Multiconstruct

Once again I am going to try to attempt to explain my most basic philosophies. I am heartened of the body of work on this blog because it will hopefully allow me to assume you may know largely where I’m coming from. I believe it is important to know what we are fundamentally, deeply and honestly, with diligent effort, and act on that knowledge to fulfill our life purpose. I believe the fundamentals of the universe are ideas; so-called physical realities are really only probabilities without an observer. Consciousness is important as it is fundamental to who we are. Consciousness is a framework of ideas built over a will built out of necessity. Self-consciousness is created through interaction with other consciousnesses in a milieu of culture, its fundamental building block is meaning. Self-conscious individuals create their own meaning both singly and in interaction with culture(s) and physical reality. Because ideas are shared and passed on and exist out of necessity (ex. “Food” is such a good idea it is eaten everywhere) they have the potential for immortality our physical selves lack. That is why we are fundamentally story. The question becomes what do we want our story to be? This is who we are; we are built out of the truth. Knowing who we are we can choose to be unaroused by any apparently negative circumstance through our control of meaning. We can give meaning to anyone or anything without limit but meaning is mediated through the truth, which thankfully is infinite. Meaning is built out of ideas and organizations of ideas, memes if you will. The more memic material you have to self-organize in an emergent process the greater your personal memic universe. Memic universes can be shared through communication, consciously and unconsciously as well as exist in culture. Memic universes are not bound by time or space but access is subject to decay and apparently termination. The deeper understanding of your own memetic existence allows you to understand others and larger patterns on interactions. By exercising our self narrative function we can enlarge and enhance our storyline within a culture, our place in the shared memic universe. We cannot force our entry onto the universal stage of known ideas without risk of unintended negative consequences obscuring the purity of the story we would have told of who we are. We need volition, but passive volition, to the greater story arc to be in balance with who-what-where-when-how we are. We allow ourselves to be part of a greater story and participate in its unfolding as it is meant to be. Knowing ourselves to be many and self-contradictory we should try to look to our highest self for direction and self-identity (internal narration). Knowing our existence to be a story we do not just look back to who we were what we were a part of but who we will be at the end of the story and what do we have to learn from that character who has finally figured it all out. What is it going to be what do I decide to do today to see this story means something.

Every way of organizing thought is a created system. Our perception of the world is shaped by the cultural norms of our belief system. Our religions, our philosophies, our professions, our role in our family, community, society, all channelize our conceptions of reality to a specific end which is not necessarily correlated with reality. How we define our terms and engage in language(s) shapes what we can and cannot experience or even perceive, invest with meaning. Each of these ‘organizations of ideas’ can be thought of as an artificial construction that can be dangerous to confuse with the real world.

Our constructs guide our vision to what reinforces our belief in the construct. Constructs both illuminate the true nature of the universe and obscure a true picture of the universe, mostly because the universe is just so damn big. We can access literally an infinite amount of information. A true picture is too large to comprehend so we cut it up into pieces. We make maps and guidebooks because there is a lot of room between being able to know something about something, which we obviously and easily are capable of, and knowing everything about everything. A true map of the universe would be as big as the universe, which is preposterous. So we create constructs, formalized systems to organize information to make the infinite universe appear to be knowable. Nothing is wrong with that until we mistake our construct of the universe for the universe. Every construct breaks down at the edges and becomes false and meaningless. That’s why every construct has a critic. To not stray from the truth ask not if a construct is true but how is this construct true? In what ways is this construct false? In what ways is this construct meaningless?

Constructs are a systematic framework of patterns of concepts and sub-organizations of concepts, memes if you will. Memes are words or ideas, but seen as existing independently in an information universe. Memes have many of the qualities of life in that they can be created (born if you will), they reproduce, they grow and evolve, and they disappear (die if you will). Constructs are simply large and complex memes.

 Constructs provide power by directing or harnessing information in a directed fashion. A shared language allows cooperation and all it entails; it allows cultures to arise preserving memes in the cultural members and in their artifacts, increasing the memes chance for survival.

Constructs create meaning and are created with a purpose. Purposeless and meaningless constructs lack survival value from competition from constructs with purpose and meaning. Malicious constructs, or patterns of behavior or belief that have deleterious effect can continue to exist when chained to a larger construct with survival value.

Perhaps you have heard this example; an anthropologist, a physicist, and a mathematician journeyed to Scotland and saw a brown cow. The anthropologist said the cows are brown in Scotland. The physicist corrected her by saying there are cows in Scotland and some of them are brown. The mathematician corrected her with there is at least one cow in Scotland, one of which’s side is brown. This illustrates how our understanding of the world filters the meaning that we attach to our perceptions. Most of us already juggle multiple constructs. Lets say the anthropologist is also a mother, a Buddhist, and a libertarian. All of these constructs will inform the way she perceives Scotland. Multiple constructs may overlap or not. If our mathematician is a father and a vegetarian as well those systems have little overlap. They provide their respective meanings to the individual who is a mathematician largely in their separate spheres of understanding. Having disparate constructs to create meaning in a variety of circumstances enriches the individual.

When multiple constructs overlap they can be in agreement or disagreement. Our Buddhist anthropologist easily sees the connection between the threat of ethnocentrism, judging owns own culture as better or more right than others and the Buddhist idea of seeing the Buddha nature in all people. In fact the anthropologist is informed and enriched by her practice of Buddhism. Both the shared language of the two systems and the extent that each reaches places the other might not have gone makes our anthropologists personal uber-construct of anthrobuddhistmotherism a more robust system in which to place her sense of self.

How does a technologically unsophisticated basically shy person get a blog? About a week before the blog began i shared an anecdote and someone asked my why i didn’t have a blog. I said i was waiting for someone to come to my house and set it up for me. Then when i was helping Terry and Kristin move (see next post) i ran into Ben Jones who i hadn’t seen in 10 years. We got caught up swimming at the quarry and i invited him back to my house for coffee. He also asked me why i didn’t have a blog and offerred to set one up for me which he did from my back porch. When he was thinking about domain names he asked me what my philosophy was and i told him “i was multiconstruct”. I believe that every way of looking at the world is not really the way the world is but its an artificial construct built to make sense of the world, a construct. I also believe that every construct both illuminates some truth and shades other truths or renders them meaningless. The best way to understand this wonderful and infinite universe of ours is to draw the best most useful ideas from all of the constructs folks have made to understand. Robert Anton Wilson taught me that everything is true in some sense, false in some sense, and meaningless in some sense. Aleister Crowley shows in the introduction to The Book of Lies that all language falls short of actuality and there is no way to tell the complete truth with words. To make the most accurate picture of the world i draw from all systems of belief to paint as accurate picture of the Truth as i can. Instead of asking “is this true?” i ask “in what way is this true” “how is this false”. This allows me to defy contradiction and hold to science, religion, philosophy and draw what understanding i can.