#mind code and context: essays in pragmatics

[pclysemia]

The classical dictum also attributed to Heraclitus: "...you never step twice into the same river..." is also essentially pragmatic, presumably pointing out to the ever-changing context -- time, the river, the self.

Mind, Code and Context: Essays in Pragmatics, by Talmy Givón (1989)

#talmy givón #mind code and context: essays in pragmatics #linguistics #language #pragmatics #self #reality #transcendence #semiotics

[rubykarelia]

ALGORITHMIC CONTAGION: Pro-ED Satellites and Self-Tracking Online (media analysis, 2022)

TW: eating disorders; self-harm

Somewhere in the world, a TikTok user uploads an open invitation—first, however, they proffer foreign eyes with a precursory eating disorder (ED) trigger warning. @reicalls is searching for like-minded individuals to engage in a collaborative mission of sorts to ring in 2022: “does someone wanna be weight loss buddies?” they ask (@reicalls). As a team, these e-quaintances would “update each other [sic], fast together, make goals together ect.” With the sentiment overlaid atop a K-pop dance video, this poster’s identity is carefully cloistered. In the comments section, @reicalls laments that the group is now full; fortunately, to a disappointed @Noname662919, there are countless other users seeking to construct yet another online ED satellite.

This essay will mediate an intricate analysis of ED content on TikTok as a distinctive media practice. After delineating the general nature of the pro-ED community, I will consider how disordered individuals use media accounting and self-tracking to negotiate both a quantified and qualified self. Next, I examine the social implications of the pro-ED TikTok subculture with a focus on its position within the larger online infrastructure. Intentionally sequestered to a self-aware satellite public, I will also explore how pro-ED hashtags and coded verbiage function in TikTok’s updated moderation system. In doing so, we will see not only how the pro-ED satellite supervenes online spaces, but that social media—namely, TikTok—has transformed disordered ideology into a somewhat contagious affliction. 

The following sections will intricately examine the pro-ED TikTok community and hypothesise its attraction to afflicted individuals. In consideration of the quantified self, we will consider how self-tracking is a cornerstone of disordered behaviour; as well, I assert that the social aspect of TikTok has transformed the eating disorder into the pursuit of a qualified self. 

Most pro-ED TikTok users dedicate their accounts to conducting weight check-ins, circulating thinspo—that is, images of thin bodies for inspiration—updating food logs, and engaging in intensive diet challenges with other members. Primarily, pro-ED users inhabit their profiles as claustral spaces for self-monitoring. For example, in a precursory post, one 16-year-old claims that “this account is to inspire me to restrict but u can use it too if u need it [sic]” (@anaricecake). Though the nature of the TikTok interface is dynamic and interactive, pro-ED profiles are quite often anonymous or private as they approach the community with an ascetic mindset, posting daily weigh-ins as a form of self-discipline (Osler & Krueger). For instance, the disclosing of stats is common across such accounts—in these posts, members reflect upon their starting weight and current weight.

These monastic routines mirror traditional self-tracking practices and align with the pursuit of a datified, quantified self. Here, consistently keeping a record of one's eating habits or workout routines “[turns] bodies, experiences, or behaviors into data” (Humphreys, 22). Akin to disordered behaviour, wearable fitness tracking devices—like the Fitbit—claim to “bestow self-knowledge” in their ability to quantify body processes and keep an aggregatable record of data (Crawford, Lingel, & Karppi, 480). Chronicling their statistics grants disordered individuals a retrospective pragmatism—by keeping a record, “[one] can remember, relive, recount, reconcile, and reckon at future points” (Humphreys, 13). One may thus experience “agency through mediated self-knowledge” (Crawford, Lingel, & Karppi, 494); notably, in the context of these disorders, attaining a sense of authority over one’s body metrics is a key motivation to further restrict. In uploading this information online, the pursuit of a quantified self becomes a multiplex quest for control. 

Disordered individuals use TikTok to equalise the two-fold power dynamic between the quantified self and her data. The data retrieved by wearable tracking devices is “aggregated, interpreted, and potentially onsold in a range of contexts well beyond the control of the user” (Crawford, Lingel, & Karppi, 490). Conversely, on TikTok, one user pins a video reading “unpinning at 40kg,” meaning she will update the data at the top of her page when her goal is attained (@haseullbs). Unlike a Fitbit wearer, this user has chosen where her data will go, and such digital upkeep is a way of exerting agency within the confines of a paralysing mental ailment. A major catalyst for disordered eating is the heightened “value of exercising control,” and, accordingly, pro-ED members may seek to control the fate of their self-knowledge by compiling it on an online profile (Osler & Krueger). The pursuit of the quantified self may extrapolate why dysmorphic teens flock to these communities; it is worth reiterating, however, that while @haseullbs may feel a sense of control over her quantified self, it is a tragic reality that any power located in disordered eating is merely illusory.

It is through the social undertow of TikTok that the pro-ED community has birthed a distinct brand of the online qualified self. The pro-ED poster is inherently aware of their surroundings—for instance, we see trigger warnings and efforts in anonymity to construct (or obstruct) one’s online identity in consideration of others. Humphreys labels this effort as the pursuit of a qualified self; that is, users are “defined by the qualities and attributes…as evidenced in their media accounting” (Humphreys, 18). In this way, online pro-ED members consciously form a qualified disordered self; that is, self-knowledge relating to one’s body dominates their profiles and is situated “within a relational context” (24). In these communities, body data is not merely analysed individually but mediated by other members; suddenly, the disorder is a process of self-discipline reenacted in a social setting.

Constructing a qualified disordered self entails posting media traces that align with the common interests of ED sufferers: fervent willpower, an affinity for all things dainty, and, namely, a low body weight. Here, the quantified self in pro-ED circles is very much conflated with one’s qualified self—the user is, indeed, “self-focused” on logging her body weight, but turning it into content “reveals the ways that others feature prominently in our representations of ourselves” (Humphreys, 23-24). ED survivor and social worker Lauren Gunebaum asserts that “individuals with eating disorders are often perfectionists,” and, in many cases, this results in the desire “to be the best at starving” (emphasis added, Grunebaum). Further, sufferers often have to “prove authenticity” in social settings, resulting in pro-ED internet slang such as “wannarexics”, denoting undisciplined or presumably inauthentic members of the community (Osler & Krueger). Much like other social media users, this means that the qualified self of an afflicted individual is similarly modified and selective (Humphreys, 19). Hence, most pro-ED TikTok accounts curate a qualified disordered self: a true victim of the disease and, most importantly, a physical embodiment of its effects.

Accordingly, What I Eat In A Day (WIEIAD) videos are commonplace on pro-ED TikTok, especially those which exhibit a concerted effort in restricting—many such instances do not surpass 800 calories per day, and, in dire cases, a member may eulogise a day’s worth of fasting. For example, one member celebrates a troubling prospect: “this is the happiest day of my life,” she writes in a cutesy font atop a baby-pink filter, “my mom is allowing me to fast for 7 days” (@boneyzombi). In doing so, she is effectively advertising an achievement to her followers, albeit through a distorted lens—in the comments, she is congratulated by another user. In these ways, the qualified self—that which she shows to others—of the pro-ED poster is, above all, disordered; she employs her quantified self—that which she ate, lost, or exercised—as proof of this fact.

The most compelling facet of the qualified disordered self is its very existence in both a subculture and social media at large. Osler and Krueger explain how solely pro-ED forums are epistemic echo chambers that “generate certainty about [pro-ED] beliefs and commitments, while simultaneously excluding and discrediting voices outside the community” (emphases added, Osler and Krueger). However, by moving pro-ED discourse to TikTok, a “less hierarchical, more visual, and publicly accessible” stage, members must now choose to exclude themselves. This final section will examine how, on social media, the pro-ED echo chamber is effectively deconstructed and has become, rather, a satellite public within a larger conglomerate. Faulty moderation techniques and lasting beauty standards precipitate the normalisation of disordered content on such platforms.

The pro-ED community, as a satellite public, seeks more exclusive, focused content and sociality that is cloistered from the mainstream. This term, borrowed from Catherine R. Squires, denotes “those that desire to be separate from other publics” as they “do not desire regular discourse” (463). Integrated into the larger TikTok landscape, the pro-ED satellite public still engages with other publics intermittently but remains intentionally sequestered as its interests are displaced (463-64). As stated, pro-ED TikTok is aware that its sentiment is unorthodox to the mainstream—an obsession with skinniness is antithetical to the contemporary body positivity movement, and rapid weight loss is considered by many to be a form of self-harm. 

TikTok’s algorithm and moderation practices have been known to turn the inside out, however. In February of 2022, following the remediation of its algorithm, TikTok made an additional attempt to remedy the insidious nature of its pro-ED content. Though they “already remove content that promotes eating disorders,” they vowed to train their moderation teams “to remain alert to a broader scope of content” that indirectly promotes such behaviours, such as overexercising and fasting (Keenan). In consultation with experts, moderators are now tasked to manually remove content that encourages disordered eating habits or make such content “ineligible for recommendation.” It is questionable that, as of April, the aforementioned videos and countless iterations remain available to the TikTok public.

Unbeknownst to many—and overlooked by moderators—pro-ED content is still thriving in internet alcoves across the vast spectrum of social media under coded hashtags and verbiage. While most satellite publics “do not feel compelled to hide or change cultural particularities,” pro-ED content survives by tactical means to avoid being taken down (Squires, 464). Since 2021, pro-ED members have implemented minor changes to both hashtags and captions to skirt the platform’s most effective automatic detection tool: word filters (Gillespie, 98). For example, this could look like #disorder becoming #d1s0rder (Hobbes, Barry, & Koh). In a WIEIAD video, a user logs that she “pvrged” rather than purged to remain undetected (@cupidiet). Coded hashtags are now necessary for such content to be categorised by users, and gibberish tags may seemingly isolate harmful content from the public eye. However, even from an enclosed satellite chamber, it seems that disordered rhetoric is a powerful contagion that cannot be antidoted by mere moderation.

Despite TikTok’s steps to ban pro-ED content, it continues to reach new eyes. According to Gillespie, the prohibition of disordered eating content online “may be the hardest to justify” (Gillespie, 61). Many contend that penalising pro-ED subcultures is too contentious as it “risks pushing them farther underground and misses an opportunity to intervene more productively” (68). I argue, however, that moderating is most difficult due to the insidious nature of body dysmorphia, a mainstay in the public beyond the pro-ED satellite. All genders experience the pressure to conform to a certain type of body; specifically, the glorification of the thin body is a “strongly entrenched Western cultural requirement” (Venus Jin, 158-163). Philosopher Susan Bordo concurs that, for women, in particular, the “preoccupation with slenderness…has become normative” such that eating disorders are commonplace afflictions that do not necessarily need diagnostic labels (ctd in Day & Keys, 82-83). Popular culture, medical discrimination, and gender constructs are indirect champions of the pro-ED tenet: objective beauty trumps physical discomfort. 

Across social media, many non-afflicted individuals promote weight loss through low-cal recipes and circulate thinspo as an aspirational aesthetic. In doing so, “these images no longer appear so niche or disturbing but share instantly recognisable qualities with both mainstream fashion and art photography and Internet meme culture” (Ging & Garvey, 13). Moderators are now enlisted to decipher the difference between pro-ED content and content that indirectly assumes a disordered ideology, a task that is almost always up to human judgment (Gillespie, 102). The very nature of our highly-saturated, dynamic, and increasingly visual social media landscape—a prosthesis of offscreen norms of representation—presents a major qualm for moderators: when does an image of a skinny person become thinspiration?

Pro-ED TikTok is a satellite public among the platform’s countless other communities. In terms of media accounting and self-tracking, the pro-ED user offers a nuanced example of appropriating social media posting in the pursuit of power. On a larger scale, the presence of the pro-ED satellite on TikTok vexes the platform’s current moderation techniques and, in turn, conveys the insidious nature of dysmorphic rhetoric. An otherwise non-contagious illness, eating disorders have grown digitally transmissible.

References @anaricecake. “#rexi #thinpo hope this reaches the right ppl, plz no pro recovery comments my cw is literally in the obese range.” TikTok, 2022. https://www.tiktok.com/@anaricecake/video/7051115477073956102?is_copy_url= 1&is_from_webapp=v1.

@boneyzombi. “| I'm so happy and proud of myself ! ! <3 feel free to ask me any questions ! #fyp #momo #foryou #foru #fasting #weightloss #fancam #for #you.” TikTok, 2021, https://www.tiktok.com/@boneyzombi/video/7005124893171928326?is_copy_url=1 &is_from_webapp=v1.

Crawford, Kate, et al. “Our Metrics, Ourselves: A Hundred Years of Self-Tracking from the Weight Scale to the Wrist Wearable Device.” European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 18, no. 4–5, Aug. 2015, pp. 479–496, doi:10.1177/1367549415584857.

@cupidiet. “my layout looks messy laugh out loud #cupidiet #weightloss #kcaltok #fyp #skinny #xyzbca #bodygoals #ed #wieiad.” TikTok, 2022. https://www.tiktok.com/foryou?feed_mode=v1&is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v 1&item_id=7086099956540509446#/@cupidiet/video/7086099956540509446

Day, Katy, and Tammy Keys. “Starving in Cyberspace: The Construction of Identity on ‘Pro-eating-disorder’ Websites.” Critical Bodies. Jan. 2008, pp 81-100, DOI:10.1057/9780230591141_5.

Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet : Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. Yale University Press, 2018. PDF.

Ging, Debbie, and Sarah Garvey. “‘Written in These Scars Are the Stories I Can’t Explain’: A Content Analysis of pro-Ana and Thinspiration Image Sharing on Instagram.” New Media & Society, vol. 20, no. 3, Mar. 2018, pp. 1181–1200,

doi:10.1177/1461444816687288.

@haseullbs. “<3.” TikTok, 2022. https://www.tiktok.com/@haseullbs/video/7081701737542 798597?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1

Hobbs, Tawnell D., Rob Barry and Yoree Koh. "'the Corpse Bride Diet': How TikTok Inundates Teens with Eating-Disorder Videos; the App's Algorithm can Send Users Down Rabbit Holes of Narrow Interest, Resulting in Potentially Dangerous Content such as Emaciated Images, Purging Techniques, Hazardous Diets and Body Shaming." Wall Street Journal (Online), Dec 17 2021, ProQuest. Web. 14 Apr. 2022 .

Humphreys, Lee. "Introduction." The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life., The MIT Press, 19. MIT Press Scholarship Online. Date Accessed 14 Apr. 2022 https://mitpress-universitypressscholarship-com.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/ view/10.7551/mitpress/9780262037853.001.0001/upso-9780262037853-chapter-001.

Jin, Seunga Venus. “Interactive Effects of Instagram Foodies' Hashtagged #Foodporn and Peer Users' Eating Disorder on Eating Intention, Envy, Parasocial Interaction, and Online Friendship.” Cyberpsychology, behavior and social networking vol. 21, 3, 2018, pp. 157-167. doi:10.1089/cyber.2017.0476 Keenan, Cormac. “Strengthening Our Policies to Promote Safety, Security, and Well-Being on Tiktok.” TikTok Newsroom, TikTok, 8 Feb. 2022, newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/ strengthening-our-policies-to-promote-safety-security-and-wellbeing-on-tiktok. 

Osler, Lucy, and Joel Krueger. “Proana Worlds: Affectivity and Echo Chambers Online.” Topoi, (20211212), 2021, doi:10.1007/s11245-021-09785-8. Paul, Kari. “'It Spreads like a Disease': How pro-Eating-Disorder Videos Reach Teens on Tiktok.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 16 Oct. 2021, www.theguardian. com/technology/2021/oct/16/tiktok-eating-disorder-thinspo-teens. 

@reicalls. “Tht would be chill. #foryou #fyp #weightloss #ive #gaeul #kpop #body #diet #workout #fancam.” TikTok, 2022. https://www.tiktok.com/@reicalls/video/7058 580538759597318?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1.

Squires, Catherine R. “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres.” Communication Theory, vol. 12, no. 4, 2002, pp. 446–468., doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2002.tb00278.x.

#nonfic

[soundsfaebutokay]

So I've recc'd this video before, but it deserves its own post because it's one of my favorite things on youtube. It's a Tedx Talk by comics writer, editor, and journalist Jay Edidin, and I really think that it will connect with a lot of people here.

If you live and breathe stories of all kinds, you might like this.

If you care about media representation, you might like this.

If you're neurodivergent, you might like this.

If you're interested in a gender transition story that veers from the norm, you might like this.

If you love the original Leverage and especially Parker, and understand how important it is that a character like her exists, you will definitely like this.

Transcript below the cut:

You Are Here: The Cartography of Stories

by Jay Edidin

I am autistic. And what this means in practice is that there are some things that are easier for me than they are for most people, and a great many things that are somewhat harder, and these affect my life in more or less overt ways. As it goes, I'm pretty lucky. I've been able to build a career around special interests and granular obsession. My main gig at the moment is explaining superhero comics continuity and publishing history for which work I am somehow paid in actual legal currency—which is both a triumph of the frivolous in an era of the frantically pragmatic, and a job that's really singularly suited to my strengths and also to my idiosyncrasies.

I like comics. I like stories in general, because they make sense to me in ways that the rest of the world and my own mind often don't. Self-knowledge is not an intuitive thing for me. What sense of self I have, I've built gradually and laboriously and mostly through long-term pattern recognition. For decades, I didn't even really have a self-image. If you'd asked me to draw myself, I would eventually have given you a pair of glasses and maybe a very messy scribble of hair, and that would've been about it. But what I do know—backwards, forwards, and in pretty much every way that matters—are stories. I know how they work. I understand their language, their complex inner clockwork, and I can use those things to extrapolate a sort of external compass that picks up where my internal one falls short. Stories—their forms, their structure, the sense of order inherent to them—give me the means to navigate what otherwise, at least for me, would be an impassable storm of unparsable data. Or stories are a periscope, angled to access the parts of myself I can't intuitively see. Or stories are a series of mirrors by which I can assemble a composite sketch of an identity I rarely recognize whole...which is how I worked out that I was transgender, in my early thirties, by way of a television show.

This is my story. And it's about narrative cartography, and representation, and why those things matter. It's about autism and it's about gender and it's about how they intersect. And it's about the kinds of people we know how to see, and the kinds of people we don't. It's not the kind of story that gets told a lot, you might hear a lot, because the narrative around gender transition and dysphoria in our culture is really, really prescriptive. It's basically the story of the kid who has known for their whole life that they're this and not that, and that story demands the kind of intuitive self-knowledge that I can't really do, and a kind of relationship to gender that I don't really have—which is part of why it took me so long to figure my own stuff out.

So, to what extent this story, my story has a beginning, it begins early in 2014 when I published an essay titled, "I See Your Value Now: Asperger's and the Art of Allegory." And it explored, among other things, the ways that I use narrative and narrative structures to navigate real life. And it got picked up in a number of fairly prominent places that got linked, and I casually followed the ensuing discussion. And I was surprised to discover that readers were fairly consistently assuming I was a man. Now, that in itself wasn't a new experience for me, even though at the time I was writing under a very unambiguously female byline. It had happened in the letter columns of comics I'd edited. It had happened when a parody Twitter account I'd created went viral. When I was on staff at Wired, I budgeted for fancy scotch by putting a dollar in a box every time a reader responded in a way that made it clear they were assuming I was a man in response to an article where my name was clearly visible, and then I had to stop doing that because it happened so often I couldn't afford to keep it up. But in all of those cases, the context, you know, the reasons were pretty obvious. The fields I'd worked in, the beats I covered, they were places where women had had to fight disproportionally hard for visibility and recognition. We live in a culture that assumes a male default, so given a neutral voice and a character limit, most readers will assume a male author.

But this was different, because this wasn't just a book I'd edited, it wasn't a story I'd reported—it was me, it was my story. And it made me uncomfortable, got under my skin in ways that the other stuff really hadn't. And so I did what I do when that happens, and I tried to sort of reverse-engineer it to look at the conclusions and peel them back to see the narratives behind them and the stories that made them tick. And I started this, I started this by going back to the text of the essay, and you know, examining it every way I could think of: looking at craft, looking at content. And in doing so, I was surprised to realize that while I had written about a number of characters with whom I identified closely, that every single one of those characters I'd written about was male. And that surprised me even more than the responses to the essay had, because I've spent my career writing and talking and thinking about gender and representation in popular media. In 2014, I'd been the feminist gadfly of an editorial department and multiple mastheads. I'd been a founding board member of an organization that existed to advocate for more and better representation of women and girls in comics characters and creators. And most of my favorite characters, the ones I'd actively seek out and follow, were women. Just not, apparently, the characters I saw myself in.

Now I still didn't realize it was me at this point. Remember: self-knowledge, not very intuitive for me. And while I had spent a lot of time thinking about gender, I'd never really bothered to think much about my own. I knew academically that the way other people read and interpreted my gender affected and had influenced a lifetime of social and professional interactions, and that those in turn had informed the person I'd grown up into during that time. But I really believed, like I just sort of had in the back of my head, that if you peeled away all of that social conditioning, you'd basically end up with what I got when I tried to draw a self-portrait. So: a pair of glasses, messy scribble of hair, and in this case, maybe also some very strong opinions about the X-Men. I mean, I knew something was off. I'd always known something was off, that my relationship to gender was messy and uncomfortable, but gender itself struck me as messy and uncomfortable, and it had never been a large enough part of how I defined myself to really feel like something that merited further study, and I had deadlines, and...so it was always on the back burner. So, I looked, I looked at what I had, at this improbable group of exclusively male characters. And I looked and I figured that if this wasn't me, then it had to be a result of the stories I had access to, to choose from, and the entertainment landscape I was looking at. And the funny thing is, I wasn't wrong, exactly. I just wasn't right either.

See, the characters I'd written about had one other significant trait in common aside from their gender, which is that they were all more or less explicitly, more or less heavily coded as autistic. And I thought, "Ah, yes. This explains it. This is under representation in fiction echoing under representation in life and vice versa." Because the characteristics that I'd honed in on, that I particularly identified with in these guys, were things like emotional unavailability and social awkwardness and granular obsession, and all of those are characteristics that are seen as unsympathetic and therefore unmarketable in female characters. Which is also why readers were assuming that I was a man.

Because, you see, here's the thing. I'm not the only one who uses stories to navigate the world. I'm just a little more deliberate about it. For humans, stories formed the bridge between data and understanding. They're where we look when we need to contextualize something new, or to recognize something we're pretty sure we've seen before. They're how we identify ourselves; they're how we locate ourselves and each other in the larger world. There were no fictional women like me; there weren't representations of women like me in media, and so readers were primed not to recognize women like me in real life either.

Now by this point, I had started writing a follow-up essay, and this one was also about autism and narratives, but specifically focused on how they intersected with gender and representation in media. And in context of this essay, I went about looking to see if I could find even one female character who had that cluster of traits I'd been looking for, and I was asking around in autistic communities. And I got a few more or less useful one-off suggestions, and some really, really splendid arguments about semantics and standards, and um...then I got one answer over and over and over in community after community after community. "Leverage," people told me. "You have to watch Leverage."

So I watched Leverage. Leverage is five seasons of ensemble heist drama. It's about a team of very skilled con artists who take down corrupt and powerful plutocrats and the like, and it's a lot of fun, and it's very clever, and it's clever enough that it doesn't really matter that it's pretty formulaic, and I enjoyed it a lot. But what's most important, what Leverage has is Parker.

Parker is a master thief, and she is the best of the best of the best in ways that all of Leverage's characters are the best of the best. And superficially, she looks like the kind of woman you see on TV. So she's young, and she's slender, and she's blonde, and she's attractive but in a sort of approachable way. And all of that familiarity is brilliant misdirection, because the thing is, there are no other women like Parker on TV. Because Parker—even if it's never explicitly stated in the show—Parker is coded incredibly clearly as autistic. Parker is socially awkward. Her speech tends to have limited inflection; what inflection it does have is repetitive and sounds rehearsed a lot of the time. She's not emotionally literate; she struggles with it, and the social skills she develops over the series, she learns by rote, like they're just another grift. When she's not scaling skyscrapers or cartwheeling through laser grids, she wears her body like an ill-fitting suit. Parker moves like me. And Parker, Parker was a revelation—she was a revolution unto herself. In a media landscape where unempathetic women usually exist to either be punished or "loved whole," Parker got to play the crabby savant. And she wasn't emotionally intuitive but it was never ever played as the product of abuse or trauma even though she had survived both of those—it was just part of her, as much as were her hands or her eyes. And she had a genuine character arc. My god, she had a genuine romantic arc, even. And none of that required her to turn into anything other than what she was. And in Parker I recognized a thousand tics and details of my life and my personality...but. I didn't recognize myself.

Why? What difference was there in Parker, you know, between Parker and the other characters I'd written about? Those characters, they'd spanned ethnicities and backgrounds and different media and appearances and the only other characteristic they all had in common was their gender. So that was where I started to look next, and I thought, "Well, okay, maybe, maybe it's masculinity. Maybe if Parker were less feminine, she'd click with me the way those other characters had." So then I tried to imagine a Parker with short hair, who's explicitly butch, and...nothing. So okay, I extended it in what seems like the only logical direction to extend it. I said, "Well, if it's not masculinity, what if it's actual maleness? What if Parker were a man?" Ah. Yeah.

In the end, everything changed, and nothing changed, which is often the way that it goes for me. Add a landmark, no matter how slight, and the map is irrevocably altered. Add a landmark, and paths that were invisible before open wide. Add a landmark, and you may not have moved, but suddenly you know where you are and where you can go.

I wasn't going to tell this story when I started planning this talk. I was gonna tell a similar story, it was about stories, like this is, about narratives and the ways that they influence our culture and vice versa. And it centered around a group of women at NASA who had basically rewritten the narrative around space exploration, and it was a lot more fun, and I still think it was more interesting. But it's also a story you can probably work out for yourselves. In fact it's a story some of you probably have, if you follow that kind of thing, which you probably do given that you're here. And this is a story, my story is not a story that I like to tell. It's not a fun story to talk about because it's very personal and I am a very private person. And it's not universal. And it's not always relatable, and it's definitely not aspirational. And it's not the kind of story that you tend to encounter unless you're already part of it...which is why I'm telling it now. Because the thing is, I'm not the only person who uses stories to parse the world and navigate it. I'm just a little more deliberate. Because I'm tired of having to rely on composite sketches.

Open your maps. Add a landmark. Reroute accordingly.

#Jay Edidin #LGBTQ #autism #mind and body #gender norms #why humans need stories #Leverage #Parker #Abby posts Leverage #my faves #Youtube #I did my best with the transcript #sorry for any mistakes

[largemaxa]

The Spiritual Path to God

For those of us who believe that God is the pinnacle of being and the ultimate reality, surely an encounter with him would be regarded as supremely Good—perhaps as the one supreme Good towards which our entire lives trend. Perhaps the experience—the reality—of constantly dwelling in his nature would be the final aim of human life, if that could be done. But how are we to reach him or dwell in him? And are we even sure that "reaching" him is the best conception of what we need to do? There have been many proposals for man's attitude to God over the millenia, and they are not all in agreement that "reaching God" is the proper aim of human life. Even if we set aside those who claim that God does not even exist, there is also another persistent set of claims from the major world religions that argue that we are not supposed to pursue God directly at all, and our aim should rather be to live in accordance with guidelines—and within appropriate bounds—that he has set out for humans to follow.

In this essay we explore the option of growing closer to God by pursuing a "spiritual path" that is independent of outer institutions and structures. This proposal has a few components. We must accept that the entity called God exists. We also accept that our aim is to grow closer to Him—as opposed to us ignoring him and him ignoring us. And then there's the the method of doing this—via the spiritual path. This implies that there are other methods. What is the nature of this "spiritual" approach and what distinguishes it from the other approaches?

What's in a word?

By the 21st century, the word "spiritual" has become overlaid with so many different meanings that it is hard to tell what exactly it refers to. Does it refer to the search for meaning in human life in general? Is it a neutral-sounding code word for specific Eastern religious doctrines that are incompatible with Western religious doctrines and attempting to supplant them? Is it a meaningless term that can have no meaning because the realities it purports to describe don't exist? This vagueness can be offputting to those who value pragmatism and rigor. Though the word shows no sign of declining in usage now, those who value the word and what it means should at least attempt to take care of its usage. After all, we have seen a backlash against the word "religious", with a trend towards people using the qualification that they are "spiritual" but not "religious" because of the negative connotations from the rigidities and archaic qualities of religions, so it's not entirely out of the question that if negative associations to the word "spiritual" develop, the word may develop a similar disrepute among serious people.

I cannot claim to give a single watertight definition of "spiritual" or "spirituality" that will match the usage of all people—that would cover, say, all of the senses listed in the previous paragraph. After all, the nature of language is that words change their meanings over time in accordance with human usage. Instead I will make one attempt at tracing out a vision that I believe this concept corresponds to, and will also claim that this use has a certain justification and correctness, even if it cannot claim to be the absolute correct usage of the term for all time.

But even to make an initial definition as to precisely what I mean for this specific context is difficult: spirituality can have many different definitions because we can emphasize different things about it, just as when looking at a diamond from different angles we may see many different gleams, facets, and shapes even though we're looking at the same object. We could define spirituality in terms of the individual or in terms of God; in terms of actions, or in terms of a worldview; philosophically or from a historical perspective, contrasting it to other concrete choices one may be facing. We'll start with the idea of "spirit", which is the Divine essence which lies behind everything in the material world—in the case of man, that Divine essence which lies beyond the external manifestations of the body, mind, and emotions. Our initial definition of spirituality is that it is a way of living with the aim of contacting that Divine spiritual essence and bringing out its expressions in life. And the spiritual life, or the spiritual path, is the life path we walk when we live this way.

This definition may seem quite harmless—who could disagree with the aim of living life with an aim to express the inner spirit? But to better understand what exactly the spiritual approach is, it's most helpful to contrast it to two other possibilities of life, the religious life and the material life. By doing this, we'll gain more specificity in our definition of the spiritual life by adding both positive and negative parts to our defininition of spirituality. The idea of spirituality might be simple, but following it out to its full potential requires individual independence and an eventual departure from other recognized forms of life.

To a religious worldview, "spirituality" is vague and wishy-washy concept, denoting an overly permissive practice that would seek to avoid the rigors and sound structures of religious tradition. A second criticism might come from a pragmatic and/or secular perspective: to this way of thinking, "spirituality" would denote the pursuit of chimeras and invisible enigmas, a way of living that shies away from the demands and practicalities of real life. In other words, the religious would hold that the approach to God that the spiritual perspective advocates is not possible outside of its institutional structures, while the secular pragmatist would claim that the approach to God is not even possible at all because it contradicts what we know of normal life.

But if there really is a substantive method of approaching God in a more purely spiritual way—that is, if the spiritual path as an approach to God really exists—then it must turn out that these these criticisms have no real force.

The material life

By "the material life" we refer to all possibilities of human life that are not tuned to God or the spirit in any significant way. This would include, for example, the lives of those who are atheist, agnostic, or otherwise secular and don't profess any active belief in God, but it would also includes the broad swath of people who are formally religious but don't practice in any significant way. It could even include those who are concerned with the deeper meaning of human life, who seek a life of meaning and purpose and could be said to be engaged with with the "human spirit" in a broad sense, with more emphasis on "human" than "spirit"—for example, artists and philosophers who explore mental and emotional idealism but are not oriented towards pursuit of God or the Absolute.

In the mundane life, there are other objects and goals that are seen as more worthy of pursuit than God: career attainments, sensory pleasures, money, family life, glory of country, support of the community. Even pursuing high ideals like philanthropy and service to humanity, while not incompatible with the spiritual life, are not necessarily spiritual in themselves if they are done with a purely secular attitude. While it is true that all of these things are forms and expressions of God, the crucial difference between the material and the spiritual life is that in the material life these are viewed as ends in themselves and not as so many expressions of God through which to approach him. The spiritual life is actually made out of some of the same ingredients as the normal life: someone following the spiritual path still uses money, still engages with friends and family, still conducts work according various to ideas and human organizational structures, but the difference is just that the spiritual seeker only pursues those activities which bring one closer to God, and sees them as expressions of the spirit rather than ends in themselves.

In practice, one who pursues this mundane life will have some fixed point beyond which they refuse to see, a point past which they stop caring about seeking for the truth of God. It may be romantic love or one's family, it may be one's country, it may be artistic expression, or it may be the idealistic service of all humanity, but as long as there is any barrier at which one feels content, uninterested, or indifferent about continuing to seek for God, it is not yet the spiritual life. Once again, this does not mean that the spiritual seeker does not engage with these forms in the outer life: someone with the proper spiritual attitude could be living with their family, doing work that is of national service, and deeply involved with the community, and as long as she sees these as being tools and forms of the spirit, meeting the outer demand with the proper spiritual attitude.

One way to view this is in terms of consciousness and unconsciousness. We could say that people who pursue the material life are still themselves expressions of the spirit in things, but they have not grown not conscious of that fact yet, while those who pursue the spiritual life have reached the point where they are conscious of the spiritual nature of life and want to express and explore it fully. This should not be viewed as any sort of deficiency on the part of those who choose to live the material life—most spiritual philosophies would hold that they are living in the way that is correct for their level of spiritual maturity, and they may be drawn to the spiritual life later at the appropriate stage of spiritual growth (perhaps even in another human lifetime).

Another way to view the difference between the material life and the spiritual life is in terms of the gratification of the ego versus the search for God. The ego is a psychological construct evolved by evolution that causes each individual to view him or herself as the central and most important being in the universe. But the ego is capable of extending itself and incorporating larger forms as well, so that the individual transfers his or her egoic identification to other things: someone could be selfless in one's contribution to one's family or country but still be attached to the family or country as an extension of one's ego, in which case they are engaged with the mundane life as opposed to the spiritual pursuit of God. So long as there is any finite form or object in the universe that the individual identifies their ego with more than the enthusiasm to dissolve the ego into service and devotion to God, they are still living the material life.

The religious life

The religious life is another conception of life that we can contrast better understand the spiritual life. In some ways, the religious life is more similar to the spiritual life than the material life is—the important similarity being that the religious life, like the spiritual life, is directed towards God. One question important we must ask, then, is whether these are really two different things.  The primary distinction is that in the religious life, one relates to God specifically through through the rituals, forms, and social institutions of an organized religious tradition. The major world religions—Christianity (in its Catholic and Protestant variants), Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism—each provide their own social and ritualistic structures for doing this. The details vary greatly, and are subject to extensive scholarly and lay commentary study, but some common features include regular worship services that draw the entire community together, an official institutional hierarchy distinguishing between clergy and laypeople, and a system of social norms for living that is suggested by the institution and enforced by the social community.

For our definition of spirituality,—the attempt to contact and bring out the inner spirit—we didn't specify that the relation to God must take place within an organized religious institution; but we also didn't specify that it must *not* take place within a tradition. So if these are two ways of relating to God, what is the difference between them? In fact, there is no absolute line between the two, and they are not strictly contradictory to each other. We could say in principle that the religious life is one form of the spiritual life. But it is possible to participate in the structures of an institution while paying little or no attention to the truly spiritual aspects—that is, the possibility of being religious without being spiritual, just as there is the possibility of being spiritual without being religious. One could say that it is possible to pursue a spiritual path either inside and outside a religious tradition, but the religious life isn't necessarily spiritual.

There is no absolute conflict between the spiritual and the religious conceptions of life. But the purpose of this section is ostensibly to attempt to understand the spiritual life by contrast to the religious life. Where, then, is the problem, contrast, or condtradiction? One seed of discord between the two approaches lies in the difference in their goals and purposes. Religions tend to be about organizing the religious life of a community, whereas the spiritual approach is about the relationship between the individual and God, without necessarily excluding the idea of community support. One possible result can that religions can devolve to the point where not much spirituality is involved at all, and adherents meet all of their outward obligations to maintain good social standing in a religious community, making a purely outward show of faith without having a real inner relation to God at all. Or it can lead to outward concerns and priorities overwhelming spiritual priorities; a common pattern is for the institution to become dependent on secular sources for funding and compromise its spiritual integrity. In Christianity, for example, we see the story of Jesus' anger at the moneychangers at the temple, or the later example of the Catholic Church's use of indulgences in the middle ages. Usually a religious reform movement arises within the religion itself whenever the inner spirit of a religion fails to meet the spiritual needs of its adherents; at that point it must either change its forms, ossify into a spiritless shell, or fail completely.

While the previous examples show some things that can go wrong with religious approach, they don't prove that the religious approach will always fail or that the spiritual approach will do any better. After all, if religions sometimes ossified to become too involved with money, they were also often restored to a more spiritual nature by powerful saints and prophets, to the spiritual benefits of many adherents. And of course, so many billions of people have in the past and present found refuge for their souls within these institutions. From a spiritual perspective, there is no reason why a particular set of rituals, spiritual doctrines, and religious community should be inherently in conflict with the spiritual impulse to seek God, especially since the professed goals of the religious approach is to seek God as well. Therefore, in principle, one could still satisfy the spiritual need while working within a religious institutional structures. But, of course, if there was no conflict between the spiritual impulse and religious structures, there would be no reason for any individual to seek out an independent spiritual path we are discussing here.

In practice, we find that the independent spiritual path meets a need that is not satisfied by religious institutions, as there are specific issues that individuals with a spiritual inclination may find when participating in currently existing religious institutions:

-Truth: Organized religious traditions may profess beliefs—and require them to be professed by adherents—that conflict with what intelligent and conscientious individuals know to be true about the world from perspectives and ways of knowing outside religion. One of the most prominent examples over the past several centuries has been science, with the most famous and influential individual conflict being Galileo's disagreement with the Catholic Church. But religious traditions continue to make claims that conflict with what cutting edge science says about the universe.

This is not to say that science is the highest standard for truth that we have as spiritual seekers. But there are more and less convincing ways for a religious tradition to reconcile its doctrines with those of science, and there are different preferences that one may have for evaluating the reconciliation. If the religious doctrine cannot square itself with the rest of what an individual knows about the world, it can't be an eventual fit. Science isn't the only way that religious doctrine can conflict with one's sense of truth; another possible issue could simply be belief in the religious claims that the religion is making, whether they are about ancient prophesies, supernatural miracles, or interpretations of historical events. Rationality is not the ultimate standard or arbiter in matters of the spirit, but at the same time, if the claims of a religion cause a strong and irreconcilable conflict in the rational mind, it is not likely that it can be a permanent spiritual solution for the soul.

-Ethics: Similarly, if a religion conflicts with what the ethical sense of an individual knows to be right, they may not find alignment with that religion. For example, if a tradition supports overt or tacit discrimination or different treatment against any group or class of people, or institutionally encourages regressive political policies that one does not agree with, that is something that will impair the ability to feel connected to it. The conflict may be about purely religious matters, as well, rather than political ones—for example, some religions profess the doctrine that only adherents of that tradition will receive the ultimate spiritual salvation. For any of these social, political, or religious matters, there will almost certainly be justifications that are given in terms of the religion's doctrines, but the individual has to evaluate whether they make sense in terms of the individual's own moral compass.

-Aesthetics/Heart: In some cases, the symbols, rituals, and forms used by a religious tradition may simply cease to fascinate and individual and thus may lose their ability to continue drawing them closer to God. Just as one may have a long and fulfilling marriage, fall out of love, and go on to find love again with a second marriage partner, so is it possible to cease being enraptured by the symbolic system laid out by a religious tradition while still loving God and go on to find another set of symbols that is more resonant. Within the framework and exclusionary claims of a given religion, of course, adherents don't have the freedom to make choices based on whether they are aesthetically fulfilled by the symbols, as from within the perspective of that tradition, there is simply no other choice available. But if you believe in the potential for individual spiritual freedom and you do not feel inspiration continuing, there is the option to make another choice.

-Restriction: An individual may chafe at the specific restrictions that are advised or required by a religious tradition. Religious adherents may be required to perform rituals according to institutionally prescribed schedules or undertake dietary restrictions that are not desired. There is also generally pressure to participate in social structures that may not be appealing, such as marriage by a certain age and/or restricted to a certain group, childrearing expectations, rigid gender roles, or restrictions on social circles. From within the perspective of the religion, this could be seen as a matter of discipline, of living a well-regulated life in the way that God prescribes. It's true that some form of discipline is necessary for any endeavor in life, including spirituality, but it needs to be appropriate for the person: the regimented schedule of an army recruit is suitable for those pursuing that profession, but would be inappropriate for someone seeking to be a novelist. The question is whether the discipline that is laid out by a particular religion is suitable to an individual's mind and nature.

-Spiritual options unavailable within religions: It could be that an individual sees the possibilities for spiritual fulfillment that are not readily accessible within a given religious tradition. All religious traditions have certain practices that are possible, while others are less advised and may even be viewed as heretical. One may find that spiritual development requires techniques that are not supported within the confines of their existing religious tradition. Someone who is embedded within Catholicism may not find that their community is supportive of several hours a day of contemplative meditation; someone who is involved with the American Buddhist tradition may realize that they don't want to do hours of meditation and want more tactile ritualistic methods but not find that their clergy is able to provide them. In both of those cases, the desire to pursue spiritual practices that are not supported by the organized religious tradition may lead to ways to practice outside tradition. Unfortunately, as with human relationships, it is difficult to go outside the institutional relationship to have spiritual needs met and still remain on good terms with the institution.

-Trust: One of the most crucial needs for an individual's spiritual framework is a basic trust in organization or religious tradition to be the caretaker of their spiritual development. In fact, all of the above factors could be viewed as relating to an aspect of this kind of trust. Any organized religion claims to be representing God on earth and doing his work. The question for the individual is whether they trust the institution in this capacity. Much can be forgiven intellectually, aesthetically, as to matters of discipline, even ethically if there is a trust that the institution really is representing God . This is similar to a child's relationship with their parents—it could really be that the institution knows better what it is that God asks, and if you trust them with your heart and soul then that is for the best.  

This is why there is no sense in finding out if religions are absolutely true or absolutely false according to some given external scientific or philosophical standard: they are representing God for those who find that representation useful, regardless of whether others do. Do you trust the priest and hierarchy at a personal level as representatives of God—do you trust that God is speaking through them to you? Or is there another way that you find God speaking to you—another person, text, image, or experience? Do you trust the laypeople in the organized religious community is the community through which you want to serve and relate to God? By "trust" here I don't necessarily mean trust at the purely ethical level, as in whether the organization can be trusted to conduct themselves with ethical financial management and being free from lurid scandals. The trust here is deeper and more profound—whether the organization can be trusted to be your soul's intermediary to God. Does the organization feel like a way that God is speaking to you, or a way that God is speaking to anyone, or just another work of man?

Authority

The reasons listed above could be generalized to evaluate one's participation in any organization or activity, not just religion, as they are essentially about seeing whether the soul is aligned with a given possibility or not. But it can be harder to make dispassionate judgements and choices when dealing with the question of whether to participate in a religious organization in particular. One major reason for this is that for many people, religion serves as the foundational source of a worldview—the collection of fundamental beliefs about how the world works, what is right and wrong, how one should act, and so on. Further, religions claim that they have the legitimate authority to be the source of their worldviews; one of the ways to understand what a religion even is is as a worldview and an accompanying social structure. In contrast, the considerations above were discussed from a perspective that assumed the individual would have their own worldview separate from that of the religion that they could use to evaluate the suitability of the religion for their individual spiritual path.

This is not only an individual choice but also the result of a civilization-wide change in the perceived source of authority. In earlier eras, religion itself was the highest source of authority, and it was not possible for individuals to bring their own judgement to the issue of whether a religious doctrine and tradition should be followed. The authority was enforced by more rigid hierarchical social structures, and attempting to circumvent it could lead to the risk of social censure or even violent persecution. At the current juncture in history, though, we hold that each individual has the capability and the right to choose their views for themselves. This change happened over many centuries and has many causes, but one major identifiable turning point was the Enlightenment, a Western philosophical movement from the 18th century. The philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Rousseau and Voltaire stressed the importance of individual reason and liberty against the oppressive authority of the Church and monarchical government. They were largely successful, and these ideals are still held as having paramount importance in the world today.

However, the independent spiritual path existed before the Enlightenment and is not dependent on it; when people were strongly motivated to pursue it, they carved out their own structures like the institution of sanyassi (renunciation) in India, or the underground transmission of hermetic philosophy in Europe, even at the risk of persecution. Therefore the ability to choose one's worldview is not something that is granted by the invention of particular philosophical ideas but is a fundamental human capability. That doesn't mean that it is necessarily easy to change one's worldview— it generally is not. An individual who questions their worldview may go through an intermediate period of teetering between seeing a religion as the fundamental source of a worldview versus seeing a worldview outside of a religion and religion as a choice to participate in. Social bonds, pressures, and emotional attachments an complicate the question further. In the spiritual view, it is ultimately the individual soul that decide what sorts of structures it can best flourish within. And if the soul grows so that a given religious worldview is incompatible with it, they will transfer to a more independent spiritual path.

Religious life is a form of life where the individual relates to God through the rituals, social structure, institutional structure, and ideological worldview of a particular organized religion. The spiritual life is the individual's search to grow closer to God, the Divine, or the ultimate spritual reality in general. As we have noted, there is no conflict in principle. We could say that for many individuals, their spiritual life and the religious life coincide; or perhaps we could say that they are able to pursue the spiritual life through their involvement with the religious organization. But there is also an independent spiritual path that can be pursued outside of religious organizations. This becomes necessary when the individual's mind and temperament become incompatible with the structures of religion due to a combination of outside influence, personal evolution, and evolution of the world, and perhaps changes within organized religions themselves, but they still want to continue searching for God. The soul ultimately demands freedom in its search for God, which is why the notion of the independent spiritual path exists at all. But it is not only religious structures that the spiritual path might lead us past: in fact, the spiritual path demands potential freedom from all contrary influences as the soul submits to God.

Freedom as as essential characteristic of the spiritual path

There is one area where the independent spiritual life departs from both the mundane and religious conceptions of life, and this is the area of freedom: the spiritual life requires that we allow absolute freedom to the growing inner spirit. As the lives of saints and martyrs show us, the pursuit of God may lead us to contradict every secular authority, societal convention, and even religious authority itself. The religious life requires adherents to stay within the ideological and lifestyle boundaries set out by the religion; spirituality means that one may feel called to take up practices or live a life that does not fit within those boundaries.

The material life, on the other hand doesn't seem to offer any lack of freedom, especially in those countries where political freedom is valued. However, the sort of freedom offered by the mundane life is deceptive. The foundation is what is called "negative liberty" in political philosophy: the individual has the power to undertake consensual actions that do not break the laws of the state. But the freedom that the spirit demands is a higher standard: one must be free from societal expectations as well as from the demands of one's own lower nature. While the "negative liberty" of political freedom assures that there will not be limits on action from the state, the individual may still encounter subtantial sub-legal resistance from members of society. In practice, one who follows the spiritual life, choosing to follow God and the dictates of inner spirit, will find themselves in conflict with family members, employers, friends, relationship partners, and others who expect them to continue acting within accepted, conventional structures that do not accord with the callings of the inner spirit.

The spiritual life may require you to take actions that set you at odds with the social body in general, whether we conceive of this social body as the body of the religious community or the secular community at large. One may feel compelled to make changes to one's diet, personality and comportment in casual conversation, choice of career or hobbies, or social circles in ways that lead to criticism, interpersonal tension, or even ostracism from the religious organization or secular community. One example could be a set of parents who expect their child to go into the family profession of being a lawyer, inheriting their parents' business and political connections, while the child wants to pursue a career in the healing arts. It would require an act of strength in the child's spirit to follow that calling in the face of disapproval and possible withdrawal of material support from the parents.

But a the second issue is that spiritual freedom requires going beyond the desires of the lower nature as well. Spiritual freedom does not mean that we should be drawn to libertinism, rebellion or iconoclasm for its own sake: one who follows the whims of the lower nature to indulge in excess is no more essentially spiritual than the one who follows all the conventions of the normal world, never questioning their rightness. An important part of the spiritual life is accepting the restrictions of the world created by God and without chafing at them arbitrarily. The freedom demanded by the spirit is not the freedom to pursue the arbitrary whims and desires of the lower nature.

For example, one degenerate interpretation of secular freedom is the freedom to generate wealth and keep posession of arbitrary amounts of wealth. There is no contradiction with the idea of wealth in a spiritual worldview; wealth is a power of the Divine, especially if it is generated and used responsibly in accordance with an individual's nature and their highest vision for themselves and others. But if one's motivations for generating wealth are greed, envy, and the desire to impress others, it's better to give up those desires rather than continue to believe in this notion of "freedom"; the spirit may be able to find what it needs to survive within even seemingly slight conditions, such as a the pleasures of a modest but well-organized and decorated apartment where one has space to do one's private devotions.

There is a certain paradox to the nature of freedom: the spirit has the right to decline any circumstance if it finds it too restrictive; and yet the spirit must be able to find the freedom within any circumstance even if outer circumstances don't change. Spiritual freedom is not, say, the ability to wave one's wand after a natural disaster and declare that everything should go back to normal by fiat but rather to stay connected to the soul and see what the possibilities of the soul are even within difficult situations.

Direct Experience

But perhaps the most significant difference between the spiritual worldview and a nonspiritual worldview, whether materialist or religious, is the idea of direct spiritual experience: in the spiritual worldview, the experience of a higher spiritual reality is possible and open to all. That is, unlike the mundane life, the spiritual worldview sees that the experience of a higher spirituality is possible and desirable; and unlike the religious life, these higher and ultimate spiritual experiences are not just accessible to the chosen few prophets, priests, or renunciates—they are not restricted to those with a special chosen birth, institutional social position, or those who have waited through multiple rebirths before seeking the experience. This is not to downplay the large amount of effort and commitment nor the possibility of substantial individual differences that may occur in spiritual development. Still, in the spiritual worldview there is no insurmountable separation—neither a religious institution nor simply the impenetrable dullness of reality—standing between human life and the experience of the Divine. In fact, the very purpose of the spiritual life is to seek the fullest possible expression of this experience, rather than being counseled to pursue worldly aims as in the mundane life, or encouraged to follow a regulated life within the boundaries of human experience as in the religious life.

Therefore, the concept of "belief" has a much different role in the spiritual life as well. In the non-spiritual life, great emphasis is placed on what one "believes" about God and about the nature of the universe. These beliefs are mental ideas that individuals hold and debate but never directly experienc. In the spiritual life, since direct experience of the content of the beliefs is possible, belief is no longer a mere mental idea that one needs to hold on to tightly; rather, it changes into a matter of provisional guidance. Consider the relationship of a physics student to the laws of physics before and after their university study. Before the university, the student is not aware of the details of physical laws, but trusts that they work on account of the trustworthiness of the professors and the successful demonstrations of science. But they are able to learn the details of physics for themselves in university, and after the university, they know the details and therefore do not need to take them on "faith" any longer.

Similarly, in the spiritual life, we hold a "belief" about God or the nature of the universe fully expecting that one day we will come into contact with the reality that the belief professes; it is not about a mere idea that one is expected to entertain about faraway things. A spiritual person "believes" in God but expects to eventually experience God; this is different from a position in a theoretical discussion or debate about whether something imaginary does or does not exist. In the spiritual life we can accept guidance and teaching of those who have gone farther on the path, but ultimately we don't need to "take anything on faith" indefinitely, as everything can be experienced for oneself.

Spiritual practice

And because the aim of the spiritual path is to have direct experience of a higher spiritual reality, the idea of the spiritual path is inseparable from the fact that someone on the spiritual path must be actively working towards that potentiality. The actions that one takes to reach this goal are called one's "spiritual practice": just as a student of piano has a rigorous schedule of exercises and studies to work towards the goal of proficiency at piano, so does the spiritual seeker have practices that are used to work towards the spiritual goal. As we noted earlier, there are multiple ways to define spirituality depending on the aspect one focuses on—in our initial discussion we used the provisional definition that spirituality is about an individual's search for God or a higher spiritual reality. Taking another perspective, one can just as easily define spirituality as being about spiritual *practice*—perhaps we could even say that the spiritual path is essentially about the practice one does, as any spirituality that doesn't involve practice in some form can only be some sort of theoretical speculation. Spirituality is not a mere worldview but rather the act of spiritual practice along with the resulting spiritual knowledge that one holds that grows deeper with experience.

What, then, is this "spiritual practice"? Suppose God lived in another physical city on earth. Then spiritual practice would be a simple, straightforward matter of taking a physical journey to God. But we know that that is not the case; spiritual practice is not as simple as making a physical journey. It's more confusing because supposedly God is everywhere, surrounding us, making up the very matter that makes us up. Lucklily, there are many specific spiritual techniques that have been devised and passed down over the ages. In fact there are potentially *infinitely* many techniques for doing practice. More important than being wedded to any one specific practice, though, is to understand what spiritual pratice *is*; for if you understand what spiritual practice is, then any practice becomes possible, or any activity or all of life can be your practice.

One way of understanding spiritual practice is that it is the process of turning one's energies towards God. In a metaphysical spiritual conception, the human being has a certain amount of cosmic energy flowing through them, and a choice as to how to allocate this energy. No matter what our circumstances might be, there is always a choice of how to direct our energies, towards something lower or something higher, whether towards destruction, pessimism, and hatred or love, peacefulness, and constructive action. Even someone stuck in a locked cell with few apparent outward options is still animated by cosmic energy and can choose to work with the tools of intention, faith, contemplation and prayer as long as they are conscious.

Spiritual practice can be thought of as the act of directing these psychological energies towards God. In the normal, non-spiritual life, as we discussed, psychological energy are turned towards the normal activities of labor, leisure, reproduction, amusement, culture, and so on, but for the essential gratification of the ego rather than God. Spiritual disciplines take these energies and redirect them through concentration, prayer, spiritual service work, ritual, and so on. But even these tools can be seen as ways of training one's consciousness to have the correct spiritual attitude throughout all activities, no matter what we are doing—the attitude which results in all of one's life and energy being devoted to God.

And getting to this point, where one's psychological energies are fully devoted to God, is what ultimately removes the separation from God. So the spiritual path is not a physical journey but the journey of changing one's psychology so that it is capable of doing this. But this is not an trivial process: while man is a creation of God and made of the substance of God, in another practical sense, man is truly separated from God. We are separated from him by our mind and chaotic life-impulses, the dense and intricate structures that constitute our body and our consciousness. We undertake spiritual practice to remove this separation. The separation can be removed internally by going inside oneself to commune with one's God-nature. But separation doesn't need to only stop at inner states. We must be in contact with God in our outer lives as well, when we aren't absorbed in contemplation, prayer, or meditation; hence the importance of spiritual practices we can work with in our outer lives as well. The process of doing this progressively throughout our whole being while remaining outside of the limiting confines and influences of any fixed religious institution is the independent spiritual path.

#spirituality #philosophy

[bluewatsons]

Alan Calnan, The Nature of Reasonableness, The Nature of Reasonableness, Southwestern Law School Research Paper No. 2019/07. (June 4, 2019)

Abstract

Though the notion of reasonableness dominates Anglo- American law, its meaning has been clouded by traditional conceptual analysis. This Essay argues that greater clarity can be gained by taking a scientific approach to the subject, exposing the natural foundations beneath the concept’s varied interpretations.

Introduction

Reasonable legal minds agree that reasonableness is one of the foundational concepts of American law, infiltrating everything from administrative, corporate, and constitutional law to crimes, torts, and contracts.1 Yet the concept’s importance and prevalence haven’t necessarily bred clarity. In fact, a recent flurry of analytic interpretations has only clouded the term’s meaning.2 While some scholars say reasonableness is a prescriptive standard,3 others ]believe it describes existing community values,4 and still others see it as a combination of the two. 5 This split is deepened by disagreements over the concept’s normative basis. Indeed, the latest proposals ground reasonableness in a wide variety of ideals, including utilitarianism, economic efficiency, fairness, deontological respect, pragmatic rationalism, formalism, mutuality, and aretaic virtue.6

Since reasonableness effectively serves as law’s conscience, doubts about its essence are an obvious cause for concern. But the impasse also puts legal theory in a serious predicament. If reasonableness means different things to different people—or at least, different things in different legal contexts—then there’s little point to searching for a common unifying principle. Even if such a principle exists, traditional conceptual analysis has struggled to discover it. As jurisprudence maven Lawrence Solum recently observed, legal philosophy’s exhaustive polemic on reasonableness eventually just “runs out of gas.”7

Yet the problem with these approaches isn’t a lack of analytic rigor. Rather, it’s an absence of critical facts. What’s missing from the discussion of reasonableness, I argue, is a basic understanding of human nature. Because science informs that inquiry, this Essay explores the biological origins of reasonableness by probing three of its key connotations: sensibleness, fairness, and moderation. The first meaning evokes mankind’s integrated cognitive faculties, the second addresses humanity’s reflexive values, and the third entails the coordinative processes animating human decision-making. Together, these attributes suggest that reasonableness is not an abstract, static, or monolithic ideal; rather, it’s an organic, dynamic, and systemic phenomenon for satisfying our natural urge for homeostasis.

I. Integrative Faculties

It’s widely recognized that reasonable and sensible are effectively interchangeable ideas. But it’s not so clear how these terms became synonymous or what deeper insight can be drawn from their relationship. After all, words grounded in reason, on the one hand, and senses, on the other, seem facially antagonistic if not incompatible. Yet as it turns out, the meaning of sensible has changed over time, and its transition to reasonableness reveals more about that concept than any standard dictionary definition can offer.

What makes the etymology of sensible so significant is its uncanny resonance with human nature. Sensible originated in the Middle Ages with a physical connotation, suggesting something “perceptible to the senses.”8 Since sensory perceptions are typically clear and emphatic, sensible things were deemed “easily understood.”9 This interpretation subtly turned a biological feeling into a mental experience. That tendency was exacerbated by the growing belief in mind-body dualism, which placed reason in control of all human understanding.10 Thus, if a thought were comprehensible, and thus sensible under the latter view, it had to be both “logical” and “in accordance with reason.”11 So construed, sensible became something of a notional composite, integrating body with mind and feeling with rationality.

Though reasonableness isn’t conceived this way today, science has confirmed its integrative nature. The ostensibly one-dimensional term—reason-able—is really the functional integration of two human faculties: reason and feelings. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has observed, “Feelings and reason are involved in an inseparable, looping, reflective embrace”12 in which “mind and brain influence the body proper just as much as the body proper can influence the brain and the mind.”13 In fact, says Damasio, body and brain aren’t really separate life systems but rather “two aspects of the very same being”14—in effect, “an organismic single unit.”15

Like reason, feelings are a type of cognition.16 They process and evaluate information obtained internally from a person’s body and memory and externally from the surrounding environment. 17 Informed by homeostasis, which sets the parameters for an organism’s survival and flourishing, feelings provide “a moment-to- moment report on the state of life” inside the body.18 That report includes a normative judgment about its findings, signaling that the body’s condition is either good or bad.19 Conditions conducive to well-being produce a range of positive or pleasant feelings, while bodily states detrimental to survival evoke feelings that are negative or unpleasant.20 Over the course of evolution, these valenced feelings get etched into mankind’s long-term memory bank— DNA—where they emerge as heritable intuitions.21

This preserved affective experience begets, directs, and grounds our “sense” of reasonableness. When the body’s sensory apparatus is stimulated by new information, our feelings spontaneously appraise the situation and sound an immediate call to either accept or reject the precipitating cause. 22 This impulse often is accompanied by powerful emotions—like anger, fear, joy, or comfort—which heighten the initial reaction.23 These tumultuous feelings finally stir our reason, but not to act as the final arbiter or sole decider. Rather, reason intervenes to serve our intuitions by updating their old wisdom with new plans, strategies, and arguments suited to the prevailing circumstances.24 In short, feelings propose general rules of behavior, while reason searches for exceptions. If none can be found or fashioned, our rational faculty readily justifies, defends, and approves the proposal.25

Even when reason counsels a different course of action, feelings continue to influence its trajectory. Feelings monitor the quality of the mind’s response to a problem, making us feel good when the solution benefits our welfare and bad when it fails to advance our interests.26 This feedback renews the rational review of better alternatives, thus completing one cycle of integrated problem- solving and initiating a repeating succession of others.27 At each turn, reason is informed and tempered by feelings, and feelings are informed and tempered by reason.

Reasonableness emerges when the relationship between reason and feelings is relatively reciprocal. When it’s not, the effect is unmistakably un-reasonable. Psychopaths and sociopaths are rational, but they lack important social feelings like empathy, compassion, guilt, or shame.28 By contrast, infants are extremely emotional, but they have undeveloped powers of reason.29 Although adults with impulse control disorders are capable of rational thinking, they often are captive to their feelings and emotions. In each situation, the actor’s dis-integrated mentality prevents her from behaving as a reasonable person.

Ironically, our integrative faculties may explain why humans ever began creating such behavioral standards in the first place. According to Professor Damasio, “Feelings, as deputies of homeostasis, are the catalysts for the responses that began human cultures.”30 When people started experiencing the stress of group living, Damasio surmises, they would have invented a variety of responses to diminish their displeasure.31 These reactions initially may have “ranged from moral prescriptions and principles of justice to modes of social organization and governance.”32 Because such conventions proved effective, they were formalized in codes of conduct and eventually sanctified as law.33

We may not know precisely how reasonableness came to represent these homeostatic developments. Yet one thing is reasonably clear. We can’t hope to understand the meaning of that concept without investigating the integrated interplay of reason, feeling, and homeostasis.34

II. Reflexive Values

As it turns out, homeostasis and feelings are not just biological faculties for creating reasonableness. They also are normative agents that inform this mindset. We’ve seen how homeostasis gives valence to our feelings, which make positive and negative judgments about our homeostatic stability. But that process goes deeper still, imbuing us with core values that prime our every decision. While these values often seem too deep to fathom, their natural foundations actually lie well within the realm of reasonableness.

The central value of reasonableness is fairness.35 Though fairness is presented as a single concept, it combines two apparently inconsistent ideals. Fairness can be either a general sense of justice and equity36 or conformity with specific rules or duties.37 In reality, however, fairness is neither unary nor binary. It is a complementary and reflexive set of ideals naturally derived from mankind’s highest normative authority, the human brain.

The brain evolved in three stages to solve three different adaptive challenges.38 While the ancient selfish brain structures promoted the individual’s survival, later social structures facilitated cooperation and group living.39 The final global layer reconciled conflicts between its discordant predecessors and fashioned long-term strategies for human flourishing.40

As an assembled unit, the brain produces the two types of fairness that make up our sense of reasonableness. The selfish and social modules emit moral intuitions. Inherited at birth, these intuitions are self-evident to their hosts, who perceive them as special, serious, imperative, and universal.41 So when someone violates these rules, the infraction feels instinctively unfair.

This deep-seated feeling derives from values so important to human survival that they have been imprinted into our genome by natural selection. Though cultures prioritize these values differently, all people crave autonomy, care or security from harm, reciprocity, loyalty, hierarchical authority, sanctity, and integrity.42 Because we possess a visceral need for these basic goods, we feel subconsciously entitled to their fulfillment. When that entitlement is threatened or impaired, our indignity reflex automatically kicks in and we are filled with a sense of injustice and inequity. This feeling appears to account for theories of reasonableness grounded in deontology and virtue ethics.43

Our global neural network works differently. It deliberatively constructs conventional rules to solve current problems that evolution, genes, and intuitions can’t or don’t address. These rules depend on a logical accommodation of many factors, including the norms, practices, customs, and conditions prevailing at the moment. Though conventions are influential, they don’t feel nearly as binding. In fact, they typically must be enforced by external incentives like punishments or social sanctions, or justified by the power of affective persuasion.44 When such rules are breached, we think the transgression is unfair because it disrespects a rational rule of behavior grounded in a utilitarian or economic assessment of costs and benefits.45

The legal notion of reasonableness does a good job of capturing the dual strands of biological valence. Our moral intuitions are embedded in bright-line rules of law, including crimes and torts against battery, false imprisonment, theft or conversion of property, breach of confidentiality, and abuse or exploitation of the weak and vulnerable.46 Because these offenses directly betray our harm, autonomy, reciprocity, loyalty, and authority values, they are treated as presumptively unreasonable. When our values conflict or interrelate in complex ways, the law typically abandons a rule-based approach and replaces it with a general standard of reasonableness.47 This is particularly evident in the tort theory of negligence, where an endless array of lawful but ill-considered acts may result in someone’s harm. In these cases, findings of unreasonableness cannot be presumed, but must be rationally and affirmatively justified by considering all of the surrounding circumstances.48

Yet law’s rendition of reasonableness as fairness is not quite complete. Because the legal concept lacks a foundation in human nature, it misses reasonableness’s essential reflexivity. Rules and standards are never entirely separate; nor are they permanently set in stone. Rather, like the faculties of reasonableness inside the brain, these valenced mediums are constantly shaping and being shaped by each other.

Such circularity is most conspicuous at the level of doctrine, where rules and standards are locked in a perpetual feedback loop. In torts, for example, the presumptive rule of an intentional tort or strict liability theory is often countered by a privilege or defense grounded in the standard of reasonableness.49 In other situations, a reasonableness standard is used to clarify an ambiguous rule, as is true for cases of outrage and abnormally dangerous activities.50 This relationship is also reversible. Doctrinal standards—like negligence’s standard of reasonable care—frequently spawn rule- based exceptions; 51 and in some scenarios—like the no-duty principle for nonfeasance—the exceptions can effectively restore the standard.52

Because reasonableness’s reflexivity is ongoing, its patterns can even shape the course of law’s historical development. If one assumes a global perspective—in fact, the sort of meta-view taken by our faculty of reason—these ripple effects soon snap into focus. It’s clear that theoretical standards—like the original writ of trespass or “wrongs”—may splinter into more fine-grained behavioral rules—like our various intentional torts.53 It’s also apparent that a hodge-podge of specific social rules can scale up to form a general standard of reasonable care, as happened with the theory of negligence.54

It’s even evident that these normative movements can waffle to- and-fro. A good example is the law of products liability, which gradually morphed from a strict no-duty rule to a standard of reasonableness; then transitioned to a rule of strict liability, and ultimately morphed back into a standard of reasonableness.55 In each situation, reasonableness isn’t just the state of fairness within our rules and standards; it’s also the process for coordinating them.

III. Coordinate Processes

The idea of reasonableness as coordination is captured by yet a different connotation of the term. Being reasonable means being moderate or displaying moderation.56 Since the core idea of moderation is avoiding extremes or lessening their intensity,57 this version of reasonableness certainly assumes a coordinative mentality. But it also comes with a familiar qualification. Like other aspects of reasonableness, the mind’s coordination process isn’t purely rational. Instead, it’s a natural dynamic of a complex biological system.

All living systems contain disparate elements organized to achieve some purpose.58 Because these elements are innately competitive, they must coordinate their individual aims just to maintain system function.59 That process, though system-specific, is neither haphazard nor idiosyncratic. Rather, it’s the product of a universal medium called coordination dynamics.60 This uncanny natural power not only senses system instability, it initiates a continuous cycle of adjustments to restore equilibrium at all levels of existence.61

In fact, coordination dynamics accounts for the integrated brain mechanics mentioned earlier. Alerted by homeostasis, coordination dynamics sets out to reconcile the cacophony of thoughts and feelings aroused by a disruptive event. It also harmonizes the selfish, social, and global drives directing the mind’s response.62 As the process unfolds, coordination dynamics employs the trick of moderation to inhibit extreme, knee-jerk reactions. Though the mind simultaneously entertains opposed positions—a process called metastability—it constantly explores the vast array of middle-ground alternatives, ensuring that the final decision is measured, moderate, and ultimately, reasonable.63

But that’s not all. These dynamics don’t just operate in isolation. Because systems are overlapping and interactive, their dynamics have a circular causality, scaling up to higher levels and affecting the levels below.64 So it is with law. Human beings first addressed their survival problem by forming larger coordination systems called societies. When these social systems came into conflict, they formed coordinative cultural systems like religions, philosophies, traditions, and customs to hold their factions together. Yet even this wasn’t enough. As cultures and sub-cultures clashed, humanity adapted once again, this time by developing the still higher coordination system of law.65

Law served as a system of sociocultural homeostasis. As Professor Damasio explains, “the development of justice systems responded to the detection of imbalances caused by social behaviors that endangered individuals and the group.”66 Law’s purpose was to coordinate society’s volatile elements by reestablishing a healthy equilibrium between the law-abiding and the lawless.67

The longer law persisted, the more deeply coordination dynamics shaped the human psyche. Nurtured by global values of authority, sanctity, and integrity, this sociocultural norm became a pervasive natural instinct, inspiring an exalted and unifying legal “system” that reflected and reinforced its coordinative nature. In fact, within democratic cultures, coordination dynamics bred legal institutions structured for the very purpose of facilitating reasonable decision- making.

These features consistently promote metastability by juxtaposing polar positions, diversifying their analysis, assessing their intersections and interstices, and synthesizing medial solutions. The process begins with law’s superstructure, which strikes a delicate balance of powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. It also permeates the infrastructure of each branch, dividing executive power among the president, the cabinet, and various implementing agencies; splitting legislative authority between the House and the Senate; and stratifying judicial authority through a multilateral court system.

Though such governance structures may seem to “leave the realm of biology,” Professor Damasio insists “that is simply not true.”68 “The protracted negotiating process required for governance efforts,” he continues, “is necessarily embedded in the biology of affect, knowledge, reasoning, and decision making.”69 Because “[h]umans are inevitably caught inside the machinery of affect and its accommodations with reason,” “[t]here is no exit from that condition.”70

These coordinative properties scale all the way down to law’s minutia. Legal concepts are framed as rules, standards, and principles or policies, and are packaged as competitive rights and duties. If these binaries can’t be reconciled, they’re functionally coordinated by law’s global mediator, the constitution. Such accommodations aren’t permanent, however. Under the common law system, each new decision must be continually coordinated with the old wisdom of past opinions. The same holds true in individual lawsuits, where law’s longstanding norms are constantly mediated by judges and juries informed by prevailing social values. Within the trial process itself, the law’s high-minded rationality gets further mediated by the raw emotion of the parties, the witnesses, and the factfinders.71 Even when a final decision is necessary, law typically doesn’t entrust the responsibility to a single person, but assigns it to a panel of coordinators willing to reconcile their differences in the common pursuit of justice.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that the resulting judgments will be sensible, fair, or moderate. Seemingly rational people sometimes do irrational things. But because law is an essentially coordinative enterprise, it’s reasonable by nature even though it’s not always reasonable in fact.

Conclusion

Conventional legal theory treats big questions as matters for deep philosophical discourse. That’s certainly been true in the jurisprudence of reasonableness, which has become little more than intellectual jousting. It’s now clear, however, that topics like reasonableness can’t be grasped by analysis alone. Because reasonableness has physiological origins, it’s susceptible to scientific investigation. In fact, science helps to illuminate three of the concept’s core connotations: sensibleness, fairness, and moderation. While the first meaning describes the cognitive integration of reason and feeling, the second evokes homeostatic values like justice and reciprocity, and the third reflects the dynamics of human coordination.

Admittedly, these findings don’t tell the whole story, as new discoveries in the natural sciences continue at a frenzied pace. But such insights do bring us closer to the truth. Even if that prospect doesn’t convert every science skeptic, it does make a naturalized approach to reasonableness reasonable in itself. As Professor Damasio counsels, “It is often feared that greater knowledge of biology reduces complex, minded, and willful cultural life to automated, pre-mental life,” but science actually “reinforces the humanist project” by “achiev[ing] something spectacularly  different: a deepening of the connection between cultures and the life process.”72

Footnotes

See Brandon L. Garratt, Constitutional Reasonableness, 102 MINN. L. REV. 61, 69-70 (2017) (recounting the concept’s significance and use within multiple legal fields); Frédéric G. Sourgens, Reason and Reasonableness: The Necessary Diversity of the Common law, 67 ME. L. REV. 73, 74-75 (2014) (same).

The latest entry appeared just two months ago in the Yale Law Journal Forum. See Alan Z. Rozenshtein, Fourth Amendment Reasonableness After Carpenter, 128 YALE L.J. FORUM 943 (2019).

See Alan D. Miller & Ronen Perry, The Reasonable Person, 87 N.Y.U. L. REV. 323, 326 (2012) (“We put forward and defend the argument that normative definitions [of reasonableness] are categorically preferable to positive definitions because the latter are logically unacceptable.”).

See Kevin P. Tobia, How People Judge What is Reasonable, 70 ALA. L. REV. 293, 299-300 (2018) (describing this view of reasonableness as a search for the statistically average characteristics of people within a community).

See id. at 296 (arguing that “[r]easonableness is best understood as a hybrid notion that is partly statistical and partly prescriptive”).

See Sourgens, supra note 1, at 80-105 (discussing utilitarian, pragmatic, and formalist paradigms of reasonableness); Benjamin C. Zipursky, Reasonableness In and Out of Negligence Law, 163 U. PA. L. REV. 2131 (2015) (proposing a theory of reasonableness as mutuality); Lawrence B. Solum, Legal Theory Lexicon: The Reasonable Person, LEGAL THEORY BLOG (Apr. 21, 2019), https://lsolum.typepad.com/legaltheory/2019/04/legal-theory-lexicon-the-reasonable-person.html (addressing efficiency, fairness, deontological, and virtue-based notions of reasonableness).

Id.

Sensible, ONLINE ETYMOLOGY DICTIONARY, https://www.etymonline.com/word/sensible (last visited June 1, 2019).

Id.

Mind-body dualism is the belief that mind and the body are composed of different substances and that the mind is a thinking thing that lacks the usual attributes of physical objects.” Scott Calef, Dualism and Mind, THE INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY, https://www.iep.utm.edu/dualism/ (last visited June 1, 2019). Such “substance” dualism was popularized in the seventeenth century by French philosopher Réne Descartes. See id.; see also EDWARD O. WILSON: CONSILIENCE: THE UNITY OF KNOWLEDGE 108 (1998) (discussing Cartesian dualism).

Sensible, supra note 8.

ANTONIO DAMASIO, THE STRANGE ORDER OF THINGS: LIFE, FEELINGS, AND THE MAKING OF CULTURES 171 (Vintage Books ed. 2019).

Id. at 117; see also id. at 12 (stating that feelings are a “cooperative partnership of body and brain”); id. at 139 (noting that feelings are “based on hybrid processes that are neither purely bodily nor purely neural”).

Id.

Id. at 26

See JONATHAN HAIDT, THE RIGHTEOUS MIND: WHY GOOD PEOPLE ARE DIVIDED BY POLITICS AND RELIGION 52-53, 102 (2012).

See DAMASIO, supra note 12, at 30-31, 146-47, 157.

Id. at 104.

See id. at 25, 102, 105-07.

See id.

See id. at 21-22; see also HAIDT, supra note 16, at 144.

See id. at 64-66.

See DAMASIO, supra note 12, at 99-100, 108-13.

See HAIDT, supra note 16, at 54.

See id.

See DAMASIO, supra note 12, at 15-16, 171.

See id. at 117.

See HAIDT, supra note 16, at 72-73.

See id. at 74-75.

DAMASIO, supra note 12, at 26 (emphasis omitted).

See id. at 13.

Id. at 13, 26-27.

See id. at 13, 21, 26, 28-29.

See id. at 5.

Reasonable, OXFORD LIVING DICTIONARIES, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/reasonableness (last visited June 3, 2019) (entry 1).

Fair, BLACK’S LAW DICTIONARY (10th ed. 2014) (entry 1).

Fair, MERRIAM-WEBSTER, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fair (last visited June 3, 2019) (entry 1b(1)).

See PAUL D. MACLEAN, THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION: ROLE IN PALEOCEREBRAL FUNCTIONS 13-18 (1990).

See GERALD A. CORY, JR., THE CONSILIENT BRAIN: THE BIONEUROLOGICAL BASIS OF ECONOMICS, SOCIETY, AND POLITICS 9-14 (2004).

See id. at 15-18.

See HAIDT, supra note 16, at 11-12 (discussing and affirming the earlier work of psychologist, Elliot Turiel).

See id. at 178-79, 200-01, 215.

See, e.g., Heidi Li Feldman, Prudence, Benevolence, and Negligence: Virtue Ethics and Tort Law, 74 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 1431 (2000) (virtue ethics); Gregory C. Keating, Reasonableness and Rationality in Negligence Theory, 48 STAN. L. REV. 311 (1996) (noting that a freedom-based approach to reasonableness  

See HAIDT, supra note 16, at 11; SHAUN NICHOLS, SENTIMENTAL RULES: ON THE NATURAL FOUNDATIONS OF MORAL JUDGMENT 5-7, 25 (2004).

See Stephen G. Gilles, On Determining Negligence: Hand Formula Balancing. The Reasonable Person Standard and the Jury, 54 VAND. L. REV. 813 (2001) (reviewing the cost-benefit or risk- utility approach to reasonableness).

Professor John Mikhail specifically has argued that the elements of a battery action find support in moral psychology. See John Mikhail, Any Animal Whatever? Harmful Battery and Its Elements as Building Blocks of Moral Cognition, 124 ETHICS 750 (2014).

See DAN B. DOBBS ET AL., HORNBOOK ON TORTS 193-95 (2015) (describing the evolution of reasonableness in the tort theory of negligence).

RESTATEMENT (THIRD) OF TORTS: PHYSICAL & EMOTIONAL HARM §3 (2010) (“ A person acts negligently if the person does not exercise reasonable care under all the circumstances.”).

For example, battery’s rule against harmful or offensive contacts may be countered by a privilege of self-defense, which depends on the reasonableness of the defendant’s response. See DOBBS ET AL., supra note 47, at 132 (“A person is privileged to use reasonable force to defend himself against unprivileged acts that he reasonably believes will cause him bodily harm, offensive bodily contact, or confinement.”). Likewise, strict liability’s rules against certain animals and activities may be met in many jurisdictions with the reasonableness-based defense of comparative fault. See id. at 793-94.

Outrageous conduct is viewed as unreasonable behavior that seriously violates the norms of a civilized society and can be assessed only by reference to various circumstantial factors. See id. at 707-09. Similarly, an abnormally dangerous activity is determined by analyzing a number of factors that “look like a poorly disguised negligence regime, balancing such things as the value of the defendant’s activity to the community.” Id. at 786.

For example, some jurisdictions recognize a rule that exempts property owners from negligence for failing to trim foliage at the perimeter of their premises. See id. at 207.

See id. at 615-16 (stating that the “exceptions [to the no-duty principle] have the effect of creating a duty to act in most instances where a reasonable person would feel compelled to act”).

See ALAN CALNAN, A REVISIONIST HISTORY OF TORT LAW: FROM HOLMESIAN REALISM TO NEOCLASSICAL RATIONALISM 160-61, 191-200, 225-30 (2005) (discussing this historical progression).

See id. at 161-62, 201-09, 231-48, 274-76.

See Alan Calnan, Torts as Systems, 28 S. CAL. INTERDISC. L.J. 1, 51-53 (2019) (forthcoming).

Reasonable, OXFORD LIVING DICTIONARIES, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/reasonableness (last visited June 3, 2019) (entry 2).

Moderate, MERRIAM-WEBSTER, https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/moderate (last visited June 3, 2019) (as a noun, entry 1a; as a verb, entry 1).

DONELLA H. MEADOWS, THINKING IN SYSTEMS: A PRIMER 11 (Diana Wright ed., 2008).

See J.A. SCOTT KELSO & DA VID A. COMPLEMENTARY NATURE 9-12 (2006).

Coordination dynamics is “a set of context-dependent laws or rules that describe, explain, and predict how patterns of coordination form, adapt, persist, and change in natural systems.” Id. at 90.

Coordination dynamics helps to explain patterns within and between genes and proteins, different brain regions, various parts of the body, natural organisms and their environments, and among people, social structures, and institutions. See id. at 111.

See CORY, JR., supra note 39, at 20, 21 & n.9 (observing that “[t]he two master programs of self-preservation and affection” within the brain are “locked in inseparable unity” to form a motivational and behavioral spectrum that continuously blends both tendencies without ever reaching either extreme).

See KELSO & ENGSTRØM, supra note 59, at 10-11

See id. at 114-15.

DAMASIO, supra note 12, at 224.

ANTONIO DAMASIO, SELF COMES TO MIND: CONSTRUCTING THE CONSCIOUS BRAIN 310 (Vintage Books ed. 2012).

Id.

DAMASIO, supra note 12, at 224.

Id. (emphasis omitted).

Id. (emphasis omitted).

See Jessie Allen, A Theory of Adjudication: Law as Magic, 41 SUFFOLK U.L. REV. 773, 811 (2008) (noting that in the ritual of trial, “[n]orms and values ... become saturated with emotion, while the gross and basic emotions become ennobled through contact with social values”).

#reasonableness #rationality #decisionmaking #irrationality #values #fairness #tort law #constitutional law #neuroscience #moral psychology #feelings #emotion #cognition #norms #systems science #coordination

[the-everqueen]

i don't know a mbti but Release The "Alexander Hamilton Is An ENFP" Essay

so for those of you unfamiliar with myers briggs, mbti is a method for determining personality types based on four dualities: Extroverted vs. Introverted, Sensing vs. Intuition, Thinking vs. Feeling, Judging vs. Perceiving. i’ll touch on aspects of each as i defend my position, but you should know there are 16 possible outcomes. since it’s a theory, the purpose is to describe basic functions of personality, not explain or determine behavior.

(obvious disclaimer here: i believe people are more complicated than can be described in four letters, and i reject the reductionist version of mbti some people propose, as though all ENFPs are exactly the same. obviously people with a similar approach to thought may demonstrate other similarities, but individuals also have infinite variation among them. also very important: myers briggs does not account for certain complicating factors. for instance, i believe historical Hamilton likely had ptsd from his multiple childhood traumas - in the musical, “Hurricane” isn’t an ENFP being “impulsive” per the stereotypes, but Hamilton reliving the two most traumatic events in his past and then taking action based on an “all or nothing” logic seen in trauma survivors. personality doesn’t always determine behavior.)

all that being said, here’s my breakdown for Hamilton being an ENFP:

Extroverted: most people won’t dispute me on this one. the idea behind Extrovert vs. Introvert is that the former get their energy from people and outside stimulation, while the latter lose energy from outside stimulation and require time alone to “recharge.” extroverts tend to come off as “people persons,” a description that applies to Hamilton. Chernow describes him as “outgoing” (… an understatement), and he made numerous friends and kept a wide social circle throughout his life (compare to James Madison, a definite introvert, who was described as shy, unassuming, quiet, scholarly, and withdrawn).

Intuitive: a lot of people label Intuition as “creativity” or “mystical insight,” which i think is utter bullshit. i would describe it as “future-oriented,” not in the sense of general goals (going to college, getting a job, going to the store on Friday), but in broader terms, i.e., envisioning what will or should happen and taking action as though that future is certain. this goes hand-in-hand with what people tend to call Hamilton’s rampant ambition: his letter to Edward Stevens at 14 shows him projecting into a possible future where he can rise above his “grovelling” life as a clerk through extraordinary events. (he’s also wildly romantic about it, a trait often ascribed to ENFPs, and seen in his later letters to Laurens and Eliza.) between staircase!gate and Yorktown, he writes the letter “that set forth a full-fledged system for shoring up American credit and creating a national bank.” (Chernow, 156): the War isn’t over but he’s thinking years ahead in terms of action that needs to be taken. same in regard to revising the Articles of Confederation - most people recognized the flaws in the system but Hamilton and Madison (another N personality) are foremost credited with seeing an overhaul would be necessary, and even that the small Annapolis Convention would lead to greater action. Hamilton’s Report on the Public Credit takes the current problem of American finances and provides a long-term solution, but more than that he uses the present issue to address potential future problems. 

(a bit of a note here: sometimes biographers credit Hamilton with a level of prescience that’s not really fair. Hamilton wasn’t the only one to see problems with the government during and after the war, and he modeled his solutions on pre-existing British and Scottish theories. what’s impressive, to me, is that he could pinpoint the larger problem behind seemingly separate incidences and adapt theories to a uniquely American context. it seems obvious in hindsight but wasn’t necessarily at the time.)

Feeler: Thinking vs. Feeling boils down to “do you make decisions based Cold Hard Logic or Emotion?” that’s an over-simplification, obviously: Thinkers can be passionate and emotive, and Feelers can be logical. but in his early articles (and more polemic essays later in his political career), Hamilton tends to appeal to general emotion. actually in all of his writings there’s a thread of personalized values underlying his arguments - his statements on Burr, leading up to the duel, come to mind: someone who has honor and beliefs, even if they’re wrong, is a better choice than someone who is “amoral,” even if that person might be more malleable to his political party. even if you argue that personal honor was a real and concrete facet of masculinity in the 18th century (which i’m not denying), Hamilton wasn’t exactly pragmatic in challenging the entire Democratic Republican party to a duel. 

Perceiving: i honestly don’t understand why the terms Judging vs. Perceiving were chosen, because they are not helpful. basically J types are supposed to be incredibly organized, and P types are go-with-the-flow and shit planners. i take issue with this, mostly because i’m an INFJ who can’t stand color-coded systems and who sucks at putting together events. in regard to Hamilton, the biggest evidence (for me) that he was a P type is his flexibility in terms of achieving his personal goals: he sought glory and legacy, but the means to achieve that changed over the course of his life. he originally went to school for medicine but ended up pursuing law studies later on; he initially encouraged reconciliation with Britain but changed his stance when it became evident a break must happen; he took on the job as Washington’s aide-de-camp rather than wait to be advanced through the ranks of artillery; he defended the Constitution despite the flaws he saw in it, because he supported the larger ideal behind it; he served in various government positions not always related to finance. so he had a broad vision for himself and the nation, and ideals he would not compromise, but the means to achieve those weren’t necessarily set in stone. 

final note: this is my opinion, based on reading multiple biographies, listening to lectures, and reading Hamilton’s own writings. thanks to Burr, Hamilton isn’t around to dispute me. you’re totally free to disagree or add your reasoning to the argument.  

#mbti #shapechangersinwinter #answered asks #look... i'm not claiming to be a historian

[cemo-art]

 CEMALETTIN CINKILIC

                                                     STUDENT ID: 13020401

'Relational Aesthetics'

My essay is concerned with Relational Aesthetics as formulated and asserted by Nicholas Bourriaud, former curator at CAPC (Musée d'art Contemporain de Bordeaux) and editor of the journal Documents sur L'art.  Bourriaud argues the challenges of modern and contemporary art, especially the 1960s' and 1990s'.

Bourriaud asks : "Where do the misunderstanding surrounding 1990s' art come from, if not theoretical discourse complete with shortcomings? "1

Through this and some other questions, Bourriad tried to discuss and find out the real challenges of contemporary art, and it's links with society, history, culture, with the material form of these works. To this theory, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Philippe Parrena, Vanessa Beacroft and some other artist's activities are shown as examples of 1990s' art which are different from  1960s' art works.

This essay argues that the artistic praxis is a game including forms, patterns, and functions  in  periods and social contexts with progress and evolution without stability. Bourriaud established that, the aspects and programme of modernity has been finished and is not valid any more. Nowadays art needs a new criteria of aesthetic judgement, more effective tools and more valid viewpoints to understand the new social situations, artistic approaches of the 1990s, and the ideas which are behind them.

To find out the cultural plan of contemporary artistic practice, Bourriaud researched and investigated the background of the modern political area since the 18th century, and the 20th century; the role of the Enlightenment based on emancipating individuals and people, the end of ignorance, the role of the technologies and freedom, the changing of working conditions, philosophy, liberation, avant- garde movements and modernity. And finally he shows as the role of these elements that how they affected and changed culture, attitudes, mentalities, as well as the conditions of individual and social living, but also their impossibility to represent of unavoidable historical evolution of nowadays. Because " Nowadays, modernity extends into the practices of cultural do-it-yourself and recycling, into the invention of the everyday and the development of time lived..."2

This idea refers to participation, interactivity, collective and communal creation, which I disagree with because 'relational aesthetics' tried to say that everyone is artist or can be an artist! The communal system refers to the equality, socialisation of the product tools against exploitation and ownership, but this doesn't mean that everyone is equal in terms of ability, talent, feeling, knowledge and everyone can do everything? This theory reduces and rejects the individual differences, ability, talent, opportunity, productivity, competition- putting all of society into the same clothes. I believe this thesis is naturally contradictory and the analysis of the communal system is misguided - because of this practically is on the wrong route as well. On the contrary, the communal system argues and proposes to give the individual opportunity to be a fully talented person to be successful and to show her/his abilities and gift.

1. Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, ( Dijon, Les presses du réel, first published 2010)p 7

2. Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, ( Dijon, Les presses du réel, first published 2010)p 14

At an exhibition, or in a fair arranging a workshop involving audiences in an unfinished work or creating a collective/plural art work is normal and intelligible, but to my mind, to create or to declare a new movement is theoretically enforcement and practically doesn't work. In these situations, the subject matter, formal elements, the starting point, construction, content, medium, etc. are not clear. Naturally we need to ask some questions such as; who started to create art work at first, whose original idea, which materials will be using, and who will decide, with which size, and when it is supposed to finish? The answers to all these questions are unavoidable will take us to meet with an individual response, not with multiple answers!

The meaning of collaboration is different from producing together, as he argues in this theory. Not the creator, but the artwork must communicate with audiences to hold an interactive position. If we intend to take away the boundary between the artist, the product and the audiences, we will log off the subjective productivity and activity as well and this will lead to the cloning of society!

The idea of taking away the borders between countries to create a new world society/system without exploitation and classes is not saying this is about destroying the differences between individuals. We can't, and we must not generalize everything. This is ideologically anti-democratic and its practice naturally will be mono colour, monotype, and create a dictatorialsystem.

Argentina born Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is a good example to understand better this concept and thesis. One of Tiravanija's activitiy, which is called "Time/Food" was launched on Saturday, September 25, 2011 in the Time/Food restaurant at Abrons Arts Center at New York City.

Time/Food is a functional restaurant , which serves home-style meals. "Functioning both as a visualization of a parallel economy and its pragmatic deployment, Time/Food is one of several new branches of Time/Bank-a platform that enables groups and individuals to collectively exchange their time and skills through the use of credits earned through the bank, as an intermediary and guarantor without the use of money. With a growing pool of more than two thousand participants around the world. Time/Bank aims to create a sense of worth of money of the exchanges that already take place within art field."3

His second remarkable performance "Soup/No Soup" launched Saturday 7th, April 2012 at the Grand Palais at Paris. "As an alternative to the economy of the artist/restaurateur, food and exchange are the core values in two projects, Soup/No Soup at the Grand Palais, and Time/Food, a pop-up restaurant that has appeared in New York and Berlin. These emphasize the artist's practice concerned with dialogue, participation and social and community engagement through cultural activity that explores and blurs art and everyday life. From being a passive spectator, the visitor becomes an active actor in a work in process. The 'social sculpture' introduced ideas of otherness, nomadism, and the outsider, and welcomed the element of chance encounters as Parisians and tourists might share "a warm moment" by taking part in the gathering, exchange and offering, and the experience based on the encounter. Tiravanija focuses on meeting points of communication and exchange with the intention to abolish the frontier between art and life. Soup/No Soup challenges the expectations, status and form of the work of art -of art world codes and contexts of exhibition and space- with no boundaries between installation, sculpture, and performance."4

3. http://www.e-flux.com/program/timefood-restaurant-at-abrons-arts-center

Time/Bank, e-flux.com/timebank, New York, September 25, 2011

4. http://www.aajpress-wordpress.com/2012/04/25/timefood-new-york-and-berlin-soupno-soup-paris/

AAJPress, April 25, 2012

It is obvious that, for Rirkrit Tiravanija and Relational Aesthetic theory, the artwork is just a tool - even not important - and the exhibition, installation or performance is an experiment intending to create an alternative and parallel cultural, political and economic society against bourgeois and capitalist system. This action includes challenges to the codes and context of art world, exhibitions and spaces. The space is a laboratory, the audiences are experimental, and the exhibition is a test. However, this theory has many problems. For example, changing the system is impossible without the working class and masses. Secondly, without getting power and creating a government, there is not any chance of creating a communal system. This idea needs to fight against the old apparatus of governance in order to collapse it with a radical action as revolution. And thirdly, art is a part of a conflict, but its role is different in terms of social change.  There are two great examples of this issue in history. At 1871, the Paris Commune lost power after 72 days in a conflict which continued for seven days because the proletariat had not a political leader party, they demobilized the professional army, they didn't take over the Central Bank, they didn't attack the Versailles, and finally the population of France was majority peasant and they had alliance with bourgeois, not with proletaria. In this case, rather than Paris Commune, it seems to me that, they are a reformist and a daydreamer group, the present day version of French and British utopian socialists such as Robert Owen, Charles Forier, Saint-Simon, and William Morris who didn’t have a revolution plan, and tried to create cooperatives as alternative to the capitalist system to change it with reforms. They couldn't change the capitalist system because there is an antagonist contradiction between the proletaria and bourgeois and this issue and the exploitation can just be solve with conflict and revolution. In fact, the followers of this theory are kind of petit bourgeoisie intellectual category who are living in the capitalist-imperialist system and do not have any anxiety about conflict and revolution. They just aimed to create some islands to live there on the margins and I think that is all, nothing else will happen. Even more, in contrast, to gather the participants, they are offering some free food as a bonus or promotion, which means they are using a capitalist method, and there is no way to escape from the value of the capitalist system!

After all, returning to Bourriad, about some points ,- which introduced by modern art such as aesthetic, cultural and political goals – a radical revolution is possible with points of relation art with new space of human interactions and its social contexts because these are reducing the gap which exist between the artist, the artwork, the space and the audience. And because of this, the space will lose its independent and private role, and become a public place. Also, the viewer will change from being a passive object to becoming an interactive actor or subject to art; and with this action and role, Bourriad designated empathy, dialogue, sociability, civilisation and democratization.

Claire Bishop says that, "These socially-oriented projects anticipate many artistic developments that proliferated since the 1990s, but they also from part of a longer historical trajectory. The most important precursors for participatory art took place around 1920. The Paris 'Dada-Season' of April 1921 was a series of manifestations that sought to involve the city's public, the most salient being an excursion to the church of Saint Julien le Pauvre which drew more than one hundred people despite the pouring rain."5

Another example is "At the other extreme from these collaborative (yet highly authored) experiences were the Soviet mass spectacles that sublated individualism into propagandistic displays of collectivity. The storming of the Winter Palace (1920), for example, was held on the third anniversary of the October Revolution and involved over 8,000 performers in restaging the momentous events that had led to the Bolshevik victory."5

Claire Bishop's research shows that these projects are not new, and the first theoretically elaborated text about political status of participation written by left-wing German theorist Walter Benjamin and his idea was practiced by German dramatist Berthold Brecht. But there is a detail that, Walter Benjamin mentioned an artwork which should provide a model for allowing the audiences-  referring directly to the example of Soviet system and proletariat!

5. Claire Bishop, Participation, (London, Co-published by Whitechapel Gallery and,Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2006), p 10

Claire Bishop, points out some risks about relational art of 1960s and today: "the first concerns the desire to create an active subject, one who will be empowered by the experience of physical or symbolic participation. The hope is that the newly-emancipated subjects of participation will find themselves able to determine their own social and political reality. An aesthetic of participation therefore derives legitimacy from a (desired) causal relationship between the experience of art and individual/collective agency. The second argument concerns authorship. The gesture of ceding some or all authorial control is conventionally regarded as more egalitarian and democratic than the creation of a work by a single artist, while shared production is also seen to entail the aesthetic benefits of greater risk and unpredictability. Collaborative creativity is therefore understood both to emerge from, and to produce, a more positive and non-hierarchical social model. The third issue involves a perceived crisis in community and collective responsibility. This concern has become more acute since the fall of Communism, although it takes its lead from a tradition of Marxist thought that indicates the alienating and isolating effects of capitalism. One of the main impetuses behind participatory art has therefore been a restoration of the social bond through a collective elaboration of meaning."6

Overall, relational art is one way to get the attention of audiences, to make it more interesting to love art, and also using public places as gallery is a great idea to make art accessible to the masses for free. Even giving opportunity to viewers to learn/teaching them to create artwork is possible and a positive idea. On the other hand, if art is political, (and yes, it is political), then what kind of art are we making,with who and for whom? To relational aesthetics, relational art and relational form, what is the reality? What is the basis contradiction of the system/society?

If we compare the concept of contemporary art and the concept of modern art, there are many remarkable differences, but Bourriad in his theory is not just interested in the changes in the art world, which happened after some social movement such as Soviet revolution, Vietnam war and revolution, China's and Cuba's revolution, 1968 student movements, the revolutions in Africa, then the collapsed of Soviet union, globalism and technological changes, his theory aimed to build a parallel economy and a new society! To my mind, this is a fantasy. Art can't create a new system even with parallel economy is impossible to create a communal system instead capitalist system as obviously we can se in example of utopian socialists! 'Social context' or 'relational aesthetics' theory is confused and misses some important points. There are questions it still needs to answer. Working on the same artwork or subject with viewer doesn't make sense about the originality of artwork, idea, subject, professionalism etc. Doesn't matter whether we are making art for money or for pleasure and it is our life and commitment, but what about the quality of art? What of all the art colleges and art faculties? What is the meaning of education and what is it for if creating art is very simple and if everyone can create art or can be an artist?

6. Claire Bishop, Participation, (London/Cambridge, Massachusetts, Co-published by Whitechapel Gallery and, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2006),p 12

Bibliography

Books:

- Bishop,Claire. Participation, London/Cambridge, Massachusetts, (Co-published by Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, First published 2006)

- Bourriaud, Nicholas. Relational Aesthetics, Dijon,(Les presses du reel, first published 2010)

Websites:

- http://www.e-flux.com/program/timefod-restaurant-at-abrons-arts-center

Time/Bank, e-flux.com/timebank, New York, September 25, 2011

- http://www.aajpress.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/timefood-new-york-and-berlin-soupno-soup-paris/

Time/Food

AAJPress, April 25, 2012

[calculatefinal9-blog]

Calculate What Grade You Need

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[gradecal2sor-blog]

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Reconciled with the prosody in teacher-education reform there is a usual savvy among contributors that practicing systematized reflexion produces the largest human of grade score calculator to new settings (Henderson, 1996; Schon, 1987) and is a desperate inconstant in developing teachers who are decision makers (Pianist & Explorer College), socially semiconscious teachers (SUNY at New Paltz), or competent curriculum builders (Physicist College).

[pclysemia]

Neither language nor mind abides by the requirement of closure, except perhaps temporarily, for limited tasks. Both mind and language are necessarily open systems that constantly expand, add meta-levels, learn and modify themselves. Equally, both language and mind are notoriously promiscuous in violating Russell's constraint on self-inclusion and reflexivity. Consciousness is indeed forever adjusting its frame, shifting meta-levels; it keeps re-framing and reflexively framing itself. This propensity of consciousness is neither an aberration nor an accident. Rather, it is a necessary, adaptively motivated capacity; it stands at the very core of our perceptual and cognitive processing mechanisms. It is a precondition for the mind's ability to select, evaluate, file, contextualize and respond appropriately to mountains of information.

Mind, Code and Context: Essays in Pragmatics, by Talmy Givón (1989)

#talmy givón #mind code and context: essays in pragmatics #linguistics #pragmatics #fragments #consciousness #self #reality

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Here it goes again! The same old tired and predictable tune, the same recognizable chorus. Once again the world is told what to think and what to believe. The world is also given both rhythm and leitmotif, so the grotesque and crooked dance could begin. Who could resist, really? The lyrics of the tune are recited in perfect English, and with that air of moral and cultural superiority, which is supposed to disperse all doubts. On February 19, 2017, RT published the following: The Telegraph, as a favored mouthpiece for British intelligence service disinformation, is a part of psychological warfare operation against Russia, said independent journalist Martin Summers. Another accusation is being thrown at Russia as a British newspaper published a story about Moscow being allegedly behind a plot to kill Montenegro’s Prime Minister last October… According to the article, Russia wanted to overthrow the country’s government to stop them joining NATO. So now it is Montenegro. Yesterday it was Crimea, Donbas, and the US elections. Evil Russia again! Evil China, evil socialist Latin American countries, evil Syria, Eritrea, Zimbabwe, South Africa, North Korea, Philippines, evil all those who are laughing at the notion of Anglo-Saxon superiority. ***** This time I’m actually not intending to write some long, philosophical essay on the subject of “shamelessness of British propaganda”. I’m just taking a short break from my 10 thousand-word ‘paper’ for the China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS); a paper analyzing the impact of the 1917 Soviet Revolution on the world. I just want to state what I believe should be so obvious, but somehow isn’t, at least to billions of people all over the world: “Those British blokes running the mainstream media outlets and global propaganda network really cannot be trusted. For centuries, no other country brought more grief to the planet, destroyed more lives, ruined more nations and cultures, and stole more natural resources from the ‘natives’, than the United Kingdom.” All this was done with a straight face, all explained and justified by the most advanced propaganda apparatus on earth, all ‘morally defended’. The entire twisted concept of British-style ‘justice’ was first introduced at home, and then exported to many corners of the globe. It went on for several long centuries, and it goes on until now: the rapists are introducing globally accepted moral codes. Mass murderers are running international courts of justice. Notorious liars and thieves are teaching the world about ‘objectivity’. Gurus of disinformation are even ‘educating’ their own children, as well as the children of elites from all parts of the world, in their ‘prestigious’ factories of indoctrination – schools and universities. Of course, there are some countries that have tried very hard to outdo the UK in terms of brutality, greed and tactics of deception. It is worth mentioning such candidates for genocidal world leadership like France, Germany, Spain and lately the United States. They really have been competing determinately and zealously, but despite all their efforts, they never truly managed to come close to the forerunner. Please, just think about all this, if you haven’t already done it for years. Then wash your eyes thoroughly, and look anew at those tabloids and ‘serious publications’ that are printed in the UK. Look at the indoctrination television channels. If you are still able to retain at least some detachment and common sense, please compare what they are saying and writing and showing, with the reality outside your own window, wherever on this Planet you may be. ***** For many years I worked all over the world, on all continents, in some 160 countries. For many years, I was told stories, shown evidence, about the most monstrous and barbaric crimes that the Brits have been committing almost everywhere on this Planet. To compile even some semi-complete list, one would need to compose at least a sizable brochure, if not an entire book. Let’s just mention a few of the most obvious horrors that ‘Great’ Britain is responsible for: Slave trade and destruction of entire huge parts of Africa with tens of millions people directly or indirectly killed. Monstrous occupation of the ‘Sub-continent’, with tens of millions of lives lost (including those in several artificially triggered famines). Ransacking of large parts of China, murdering and participating in breaking the most populous nation on earth. Brutal attacks against the young Soviet state. Horrid treatment of colonized peoples of the island nations, from Oceania (South Pacific) to the Caribbean. Gassing, bombing, literally exterminating people of the Middle East, from what is now Iraq and Kuwait, to Palestine. There were invasions of Afghanistan and the ‘reign of terror in Kabul’ in 1879. There were many other things, many nightmarish crimes, of course, but today I’m being brief… In the “New World”, consisting of countries like the US, Canada and Australia, the most terrible massacres of the native people were committed by the first and second generation of Europeans, mainly the Brits. Britain actually never ceased to commit crimes against humanity. Since WWII it has been tutoring the United States, strategically and ideologically, in the art of how to run the Empire and how to manufacture unanimity inside the West itself, and even among the population of the colonized nations (in the neo-colonialist context). It has also been involved in some of the vilest acts in modern history, related to countries like Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo as well as entire areas of Asia Pacific and the African Great Lakes. Again, that’s only a brief and incomplete summary. ***** Having experience with occupying huge parts of the world for centuries, knowing first-hand how to ‘pacify’ the natives, the Brits gradually developed and then passed on to the rest of the Western world their highly effective and successful indoctrination methods. These were eventually spread further – mainly among the elites of the colonized nations. As a result, fully standardized global perceptions evolved, and were implemented and upheld until this very moment. They included the general worldview, ‘principles’ and ‘moral standards’, law and justice (including such concepts as ‘human rights’), and even the set of overall values. The English language (especially well articulated; spoken with certain recognizable and ‘acceptable ‘accents) became the main linguistic tool embodying both truth and authority. News presented in a certain ‘objective’ way and with a certain accent (or acceptable set of accents) became subconsciously, for the great majority of people, much more trustworthy than that which would be delivered by individuals whom a great Polish journalist, anthropologist and philosopher Ryszard Kapuscinski used to define as ‘the others’. ***** This ‘perfect’, seemingly bulletproof system produces intellectual laziness, submissiveness, even servitude. It is successfully upholding the status quo. Lies are mounting on top of lies, and even the most obvious fabrications lately do not get challenged, except in some marginal and ‘extremist’ (defined by the Western regime) outlets. The colonialist empire managed to survive. It is now fully in charge. It dominates the psyche of both the colonizers and the colonized. Advances that were made by liberation and independence struggles, by the anti-colonialism fighters during the post-WWII era, have been skillfully annulled. Then, it was officially declared, “colonialism is over”. At some point, the Anglo-Saxon demagogues invented ‘political correctness’, one more highly effective tool designed to neutralize and ‘pacify’ any serious resistance. Political correctness claims that all nations and races are equal; it is even glorifying those ‘little people’ and almost all ‘cultures of the under-developed nations’, at least verbally, while in reality the Empire keeps plundering and manipulating the planet, as it has been doing for ages. In the colonies, the only individuals who are gaining are the elites; those morally corrupt rulers of the deprived and still enslaved world. ***** As in the past, the regime pragmatically chooses its enemies, and it then applies the most proven and spiteful tactics, launching defamation campaigns, dehumanizing citizens and leaders of adversary states, creating often phantasmagoric but highly effective conspiracy theories. The British media, the British propagandists, in fact, the entire British establishment, had reached absolute perfection in the field of mind-control and brainwashing. How else, otherwise, would anyone in his or her sane mind trust the words of those who are responsible for tens of millions, perhaps for hundreds of millions of lost human lives in all corners of the world? How could the primary architects of our insane global arrangement be taken seriously, unless they managed to fully indoctrinate their ‘subjects’? Some would suggest that we are living in a world where the ‘normality’ could be found only in an insane asylum; where the only place for a decent man or a woman could be behind some barricade, or behind bars. However, not many would have such thoughts, as even reflections are now almost fully standardized and controlled. So much glorified freedom has been reduced to just a handful of personal, very limited, often self-serving choices that one is still allowed to make while being generally fully locked within the existing system. This British, European, in fact, Western obsession with controlling, with ruling over everything in this world, has actually fully derailed natural human evolution. Instead of much higher aspirations, instead of optimistic attempts to build an egalitarian, compassionate and joyful society, our humanity is once again stuck in some master-slave morass, in something that appeared to be on its way out even during some periods of the 19th century, and definitely later, in the 20th century. ***** How to fight this nightmare? I wrote it many times before, and I have to repeat it again: To change things, one has to first understand reality. But it is not only about knowing the facts; it is mainly about how to analyze them, how to perceive the world and essential events. We are being bombarded, in fact flooded with information, data and ‘facts’. What is missing is a totally new approach towards sorting and analyzing the reality within which we live. The Empire is not withholding the facts. It is doing something much more sinister: it is depriving people of learning how to analyze them in the most logical ways. Let us begin with absolute basics: “Mass murderer cannot be a judge”. “Indoctrinator and brainwasher cannot be a teacher”. “Those who are shackling, enslaving billions, should not be allowed to preach about freedom.” The reality is: we have a handful of deranged, mentally disturbed nations and cultures that have been subjugating, raping and robbing entire nations and continents, still in charge of our beautiful but already terribly scarred Planet. These morally defunct nations have no compassion left, and no real rationality. This fact they have proven again and again. One million victims, tens of millions of victims – it means nothing to them, as long as they can continue to rule. Ruined nature, disappearing islands, poisoned air, it matters nothing to them. People turning into indoctrinated, intellectually and emotionally uniformed cattle; good, who cares? It is an extremely unsettling reality, but reality it is. The sooner we recognize it for what it is, the better. ‘Great’ Britain should sit down on its ass and cry in horror, recalling all crimes it has been committing, imagining the concentration camps it built in Africa and elsewhere, recalling the famines it triggered in India and elsewhere, remembering all those innocent people it murdered on each and every continent. It should be howling from shame, because of the nihilism it has been spreading, while ruining enthusiasm, beautiful dreams and hopes of our human kind. It should stop and weep in horror, picturing instructions it provided to countries like South Africa, the United States or Rwanda – instructions that brought terrible bloodbaths, instead of harmony and progress to our world. Why all this terror? Just so the UK and its cohorts could continue to rule! It is not about greed only, or natural resources, it is about control. ***** I don’t want their analyses, anymore. I don’t want their news, their films, their books, and their propaganda materials. Even in the dark solitude of some cave, one could understand the world much better than when reading their disinformation sheets, or when watching their indoctrination channels. All this is just designed to confuse people, to make them passive and submissive. Their announcers as well as their writers are like some sad lobotomized robots: there is no life, nothing new, nothing daring or revolutionary in their words. They function, somehow: they move, they eat, shit, repeat what they are expected to say, but they are not alive. They only smear, but don’t inspire. If there is any optimism, it is always false, pre-approved, and mass-produced. If you think about it, it all actually makes sense: A torturer cannot be a visionary, or an idealist. Compared to China or Iran, the UK is a relatively young culture. But it feels old, tired, spent, and obsolete. Too many crimes and too many lies can exhaust and depress even a young person. Were England a person, operating in a normal society, it would be either in prison or in a mental institution. The same could be said about the rest of the West. We have nothing to learn from some murderous maniac, do we? The only concern should be: how to put a straight jacket on such an individual, how to prevent him from killing and harming others, and how to do it as quickly as possible. I also highly doubt that with such a background and monstrous track record, our dangerous maniac should be allowed to interpret the world publicly, to teach people, and to even participate in the discussions touching the most essential issues facing our planet! http://clubof.info/

[rocha-janet2y1bidx-blog]

Qualitative Report Writing

Qualitative Report Writing

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9 Jun 2014 How to write a good qualitative report - All of us have acknowledged that focus group discussion is a helpful tool for data collection.

Sample of the Qualitative Research Paper. In the following pages you not use Mr. or Ms. ** For example, Master of Arts in Communication, Master of. Science 

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This paper offers a format for writing a qualitative research report for publication. It suggests, at least, the following sections: introduction, aims of the study, 

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The Structure of the Qualitative Paper Nick Fox, University of Sheffield March 2013 Introduction • What's different about qualitative papers? • Considering the 

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common to include direct quotes from, for example, interviews. Keep in mind that representing qualitative findings as comprehensively as they deserve is 

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9 Jun 2014 How to write a good qualitative report - All of us have acknowledged that focus group discussion is a helpful tool for data collection.

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This paper offers a format for writing a qualitative research report for publication. It suggests, at least, the following sections: introduction, aims of the study, 

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Insight for Writing a Qualitative Research Paper. Young-A Lee. Iowa State University. The purpose of this essay is to describe how to prepare a qualitative 

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2 Jun 2010 Qualitative data analysis is often constructed around themes and so is the Writing for the readers - a research report should contain all the 

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9 Jun 2014 How to write a good qualitative report - All of us have acknowledged that focus group discussion is a helpful tool for data collection.

Find out more

2 Jun 2010 Qualitative data analysis is often constructed around themes and so is the Writing for the readers - a research report should contain all the 

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The Structure of the Qualitative Paper Nick Fox, University of Sheffield March 2013 Introduction • What's different about qualitative papers? • Considering the 

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The Structure of the Qualitative Paper Nick Fox, University of Sheffield March 2013 Introduction • What's different about qualitative papers? • Considering the 

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26 Apr 2008 This paper provides a pragmatic approach to analysing qualitative data, . It is from this folder that the report of the findings can be written.

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Appendix 4: Coding Example (Interpretation workshop 2) . In the context of the qualitative research report, as in the whole BeLL study, we operationalise 

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26 Apr 2008 This paper provides a pragmatic approach to analysing qualitative data, . It is from this folder that the report of the findings can be written.

Finally, we give practical advice for writing a scientific article and discuss where to publish . Many qualitative reports often discuss at length the character and.

[pclysemia]

The non-pragmatic tradition speaks of two modes of knowledge - or modes of inference - deductive and inductive. The first proceeds from the general rule to its specific instances. The second presumably proceeds from specific instances to the general rule. Pragmatically-based abductive inference -- concerning appropriateness of context, importance, relevance, similarity or explanation -- is in principle a different kind of reasoning. It proceeds by hypothesis, guesswork or intuition, often by analogy. It is thus, in principle, unconstrained.

Mind, Code and Context: Essays in Pragmatics, by Talmy Givón (1989)

#talmy givón #mind code and context: essays in pragmatics #fragments #reality #language #pragmatics #linguistics