Table of Contents
Gravitating to the Known.
How do you know when you are talking about the unknown? Perhaps another question. How do you feel about the unknown?
There is a lot of theorizing. Excellent point.
Excited, challenged.
Maybe you think of more questions than answers when something is unknown.
It’s often more interesting than the known, and the questions are intriguing. For some people, certainly.
Ever notice how much you theorize? Is it not really a compulsive process? There is a lot of theorizing aka speculation on a day to day basis.
How do you feel about the known?
Compared to the unknown – the Mystery – the known seems flat and unsubtle. Sounds like solid ground. Stable.
Sometimes intrigued, sometimes bored as it isn’t practical or pragmatic at the time.
How do you distinguish between the known and the unknown?
I run little tests through my mind. Reality testing is an important process, yes.
The known needs less brain power.
The known can be more comforting as you know what to expect. It’s also a source of much delusion as well. Really all delusion.
We gravitate to the known. It’s an instinct and necessary for emotional regulation. The comfortable and the familiar makes us feel safe, feel our sense of identity. Could you know who you are if nothing were familiar?
Yes, the known is like a routine. You don’t really need to think about it, you just do it.
Our first familiar thing…would that be sounds or smells? Smell and touch.
No, we at least need familiar memories.
You mean not even our own memories would seem familiar? Indeed, that is an excellent question. What is memory other than familiarity? Can you claim to remember something if it isn’t familiar to you? Recognizable?
Going over the same neural pathways? Your neural pathways were in place well before you had time to familiarize yourself with anything. They reach what is virtually full maturity even before we have had much time to familiarize ourselves with anything. The brain is initially the body’s fasting growing organ. Would you say a five year old is familiar with much?
Yes, I would. How so? Well maybe they are familiar with enough. I would say they are still functionally free of familiarity as it manifests in adults.
They need a lot of supervision due to unfamiliarity. Yes. They show keen perceptual gifts, like being better judges of character for the most part than adults are. Even infants show this gift.
Is perception the same as familiarity?
Well, familiarity may affect my perception but they’re not the same. They use the same pathways. In fact, there are theories that state your ability to process perception at all would fail if you had no familiarity at all with the things perceived. This even proves true in the lab with adult test subjects.
Yes, like people in Alaska seeing aliens and reporting them to be owls. Yes. The brain can’t accept something so strange into it’s trained processing so it brute force hacks your perception so that you do perceive something, and then it makes you very afraid of that thing. Always red flagging something that made it react that way.
In colonial times, they refer to them as flying swine, because the shape of the ship didn’t make sense to them.
The Native Americans thought they were seeing moving clouds hanging strangely low over the water, when in fact what they were seeing was the sails of ships. The brains tendency to do this is also what lead to many of our mythological creatures, like the centaur. That and our love for symbolism and metaphor. We have a language addiction, but there is a mind behind all this mess.
Perhaps we have an analogy addiction. Language is analogy, otherwise how can words have meaning?
Precisely! — through imprecise comparisons. Yes.
The word apple and the fruit held in my hand are very different things, and yet they also aren’t. What do you think of this notion? Any thoughts on how that is possible?
One is a symbol of the other.
The word apple is a name you have given to an experience.
The word apple, the name, and the perception of the physical apple, trigger the same parts of the brain. If you think the word apple, your brain recreates your experience of the apple.
It’s like a pointer in coding or a shortcut on your desktop.
If you are blocked from being able to do that, you won’t be able to understand what the apple is. Something like this happens in a variety of head injury syndromes. The person can see clearly, even recognize that people are in the room, but if they can’t re-trigger the same process they originally used to identify the people, they will insist they don’t know them, or even that they are imposters.
Doesn’t left brain and right brain come into this somewhere? Hemispheric distribution of function does play some role, but not as much as is popularly thought.
So the pointers required for recognizing people are no longer there, or at least are dysfunctional.
Even at times a common word can stop making sense to you. It appears strange even though you know you’ve used it a thousand times. Sensory saturation causes that, yes. Too much familiarity in that case. The brain refuses to process something that has stayed stuck in its perceptual buffer for too long, treats it as noise.
It seems like the simpler and shorter the word, the more commonly the brain thinks it is just noise.
I’m actually heavily prone to sensory saturation or satiation as they call it. It’s the primary reason for my perceptual blank outs. I’m still thinking, but am not fully plugged in perceptually.
Multi-syllabic words, curiously, do not register as noise so much, for me anyway. They can begin to register as words, noise I mean, if they are repeated steadily enough. It sets a rhythm. Transcendental meditation actually relies on this mechanism.
Manifestation of Embodied Cognition
So this perceptual thing is this also an embodiment thing? Indeed, perceptual behaviour is the manifestation of embodied cognition. Embodied cognition is also why I am so interested in the tidal brain model. Before a child is lingual they are still capable of thought. They have tested this heavily now, and still are, recognizing steady behavioural responses in infants and pre-verbal toddlers, but if they have no real language, then how can they think? No codification to rely on, no familiarity to draw upon.
Perhaps like sign language, in images, pictures.
Pictures or touch/sensation?
Some even say it’s a species memory, though I think that is a cop out. Perception is thought. They haven’t figured this out yet, though it shows up in all their tests and experiments.
I suspect we are born with a whole lot of familiarity built-in, innate. No, familiarity is an entirely different construct. It’s not a false hood, just a prematurely rendered opinion. This stops them from looking much closer. The process of familiarity is a virus. It is not the foundation of human consciousness as it might at first seem. Familiarity is the known, but before our capacity for familiarity emerged, we were still capable of perceiving the unknown.
Sounds like a form of prejudice. Prejudgment. So if we see the same advertisements on TV over and over and over, we become familiar with them…
Artists have to look at things as if they haven’t seen them before to replicate them accurately. If I attempt to draw something with my left hand (I am right-handed), then I “see” the thing I am drawing as unfamiliar. Familiarity is necessary for a sense of possession.
You can be made to love something you hate just through long familiarity. There is even a credible theory that states that this is how people fall into a life of crime. At first it’s repulsive, you would certainly never do that, but as you see it more and more, as the people around you do it, as you come to adjust to living in the circumstances you do, it readily becomes much less unthinkable.
That doesn’t explain why kids steal. Very young children have only a very limited sense of possession, and what they do have is more relational than concrete. They don’t understand mommy’s toy, they understand mommy and toy, and that mommy reacts to the toy and to them. They can even understand that mommy wants the toy, and depending on how they are feeling they may just give it to her. They don’t understand that anything has been taken from them, and that they may not get it back, and are unable to care or emotionally react to that notion so they aren’t stealing, they are forming relationships.
Autistic Empathy
So the child’s capacity for “empathy” has not yet developed? The typical view of empathy is warped. Sorry, that’s a trigger topic for me. Remember the theory that autistics lack empathy? They insisted it must have something to do with mirror neuron deficits. Even I believed it though it didn’t, at the time, make proper sense to me. It didn’t make my own experience make sense. Well, they have found that there is no such deficit. To the contrary, that system is fully present and more heavily active. So now the theory is that the autistic may be unable to distinguish themselves from others.
I relate to my wife strangely. She loves me and tolerates it readily, but the things she does to help herself, to understand her world, as simple and virtually meaningless as they seem to her, are a huge comfort to me. It’s like I share her world, and when I do not have such a privilege, then I change. I don’t act out, I actually express much less and things make less sense to me. I don’t display as much of what people would call wisdom, and find it hard to even find such motivation, like having all your experience lose any context.
I have learned alternatives, had before we met, but she if anything filters it. I will ask her which of us do you think is more of a people person? You. You engage people more, make them feel comfortable. But in fact I am not. What she does is help ground me, because she is not what she thinks of as a people person.
So by being able to anchor my tendency to identify with people, in her, it filters out my reactions to the wide range of things going on around me. Because she is not reactionary, I can share in that also.
The reason I took to language is everyone is an unknown. I never become truly familiarized. Familiarization looked at from a neuroscience point of view is the process of synapses stabilizing. Because of my mutation and my general neural phenotype, my own neurons are hyperactive, and hyper plastic. The synapses change faster than they are supposed to, and thus it becomes very hard for me to acquire and keep new physical skills, or familiarize myself with any single individual well enough to form a normal relationship with them. This is why they describe people with brains like mine… Well, they say the regions of their brain are under-connected. They expect to see more cooperative signaling than they do, because in a typical persons brain some combos of activity always happen.
I have recently discovered why I was having trouble with my brain computer interface (BCI) headset. The activity in my brain I use for thought, doesn’t register to the machine as thought. What I use to move is what registers to it as thought. Very strange to my thinking but I’m confident I can learn to finesse it and make it work.
Embodiment? I don’t experience the embodiment in the normal way I guess, and it may be common in people with autism, as a universal symptom of this issue is what they describe as poor motor planning.
I suspect that there are many forms of grounding, many forms of “familiarity”? Oh, inevitably. Autistics are also known for getting along surprisingly well with animals. This is why it’s becoming more common to assign them a helper animal. But a famous example would be Temple Grandin, everyone familiar?
I have watched many of her videos on YouTube. As a child I once expressed the notion that I could communicate with animals. My family thought it meaningless, strange nonsense. I didn’t say I could talk to them, or that they understood my speech, just that I could communicate with them. That ability diminished though, as I withdrew my attention from the world as much as I could, so that I could cope with growing up as they call it.
I find people that don’t understand animals to be strange. As a child, my very closest friend was our English setter, Count. The first thing I remember in life was his birth and he died when I was 16. I would prefer that anyone else in my family die, rather than him.
Familiar Illusion
So how this all relates to the unknown… The known, the familiar, is an illusion. Your familiar thoughts and knowledge are also illusions. You have never actually done something because you knew what you were doing. What do you think of this?
Then why did I do it? The unknown. You can’t actually lose it. It would require destruction of your brain, but it has and will continue to shape your experience of the world. You vandalized it most likely, buried it behind a lot of sound and fury, heavy on the furry and resentment, but it’s still there.
The fury and the furry! Fury yes, pardon the typos. Furry would actually be the unknown in you, the inner animal, the shape shifter. No one can ultimately deny their instincts. We are all, in a sense, werewolves, and that part of ourselves makes more of the decisions than we have trained our filter to recognize. We avoid recognizing it because it would be inconvenient, incomprehensible. We would not be able to create the sense of security or identity we have come to depend on.
Is it clear how that is true? The world as you see it, and the world as you perceive it, are two separate things. The mystery of things like psychic ability is that there is no mystery, and all the strange metaphysical interpretations that have cropped up around it, well to my point of view are more of an impediment than an assistance. What do you think?
This is sort of scary, especially when you consider that some people’s “security and identity” is grounded in doing harm to others. They are most subject to being broken themselves, and they call that to themselves. The world of the unknown is not really behind a veil. It’s a useful metaphor, and makes it easier to move on to other ideas, but there is no world of the known to exist separately from the other.
The behaviour of the brain, is like the behaviour of gills, vitally necessary, but do the gills really make the fish?
Perhaps they do! If they filter out and filter in what is needed to survive. I think if they did there would never have been humans.
What is needed to survive?
Some sense of connection. Connection to what is needed, physically, emotionally…
Oxygen. Oxygen can kill you. It does in time.
Where are those antioxidants when we need them? They are there. And you hit on it. What is needed to survive is connections, just as in one of natures ecosystems, relationships, we need both oxygen and anti-oxidants. The two as individual elements do not have as much meaning as the two combined. They exist out of context.
Now tell me of perception as you experience it normally, if you would please.
Well, I perceive stuff out there, at the same time that I recognize all these perceptions are mental constructs…
Objects where I think they should be.
Sets? Patterns? For sure. constructs = sets, patterns, expectations, interpretations… Anything much suggestive of anything beyond its individual set?
No, not normally.
Sometimes there are epiphanies, though. Rarely.
Reality is more connected than that. The world behind your trained perception is waves, cycles, tides and reflections, holographic. Nothing accidental because these sets all suggest all other sets. What even lets them be set apart from each other is sequencing.
Although recently I’ve been getting hints at a shift in perception, like something beneath. Do tell? It’s hard to explain. It’s a different noticing of some kind. Not sure how to describe it. Like something is underneath.
A substrate for perception?
There is no outer space. Space doesn’t organize itself the way we commonly perceive it to. That is the ultimate symbol of the unknown, open, and so called empty space. There is a reason for things like the Casimir effect, and it’s not something as simple as supposed virtual particles. This space exists in what could be described as an atmosphere, and human beings are sensitive to it.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~
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