So…people are complex
We are not simple creatures
We’re not talking “complex” along the lines of a multiplicity of if-then statements rolled up and with a variable outcome.
We’re talking “complex” along the lines of a multiplicity of variable inputs, each with its own system attached that can sometimes borrow resources from abutting systems, that form a grounding foundation of the environment. That, then, is filtered through a biological response system that won’t necessarily react to everything and can be offset by the primary consciousness, but could become so strong that even the primary consciousness has to roll with it. It depends on a layer of preconceived yet variable trust points to allow at-hand immediate decision making while pushing questionable or more gnarly decisions-to-be-made into higher consciousness.
In other words, we can’t separate people from their environment, emotions, and cognition.
That’s just the beginning.
Variable upon variable, system upon system. Process and highlight and multiplicity and action as spectrum nodes, each of which may or may not come into play in any one particular moment, which is itself set in a stream of time.
All this, and still we can walk through entire days on autopilot. Actually, in many ways the world at large seems to prefer everyone (else) in autopilot: do what is expected when and where it is expected according to the expected process, deliverables, timeline, and outcome. That’s about every job out there, from delivery of a package to managing retirement funds. FYI, both are equally complicated, but in different ways.
We are not simple creatures. Even before we get to the complexity of a single human consciousness, look at what we’ve done as a whole.
We’re tiny compared to the face of the earth, but we built the Great Pyramids of Giza, which can be seen from space. That was 4,500 years ago.
We build complex homes that have spread over the face of the earth, with a multiplicity of variability. The lights of them can be seen from space, too.
We can even get to space to see it for ourselves.
We scatter our lives with tools. Tools upon tools upon tools. We heat and cool our buildings to more livable and preferred temperatures, and let the outside in according to whim. We refine bits of nature, like metals, to be able to use them more directly. We can create materials that don’t exist in nature. Data, the most abstract of our tools to date, is shared by electrically encoded 1’s and 0’s over the very air.
Indeed. We are not simple creatures.
We’re also not as complex as we’re going to be, assuming our species survives.
My model of individual human experience has movements — layers of data and concepts that don’t remain in a fixed strata or singular architecture. The same data shifts and moves, providing context through multiple layers. In this writing I’m focusing on the ones that tend to happen during an experience.
The first movement is environment. It’s what we move through, with the body in which we move through it, leveraging what we already understand. It interacts seamlessly with the second movement.
The second movement is our reactions. They are those things that happen before the conscious mind can intervene, and include the biology of us. The biology is complex, though. Our neurotransmitters fire incredibly fast. It can be faster than our conscious mind — but they also respond to our conscious mind.
The third movement is our response, the more considered (but still in an instant!) thoughts that most of us think of as our mind or primary consciousness. It’s that voice in your head that you hear right now, that is partly reading this and partly nattering on about how it is or isn’t connected to something else that’s been on your mind.
These three I pull together into a model of who-ness. I keep our who-ness outside of time because we can be much more varied personalities than many people give credit for. The impact of time on that belief can often be what throws off the understanding.
Finally, we get into the doing, which happens in time. This is where our digital lives kick in – our building of it, experience of it, and how we go about trying to figure out if what we’re building is working.
There are movements after these, but they get more and more variable. Yes, more variable on top of all the variability that we’ll go through in the next pages. Those movements aren’t in this book.
Each movement is moved through experientially, and quickly. A person can absolutely survive living in the first movement. Every soldier who survives a battle proves this, their training embedded in their muscles so at no point do they need to think through the complex variables. It’s expected in the average soldier, actually: minimize the thinking outside of the perception and actions taken in the fluctuating environmental variables. The reaction and responses are mostly on autopilot.
This is trained for, though. It’s done, by my inexperienced estimate, to create a dissociative state so that the body keeps functioning despite the visceral violence being moved through. When it works, it shelves fears for the span of the battle time. Someone spent the time beforehand to work through scenarios and then train soldiers so they can get through the stress moments and survive to see the after state.
Battle is a small facet of possible experiences, though, that not all of us will deal with first hand. Training doesn’t remove stress, it just moves it. PTSD happens no matter how matter-of-factly someone moves through the stress in the moment.
In our day to day lives, we think. Fast, fleeting, using our memory as our primary information source, but we think. We can think about the charming color/scent of a flower, decide we have a moment, and bask in its beauty for a given time. We can do this and still move through and get things done.
Recently, we’ve had to do this en masse. With the Covid pandemic, we were kicked out of our routines, forcefully. We had to come up with new patterns and behaviors while managing the expectations of today, which were suddenly much more complex because all our standard patterns were out of balance. As we rebalance, some of us are trying to reach for the old, familiar patterns — they never quite found the balance for their goals in the shook-up world. Some of us went to the other extreme, and upended their lives, careers, and goals; shook just enough out of the accepted norm to realize that the norm sucked for them, and another norm had to be made. Most of us were somewhere in the middle.
We can move through survival and short-term decisions to long-term thinking. We can use that long-term thinking to impact even our core precepts in our more considered responses, which in turn accumulates and affects the survival of everyone in our immediate surroundings, which may or may not be picked up and mirrored out to form broader ripples in our cultural and physical world. In other words, we can take what we’ve experienced and think it through again. We can learn, to impact future decisions.
That’s where it’s hard not to impress some judgements and definitions of good and bad. We do it for ourselves all the time, and in coming to those conclusions it’s hard to not bubble that up and out to impress on others. It’s where complexity moves into ethics and morality. I try very hard to not say something is good/bad, right/wrong, etc. Sometimes the logic of the underlying information shines through anyway, with the long-term survival of our species in an unknown universe picking out the path.
So what I’m sharing in this writing focuses on our moments, that snap in time during the making and moving through life. This is the point where we all could use a little level-setting.
People are complex.
connections, context, core precepts, environment, hierarchy, information structures, juxtaposition, learning, memory, ouruborus, reality adhesion, strata, systems, time, tools, trust, who-ness
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