very cute, but I don't want to take the risk of my deepest feelings on the topic being proved right.

I think everything I do is built on trivial, unconscious foundations, rationalized after the event with the aid of confirmation bias. At the same time I fall for the idea that nothing else could ever have happened, that....well, from Burnt Norton, Eliot's recording of which [here] has been sitting on my MP3 player and getting a regular work out:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

Which for me means there were never any choices, because only one path was taken, and the future is already written. Why not? I don't know what happens next, nothing actually changes.

Related: All posts labeled 'plants'

Shadowplay

almost taiwan

Tired, but riding home and memories from an Ann Shulgin talk [Psychedelic Psychotherapy and the Shadow] that loop back to Leary's Interpersonal Grid / Eight Circuit Brain....essentially this: The Shadow Self is the repressed self, and growing to make a conscious choice to accept the darker self as an ally when necessary. Not getting too attached the idea of a steady state self.

Sasha & Ann

Robert Anton Wilson simplifies / clarifies Leary and puts it into four quadrants: friendly strength, hostile strength, friendly weakness, hostile weakness. You can find more in chapter four of Prometheus Rising [earlier post includes a link to the pdf file], but I have to collapse into other things.

This is your brain on drugs

Image lifted from James Kent

James Kent of Dose Nation / Tripzone is a reliably sober reporter on the psychedelic beat. He's not a believer in machine elves or other-dimensional beings, which makes him a good counterpoint to most of the stuff a naive psychonaut is going to encounter as they gather more information, Which is not to totally discount the freakier readings, only to make a strong case for the straight approach of How does this substance change the brain? The beliefs on the wilder fringes of the scene seem no better than other religious mythologies. Far better to deal with what is observable and can be shown to be true, than to make up grand theories about things that can never be proven. Still, we'll see looks more foolish in late December, 2012.

Probably me, but for reasons unconnected with the content of this post.

Anyway, sometime ago James Kent produced an excellent classroom poster PDF of his signal theory of psychedelic effects, subtitled "Hallucinogens and recurrent excitation in cortical circuitry", available at the link. No drug education class should be without one. He's now written a new paper developing the same ideas in a much more technical fashion. The title is: Selective 5-HT2A agonist hallucinogens: A review of pharmacological interaction and corollary perceptual effects, and it can be found here.

Related post: A methodology for studying alternate reality

The User Illusion, part four

We have to face the fact that we are far more than we believe ourselves to be; that we have far more resources than we perceive; that we leave our mark on more of the world than we notice. p359

Riding my bicycle late at night and choosing small lanes and alleys for the sake of safety, darkness and interest, a peaked woolen cap pulled low to obscure my face. I work with people in a classroom and at the end I don't want to see any more, but I also don't want to be seen. My face is not the kind that reassures. I have a look that's indecent, like a long, drawn out crime. When people see me they know there's something amiss.

And they're right, body language giving the game away, even as I intend to behave, not yawn, grimace or leer.

The unconscious is not hidden to anyone except the individual who hides from himself ... Other people know more about us than we know ourselves. p151

I was in a restaurant on the second floor, looking out at the street. People walking by, doing nothing, automatic, but closely observed, the jerks and the scratches and the coughs and the looks.

The panopticon was always here, not so much invented as discovered, keeping active streets safe at all hours.

The User Illusion, part three

My wife is Japanese, I'm English and we met and live in Taiwan. Her English is not very good, and my Japanese is barely functional. My Chinese is OK, while hers is fluent.

People always want to know how we communicate. We do it in a mix of English and Chinese. These conversations are limited, and there are many topics that we can't begin to discuss in detail, and yet this rarely creates a problem. We have fewer misunderstandings than I had with girlfriends who were native English speakers, and there is a feeling of closeness that makes no sense if communication is seen only as words.

The interesting things in life may not be the ones that take long explanations to describe, but those that take many experiences to get to know. p80

The least interesting aspect of a good conversation is what is actually said. What is more interesting is all the deliberations and emotions that take place simultaneously [...] in the heads and bodies of the conversers. p94

...we can only talk about what matters when we do not talk but act... p309

The User Illusion - Tor Norretranders

If you have a cat or a dog you will never share a word, and yet you can have a relationship that's as close and rich as with any person. Words are not that important.

Later, these lines will haunt me.

The User Illusion, part two

The importance of discarding information to create meaning. A huge number of associations boiled down to a few lines, easily communicated and yet hard to express.

Meaning is information … that which is no longer present and no longer needs to be. p98

Beauty, elegance, ease and laid-backness are linked: Saying a lot in a few words or signs or movements of looks or caresses – now, that is beautiful, clear and cathartic. p133

Hiding a large amount of meaning in a short mnemonic, a keyword that unlocks the world.

An outline is good if it contains microstates with high entropy: lots of possible microstates for each macrostate p133

…everything that is not present, but is not gone either. p133

Check out the book

The User Illusion, part one

The User Illusion , by Tor Norretranders, is a book that tries to explain consciousness, and does so with the idea of the user illusion. This refers to the illusion of clarity and simplicity computer users get when they interact with the mysterious 1000001101111110101… of their machines, and on to the overall illusion of reality and control that our brains conjure up so that we think there is an ‘I’ that is continuous, in control and experiencing things. Just as the user interface in a computer only gives a superficial and misleading idea of what is going on behind the Windows, our sense of self has little to do with the reality of what goes on in our heads.

The one line summary is that we spend most of our time, and the best of our time, nonconscious, with no sense of self. The postscript is that we have increasingly tailored our experiences to cater to our tiny conscious attention, neglecting the importance of all the information that our nonconscious discards before presenting the illusion. Case in point: starting at a computer screen to take in a few words a second rather than walking in a forest and our senses being assailed. We are making life less rich by becoming more focused on what our consciousness can process.

When I was younger I used to cling to a strong sense of self, to the teen-angst existentialism of man vs world, but that point of view – which at the time felt like a real expression of a real personality - was not very in any sense rewarding. A strong sense of self demands a strong ego, while the jujitsu of mental health and / or spiritual practice requires a deliberate undermining of the same. There are easy and hard ways to undertake this, and the difference between them is not always clear, the choice between excess and self-discipline.

At some point taking the easy way out becomes too hard, and vice versa.

The road of excess leads to the palace of excess. Mark E. Smith