Instrumental Directives

Bob Fiske

Instrumental Directives

Here is a little background, just to let you know how I arrived at this.  I was reading Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now for the second time.  I got up to the same chapter where I had stopped the first time—and I quit again.  It was driving me crazy!

Several days later, while visiting my parents, I went for a morning walk.  I needed to settle my brain, which was whirling around and around.  The brain, the intellect, does not submit easily to spiritual awakenings.  I walked, I grumbled, I asked, I moaned.  Why?  Why?  How does Tolle’s spiritual awakening help the world?  Why does this matter so much to me?  Why do I feel so alone?

Finally, a thought came that lent me some stability: What do you know?  I started to think about my writing and my journaling.  A picture was forming.  The picture was formed of words.  Not just any words, though.  Verbs!  Verbs flooded into my consciousness.

Verbs are important.  They represent action.  Moreover, a verb can stand for an entire sentence.  The shortest sentence is the imperative, the directive.  Run!  Jump!  Buy, buy, buy!

In fact, a well-chosen verb can stand for more than a sentence; it can stand for an idea.  Plant it, water it, explain it, and it starts to grow.  Yes, a verb can become an entire treatise, telling others why you chose it and what it means to you.

So, yes, these verbs began to paint a picture in my head.  It started with my deepest yearnings for humanity.  As I thought about it, I realized that my yearnings for humanity were not shared by most people.  At different stages of our adult lives, we choose where to focus our energies, what to call important.  So, I began to put myself into other people’s shoes.  The verbs began to arrange themselves into three “islands”.

The last island popped into my head, literally, as I stepped up to my parent’s front door.  No kidding!  I’m reaching into my pocket for the house key, and Bam!  The picture felt complete.  In the kitchen, I immediately grabbed some paper and sketched my work as a diagram.

Between then and now, I have thought about it and have “refined” it.  The three islands now have names and represent three levels of awareness and action.  Also, I polished some of the words.  The urge to look clean, I suppose.  For instance, the verb “conserve” was originally “use less”.  And, “replenish” was “give back”.  Maybe I should have left them alone, should not have tinkered with perfection.  Hah!

So here it is.  First the overview:

And now, the verb-y version:

Possibly, I am the only one to whom this is meaningful.  I guarantee you, that would not be the first time.  However, if you grasp this immediately—especially the earth directives—I would very much like to make your acquaintance.

With love,

Bob

Reciprocity – Like Water to Fish, Part Four

Bob Fiske

Reciprocity – Like Water to Fish, Part Four

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An Experiment.  The value of reciprocity is very hard to shake off.  To make the point, we can try a little experiment.  Suppose you find a penny on the sidewalk.  Then you pick up the penny and put a nickel in its place.  Then you tell all your family members what you did and suggest that they do the same.  I predict that the large majority of them will look at you like you are crazy. Even if you are able to explain to them why you did it (see below), they will not get it.

If you do this experiment, be prepared for responses like this: “You idiot, you just lost four cents.”  “Are you nuts?  You picked up a penny!”  “No wonder you can’t pay your bills, look how you handle money!”  “What?  Where’s your payoff for that?”

By the way, there are other ways you can act “crazy”.  Got a little spare change?  Put it in a vending machine when nobody is looking.  Or walk down a street that has parking meters.  See a meter set to expire, and add a quarter to it.  These senseless acts can do you no good and earn you no profit.  (Unless you count the possibility of making someone a little bit happy as profit.)

The world is imbalanced because the human system of exchanges is imbalanced.  We have been taught that nothing that people do happens without a payoff.  We are conditioned to judge the payoff before we choose.  Why does that make for a broken system?  Because while we are busy with our value exchanges, which we regard as fair, we are ignoring the debts we owe to the earth, to its people and to all other forms of life. That is not fair.  Our economic system, that we designed to keep exchanges fair has no room in it to account for “invisible” debts.  We mortgage the welfare of poor countries, the earth, the biosphere, and the future condition of the world that our descendants will inherit every time we make value exchanges that ignore the true costs of production and disposal.

The Other Side of the Coin.  If reciprocity is the underlying deep value that guides our value exchanges, and if it is not a trustworthy guide, then what might we establish in its place?  In a word, “non-reciprocity”.  Allow me to explain.  I am not talking about selfishness.  Nor do I mean a breakdown in a lawful society such that “might makes right”, and the strongest take from the weakest.  In fact, I would suggest that our reciprocity-based system has already moved us in these directions.

As members of one of the world’s “Major Economies”, we have bought the rights to natural resources buried in the ground of “Minor Economies”.  We have exploited impoverished workers by paying factories to hire them at non-living wages.  Who is going to stand in our way?

As big-brained humans, the smartest species on the planet, we have over-exercised our might and our right to take from the earth.  In the name of inexpensive meat, we burn forests.  In the name of our personal health, we plunder the fish stocks of the oceans.  In the name of housing tracts and business development, we crowd out endangered species.  Who is going to stand in our way?

As a perpetually fertile animal, we have a natural ability to procreate.  We do this in the name of giving our children a better life than our forebears had.  We do it in the name of immortality.  Unlike other species, we have no predators to keep us in check.  And the earth itself cannot stop us from despoiling it except by damaging living conditions in general, both for us and countless other species.  Who is going to stand in our way?  (Perhaps the physical limits of spaceship earth will, if you choose to adopt such a belief.  Even then, it is not a pretty picture.)

Non-reciprocity.  Here is what I mean by non-reciprocity.  A non-reciprocal act is giving without receiving.  To many people, this idea is such a great departure from the norm that it would be rejected outright without being given any further consideration.  How can you give without receiving?  Why if we did that all the time, we would have nothing left and would end up as paupers!  And that is nonsense!

So who said anything about doing it all the time?  Let’s try to embed this idea in a larger framework in which it makes more sense.  In spite of the principle of reciprocity—which many equate with fairness—we already live in a society that has forfeited generosity for selfish gain.  How can I support such an assertion?  Perhaps through some examples.

How many people wait until driving a large automobile is economically unfeasible to switch to a small automobile?  How many people take the time to find out who they are really voting for instead of letting political advertisements decide for them?  How many well-to-do taxpayers use a tax-write-off as their excuse for making charitable donations?  How many of us get impatient, or even angry, when a cashier has a long line of patrons, and we have to wait a little while to reach the front of the line?

Far too few live by the true equation of life: if you take, you must put back, otherwise you doom your own existence.  It is a strange irony that indigenous cultures, such as the Maasai nomads in northeast Africa, know this better than we do.  In a land where water is precious, they guard this resource.  They manage vast herds of livestock, but they are careful to keep regional collectives of families from growing beyond resource limits.  Even their children learn that each water source must not be dirtied, and must be preserved.  (Source: Masood E., Schaffer D. (eds.), 2006. Dry: Life Without Water.)

Observing them you would describe their economic system as, “Put something back so that there will be something to take in the future.”  That is what non-reciprocity buys you.

The Unbalanced Economy.  In short, we have become so accustomed to reciprocal trade-offs that this has become the unspoken, unquestioned assumption in all of our dealings.  Unfortunately, this approach to dealing with life uses only one-half of our humanity, the taking half.  Meanwhile, our giving half atrophies.  Our consuming society has conditioned us to ignore this half.

This is like exercising part of our body while allowing the rest of it to wither.  Imagine the human species as a weight-lifter who has built up his left arm’s musculature and strength while ignoring completely his right arm.  The picture that comes to mind reminds me more of some aquatic crab with its asymmetrically enlarged claw than it does of a normal, well-balance person.

In fact, this is exactly like the philosophy that underpins most economic models and government policies.  According to these models the only rational and desirable outcome is to raise the general welfare of the citizenry and to promote growth of the economy.  These models have an unchallenged assumption that “good” equates to raising the bar, in general.

There is no room in that discussion for lowering the bar.  Yet, the time to lower the bar is upon us, and our definition of economic welfare is seriously in need of reformation.

Summary of Part Four.  We have become conditioned to give only for the sake of payoff.  Yet our system of exchanges mortgages the welfare of exploited countries, the existence of other species and the future that humanity will inherit.  Our system of exchanges is based upon the strong drawing upon the weak and the power to ignore invisible debts.  These are uneven exchanges, yet they are deemed “fair”.  If this is what we mean by reciprocity, then the proper thing would be to call for “non-reciprocity”.  This is defined as a giving act that does not expect a payoff to balance the loss.  This is defined as taking from the present world only enough, and putting back what you have taken to preserve the opportunity to take in the future.  Economic models in modern societies do not grasp this concept.  They are couched in terms of raising the bar.  In these models no credence is given to lowering the bar.

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Nature’s Brains, Part 6

July 8, 2012

Bob Fiske

Nature’s Brains, Part 6

(Note: I invite you to read Part 5 before you dive into this part.)

It’s time to wrap this up.  Have I convinced you that brains are obsolete?  Probably not.  That’s OK, because I am not perfectly convinced, either.  However, I do suspect that they may be.

Let’s reexamine the idea of species survival.  Many people—including some biologists—equate survival with competition.  In layperson’s lingo survival amounts to “survival of the fittest”.  Even those trained in genetics might say that a unique gene (or complex of genes) confers a “survival advantage”, meaning that individuals endowed with this advantage will be more likely to pass on their genes to the next generation than individuals lacking the genetic trait(s).

What this amounts to is that more competitive individuals or species, because of “superior adaptability” will out-reproduce other individuals/species in the race to acquire resources, meet physical needs and produce offspring that also produce offspring.  Understood this way, human beings would be judged as the most competitive species, and largely due to the human brain.

If I stopped there, then you would miss the other crucial half of the picture.  The “competitive half-picture” conveys the image of nature as a producer of Olympic gold medalists that can beat out other contenders.  However, that is a simple human notion.  Nature has been in this business too long to aim so low.

The truth is, I believe, that nature’s brilliance can be summed up in a simple word: harmony.

While it is true that the natural world does create species rivalries, it is of much greater significance that species coexist.  It’s not hard to see.  Walking in the neighborhood in the summer I notice that every bush is laced with spider webs.  The plants don’t simply tolerate these invaders, they make them a comfortable home.

Go into any forest.  You are standing within a well-balanced system in which plants, animals, insects, worms and fungi each contribute in species-unique ways to the overall health of the biome.  By the way, one reference uses another interesting word: communities.  Biomes are notable as communities hosting a diversity of species.

Even in extremes of inter-species competition, nature manages to maintain harmony.  For example, swarms of locusts (immense concentrations of juvenile grasshoppers) can consume plant life rapidly in areas of thousands of square kilometers.  In their wake locust swarms leave no living thing.  This appears to be extreme competition, but it is more than that.  Grasshopper populations die off, and plant communities grow anew.  Nature restores balance by means of a time-based cycle.

The human brain appears to play by its own rules.  As a competitor it is unsurpassed.  The problem is that, in achieving its competitive advantage, the human brain has brushed aside nature’s tendencies to create coexistence.  Competition may be hard, and Homo sapiens may be the winner.  But one thing is certain: winning is easy when measured against nature’s ability to weave communities that maintain harmony among species.

Some people do understand this.  Farmers specializing in permaculture strive to create interactive plant, animal and insect communities that produce food, retain water, create shade and sun, grow flowers and constrain pests.  Their goal is to grow food in the manner that nature grows forests, with multiple species coexisting.  The knowledge of how to emulate nature exists.  It is not mainstream knowledge, but it exists.

That knowledge is not enough.  The human brain has painted itself into a corner because we are well on our way to nine billion individuals.  Most species have constraints that keep their populations in check.  Prey have predators, and predators have a limited supply of prey.  They are subject to limitations in territory or key resources.  The human brain, though, has invented methods to defeat every limitation that governs unbridled growth in other species.  Our population goes in one direction only: up.

In the end, I suspect that nature’s way will ultimately triumph.  The human brain is on course to exhaust every last resource it can.  In doing so, it will end the supremacy of the human species.  It will also take down many, many species by disrupting the finely tuned harmony that nature has woven.  Because of the human brain’s competitive and simplistic behavior, the world will undergo yet another massive extinction event.

Like the crops that were devastated by locusts, nature will re-emerge.  It will continue its process of creating species that both compete and coexist in balanced communities.  And it will never again produce a species with an over-competitive, non-harmonizing brain like the one encased in the skulls of Homo sapiens.

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Nature’s Brains, Part 4

July 8, 2012

Bob Fiske

Nature’s Brains, Part 4

(Note: I invite you to read Part 3 before you dive into this part.)

Sooner or later, in nature’s tinkering with brain designs, a truly superior model was bound to come along.  The simian family lays claim to this prize.  Scientists don’t really understand how this happened, yet we see many descendent species alive today that clearly show the innovative features that formed over time.

One of these innovations was exquisitely fine motor control.  This capability appears to have co-evolved with body characteristics that could express new types of movement.  For instance, all monkeys and apes possess a finger-based hand that shapes itself with greater precision than is given to clawed or hooved mammals.  Also, some of these species are endowed with long limbs and tails that give them the arboreal advantage to swing, climb and hang.  Of course, living in trees also requires balance, eyesight and hearing to match the motor skills.  These are jobs handled by the new brain, and they couple well with this brain’s superior learning ability.

Courtesy of e-mail, I once watched a film of a gibbon teasing a pair of tiger cubs.  (You may watch it here, though be warned that the film quality is low.)  If ever I saw a gymnastic wizard, this little gibbon was it.  It is a remarkable testimony of the superior level of body-and-brain coordination possible using a simian brain.

Other capabilities emerged in the simian brain.  A brain that can learn is a brain that can teach.  Thus, it is possible to pass brain-encoded patterns from generation to generation without relying only on the DNA hard-wiring of behavior.  By the way, the teaching of new generations is not a monopoly owned just by simian brains.  Bears teach their cubs how to forage, and many types of young male birds must learn their songs from older males of the same species and geographic location.  Nonetheless—as we well know—the simian brain would push the ability to learn and teach to new heights.

The most recent brain innovations are sported by the hominids, or great apes.  Some of our less intellectual cousins, chimpanzees and gorillas, show that they, too, carry the seeds of the type of intelligence that flourished in the Homo (human) line.  Chimps have been observed to make simple tools such as using sticks to fish out ants from a nest for eating.  These species show other “human” traits such as problem-solving, concern for the welfare of others, and self-awareness.

And, surprisingly, both chimpanzees and gorillas have revealed that they possess previously unsuspected symbolic language skills.  Given the right expressive media (American Sign Language, computer screens or colored shapes), hominids in research settings have amassed sizeable vocabularies and have shown that they can fashion novel “utterances” to express, wants, needs and general observations.

Finally in this discussion of the “advanced design” hominid brain, I wish to mention a series of brain structures that are loosely bundled under the term “the limbic system”.  The limbic structures lie at the base of the cortex, at the juncture where it surrounds the “old brain”.  In fact, these structures (the hippocampus, the amygdala, the nucleus accumbens, and others) appear in other mammalian brains of less intellectual stature than the hominid brain.  In spite of this fact, it is probable that, in hominid brain design, limbic structures were enhance and pressed into service to perform more complex functions.  Limbic functions are thought to play a role in reward, fear, addiction, emotional memories and memory formation in general.  Perhaps that’s too much anatomy.

The idea I want to paint about the new-and-improved hominid brain might be better conveyed using broader brush strokes.  This brain permitted a new level of behavioral and thought patterns, patterns that were the product of emotions, punishments, rewards and social transactions.  In ape communities we see such things as exchanging grooming services, currying favor and shifting dominance hierarchies.  However, in human communities an entirely new social reality was called into existence.  Its final metamorphosis would be expressed in human culture.  In this culture the social, emotional, symbolic, political, artistic, economic and intellectual components could take on reality as  by-products of a marvelously large brain.

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Nature's Brains, Part 3

July 8, 2012

Bob Fiske

Nature’s Brains, Part 3

(Note: I invite you to read Part 2 before you dive into this part.)

As nature continued to tinker with brain designs, sooner or later some sophisticated features were bound to arise.  In larger, brained animals, such as dinosaurs, the reptilian or “old brain” did little more than regulate basic bodily processes.  These brains sent “down” nerve impulses for modifying respiration, digestion, heart rate, and perhaps even body temperature.  The old brain could also chain together primitive movements known as reflexes.  Reflexes are simple and are coded in the spinal cord.  Through the dominance of the brain these simple movements could be orchestrated into more complex behavioral sequences, sort of like composing words from the letters of the alphabet.

The complex behavioral sequences could accomplish tasks such as hunting, mating, building a nest, walking, running, fighting, and so on.  How did the old brain come to encode the complex behaviors?  Through trial-and-error.  In other words, species went extinct or found a survival advantage based upon the behavior sets that were genetically hard-wired into their members’ brains.  These behaviors were determined by the DNA code in that species’ genes and were passed from generation to generation.  Learning of the sort that we take for granted had not yet been invented as a brain design feature.

Even today we are able to see in the “advanced” mammalian brain vestiges of hard-wired, genetically coded behavior.  One example of this is the newborn foal.  Within minutes of being born, baby horses struggle to their feet and begin to walk.  Seeing a fully developed behavior of this sort is fairly unusual in the mammalian brain because the innovations it has acquired generally impose a long development period on the young brain.

One of the premier innovations that enabled mammals to survive was the brain’s ability to learn.  This is anything but trivial (even though we take it for granted).  In order to learn, the brain needed to have a memory that could be loaded with new patterns.  But, for that to happen, the brain required an exquisitely complex coding mechanism that could replicate, in a “neural form”, qualities of the real world, a virtual model, so to speak.  This required more and more neurons in the brain.  The result is the “new” brain, a larger accessory that physically sits above and around the old brain.  All this new neural tissue was crammed into a larger skull in a folded and wrinkled fashion.  Scientists call this the cortex.

Parts of the cortex could more richly record auditory information or visual information.  Also, parts of the cortex were dedicated to producing complex movement sequences in various muscle groups such as the limbs, the mouth, the tail, the vocal chords, etc.

By the way, mammalian brains exerted pressure on other species to keep up.  So, we see that many birds (the descendants of the dinosaurs) also innovated their brain designs in similar fashion.  Maybe we mammals are not so special, after all, just lucky to come out in front of the race for survival.

Of course all this ability to encode a rich a faithful inner world model or command exquisitely complex movements would be better utilized if the brain were endowed with an equally rich storage system, that is, a memory.  The memory would allow multiple experiences in an individual’s life to be compared.  This is essential to learning (and survival), for it enables the search for cause-and-effect relationships to be found.

Here’s a simple example.  I am travelling with a herd of my companion mammals over an area of dry, parched earth.  Yet my eyes and visual cortex are able to discern a distant spot of green and brown as a concentration of things known as plants.  The brain, commanding the eyes to look more closely, enables the visual cortex to spy that this is a rich and dense collection of vegetation.  And the brain’s memory yields up a “conclusion” that other dense collections of vegetation have proved to be a source for water.  Even without the benefit of language that can name things, my mammalian brain has recorded (learned) the causal meaning of an oasis.

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