[MD] Blink

[Case]

[Case]
Just a few thought here on your comments below. Gladwell makes the point
that we can train our unconscious perceptions to our advantage and use this
ability to instantly sort the wheat from the chaff. A couple such examples
are two women who do taste tasting for food companies and can tell what
spices and flavors are in a given food and in what proportions. Or a guy who
trains bodyguards by running them through simulated stressful scenarios
where in the course of defending their "employers" they get shot with
plastic bullets and after several run throughs learn how to continue
functioning without stressing out over being shot. But he also talks about
Larry Bird's ability to play basketball in a focused almost slow motion
state of hyper perception. Ron mentioned something like this in martial arts
training.

But my beef comes in with how you are choosing to interpret this. I won't
speak for you but I am NOT the same as the world. 
I am connected to the world. 
I am a part of it. 
I seek to be in harmony with it.
To be at peace with it
I see my connected relationship to it. 
I understand that I am totally the world I have recreated in my head.
I am the sum of my experiences. 
But my experience is OF something that is not me.
It does not depend on me.
I depend on it.

Being a part of something is not the same as being the whole thing nor do I
have it all stored upstairs either. (I can count on you to remind me that
there isn't room.) Maybe you are not really saying that at-one-ment means
identity with or one-to-one correspondence with the world. But I would say
that this would be an even great illusion that believing you are total
separated from the world.

I am no Zen master but how could anyone who lived through any part of the
last century NOT see the world and our conception of it as ephemeral
shifting and anything but plastic. We are among the first generations of
people in the estimated 45,000 year history or our species, who fully expect
that our grandchildren (if they survive our self centered folly) will know
more about the world than we do. Our reverence for the wisdom of Greek and
oriental philosophers is an echo of what every previous generation took to
be a matter of fact: wisdom is ancient it comes from the past.

One of the things I enjoyed most about Gladwell was the wealth of examples
he gives of research in psychology and marketing that show just how amenable
to study the unconscious turns out to be. 

He spends quite a bit of time showing what happens when our unconscious
process go wrong and how untrustworthy they can be. There is the example of
the New York City crime unit that shot a young African immigrant 41 times
after he ran from them. When he stopped and tried to pull out his wallet,
they mistook it for a gun. 

Or when he describes a psychological test that exposes our unconscious
racial biases, even his own and he is half black. He talks about the
demographics of corporate executives, who are overwhelmingly white males.
His point is that this aspect of their demographics is changing, but there
is a dramatic under representation of short people among their number and
this prejudiced goes unnoticed and there is no outcry to correct it. 

Or the prejudice of symphony orchestra conductors who believed than men were
inherently better musicians than women until they started conducting
screened auditions and on and on. 

He is not claiming political bias or malice he is merely showing that our
judgments both snap and considered are often influenced by factors we can
not articulate and that what we do articulate is often wrong.

If you really want to understand your relationship to the world it seems to
me it is important to look at two big things... How the world works and how
you work. Gladwell wrote a popular book about how you work. It is highly
accessible and highly relevant to the MoQ and whether it is 100% relevant or
a 100% accurate or not I found it entertaining and enlightening.

I do think it is a mistake to think that we can gain a greater understanding
of our self or the world by simply playing tinker toys with logical
constructs or focusing exclusively on our private experiences. I surely
don't think that's what James did for example. He combined the best of
philosophy and science and showed that when the two approaches are combined
extraordinary things result.

dmb says:
Okay, good questions. If the pre-intellectual experience is that brief 
moment before this this reality is divided up into concepts, then we can say

the pre-intellectual reality is undivided. The relevant division in this 
case would be one of the most basic to our conceptual scheme; the 
distinction between self and the world. This distinction is made so 
habitually and so automatically, that most of us believe this is a natural 
feature of reality rather than an inherited conceptual interpretaion. And so

its just common sense in our culture to think that you and the world are 
definately not one and the same. So the years of arcane practice are aimed 
at controlling the mind so as to avoid this automatic and habitul 
distinction making process and instead hold on to that otherwise brief 
moment. After a lifetime of believing that you are separate from the world, 
this state of undivided, undifferentiated mode of consciousness reveals what

was right under your nose the whole time, that you are not separate from the

world. This at-one-ment is a mystical experience, it is the realization of 
the lack of division. After a lifetime of believing the opposite, this can 
be quite powerful and so we hear stories about it in terms of amazement and 
such, but its not like you see fireworks, learn all the secrets of life and 
automatically get a PhD in everything. I'm not so sure these things can be 
explained in physiological terms, but I would argue that it is completely 
natural. And finally, maybe the goal isn't to achieve this unitive vision so

much as it is to realize that our conventional reality is very plastic, that

there is a lot of room for creativity in shaping it.

dmb says:
I find that very easy to believe. I suppose we all know this level of 
communication from experience and use it every day. Wasn't there a study 
that concluded verbal content is only a small part of what is said when 
people are talking? Seems it was counted as less than 20% of the total info 
conveyed, but its an old memory.

[Case]
I recalled the same thing and about as well. I also think that we share very
similar facial expressions with the other great apes; chimpanzees, gorilla
and orangutans.

Dmb says:
Always a pleasure.

[Case]
Likewise!