2021-02-25

模倣子 Figuring Out the ACA 4th Step with Autoimmunomemetics

A cool video about General Relativity.

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The saying that if you thought of something but then couldn’t remember it, “well, it must not’ve been very important then!” Is deeply flawed. 

Any innovation or insight into personal growth is of need disruptive and therefore automatically resisted and opposed by endemic conservative forces and mechanisms. 

This is of course deeply rooted In immunomemetic theory, too, by the way. 

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I just checked out a video that does a pretty good job of deriving E = mc2 from base principles, like we talked about.


Apologies about the odd message earlier.  Apologies about this message as well. I just seem to have gone off on a tear, probably because of lack of sleep, but I figured, "what the hell."

I guess the point is that insights achieved through therapy (or elsewhere) are to be written down (or otherwise made note of). Everybody has denial in one form or another. As an alcoholic and adult child of alcoholism/dysfunction, I may have more than most, but what I've learned is that the mind recoils at the kind of insight that leads to lasting change.

Any dynamic system has to have stabilizing mechanisms, conservative subsystems, otherwise every disturbance would cause each of us to drift off in some random direction, butterfly wings a-flappin'. Since we don't seem to wake up each morning all of us speaking completely different languages or baffled at how to use a fork or lost for hours or days in our own kitchens, there seem to be strong conservative forces (memetic in nature I would argue but the point stands) in play that reïnforce how English grammar works, what words mean, stick your eggy-weggies with the pointy end, and the Cheerios are in the cupboard over the stove and there's milk in the fridge (oh, bugger, I forgot to buy milk, but that's not a drama since I know what money and supermarkets are and how they work).

The downside of the urgency of all this routine is that we also don't seem to wake up relieved off all the bad habits we resolved to stop doing last afternoon, or living in the spirit of the documentary on yoga or Zen Buddhism we watched over the weekend and which so inspired us, the bathroom scale needle remains infuriatingly stuck in place, learning is often agonizing, and so on and so forth.

The point is, again, that we are the way we are because we are the way we are and there are mechanisms, little demons, whose job it is to keep us that way, because the alternative is ridiculous. The extreme example, like me, an addictive personality, is that if I try to read or discuss anything on recovery, I literally can't read the words on the page, because to do so would cause too much cognitive dissonance or whatever psycho-gobbledygook. It's the same principle.

I wanted to say something about Jung's "The Shadow" (apparently he knows, or likes to stroll down the avenue or something), but more on that later. I don't actually know much about it, except that it seems to be roughly equivalent to Freud's unconscious or subconscious or id or probably bits of all of them. Of course, the 12 Steps (and psychomemetics) cut through all that crap by getting down to "how" instead of focusing on "why."

You might get some mileage out of the Twelve Steps since it's immensely practical and you can get started right away. The first three steps are just "my life sucks, God help me" and you might be able to skip over them, or by deciding to go to therapy you've kind of already taken them anyway.

The Fourth Step is a personal inventory, and in the AA practice, the main bit (the "Four Columns") is writing down what pisses you off (or scares you).

That turns out to be a very effective lever or hook into the unconscious, or into the (probably) "Shadow". It's just the people, places, and things that you resent, that you think about, that come up, that you can't seem to get around or out of your mind. You can find stuff online, certainly, but it looks like a spreadsheet. This is THE LIST or THE GRUDGE LIST.

1. Who, What, or Where?
2. What happened?
3. How does it affect me? (1)
4. "My Part" (2)
__________________
(1)  from page 65 of the AA "Big Book", 1. Self-esteem, 2. Security, 3. Ambitions, 4. Personal relations, 5. Sex relations, and some add: 6. Pride, and 7. FEAR. Nota bene: don't go adding a bunch of random crap to these 5-7 items. Why? Because then you can't see patterns, which lead to understanding your character defects which leads to growth and recovery. I've had sponsees just make up shit and it ends up not being specific, blunts the value of this step, and is a kind of not taking responsibility for your own shit.

(2) This is where the rubber hits the road. It's on page 67 (4th Edition). This is something you can work on in therapy, by the way, but it will save time to have a bash at it on your own first. I find it helps to think in terms of what I personally have control over. What did I actually do? To cause the problem or hurt the other person? What might they see of me, from a purely objective standpoint? What's the most generous and sympathetic attitude I can take toward the other, seeing them as also being sick? In AA they have the expression "cleaning up my side of the street." The other person may have fucked up, too, but 1. I don't have access to their inner life, and 2. I can't change anything that is their responsibility, their bailiwick, their side of the street.
____________________________

Anyway, this is how drunks get off drinking. Of course, Step Five involves sharing this list with somebody (could be a therapist) , and so on.

I'm not typing up all this stuff because I'm some kind of paragon of spiritual enlightenment and want to be revered as such, by the way, rather the opposite. I have these ideas in front of me all the time because I'm a very sick puppy, and I talk about them with other sick puppies who all need recovery. It's a constant struggle, but I'm so much better than I used to be, thanks to this stuff. The other reason is that I'm a systematizer. I have to process stuff down to something simple and systematic, with clear steps, otherwise I just can't deal with it.

The Big Book of AA is quite systematic when it comes to the Fourth Step (which is the biggie). I had a sponsee tell me that his parole officer wanted something concrete about the work we were doing, so I systematized the first three steps (which I can tell you about if you want -- let me know). I also systematized the Fourth Step (there are three other parts which might be useful later -- let me know).

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I've got a buddy who's on about "Shadow Work" a lot. From what little I've seen, it seems that in these "Shadow Work" videos on YouTube, when they say "my shadow" they could just as well say "my halitosis" without breaking semantic/grammatical (?) consistency.

It's descriptive, not prescriptive.

Same thing about the subconscious. Yes, yes, obviously there's stuff going on, there's stuff that we suppress or repress, we have dissociation, and projection is obviously working. But just because we call it the unconscious or "The Shadow" doesn't illuminate a mechanism for all that, or, more importantly, a toolkit for dealing with it, for using what we know (I'm pissed off at others = equals projection of my inner shadow = equals self-knowledge = big whoop-dee-shit) to reduce our suffering and make us more effective in our own lives.

It seems like a dead end. Or you have to defer to your "trained professional therapist" to be able to do anything about it.

The first two columns of the Fourth Step clearly deal with projection, which is a concept in both Freudian analysis and Jungian "Shadow Work." What I hate about others I hate about myself, but in a state of denial or dissociation. The problem is that the question "what is it that you hate or fear about yourself, or feel guilty about, that you have no conscious access to?" is ridiculous, unless you posit something like "dream work" which as far as I'm concerned is question-begging at its finest and probably superstitious fantasy (plus, I never seem to have dreams that I remember).

I'm not sure what Freud or Jung prescribed for working on this stuff. All I've seen so far is "introspection."

Doesn't seem like that will get very far. The suppressed part of the self is buried for a reason: the memories buried there are too terrifying or shameful to be exposed, so to try to get at them directly is impossible.

The Fourth Step inventory offers access via the bit that is poking up above the ground.

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I'm trying to come up with an approach for dealing with childhood trauma using memetics. I've gotten massive results so far. It's basically the same thing as the Fourth Step inventory

I'm still trying to systematize it.

It's effectively about ongoing psychodynamics. 4th Step resentments are processed, and then they're done, the alcoholic feels relief, understands his character defects, gets better, and in Jay's Cynical Take on the 12 Steps, learns over time to "go and sin no more" since every future fuck-up leads to making amends (9th step) and that's a pain in the ass, so we learn not to fuck up in the first place.

Complex PTSD from childhood is caused by an enormity of abusive events which cannot be removed or dealt with in the same way, even if they could all be remembered, and since the child is not to blame, there is no unearthing of character defects in the same way.

This pattern of abuse over years of a child who has no context in which to frame the abuse gets stored, and my theory is that these hundreds and thousands of abuse events are both stored as trauma than can later be triggered, impairing the adult, but are also somehow distilled down (and this is what I'm working on) into a set of "core beliefs" that continue to drive the adult child's decision making process and internal life.

ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics/Dysfunctional Families) has a list of 14 "survival traits" such as "fear of authority figures" and "addiction to excitement" and so on, with which children of abusive households identify with (I identify strongly with all but maybe one of them).

But once again, we may be in the Freudian, Jungian "The Shadow (doesn't) know" situation of yes, this is a correct description, but it lacks extensible/falsifiable theory, and (engineering) method for dealing with it. 

Yes, there is such a thing as fire. The scientist might point out that oxygen (an invisible "gas") is required for it to work. The engineer wants to know how much, how can I inject it all into an engine to make it work, and so on. Freud and Jung (and my shadow work buddy, and maybe a lot of therapists) stop at the first one.

I like to think like an engineer. Sorry, folks, if y'all think that's coldly reductionist. I like to get healthy as quickly and efficiently and with as much certainty as possible. If others get there, too, using what I come up with, so much the better. But as we say in AA, "It's a me program," and I'd like to get on top of this.

Not all parents tell their kids "I wish you were dead" out loud, or even "If you get pregnant / come out as gay, I never want to see you again" (I'm willing to throw our relationship away, given the right circumstances), but that can nonetheless get installed as a "core belief." I'm still trying to come up with a theory as to how that works, and a reliable practice from extracting these "core beliefs" (I'm also kicking around the term "minimal elements").

These are effectively self-directed bullying memes

Since I know a lot about how the mind deals with memes (in social situations), if I can define an internal memetic environment (ideomemeplex or endomemeplex), then all the laws of memetics I've identified so far should apply there. I've also been holding onto the idea that ideomemetic theory might shed some light on deployment decision theory (how a group of individuals decides who will deploy which meme in a given face-off or "jinx event" or race condition situation)., so that would be two birds with one stone.

So self-bullying ideomememetic subsystems, or autoimmunomemes, are the model I'm working on for how Adult Child dysfunction works. This is not just mental memetic masturbation, by the way, since not only do I have a lot of understanding about how such systems work, I also know a lot about how memes may be manipulated in the mind. For instance, you cannot turn off a meme, but you can replace it with a different meme, and there are very clear engineering principles for how that works and how to do it successfully.

If you have any thoughts about this, I'm all ears. Like I said, I'm still trying to tidy things up.

I'm trying to tackle it from the same angle as the 4th Step of AA, i.e., start from resentments.

I'm also trying to come at it from the "other end," i.e., parental responsibilities:

1. Safety
2. Sustenance
3. Sensuality

...sometimes I have to define these a bit broadly to make it a comprehensive list. But I guess you'd say that with dysfunctional parenting, one or more of these "responsibilities" or "guarantees" (might be a good word), are let down. I need to work out if all this is true. Is there a series (or collection, since in cPTSD who know if order matters) of abusive/neglectful events that take down #1 "Safety"? These may constitute my "core beliefs" or "minimal elements".

1. "if you die, I die" versus "your survival is optional to me"

1.+2. "I'll support you in whatever you do" versus "if you get pregnant / gay / change religions / don't follow in my footsteps, you're cut off"

So two big questions:

1. How do these minimal elements get created from collected experience (or do they even really exist in a useful way at all in the first place)?

2. How do minimal elements "bubble up" to product inner voice and outward behavior (meme deployment...?), again, assuming they're real in any meaningful sense?

Of course, the subconscious and The Shadow ("Who knows?") are both effectively abstract constructs -- they cannot be (or at least they have not) been shown to exist in any measurable way.

HOWEVER, and this is another appeal of the memetic approach, memes HAVE been shown to exist, rather like subatomic particles have, in that they can be spotted and are known to obey a number of very specific laws which further allow them to be predicted and engineered with a high degree of accuracy.

In other words, using AA and memetic principles, it should be much easier to identify and isolate parts of the psyche that are unhealthy, and replace them (read "remove") using well-understood principles and techniques.

2021-02-22

模倣子 Trump's Manipulation of Ideology

Feeling Betrayed, Far-Right Extremists Have A New Message For Trump: 'Get Out Of Our Way' (yahoo.com)

Not super-surprising. Incite a mob, and they take off on their own.

Hopefully things will peeter out pretty quickly without a lot more violence or tension. That remains to be seen.

A major general governing principle of memetics is that the creator of the meme fades into the background.  That's why we have patent, trademark and copyright laws, by the way. Create a bad (but successful) system of memes and it will take on a life of its own. That's the way memes work -- they're either virile, viable, successful, or not. It doesn't matter who created them

Government and the rule of law work because their are linked to a system of MIAOs (memetic iconic anchoring objects) that anchor the memes in play to things like office(holder)s, buildings, etc.

This occurred to me when I was watching a docu-drama about Augustus: The First Emperor, and how all the Roman buildings and statues, and the buildings where Senators meet and all that are integral parts of maintaining a stable government. That may be why humans go to so much trouble to put up impressive buildings. It may be also why people hang onto sacred places, such as the Wailing (West) Wall, The Black Hills, and so on.

The enduring power and stability of a memetic system is independent of whoever cobbled it together, once it's up and running.

I don't feel that Trump was ever very original, by the way. He just cobbled together a bunch of racist, misogynist ideas into a sort of "Mosaic of Hate" and that automatically brought a lot of people together and consolidated his base of support.

Reagan performed a similar (and in my view not much less ugly) agglomeration by politicizing and ultimately weaponizing the Christian Right. Trump carried on in this same disgusting tradition to keep the Republican party "relevant."

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So Trump  noticed there was deep anger, depression, resentment, and ideological reaching an explosive level before MOST "leaders" were able to guage it.
He played it like a piano... Evidently the values we talk about in 12 step work are not memetically powerful and perhaps antithetical to memetics? 

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Why would you make that statement?

Aside from the fact that, like air, pretty much everything in human affairs relates to memetics?

Given that AA has been around for 75 years and has spread into hundreds of other 12-step programs where it functions in exactly the same way, I'd have to say that couldn't be more wrong. And in that time it's going from a few dozen adherents to millions in 140-plus countries, and it's book translated into dozens of languages, also speaks to the virility of the 12-step memeplex, so yeah, no, it's pretty damn successful (virile).

I use the term "stability" to describe the susceptibility to mutation. In just over twice the length of time, if you compare the Mormon Church and the 12-Step program, 12-Steps seem to have been much more stable, in that there are no 12-step spin-offs that don't use the same steps or don't talk to other programs, while the Mormon church has fragmented into at least 2-3 mutually antagonistic factions.  That's a very rough example. But the Mormons have a church most of whose function is to impose orthodoxy, and a heavily funded proselytization movement, to the extent of hundreds of people being murdered to keep it all together. AA has done none of those things.

So, yeah, I'm a little confused by the comment that AA isn't a successful memeplex, or isn't a memeplex (which doesn't make sense at all).

I don't necessarily agree that Trump played it all that well, especially given the meltdown of his movement right now. I feel his capitalization upon existing misogynist and white supremist memeplexes to be pretty ham-fisted.

The thing about a coherent memetic system, whether it's the Mormon Church, AA, any of the several White Power organizations (Ku Klux Klan, Boogaloo Bois, QAnon, Neo-Nazism, etc.) to which Trump made appeals to build his powerbase, is that they all have Interface Memes (or contact memes, although this typically refers to how minority groups are exploited) and MIAOs. You don't have to organize them because they're already organized, and you don't need to give them a rallying cry, because they already have one, thank you very much.

It's possible to invoke ideological iconography, such as nooses, white hoods, swastikas, aborted babies, the letter Q, any number of different flags, and you're automatically invoking a lot of the memes to which members of the given group resonate. It doesn't take any skill.

I have a term for this ham-fisted invocation or referencing of out-group iconography (such as racial and ethnic epithets): "(employing) the language of the other." Basically, and Trump certainly seemed to be doing this, "I don't know what the word schplunktifier means, but I know that the members of the S-Group get all excited when I use it. Either they think it's offensive and claim it as "their word," or anybody who is called that its automatically somebody they hate. It doesn't take a lot of skill to use and manipulate in-group iconography like this, through these kinds of interface memes.

Hitlerian, yes, Machiavellian, obviously, and Machiavelli was writing down what people already knew. The book Linked points out that ideological groups tend to isolate, bifurcate from each other, as expressed by a shrinking number of links. This is the same thing as memetic pathways, i..e, there become very few. As I pointed out, totalizing ideologies (or dogmas) which have immunomemetic  that cause them to totally isolate themselves lead directly to violence. The groups Trump manipulated were self-isolating as part of their internal functioning -- any out-group messages were automatically treated as "conspiracy."  Trumped stoked this, and it led directly to violence as I've explained here and elsewhere.

That's a powerful insight, don't you think? Disenfranchisement, not over-taxation, is the root cause of revolutions (like the French Revolution). Disenfranchisement by itself, leads to social turmoil and violence. If you look at it in memetic terms, that is, structurally what is going on, you can see that there is a symmetry, a transitive phenomenon in play. If an ideology is not initially disenfranchised, as such, but contains within its ideology a collection of immunomemes that automatically rejects, rather than communicating with, any incoming memetic overture as being "heresy," or "a conspiracy," or what-have-you, then you are in a memetically comparable situation to a group (for example, immigrants) who have no shared language with the hegemonic mainstream, can't find employment, are denied housing, are subject to violence, are unable to make their voices heard so as to have any control over or improve their situation.

That's a powerful insight, don't you think?

It's possible to examine the ideological structure of any subgroup and determine whether they are at risk of becoming dangerously unstable. It also lights the way to possibly fixing it. It's more than just saying that an ideology is racist, or hateful of such-and-so, which is a lot, but it's about whether they are incapable of listening. That's the thing that scared me about these people who eventually attacked the Capitol, is that they are incapable of hearing what others have to say and taking it into account.

Trump didn't invent anything new or original. Bill Wilson did. Bill W. may have been standing on the shoulders of giants, actually we know he was, but he definitely wrapped things up in a way that others could adopt and copy. He did it because he was spurred by the fear of agonizing death, and part of the memeplex was the propagatory meme (almost like an immunomeme) to pass it on, to help the next guy, and later with The 12 Traditions, underscoring "no matter who he is."

2021-02-19

Floating on Back with Mermaid

だってさ、二人とも友達で良いんじゃないか。可愛い!

 

漫画 Squirrel Furry

   Manga Index  

From the first draft of the coloring book


Device Files in Windows and Unix

 


Funny! This is kind of like the /dev in Unix. I gather this is why there was no Windows 9–the worry was that some bit of code might see the 9 and think it was code from Windows 95 or 98 and run it wrong or fail to start or something disastrous.

Corvec
Could you tell me what /dev has to do with this? I'm not aware. I feel that as a Linux user that I should be aware of it.
Jay Dearien
@Corvec all the devices for a Unix machine live in /dev, e.g., /dev/null, /dev/com1, /dev/print1, /dev/rhd1, /dev/chd1, /dev/net, etc. i.e., they are special files which are not special files at all but call I/O interfaces in the O/S when they are referenced as a file. However, Unix, I think, abstracts things more thoroughly in that these "special files" only live in /dev (maybe you could create a device interface inode elsewhere, I don't know, have not tried it). And you can delete them or replace them with "real" files or other device driver links, and then things would get missed up really fast. Plus, the programs that use them have to have access to the files, e.g., Oracle likes access to the raw device interface to a hard disk partition it is using (as opposed to the character mode or block mode interface...to the same disk device...but two different device driver interface file in /dev). Of course, having said all that, many or most (except for the actual disks and maybe the console, i.e., /dev/con or such) are going to be out there on the ethernet or Internet cloud somewhere, so accessed by something like /dev/net. Back in the day dozens of terminals and printers would all be hooked directly to a Unix box by serial cables, and so there would be things like /dev/com1-32 or /dev/printer1-5 or such, which you don't tend to see these days. If you're installing devices which are directly wired to the box (like a non-network printer which you are hosting), or installing middleware that has an intimate contact with the built-in devices of the box (like a database), or installing a device which has a lot of special properties, then you may have to dive deeper into the /dev directory.