I want to tease out a few probably
disparate ideas, but have all become stuck in my head at once.
1. On an episode of StarTalk, Neil DeGrasse Tyson says something like, “What if you wake up as a completely different person, would you ever know it? You'd have all their memories, mannerisms, etc.”
2. Considering the inability to think something that never occurs to you. And closely aligned, the idea that you can keep making the same mistake.
1. On an episode of StarTalk, Neil DeGrasse Tyson says something like, “What if you wake up as a completely different person, would you ever know it? You'd have all their memories, mannerisms, etc.”
2. Considering the inability to think something that never occurs to you. And closely aligned, the idea that you can keep making the same mistake.
3. The idea that, “you should pick the ones that pick you.”
4. Looking up to “cool” people.
To the first idea, I initially thought of claims regarding the “collective conscious” and the title of the new show “Wisdom of the Crowd” kept flashing by. If we presumed a collected conscious, then, in a sense, every day you are waking up as any or everyone else. “Their” memories are only as good as they can remember and relate them. “Their” quirks or habits presumably things you could work yourself into. Or, maybe better said, at the level of experience, maybe you can't hit a high A note above the highest C ever sung on stage, but you can experience the same nonchalance and calm with regard to one of your own talents or capacities.
That same consciousness could possibly, only be so conscious. In the sense that if you take an opinion poll from all of the same type of person or demographic, you'll get a skewed answer. The crowd may be able to provide some larger insight some of the time about a few specific things, but there's little reason to believe much of what they say or do lies beyond the confines of convention and norms of the era. Science, then, as a set of processes to remove the biases of that consciousness, in it's interpretation can also only be so conscious of its conclusions. To the extent you let the conclusions breath independent of your opinion speaks to its efficacy and survival as a viable means of interacting with the world.
I don't personally think there is a collective consciousness, and I think if you had an exacting and comprehensive method of accounting for how and why people transmit ideas, you'd narrow down the harbingers of the next waves of good or bad ideas, much as if you had the computing and recording power to better predict the weather. I think that would be a pointless goal and shift too quickly in real time to provide any real insight, but I don't think the transmission and evolution of ideas is fundamentally magic or hard to understand.
Waking up as someone else, shifting your life laterally perhaps, could simply be an exercise in extreme empathy and imagination. It'd be utilizing the part of our brain that grew to run the thought experiment so we wouldn't have to risk our lives to figure something out. Your specific interpretation of whatever the subject matter then becomes mute. I can envision myself as a rock star. I can play the instrument, I can sign autographs, I can run from paparazzi. At the smallest level, while I won't be “culturally interpreted” as deserving of the Hall of Fame, no act of any band member is beyond my doing or feeling. They incidentally get swept up by the winds of chance that begot fame. My winds, while ignored, blew just as ferociously as forces in my own life.
Here seems like a good time to talk about idea 2, being unable to think something that never occurs to you.
Say it never dawns on you that you could ever pick up an instrument, let alone develop a “talent” for it. Given the innocuous nature of whether or not you play an instrument, no one is going to bother to blame or shame you for that. There's a million roads you haven't taken that no one would bat an eye about. But then force yourself to think of criminal behavior. It's immediately easy for us to imagine why we wouldn't spend our time kayaking or becoming a lawyer, but somehow our brain shuts down imagining getting into elevated levels of trouble. We affirm a “be anything you want to be” posture and completely forget we can be absolutely terrible. We can desire destruction and aberration, and yet even acknowledging that seems lost on our “collective consciousness” no matter how many war documentaries get produced.
I think this happens because of an idea often forwarded that “people are fundamentally good.” It's that people don't normally want to be be bad, or suffer the social repercussions. People aren't good or bad, they're people. Any and all behavior that strays from the echoed, presumed, or televised “norm” triggers bad feelings. This creates a condition where you don't allow yourself to play with just how “bad” you actually are. This is how “weird” fetishes and taboos get created. This is why self-righteous religious hypocrites accept things like pedophilia and rape. It never occurs to them they're bad. Never. Meanwhile we blame the “intellectuals” and “left” for not speaking their language and not being understanding. It never occurs to them, irony weeps, that someone else's brain never had the same ideas occur to them.
Take an easy example, like being gay. How do you know you're not gay if you've fundamentally barred your brain from ever asking the question? You don't just “never find the words,” you reduce even the hint of discomfort into derision or violence. Similarly, you don't care how science operates or at what stage a nervous system develops if, in your mind, you've never not known how to have a thought where “soul” came first. Not the simple word, “soul” but every feeling, memory, positively and defensively reinforced ounce of care that soul has meant to you your entire life. It never truly occurs to you that “accidental life” is even on the table. You don't have a real conception of “cell,” “life,” or even “accident” because what they mean isn't your hard won parsed perception and description, they're a jumbled mess of righteousness in need of defending.
I think this speaks so much to why I try to read and watch “everything.” I've heard a number of times back to back how the study of philosophy or constant pursuit of knowledge just keeps informing you of the different degrees of your ignorance. You can get insanely technically proficient at a handful of things, and you can create a thousand new questions regarding a new topic that grabs your interest. I don't know what I don't know. The things I do know, and the way I've oriented my life, I start to lose sight of how long it took me to get there. It doesn't occur to me that habits I've built or fought long and hard for can be, in a more specific sense, forgotten. Habituating doubt is great for breaking prejudices, but dangerous when let out of the box of context.
So onto “choosing those that choose you.” On its face, it sounds like a terrible idea. Anyone could choose you. A gang member chooses you for your desire to impress or balls in dangerous situations. A self-destructive lonely partner sees you for the beautiful, amazing, strongest person they've ever known and equally as afraid of being alone or disappointing their parents as they are. Ash and Pikachu took a minute to get on working terms. It makes me think of the fatalistic yet cheerfully sung, “Love the one you're with.”
The same could be said for topics of interest or compulsion made by society or family. Get a STEM degree! They scream, as you ignore the statistics regarding a glut of cheap engineers coming from India. Kim Kardashian! As you join in the chorus of, “What does she even do?” and peep the price of her new perfume. Marketing chooses you. Schools choose your family for their money, not because IU feels a stately obligation to educate the Midwest. The army chooses you to stand for your country, even if it knows you're only there because you couldn't afford school or were caught up in the romanticism of dying in service to “freedom and democracy.”
A less insidious interpretation could be at the level of an actual healthy family or friendship. Choose to engage deeper the friends that bother to occasionally text or call you first. Choose to engage the ideas like the ones I listed above because they couldn't go away and try to figure out what you really see in them. Maybe you want to get all mystical and say “chance” chose you to engage and perceive the life you're living, so choose to just generally pay better attention and offer the level of choice and engagement that your eyes and brain seem to lock you into whether you like it or not. I can't help but think I've tried to have the best of all worlds in picking back the girls who've been happy enough to sleep with or cuddle up to me, but here the failure of the idea seems most easily manifested when they haven't picked each other...
Finally, the idea of looking up to “cool” people. Part of looking through endless streams of information is the search for people I want to be more like. For a while, I caught the idea that I wanted to be “nicer” and worshiped, in a sense, the friends of mine in college that seemed to have these “pleasant” or “delightful” dispositions that attracted more of the same types. Easily argued, that's not me, but I admired, and still kind of do, the ones who can pull that off. The mean part of my brain calls their behavior mostly a well-rehearsed lie that they suffer indelibly for and lays at the ground of why we often part ways for stupid and insecurity-screaming reasons, but that's just one interpretation, right?
I've found fictional characters cool. I thought the “new atheists” were cool. I've had a handful of teachers I admired for their dispositions or hilarity. I think my dad is cool. My grandma and grandpa were cool. I have a handful of friends so wildly outgoing and individualistic, no matter how absolutely weird they absolutely are, they're stuck at the coolest level I could imagine.
You think of people as cool because you want to be more like them, whether you're always comfortable admitting that to yourself or not. A big reason I “hate everyone” isn't because I can't make a case for why they still deserve a place on the planet, but because they don't have a single thing I want to be more like. I don't want to be a bureaucrat deferring to the rules to perpetuate stupid exploitative ideas. There goes my life as the voice on the other end of a “help” line. I don't want to be a single-minded gamer or stoner. I don't want to be “middle-class,” pulling in just enough to keep paying the bills as I salivate about the week vacation I'll get maybe a year or two from now. I don't want to crawl up the ass of one of my hobbies until I can black out the rest of the world. I don't want to force conversation because you're scared we won't be cool if we don't see each other for a while.
The last person I genuinely thought was cool was Jordan Peterson. There's many many people I certainly admire, don't get me wrong, but what I recognized in Peterson was an infatuation and enthusiasm with his chosen material that I felt I at one point had and missed about myself. He had a moral and intellectual compulsion to fight with difficult and horrible ideas until he could shake out solid foundations. Him having the ability to articulate and move my thoughts into realms I didn't know I didn't know how to think about was, still is, immensely gratifying. I want to be that for other people. I find it unimaginably motivating and cool when I get the opportunity to explore new territory someone has opened up. On my horizon is a field and an open-ended mapping website. I want to create the conditions for my own motor running in service to discovering the unknown.
It'd be great if there was a way to tie it all together right? I mean, these 3 or 4 pages now exist as one new thing. It's another little chunk of me to add to the pile. I think it's cool. Until I wrote it, only those four thoughts at the top occurred to me, against my ability to escape them or anticipate them getting stuck in my head. I picked the idea of writing about them after they picked me. And if you read this, or re-read it, and then “forget” about it, and then one day spit out a line exactly as I said it, maybe it could be said you woke up as me and never would be able to say so. It would never occur to you my impact or what my consciousness did to our collective one. Or maybe I'll get ignored and taken for granted, and different forces will fill in for what mine might've done. Could I blame you?
