Appreciating what we cannot map

Letters from O'Brien #5

Dear Mr Smith,

Once again more ideas swirling around in my head in these strange days we are living, and I thank you in advance for entertaining my scattered thoughts! For the most part I’ve been thinking about our collective fixation on health, safety, and the insane totalitarian measures surrounding it all, and how we are missing a bigger picture. I know fear has a lot to do with the madness, but I’m wondering about a more fundamental perspective we have, or don’t have, about the world.

I’ve been thinking that when we look out at the world, we see what we know and pass it by without a conscious thought, but what is unknown draws our attention - the uncharted external stimuli stand out to us. If I remember rightly from what you’ve told me, this is the curiosity of the right hemisphere, always open and aware of novelty. Like the monolith appearing in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the appearance of something unfamiliar draws our focus, and immediately we attempt to map out this unknown, and attribute some sort of meaning to it. 

I’m guessing there is good cognitive reason for this - by not applying much mental power to what is already known, navigating the world becomes a far simpler task. We can walk down the street without giving too much processing power to the colours of houses, the shapes of buildings, etc. We can also fill in the blanks; a car travelling along a road is a car regardless of colour or make. We don’t need to reprocess and remap each and every individual automobile unless its design is so abstracted that it shares nothing in common with a regular vehicle (shape, outward utility, etc.).  For the most part we run on autopilot with our maps of the world - processing is automatic, subconscious, and we have the mental capacity to process the new, the novel.

(This also makes me think that many people can become lazy and run on autopilot most of the time, consuming the garbage that comes from the media, passively absorbing again and again what is already known, as long as it’s ‘black and white’, as long as it’s some sort of ‘logic’, measurable, pre-packaged data. Using our curiosity and actually investigating things ourselves requires too much energy!.. Sorry, I digress.)

But I do feel, Mr Smith, that we have become overly reliant on this mental ‘map’ of what we know (and maybe what abstractions are just fed to us) and tend to dismiss the things that may require a different sort of processing. As you would say, the sort of processing that the right hemisphere of the brain is good at (please correct me if I’m wrong on this point). I think our minds have slowly shifted away from the spiritual/mystical appreciation the universe and toward the mechanical, utilitarian realm of logic - we’ve lost the ability to properly appreciate things we cannot fully understand. Our modern mind wants everything to be measurable, and no longer knows what to do with things which cannot be measured. Music, art, religion and myths become problematic, they cannot simply be bound into a box, they may not be clearly defined by linear logic. It seems individual subjectivity is lost in the face of group-think. We map the ‘value’ of songs to chart performance, net value of sales, number of streams,  performance on social media, or any other ‘logical’ dataset, that completely overrides the individual subjective experience as a measure of value. Does the social value of the intangibility of beauty reduced to the commercial transactions of whatever that is?

Perhaps the rise of a materialistic worldview is a result of a positive feedback loop, bought about by a growing interconnection of nodes (people) who relay certain stimuli? If a community sees the world in a particular way, that is simply how it is. The measurability of what is sensed, in the form of scientific materialism, gives the Western world a launching point for all future ambitions in the realm of materialistic expansion. In contrast, I believe, religious ideas create groups who’s focus is on the better understanding of the incomprehensible. 

While both materialistic and spiritualistic thought offers a launching pad for the formulation or discovery of new ideas, I think the materialistic outlook is constrained by its inability to comprehend things outside of its measured bounds (that which can’t be put on the cognitive ‘map’), and possibly the spiritual view misses some grounding in the material world. I guess what I’m getting at is that we need both the ‘map’ of what is known and can be measures, equally as much as we need the open awareness of those things which are spiritual, can’t be mapped in the same way. If I’m reading your other posts correctly, we need a balance between the left and right hemispheres of our brain, we need to embrace the known and openly explore the unknown. We need to appreciate that the context of life is bigger than what can be abstracted onto a map.

Although it may seem that art, music, stories, and religious ideas are less respected than they once were, we must realise that these things do have cultural value, despite not having a measurable ‘value’. I’m guessing there is a reason why music from centuries past live on, and stories from thousands of years ago continue to be told; because they teach us things about ourselves which we do not understand, and perhaps never will.

The unknown flows out of us into beautiful works of art, music and narratives, and I do hope that we can realise these as important, not only to us as individuals but to us a culture, and we may not know where they will lead us. 

Yours sincerely

O’Brien

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Dear O’Brien,

Thank you for your thoughts - I do appreciate your correspondence and bouncing your ideas off me.

As you mentioned, fear plays centre stage with all that’s going on in regards to our safety culture and the measures to control a virus. I think it’s all artificially provoked fear through a massive propaganda campaign, the likes we’ve never seen before. However, there are some other fundamental things at play here, so I appreciate your musings on such things.

You are on the mark when you talk about ‘maps’ and what is unknown - as you say, the things that can’t be mapped. This is directly correlated with the left and right hemispheres of the brain, as I’ve been writing about, where the left hemisphere re-presents everything, as one would re-present the contours of a terrain on a map of that terrain. The map is not the terrain and cannot be experienced as the actual terrain can - but the map is nevertheless very useful in navigating the terrain. I think the problem, and maybe this is what you are getting at, is that we are so focussed on the map, thinking that reading the map is to experience the terrain, that we miss the actual terrain. Maps, for the left hemisphere are appealing as they are abstract, static, clear/unambiguous, non-living, known. The actual terrain is real, in flux, ambiguous, living, unknown (to whatever degree you are unfamiliar to it from experience). The ‘terrain’ of this virus has been one of flux, ambiguity, full of unknowns, but many health bureaucrats cannot tolerate that fact and want everything ‘mapped’ to an abstract, static, unambiguous, measurable, quantitative thing - reduce it all to numbers and you have it all pinned down and then you can beat it!

On your point about feedback loops in an interconnected society perpetuating a materialistic view - I agree this plays a big roll, is amplified in this age of social media, but the actual process of feedback is not the problem. What I mean is that the same process of positive feedback loops in a society could foster a much more holistic and healthy perspective. The problem, of course, is the content that is being fed back. The same can be said for technology generally. We are communicating with many people, easily, with hardly any barriers, because of technology - this could be good or bad depending on the content and its ultimate end. Just as atomic energy can provide electricity for a city or destroy it - the intent, not the technology, is often the problem.

When it comes to the spiritual, as you mention, it’s extremely difficult to ‘map’, the parameters can hardly be measured - and explanation or categorisation of that sphere of existence is open to a multitude of subjective perspectives - there’s nothing ‘black or white’ about it. For these reasons it’s not something the left hemisphere entertains unless it can pin it down with dogma. And wasn’t this the case in the so called Dark Ages? There was a passion for control, for things to be fixed and certain - there was an intolerance for the mystical and those who departed from the dogma found themselves exiled or killed. Like Plato who said we should do astronomy by ‘ignoring the visible heavens’, that the theory was more important than the thing itself, the dogma of the age became the reality over any other reality - I don’t think God got a look in. Actually, Plato in Republic and in Laws showed a related distaste for emotion, the body and the physical world, and envisaged an authoritarian state where everything is compulsory or proscribed. It was all theoretical and very left hemispheric if you ask me. This was also the case in the Dark Ages, and I feel we are heading that way in the 21st Century. I’ve mentioned in other places that if we continue in this direction we will be another Dark Age, if we aren’t already - it’s just the dogma is different this time.

I do feel, however, that we are not as collectively ignorant of the spiritual world as I think you are suggesting, and there are many who reject, at least partly, the materialism that has so permeated our lives. There is still an appreciation for the spiritual, the mystical, and beauty - we are not all automatons in a fear trance marching to the tune of totalitarian dictators running the global Ministry of Truth (although you would be forgiven to think so in some parts of the world during the last 2 years). And herein is the key to getting out of this mess - Engaging our Right Hemisphere! First step is to remember again the bigger picture. One of these remembrances was expressed by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who said of the fall of Russia to Communism, “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened”. And there is also the added burden of technology that is creating a feedback loop, creating and re-creating a world fit for only the left hemisphere and not for anything like God. Technology should be our slave, not our dehumanising, brainwashing, demoralising overlord that we’ve willingly embraced. Stand back (again a right hemisphere talent) and let’s take a good look at ourselves. It’s not just the technocrats, the globalists, it’s all of us.

Thanks again for your letter O’Brien.

Kind regards,

Winston

The first step to tyranny