138 Semantic Consciousness: Abstraction Intelligence (Pt1)

"Semantic Consciousness" is the layer of our perception responsible for rationality, intelligence, and symbology (meaning-making). This episode covers how language creates reality and can skew perception. This is a Circuit 3 of Leary's Circuits of Consciousness model, continuing from the Dog Brain (circuit 2) episode.

Transcript

I begin most episodes of this podcast with a story.

The reason being that a story,

By the nature of what a story is,

Refers to concrete events done by concrete people,

Whether they're real or imagined.

And the reason why stories are so great in this medium is that it's a lot more palatable to the attention,

To imagine people doing things rather than to just think of abstractions,

To just think of concepts.

If you're just listening to concepts,

As you may recall from formal school,

It's very easy to fall asleep.

Even if the concepts are interesting,

Even if the concepts are super valuable,

Because of the nature of what a concept is,

An abstraction,

Something that's detached from concrete reality,

It becomes very taxing on the attention,

As opposed to a story where you can imagine real people doing things.

It's a lot closer to just observing things.

That's why it's easier on the mind to watch a movie than read a book.

One requires you to use a little bit more brainpower.

So if I could start this episode with a story,

That would have been great.

But it doesn't really work for this episode,

Because in this episode,

We're going to be speaking about semantic consciousness,

Which is the layer of our consciousness,

Our rational mind,

Responsible for understanding language.

In this episode,

We'll be speaking about how language creates reality.

That's a quote by Alfred Korzybski that I've mentioned in other episodes.

We're really going to be talking about it in this episode.

So in lieu of a story to serve as an analogy or symbolize what this episode is about,

Instead,

I'm going to offer you an image.

Actually,

If you're listening to this on a podcasting app,

You should be able to see the thumbnail of this episode.

It's M.

C.

Etcher's famous sketch known as Drawing Hands.

If you can't see it,

I'll describe it,

But you've probably seen this image before.

It's a pencil sketch of a drawn hand drawing another hand that's drawing it,

Or it's this circular thing of hands drawing themselves.

This image represents this episode better than any story you can tell,

Because here in this podcast episode,

We're going to be using language to explain how language explains perception.

So a bit of circularness here.

And also on top of that,

Using Timothy Leary's model of consciousness,

This is the third circuit,

Known as the semantic consciousness.

It corresponds with our cortex.

It's what most of us think of when it comes to consciousness,

Meaning our rational consciousness.

Rational consciousness to humans is often like water to a fish.

Especially since Aristotle and maybe even before that,

Rationality has been an assumed value amongst human beings.

Across cultures in modern day,

It's just assumed that one should be rational.

Rationality is always considered good.

If you ask someone what their values are,

They might list things like honesty and this and that,

But it's just assumed that rationality is important for most people,

Almost all people.

So this layer of consciousness is a little bit different than other layers we've done,

A couple episodes ago.

I did an episode on what's known as emotional territorial consciousness,

Or what I was calling the dog brain.

It's our lower animal instincts,

Our emotionality.

It's very easy to look at our emotional consciousness objectively or close to objectively,

Because we're looking at it from a rational perspective.

Most of us can look at our emotions and just recognize that emotions are volatile and they don't necessarily describe what we would think objective reality is.

Like a common excuse that people use when they've had behavior that they regret later.

It's like,

Oh hey,

Sorry,

Sorry I was emotional.

I wasn't thinking clearly.

I was being irrational.

I apologize for that.

That's a very common excuse for behavior that is no longer desired,

And it's usually an understandable thing.

We've all been emotional,

And then when we're not emotional,

We look back and be like,

Oh yeah,

Shit.

I wasn't seeing things rationally.

But you'll never hear someone say,

Oh man,

Yeah,

Sorry about last night.

I was perceiving reality through a different kind of rational lens,

Or my sense of rationality was different than it is now.

That's not even really language to say that without being super cheeky,

Because no one would ever say that.

Maybe on a super long timeframe,

Or a much longer timeframe,

Someone would be like,

Oh yeah,

10 years ago back in college I subscribed to Marxist ideology.

Someone might think that.

But it's still from this perception,

The way those sentences are spoken is with an assumption that the speaker is now speaking from an objective,

Rational perspective.

People don't like to consider that even rationality,

Similar to emotions,

Can be skewed.

It's certainly less volatile than emotions,

But it still is volatile.

It's not static the way that we think.

So this episode,

We're going to be going deeper into semantic consciousness.

We call it rational consciousness,

Semantic consciousness.

Robert Anton Wilson calls it the time-bending semantic circuit.

I'll explain why he says that.

I don't call it that.

It's too many words.

But this element of our consciousness,

And just to be clear,

What we mean by consciousness,

What I mean by consciousness when I'm using this word anytime in this podcast,

Is the way that we perceive reality and interact with it.

There's nothing mystical about it.

We're coming from a very grounded lens,

As grounded as we can.

This circuit of our consciousness is responsible for rationality,

For our ability to understand language,

Sanity,

Sanity being the ability to properly model reality,

Communication of course,

Which is tied to language,

And our ability to abstract ideas.

Even language itself are abstractions.

We'll get into the nature of language in this episode,

Which is directly related to intelligence.

There are three parts to this episode.

First,

We're going to speak about the origin of semantic consciousness and also the creation of language in humans.

In part two,

We're going to be speaking about sanity specifically,

How our semantic perceptions are either accurate or inaccurate.

And the third bit,

It's going to be the shortest piece,

But it's going to kind of serve as an intro for a future episode on propaganda and brainwashing,

Which is what we might call personal mind control,

Or to use Korzybski's language,

Having an efficient nervous system.

I'll explain what that means,

But these are things that are important.

In this episode,

I am going to be using some stories and concrete examples.

It won't be just rattling off abstractions.

We're actually going to speak about why it's important that you don't do that in both your thinking and communication.

Some of my examples,

Some of my stories are going to allude to political topics.

It's actually,

I mean,

They're just the best examples.

And one of the reasons why I really wanted to do this episode well,

And I did a lot of reading for it,

Not to say that I'm done reading or that there won't be other future episodes or even that my understanding of this topic is complete.

One of the reasons why I was so charged up about this topic is that certainly more than ever in my lifetime,

Our culture seems to be full of what Korzybski would call semantic disturbances,

Which are basically errors in perception caused by the structures of our language.

And we can see this more than anywhere else in politics,

Right?

The hate,

I mean,

I'm American,

Even though I don't live in America,

Most of what I'm aware of is American culture and politics.

But I think this is true around the world.

There's a lot of hate,

A lot of us versus them mentality,

A lot of lack of nuance.

You know,

You could even see specific groups in America,

But also around the world,

Certain cultures and subcultures developing almost with the goal of creating more semantic disturbances,

More misperceptions in the population.

And I'm going to be referencing Alfred Korzybski throughout this episode.

He was a mathematician who founded the field of general semantics.

He was also very fired up.

I mean,

Most of his work was written in the 1920s into the 1940s,

So around the world wars.

And he was fired up back then because he saw back then that a lot of the problems in the world,

Many of the,

Like almost all the political problems are caused by both world leaders and the general populations not understanding how they were structuring reality,

Right?

These incorrect modelings of reality,

Largely due to language and manipulation of language by media,

What we would call propaganda,

Shifts how people perceive reality.

And even though it's all in the realm of abstraction,

Causes real things,

Right?

Genocides,

War,

Hate,

Even inefficiencies in the economy,

We can argue,

Are caused by a lack of semantic understanding by world leaders and the population.

So I'm going to be talking about certain current event political ideas.

I'm going to do my best not to interject my personal opinions,

But to be fair,

Some of my personal opinions are based on my understanding of semantics in that I need to check myself because probably everybody everywhere in the history of political opinions,

Anyone with a strong political opinion probably thinks that the opposition to his or her opinion are people who are thinking incorrectly.

I'm one of these people,

But mine is actually based in semantics.

I don't know.

Maybe I'm as just as deluded as everyone else,

But I'm going to share these ideas not to sway you to think the way I do politically,

But to perhaps introduce a method of thinking that I'll have you arrive at conclusions better than what is fed to the populations.

The thing is though,

The reason why I threw in this caveat,

This maybe mild warning,

Is that when you break down people's rational perceptions,

They tend to get angry.

I mentioned this briefly in the dog brain episode and why a dog has to attack you or confront you when you step onto his territory.

The reason being,

If you didn't catch that,

Is that that is his world.

That is if he seeds ground to another dog or a person who's not friendly,

His ability to move freely in the physical world has now become smaller.

The territory really matters to a dog because that's the highest level of consciousness that as far as mapping reality,

He can perceive.

It's kind of a vestigial instinct,

But people do the same thing,

I mean with territory too,

But that's less common in 2022.

People have the same instinct when it comes to defending their beliefs because beliefs are basically the circuit three adaptation of our physical territory.

Our rational perceptions form the basis of what we hope is objective reality.

As I mentioned,

We know that our emotions are volatile.

Everyone is aware of that.

We like to believe,

And many people believe,

That our rationality is not volatile at all,

Is stable.

The reason why people get so angry when you challenge their beliefs about things,

The reason why they say don't talk about politics or religion at the dinner table,

Is that when someone feels that their belief system is being challenged and the possibility that their beliefs are wrong,

It makes it seem like their entire reality is now unstable.

If rationality to humans is like water to a fish,

A fish without water will freak out.

Part of this episode is to encourage anyone or to have anyone not have that freak out and to recognize the somewhat volatile nature of rational perception.

It's also just to recognize that this is in itself a semantic disturbance.

Ironically,

People tend to get really emotional when you challenge their sense of rationality or logic because they don't want to consider that—they basically don't want their reality to become unstable.

It's a very terrifying feeling.

It's probably on par to what a dog feels when his physical territory is taken away.

Obviously in politics and religion you see this,

And I brought this up in the podcast before.

You even see this when it comes to beliefs about something that seems as benign as diet.

Paleo versus vegan is a huge thing.

You could see this—I mean the pandemic is full of examples of this where people are fighting as if—I mean obviously with the pandemic there is a life and death element in some things,

But people fight over little things with pandemic mandates that the reaction,

The emotional reaction people have and the hard black and white line in the sand people have is kind of out of proportional to what the actual thing is,

Like whether you wear masks or not or whether everyone has to be vaccinated or not.

Anyways,

We're going to talk about some of these examples,

But just recognize if you do get upset in this episode,

Perhaps it's something you don't have to get upset about.

That's the simplest way I could put it.

Because in the same way that our dog brain,

A lot of our dog brain reactions and behaviors that are typically unwanted when it comes to like say socialization are driven by the nowadays irrational fear of ostracization,

Right?

Like if you have a supplicating tendency or any sort of behavior that's not ideal,

Like some sort of like social reaction you don't like,

We can tie almost all of those things to the fear of ostracization.

In the hunter-gatherer days,

If all of your friends and family didn't like you and they abandoned you,

You would die.

Nowadays that will not happen.

You know,

Someone,

A bunch of people leaving mean comments on your Facebook post does not mean you're going to die,

But even though you might have some of those feelings.

On the circuit three level,

On the rational consciousness level,

The rational conscious version of ostracization is the fear of,

I don't know what is true,

Right?

This fear that I don't know what is true is almost as scary to our rational brain,

Our cortex,

As the fear of ostracization is scary to our dog brain,

Our limbic system and lower.

So most people don't even consider that rationality is not in itself or rational perceptions are not static.

Many seasons ago,

I think this is maybe like 13 or 14 years ago,

It might even have been when I was in college,

So it's like 10 years ago,

Let's say,

South Park did a season that took place,

I vaguely remember,

It took place in the future and it was obviously a satire where the world had broken up into different factions,

Where each faction had a different science,

And they all were proclaiming,

Oh,

We have the one true science.

And of course it was a satire religion.

But it's funny that nowadays in 2022 in the pandemic world,

You kind of see this where there's all these different political factions,

All these different ideological factions,

And they're all alluding to science,

Right?

They're all alluding,

They're all saying,

We're the rational ones and you're irrational.

We all have the one true grasp of science,

Whether you're a pro-vaccine,

Anti-vaccine,

Whatever,

Right?

You see this and if you could zoom out for a second,

You can see how ridiculous it is as South Park kind of predicted many,

Many seasons ago.

In a practical sense,

Rationality has become the religion of modern day,

Right?

Nowadays it is kind of uncool.

To argue about religion is certainly seen as a kind of taboo or even lowbrow.

And even someone,

Obviously there's still many religious people,

But say in the United States where Christianity still is an influence in many people's lifestyles,

It's an influence in politics,

Especially if for Republican politicians,

They might mention how they are churchgoers or they'll have a Christian base.

Many will have that.

It's a big voting point.

Even then,

And I've been following this guy,

Ron DeSantis,

Governor of Florida,

He mentions that he's a Christian,

Goes to church.

I think that's part of his,

It must add to his following,

Certainly his Christian-Republican following.

Even then,

Even with all of that,

If a guy like Ron DeSantis held a press conference in Florida and said,

Hey,

Jesus came down to me and said,

We have to wear masks again or whatever or something,

Right?

Or the archangel Gabriel came down and told me this,

Even his Christian-Republican followers would think he was nuts,

Right?

Religion still has its impact.

It still affects lifestyle and community,

But as far as perception of reality,

Western culture certainly doesn't take it seriously anymore,

Right?

No politician,

Even one who is popular because of his Christianity,

Can really use that as a basis for his reality.

Maybe his values.

He can reference Christian values,

He can reference the Bible and lessons,

But he can't literally say anything like,

Oh yeah,

I was visited by an angel.

People would think he's insane.

Religion is no longer the basis of reality for our culture.

It was interesting,

And I realize my intro to this episode is basically an episode in itself,

But I think this is important.

If you look at structures of thinking and bases of reality,

Plural,

Throughout the development of human culture,

There have been different sets of assumed values people lean on,

Right?

To our earliest animist ancestors,

The ones who,

Their religion was some version of animism,

Shamanism,

They assigned spirits to things,

Right?

They didn't have technology to understand things scientifically the way we do,

But the way they explained things was through spirits,

Right?

There's a spirit of the sky,

There's a spirit of the trees,

Some version of that.

There's obviously various forms of animism.

As culture developed,

People developed more abstractions.

The pagans,

Which came after the animists,

Essentially personified what the animists set up,

Right?

They were still working on the animist framework,

But even a pagan would look probably back to an animist,

Like,

Oh yeah,

You think there's a rock as a spirit?

No,

No,

No.

But there is,

You know,

There is a thunder god that we believe in.

Even if the old system was discredited,

The new system still worked off of what it inherited from the older system.

After the pagans,

The polytheists,

Came the monotheists.

Monotheists unified god.

Instead of many gods,

There was one god.

And if you look at the rise of monotheism,

The big three religions,

A lot of it was based on condemnation of old polytheism.

But they still had the conception of god,

Which they got from the polytheists.

For monotheism came rationality,

Right?

This idea that there's one objective way to look at things.

You know,

To a polytheist,

If we zoom back to like a true polytheist,

Who's like really in a polytheistic culture,

That's the highest level,

That's the most advancement in assumptions of reality,

One could assume that they probably had less of a concept of objective reality.

Because when you're listening to many different gods with many different opinions,

You know,

It's probably easier for their minds to conceive of many different ways of looking at reality.

I mean,

This is a bit of speculation,

But the reason why I come up with this conjecture is that,

You know,

Rationality follows a similar structure of thinking as monotheism,

That there is one way.

There is one way to look at things and anything outside of that one way is incorrect.

And I spoke about this briefly with James Callifson,

Who was on the podcast a couple episodes ago.

He's a grad student at Pacifica.

We were speaking about Jung and Freud.

And I mentioned this essay by James Hillman,

A Jungian psychologist who theorized that most of our culture's assumptions about the mind through psychology comes from the assumptions of Freud.

Even though modern psychologists might discredit Freud and say,

Okay,

He was wrong about this and that,

Because he was the first person to popularize psychology,

A lot of what were his beliefs and his perceptions have kind of become assumed values in psychology,

Even with people who disagree with Freud.

And Hillman suggested that Freud,

Even though he was culturally Jewish,

But he wasn't religious,

He was a very scientific,

Rational guy,

Because he grew up in a Christian Austria in the 1800s,

His view of the mind in itself was influenced by monotheism.

Had he grown up in a polytheistic environment,

He might not have structured the mind as aid ego and superego,

Which is very similar to the Holy Trinity.

Whereas Hillman was arguing that one of Jung's major contributions to psychology was that he went back one generation of thinking into looking at polytheistic and pagan symbols,

The idea that there are many gods,

And that was kind of the formation of archetypes.

If the Holy Trinity has led to the aid ego and superego,

Then the polytheistic pantheons of other religions,

Of those pagan religions,

Led to the conception of archetypes,

That our consciousness is made up of all of these disparate forces that sometimes get along and sometimes don't.

These structures of thinking,

I've mentioned this in my criticism of feminism,

Specifically second and third in what has now become fourth wave feminism.

My main criticism,

Aside from the little things,

Obviously there are male haters,

There are non-male haters,

There's a big range of people that fall into that category,

A big range of ideas that fall into that category.

My overall criticism though,

Even though I'm certainly in the support of rights and the well-being of women,

I'm expecting a daughter,

I want her to have an amazing life,

My criticism of feminism as an ism is that it actually runs on patriarchal assumed values,

Right?

Like third wave feminism's idea,

And I mentioned this in other episodes,

But I bring up this as an example for semantic consciousness,

A lot of the values put forward or a lot of the objectives of something like third wave feminism,

A lot of their memes saying,

Fight fire with fire,

Or second wave feminism saying a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,

These assumptions of independence and power and being CEOs,

These are all testosterone driven values,

Right?

They're valuable in a male oriented society,

In a true matriarchy,

In a society that wasn't developed specifically around men.

I don't think if women really ran the world from the beginning,

I don't think they'd be fighting to be engineers and CEOs and things like that.

They'd be championing motherhood.

I know I ranted about this in one of the recent relationship episodes in a different context,

But I rant about this again because of the error in thinking,

Right?

It's a lot of ideologies,

And we're going to talk about this more later in the episode,

Many ideologies that are formed to fight against another ideology often ends up adopting the same structures of thinking,

The same assumed values.

So we're going to break all of this down in some way in this episode.

This is not going to be the only episode I do on semantic consciousness,

I'm sure,

Because I'm still reading more by Korzybski and other thinkers in the field.

And I noticed that my intro,

What was supposed to be my intro for this episode has gone deep into the episode's topic.

But yeah,

This episode might be a little bit longer.

There's going to be more on this and it is going to be a setup for probably a series that I'm going to do on brainwashing and mind control.

I actually have a concept for a book called How to Brainwash Yourself for Final Profit.

Please no one steal that idea.

Something I'm working on on the side.

So there's not really much of an intro anymore because we got deep into this topic,

But here I'll say right now you're listening to episode 138,

Semantic consciousness,

Sanity,

Intelligence,

Mind control,

And how language creates reality.

And of course,

Thank you to everyone who's been a listener.

If this is your first episode of the Ruondo podcast,

I actually recommend you listen to a different episode first.

Prometheus Rising is a good setup for this episode.

So is the dog brain episode from a few weeks ago.

And of course,

I appreciate all of you guys who listen.

If there is someone you know who might enjoy this episode or some other episode of my podcast,

It means a lot to me if you would share it with that one person.

All right,

So let's start with the origins of semantic consciousness and language,

Where all of this comes from,

Why it even exists.

So just as a quick refresher of the eight circuit model of consciousness,

It's something I've done a few episodes on.

This is focusing on what's circuit three.

Circuit one,

If you didn't catch the other episodes on that,

Circuit one is the most basic survival circuit,

Which its program is essentially move towards things that are good for you,

Move away from things that are bad for you.

It exists in basically all life forms down to single celled organisms.

Even plants have a version of like proto-conscious,

Like a proto version of consciousness on circuit one,

Right?

Plants grow towards lights,

Grow towards water supply.

They die,

I guess,

Or grow.

They don't grow away exactly.

But even plants,

Even single celled organisms have some version of this circuit one proto-consciousness of how it interacts with reality.

Circuit two,

Which was covered more deeply in the dog brain episode,

Is all about the social brain,

Right?

It's all about herd security and within herd security status.

So circuit two is where communication with one species starts to matter,

But kinematication on a very simple level,

Right?

Like some sort of communication of run,

There's a predator,

Or some sort of communication of there's food over here,

Right?

Dog brain level communication is not very nuanced.

And as you know,

If you've owned a dog or interacted with dogs,

Dogs can learn language,

But not complex language,

Right?

They can learn their name.

They can learn single word commands,

Things like that.

Then at some point in our evolutionary timeline,

More than a hundred thousand years ago,

Not much more,

Humans or some creatures that would eventually lead to humans learn to communicate with much more nuance than what dogs can understand,

Right?

They developed a more complex cortex in their brain,

And it was to communicate nuanced information,

Specifically time-bound information.

It wasn't just,

Oh,

There's a bear run.

It's that,

Hey,

I saw a bear here yesterday.

Maybe if we come here tomorrow with a trap,

We can catch it.

Things like that,

Right?

You can't just communicate that with a blast of a syllable.

There has to be more to it,

Which is why the human brain developed to perceive these things.

Now to understand what we now understand to be verbal language beyond just these caveman grunts or commands,

What our brains had to be capable of was something known as metaphor.

This is in the language of Ovo and Barfield.

There's also something I mentioned in earlier episodes briefly,

Which is that the first words in every language stood for simple objects and action verbs,

Basically things and actions you can do with things,

Right?

That was essentially an extension of dog-level intelligence,

Of beyond just naming people,

You name objects,

Naming objects makes it easy to refer to things.

And then what do you say about the objects?

Well,

The things that you do with objects.

Now,

Of course,

Our language didn't stop there,

But what allowed our language to expand beyond that was what Barfield calls metaphor,

What Korzybski refers to as abstracting,

Which is identifying two things of a similar structure,

But different things,

Right?

So for instance,

The metaphor,

Her eyes were daggers,

Right?

Even if you've never heard that expression before,

You kind of know what that means,

Right?

If you know what a dagger is and you hear someone say,

Her eyes were like daggers,

You think of the nature of a dagger,

The connotations,

Your perceptions of what a dagger does.

And certainly you're not imagining if you hear someone say,

Oh yeah,

Her eyes were like daggers,

You're not thinking that her eyes were like lovely and shiny and loving,

Right?

So there's something,

What do we associate with a dagger?

Like piercing,

Violence.

We would assume if someone says her eyes were like daggers,

It means that there's some sort of violent intent in the expression of her eyes,

Right?

That is conveyed through this metaphor very easily.

You could convey a lot in this metaphor,

A lot in that sentence without having to explain exactly what her eyes were doing.

You convey the meaning,

The thing that is relevant to the person receiving the communication.

Garfield points out that every word that is not an object or an action verb is essentially a metaphor from something that originally was an object or an action verb,

Right?

Like if you take a really,

If you look at the etymology of any abstract word that you think like,

What does this word have to do with anything physical?

If you trace it back down,

You might have to trace it back really far down.

Eventually it'll refer to something that is physical.

The reason why this is,

Is that it's easy for us to conceive of something that we can directly observe or interact with,

A physical object or a thing that we can do with those things.

The further,

And as we mentioned right in the beginning of this episode,

The further we get from material reality,

The more energy it takes.

And actually the easiest way to understand an abstract idea is to relate it to something physical,

Which is why most people,

Especially people on the internet,

When they're talking about concepts,

They relate it to a story.

It's just considered a good thing to do.

Concepts,

Which are things that aren't physical things,

Usually refer to something useful,

Right?

Like we wouldn't have a word for a thing if there wasn't some use to it.

And the farther away it is from physical objects,

Typically the more general of things that it refers to.

And this was useful to our early ancestors.

Let's say,

Go back all the way to our ancestors who were basically creating languages for the first time,

Because it allowed them to translate a lot of information,

Strip away the unnecessary details and pass on what was useful.

So like for one caveman to tell another caveman,

I saw this specific animal with,

It was orange but with black stripes and it ate our friend Mowgli over there.

That's a lot of sentences.

That's a lot of words.

That's a lot of information.

Most of it is not necessary,

Right?

But if they label that animal as tiger,

Oh,

I saw a tiger eat a human,

They can learn this idea,

Oh,

Tiger eats man,

Let's treat all tigers as the same.

We don't need to think about every individual tiger.

We don't have to name each tiger.

We don't have to even differentiate one tiger from another,

Because we can extrapolate from that example that tigers are dangerous.

Tigers eat people.

We are people.

Tiger means danger.

Let's have the same reaction to all tigers,

Right?

We don't have to learn how to interact with every single tiger.

It's very useful to put them all in a category,

An abstraction of tiger.

You could even abstract a further of like all predators are bad.

All big animals are dangerous,

Right?

There's no reason to like if you see a new giant animal,

Maybe these cavemen had seen tigers a lot,

But then they see a lion for the first time.

There's no reason why they need to think,

Oh,

Is this a totally new animal?

No,

They could put in the category of big cats that roar.

Stay away from it,

Right?

That's all that a human needs to know,

A hunter,

A human needed to know as far as how to interact with this thing.

Its consciousness,

Its conscious perception of large animals with claws that roar,

Don't need to think about the details more than that.

That is the positive function of abstracting.

And when words or concepts are invented,

It's for this purpose.

It's to have a quick,

Basically reaction to a thing without having to go into all the details.

When you abstract something,

You are by necessity taking away its nuances,

Right?

By definition,

I should say taking away its nuances.

And that is useful,

Right?

Like an abstraction that I've used a lot on the podcast is Jung's idea of archetypes.

Archetypes are an abstraction.

They don't refer to anything physical.

They refer to a concept,

A concept that we can identify that I find useful.

It's a lot easier to reference the warrior archetype when you're talking to a person and trying to have them access certain traits and behaviors than listing out every single trait or behavior rather than saying,

Oh,

You know,

You could be a little bit more competitive and it would be useful for you to respond differently to this kind of challenge.

No,

No,

I could just say the word warrior archetype and most men will immediately know,

Recognize a whole set of behaviors and feelings and traits associated with that.

Even Jung's idea of archetypes,

Which he conceptualized similar to something a lot less abstract,

A lot more physical,

Which are our genes.

He didn't say this exactly,

But if you look at Jung's early writings on what an archetype is,

He describes it as essentially a behavior set or a set of feelings that has passed on from person to person in the same way that the structures of our organs and basically the nature of a certain type of physical trait passes on,

Similar to genes.

Part of the fact is that genes also are an abstraction of a sense because there is no – in biology,

There is no concrete unit known as a gene.

A gene is simply a sequence of data in a chromosome that has seemed consistent.

If that same sequence is in you and it was in your mom and it was in your grandma,

We can call that a gene.

But the gene can change.

It can change in size.

There's no standard unit of how big a gene is.

A gene is basically just a recognizable sequence.

It is a low entropy configuration that we can identify.

So it's also an abstraction.

There's no physical thing.

There's no standard thing that is a gene.

Now one thing to understand about abstractions is that we tend to abstract things based on its use to us.

In an earlier example,

All big cats are dangerous – can be assumed to be dangerous to a primitive human.

They didn't really need to differentiate.

Obviously they would notice the difference between lions and tigers.

But as far as like their immediate reaction,

They can basically abstract into one category of predators to humans.

We abstract things based on their use to us.

One thing is interesting and we'll talk about race and racism a little bit.

Here's a non-racist racial example.

I'm living in a part of Thailand where there's a huge Russian expat community.

There's actually almost as many Russians as non-Russians in this part of town or at least it seems that way.

I go to one of the Russian bars.

There's sauna every so often.

It's usually about half Russian.

It was interesting.

There was this guy.

He was a Russian guy and he was categorizing the people.

He was like just mentioning,

Oh yeah,

Sometimes it's all Russians here.

Sometimes it's Russians or more Europeans.

Today it looks like it's half-half Russians and Europeans.

It was interesting the way he was abstracting people because to him,

There were Russians and then any Westerner who's not Russian is a European,

Which was funny because I was actually there.

Me,

I'm not European.

To me,

I'm American.

I was there with some American friends.

Actually most of the people he was referring to as European were Americans to me.

I mean they were Americans,

But I would categorize them as Americans because I would actually put him in the category of Europeans.

To me,

A Russian is a European.

There's Americans,

There's Europeans,

And then there's Asians.

To him,

The categories were different.

It's an interesting,

Benign example of how we abstract people based on their use to us or how different they are to us,

Which leads us to a semantic disturbance,

As Krosoczewski would call it,

A semantic disturbance being an improper modeling,

An improper way of abstracting reality known as racism.

When someone puts—typically,

And I just use this example of the Russians and Europeans—most of us assume that who we are and our group,

Whatever group that is,

Whether we're talking race or some other way of categorizing people,

That is normal.

It's normal to see that as normal.

In the environment that humans evolved to be in,

So in small tribes,

It makes all the sense in the world that you'd perceive your tribe to be normal and that all other tribes to be abnormal.

Any perception other than that would make you feel really weird,

And there's no reason for that.

One thing interesting about Krosoczewski's take on things is that—I mean he was a mathematician,

Very big on abstractions,

And his actual general prescription to humanity is that everyone needed to think a little bit more like mathematicians.

We're going to talk about why that is in a bit.

But he was very big on social change,

And he was very critical.

I mentioned that his writing,

Most of his writing was written between the two world wars.

He was very critical of society and politicians in the way that they think incorrectly and spread incorrect thinking in the world.

One of these things was in regards to racism and ethics in general.

His take was that people are unethical because they haven't learned how to think correctly.

Because racism is essentially a semantic disturbance.

It's incorrect abstracting,

Where one is putting a huge group of people into one category and interacting with them all as the same thing.

When you abstract a group into something like that,

You're by necessity taking away their nuance.

I'm just going to use the common examples in let's say American culture,

But in the world,

It's like black people and white people.

If you think of all black people as having a shared trait beyond just being black,

Obviously you're missing out on a lot of nuance.

Obviously any intelligent person can recognize,

Oh,

I mean there's a whole range of people.

You think of many examples,

There's a lot of people that fit under the category black.

The same way there's a lot of people that fit under the category right.

Some of them are smart,

Some of them are dumb.

Some of them do these things,

Some of them do totally opposite things.

Obviously there's a range of opinion.

But it is in some ways a natural tendency to put an other category,

A group of people that you don't have a lot of direct interaction with,

As one in the same way that it makes sense to treat all tigers as one thing.

If you have reason to believe that all tigers will eat you,

There's no reason to treat each one as an individual.

So racism is basically an old survival strategy,

An old fear-based survival strategy that makes a quick judgment for safety.

So we could call this a disturbance in the sense that it doesn't make sense to do this in most cases and it has a harmful effect on yourself and others.

But we should recognize,

As with all dark instincts or things that are easily shamed,

That there is some root to it.

This is my personal opinion,

Or I should say,

Yeah,

I think it's my personal opinion,

I think it's the correct opinion based on what I'm about to say,

Which is that shaming or trying to delete parts of our instincts actually never works.

It always causes some sort of pushback.

With something like racism,

Which we can probably all universally say is not useful,

Not useful to the individual or to others,

It's still good to understand where it comes from.

Because something that we have in the United States right now and probably far throughout the world,

Certainly the Western world,

Popping up is actually this idea of anti-racism.

Anti-racism follows the same exact structural thinking as racism.

Anti-racism is another blanket abstraction that makes another group of people,

That takes away all the nuance of another group of people.

It's like,

Oh,

You didn't vote for my candidate?

Well,

You are racist.

You are a part of this other evil group.

It's like treating all black people as criminals or treating all tigers as evil,

Which I realize may be.

Well,

Anyway,

I hope you understand the nuance of what I'm saying.

I noticed there's a sidebar,

Meta note.

If you find yourself getting upset or triggered right now,

I would just call attention to the possibility that you might have a semantic disturbance.

When people,

I mean,

Nowadays in our culture,

People are almost afraid to use race even as an example,

Even to talk about it neutrally because of the fear that other people will assume they're racist just because they're talking about race,

Which of course is an incorrect abstraction.

It's a semantic disturbance.

But this is all to say,

I know I'm going off on tangents and meta tangents here,

Even the impulse of,

Even a racist thought or what might be called a racist thought later,

The thought shouldn't be shamed.

It should be mitigated.

It should be redirected.

I mean,

Part of the purpose of our rational consciousness,

This is something that Korzybski said a lot,

Which is part of what our rational conscious does is it allows us to modify our instincts.

Korzybski kind of took what I thought was an extreme example of thinking that rational consciousness should totally overcome our instincts.

I wonder what he would have to say about my takes on the importance of instincts for our emotions and for our sexuality and intimate lives and well-being.

But of course,

I'm only reading his books.

He's been long dead.

Can't have them on the podcast,

Unfortunately.

But actually,

I mean,

This is all to say that even with the idea of racism,

Chris Rock has a bit from a long time ago,

I think the 90s,

Whereas I forget exactly the words and I'm not going to say it in a way that's funny like him,

But he has a whole thing about white people not wanting to be racist.

And he has some joke that ends with,

If you see a bunch of young black men wearing gang colors running at you in an inner city,

You should run.

Certainly to take that versus treating all people with a certain skin color as criminals is very different.

There has to be room for nuance.

This is one of the issues with abstracting and one of the problems in society with both our world leaders and our populations where people are incorrectly abstracting.

The solution to this incorrect abstracting,

And I'm going to use racism as the example because it's charged,

But it's also something clearly we can all relate to on some level.

I'll reference Daryl Davis,

Who I've mentioned before.

If you don't know who that is,

He's a black man who had all of these sit-down conversations with KKK members,

Like actual card carrying,

Literal card carrying racists,

And just had conversations with them because he wanted to understand why it is that they hate all black people.

He just wanted to understand.

He didn't sit down to yell at them or tell them they were evil or to be confrontational or even convince them of anything else.

To him,

Because he was very sane and he was not semantically disturbed,

Just to his mind it didn't make sense why someone could hate a whole group of people just on skin color.

So he sat down and he's like,

I need to understand,

Tried to understand,

In the process of trying to understand the other.

I think it was something like 200 high-ranking KKK members after getting to know this Daryl Davis guy quit the KKK because they realized after hanging out with this guy,

Daryl Davis,

Who obviously was quite secure and strong and not semantically disturbed,

They were like,

Oh man,

I like this black guy.

And shit,

If I like this black guy,

I obviously don't hate all black people,

Which means shit,

I'm not a racist,

Which means crap,

Everything I've subscribed to with my reference group,

The Ku Klux Klan,

Is false.

So it's a reality-shattering moment that was possible because all of these prior racists got a real life,

Material,

Concrete,

Unobstract,

Non-abstract experience that proved to them that the abstractions that they were believing were incorrect.

This is how you correct semantic disturbances like racism.

It's not by taking on an opposite abstraction,

An opposite ideology,

And trying to force feed that down people's throats.

This does get me fired up.

I'm not a white person,

But I can see this.

I can see this with some of my friends who are maybe subscribing to this anti-racist thing.

I've seen some white friends in liberal cities in America where they actually feel guilty about – I mean,

These are people who are definitely not racist.

I've grown up with them in mixed racial groups.

It seems ridiculous to me that they would think they're racist,

But they actually bought this stuff.

But the worst thing is,

Just imagine,

And this certainly is happening already,

If culture is yelling at some young,

Let's say five-year-old white kid who has never had a racist thought,

Maybe barely even perceives race,

And he's being yelled at and told that,

Oh,

You're a bad person because of the color of his skin.

If he is weak-minded,

He might be like,

Oh,

Shit,

And he'll take on all this shame and he'll be all messed up.

Maybe he'll be messed up and meek the rest of his life.

Maybe he'll have some red pill awakening and become really angry.

Or immediately he might be like,

Wait,

These people who I'm now putting in a category because they're saying they're different than me are all telling me that I'm a bad person just because of the color of my skin and they don't even know me?

Well,

Fuck them.

I hate them all.

And then you just created a racist.

Anyways,

I didn't mean to go on a whole rant.

Maybe I did a little bit.

But this is just an example.

We abstract things based on the use.

When you abstract something,

You're putting more and more things in a category,

Ideally because it makes it easier to deal with that big category.

We have to be careful that we understand what order of abstraction we're acting on.

Abstractions are useful.

Concepts are useful.

But we can't treat them as material things.

So general semantics,

This is the idea of the orders of abstraction.

I won't go into this too deeply.

I'll just give the basic things.

The example typically used in general semantics is this idea of Bessie the cow.

And it's actually funny,

Just a side personal note.

My first introduction to the idea of general semantics actually came from a woman named Nicole Day-Done,

Who was the leader of a cult I was in when I was younger.

She was a PhD candidate in semantics.

It's funny,

Like 10 years later,

Getting into this on my own.

But she did mention something like this.

Well anyway,

I'll just share this idea of Bessie the cow,

Which is the least abstract way to interact with a certain animal or perceive a certain animal is to give it an identifiable – well,

Really the least abstract thing is to just perceive it,

Just to take it in with your perceptions.

But if you have to label it for the sake of referencing it to other people,

You could give it a name.

And we're going to talk about identity in a bit as well.

We'll name this cow Bessie.

Bessie is – referring to it as Bessie the cow as an individual cow is not a very abstract – is a less abstract way of referring to it.

But once you put it into a bigger category,

Let's say cows,

You just treat them all as cows,

It's more abstract.

It refers to more things.

When you just say cow,

You could be referring to Bessie the individual cow or you could be referring to any of the other 10 cows on this pasture.

Same thing with cattle.

It's an even more abstract thing because you're referring to more of a commodity.

You can move it to livestock,

Which now includes Bessie,

All the other cows and all the pigs.

And if you are say someone who interacts with cows as a unit of your wealth,

Let's say you're a farmer,

You can refer to Bessie the cow as a unit of wealth.

Now how you abstract Bessie the cow,

It depends on how you interact with it.

A PETA activist wouldn't abstract Bessie the cow as wealth.

If the most abstract they probably would abstract Bessie the cow would be maybe a unit of – I don't know,

What's the word for something you do activism for?

I'm blanking on the words.

A protected group.

So you might put Bessie the cow in the category of protected groups,

But not wealth.

So how we abstract things,

The more abstract is the less nuance,

The more things that can fit under that category.

Like obviously as a unit of wealth to a farmer or to anyone,

There are many other things that can be units of wealth that are very different than cows,

But they could all fall on the same category if you're abstracting at this high level.

Now we have to notice that the more and more abstract we get,

The higher the order of abstraction,

The further and further away we're getting from the concrete thing.

The further we are getting from something that is actually observable in real reality.

Now the ability to abstract things is – it is actually a type of intelligence and some would argue this is what intelligence is.

In fact,

I believe it's – I've never taken IQ test,

But I believe symbolic abstraction is part of it.

Understanding analogies I believe is part of the IQ test as far as symbol recognition.

I've heard this.

I did take one aptitude test as a kid to get into this specialized school program where the – instead of doing math problems and reading comprehension,

Which is what most standardized test was,

The entire verbal section was analogies.

It was just like this is to this as this is to this and you have to fill in the fourth blank.

That was like – they were basically trying to measure how well someone could abstract words and I forget what the math section was,

But it was something similar to that,

Right?

It was basically measuring how well you could abstract things.

Because even though memorizing the definitions of things is not what makes – it might make you a good student,

It's not what makes you intelligent.

Being able to abstract things accurately is intelligence,

Right?

When you're reading a book that's very difficult to comprehend,

Usually it's because they're speaking in abstractions that you have – it's taking a lot of brain power for you to translate that into something concrete.

A funny,

I guess,

Meta example,

A lot of this episode is based on a couple of books that I read by Alfred Korzybski and it took me a long time to put the notes together because – and I'm not even done with the second book because he speaks ironically.

He writes in such high-level abstractions that it takes me a long time to be like,

What is he talking about?

I have to go back and define things and define concepts and even in a given sentence,

I have to go back and like,

Wait,

Wait.

I don't always – the recall of what a given concept means doesn't come to me immediately.

So I'll read a paragraph or a page and very often I'm not really sure what I just read and I have to go back and do that.

That's what makes something difficult to read as opposed to something like a well-copyrighted sales page or something.

It's something that's supposed to – I have a friend who's a really good copywriter and he says how good copywriting is something that holds your attention for a line so that you want to read the next line,

Which is one of the reasons why when people write on the internet,

They use single sentence paragraphs and really short sentences because they want you to keep going,

Right?

If you have to use too much brainpower to understand what they're talking about,

If you're using abstract terminology,

You're going to lose more people.

So it's funny that while I was reading Korzybski's book,

Throughout it I was just like,

Man,

If this guy could just throw in a concrete example,

If he could tell a story every so often,

It would be so much more easy to understand general semantics but the guy just stays in abstract land and even funny enough because he does use analogies,

The purpose of analogy is to make something easier to understand,

He'll use analogies referencing Einstein's theories as if this is a way for me as a reader to better understand general semantics.

He's comparing it to general relativity and I think it's just either he was just a shitty writer and or he just didn't really understand the level of abstracting of his audience or maybe he was writing for other mathematicians for whom this would be easy.

I'm not sure but I had a really hard time reading his book.

But actually some time ago when I was doing more with Jung's work and I was reading a lot of books by Carl Jung and talk about him on the podcast,

A listener messaged me one time because he was trying to read a lot of the books that I was reading and he was saying like,

How do you understand this stuff?

Like it seems so dense,

It takes – I mean basically the same thing I was just saying about Korzybski and I told him that the way that I understand something like Jung is – especially if I'm reading the physical book is that almost every paragraph I'll just – or anytime I notice something that seems useful but is written in like early 1900s speak and of course has also been translated from German so maybe the sentences are hard to comprehend for an English speaker in 2022.

I'll usually just jot down in the margin what I think it means in my words and then it makes it very easy to translate and that's essentially what my podcasts are,

It's me translating material that I think is denser.

But anybody could do this,

Right?

It requires a little bit of recognition of,

Okay,

I'm reading something or I'm taking in something that's at a level of abstraction that doesn't fit me.

Let me either simplify it or we can call it like lateral abstraction,

Essentially translation of just like changing the words so that it actually makes sense,

So that you can assign it to meaning more quickly.

It's funny,

My same friend who's a brilliant copywriter,

His brain is just built for copywriting where even in social conversation,

He has to relate every single thing to a story.

I think that's just how his brain works which makes him a good copywriter.

Every single idea that gets talked about,

He has to relate it to something that he did or something observed or an article he read which sometimes is kind of annoying because he'll say all of these extra words and the rest of us listening like,

Yes,

We know,

We got to that conclusion a long time ago because we've abstracted the meaning much quicker.

His mind is really good at de-abstracting.

He's a little bit more challenged with abstracting,

Right?

But both are important.

You know,

De-abstracting,

When people go abstract and I know a lot of intellectuals who they have some great ideas but they can't do anything with them,

They can't communicate them because they suck at de-abstracting.

Both of those things are very important.

And this is something that got nailed into my head when I was doing improv in New York City.

A little shout out to everyone at the People's Improv Theater.

One of the skills I learned there came from one of the coaches that I worked with where he was saying that – because he was pointing out to me specifically that perhaps the way that my mind works,

I was often talking about abstract things in improv scenes which is not that interesting,

Right,

Unless they happen to really understand that idea.

It's not that interesting.

What is interesting is when people talk about real things,

When there's concrete actions.

And he mentioned this – because it wasn't even the speech he was pointing out that – it wasn't even the content I should say.

He was pointing out that when someone is speaking in abstractions,

As I am in this podcast of course or like an academic does,

Like someone like Jordan Peterson,

They tend to – kind of like what just happened,

There tends to be stops and starts.

They might say,

Oh,

Just like I just did.

Even a very well-spoken abstract speaker – and I just mentioned Jordan Peterson because I think he's a good example of this – even someone like him who's very eloquent,

When he says – when he's talking about abstract ideas in psychology let's say or whatever,

There's kind of a lack of smoothness.

There's like a stop and start.

In the same way,

I tend to say,

Oh,

Man,

Ah,

And I'm also ad-libbing a lot,

I had these stops and starts.

Anytime we talk about abstractions,

This is something that happens.

Whereas my improv coach was pointing out how if you look at someone that's maybe not known for being eloquent like an athlete,

When an athlete is in a press conference and they're talking about what happened in the game or the match or whatever,

You never see that.

You never see them going,

You know,

There's not this stop and start thing unless maybe they're nervous or something.

But when you're speaking about real events as what happens in a sporting event,

It's very easy to flow because you're just saying things that happened.

Like the recognition is very simple.

When you're speaking about abstracting,

Your brain has to do a little bit more work of reaching to the abstraction and then relating it back down into concepts,

Which is why when you speak in abstractions,

There's a lot of stops and starts.

When you're writing in pure abstractions,

It's harder to comprehend.

It's hard to write as well as opposed to just writing what you did and what you ate for breakfast.

That's kind of like a,

You know,

When you do microphone checks,

People will often ask,

Oh,

What did you eat for breakfast?

And you just say it.

It's very easy to just recall the real events.

So we need a little sidebar moment right now because I'm realizing we are over an hour into this episode and still on part one of my notes of what was going to be a three-part episode.

So I'm actually going to leave parts two and three for a later episode,

Actually the next episode,

Possibly two more episodes.

Part two being on sanity,

Ironically,

Which is properly modeling reality.

This is a little example of my little insanity that I thought I could fit all of this information in an hour and a half or so.

Something we'll speak about more in the next episode is how we model reality,

How our immediate sensations,

Our low order perceptions translate into higher order perceptions,

Beliefs,

How important this is to properly model reality.

One example,

Actually on a similar note of my little insanity,

I was speaking with a friend recently who,

Friend and client,

Who has had some issues with his wife in the past because of scheduling conflicts and expectations not being met.

And something he identified,

We identified together as well.

It's like,

She's just not very,

It's never because of bad intent on her end.

It's just like for some reason,

She's not very good at modeling time,

Right?

She always loads her schedule up with things and doesn't know how long things take,

Which is,

You know,

It's not anything bad on her end.

It's just like,

It's just,

You know,

For whatever reason,

She doesn't model things well when it comes to schedule.

But then I was pointing out to him that on his end,

It's kind of insane of him,

You know,

Being married to her for many years to expect her to be on time.

The conflict was coming from him getting upset that she would say one thing and then do another,

Not because she meant to,

But because of the thing that he knows about her,

Which is bad modeling of time.

So I pointed out to him that he was doing a bad modeling of her,

Right?

She was demonstrating some poor modeling in her schedule.

He was demonstrating poor modeling of her.

But if on his end,

At least,

If he could just model her properly and set up his day in accordance,

Knowing that she,

Knowing who she is,

That removed all the conflict,

At least when it came to that,

Right?

So like proper modeling is important.

I want to try to get better at modeling how long my podcasts take,

Because this is a bit of a theme for me around this time last year,

I announced I was doing the History of Masculinity series.

Initially,

It was supposed to be a seven-part miniseries.

Episode two was going to be on the history of warfare.

I thought I could basically get those seven episodes out in maybe a month and a half.

I realized,

I pretty soon realized how insane that idea was,

Given that just episode two,

I was trying to cover the entire history of warfare and how it shaped masculinity age by age.

It was ridiculous for me to think I could do that in a couple of weeks.

So that is still in production.

If you have been following me for more than a year,

You've heard me talk about that.

It's still in production.

In fact,

It's my top priority project for 2022.

I actually just re-got into the notes.

So that should be out soon.

If you do want to be notified about that,

You can go to historyofmasculinity.

Com.

There's an opt-in to be notified.

You can also get an immediate download of what we say is the first version of the prologue,

Which covers the biological origins of that.

In the meantime,

I'm going to try to get better at modeling how long podcast takes.

So we're going to end this part of the episode or this episode on abstraction,

Abstracting intelligence with a takeaway concept,

Something actionable,

A technique you can use to improve your abstraction ability.

Of course,

Going to the work of Alfred Korzybski,

Father of general semantics,

Who we'll speak about more in the next episode.

And this topic is what he calls or subtopic we can say is what he calls the isness of identity.

It's a whole series of basically thinking fallacies that are baked into how most of us think due to our language.

This isness of identity targets the verb to be,

The state of verb in all its forms,

Because this verb,

The way it's typically used leads to confusion in orders of abstraction.

Korzybski's solution to this is something he called English prime,

Which I've spoken about in other episodes in how you think basically,

Which is essentially it's speaking and thinking and writing.

It's English without the verb to be,

Which seems a little crazy at first because the most common sentences that we speak use this verb to be.

This is,

I am.

I am hungry.

It is raining outside.

The most common ways to express ideas is with the state of verb,

But it leads to inaccuracies.

One place where this is obvious is in science.

For example,

If you ever looked into quantum physics or heard any pop science version of it,

There's some pretty trippy things when you go into the subatomic realm.

For instance,

You may be familiar with the double slit experiment,

Which basically shows that an electron or certain things like photons,

Certain things can behave both as particles and as waves,

Which seem like totally different things,

Which is a very trippy thing.

In double slit experiment,

It shows that depending on how a photon is observed,

It can either behave like a particle,

Which is like it shoots in a straight line or if it behaves as a wave where it goes through the slit with a gradient spread.

That's not the correct term,

But it's not coming to me right now.

It's a pretty trippy thing to most of us.

It's like,

Man,

How could one thing behave as two different things?

But Krosinski argues that the reason why we even think of it as trippy is because we've taken on these assumptions that he refers to as Aristotelian essentialism,

Which goes back to the thinking of Aristotle in the same way that I mentioned earlier how Freud's beliefs,

Because Freud was the pioneer of what has become psychology,

The initial thought leader,

Let's say,

His beliefs,

His perspectives have kind of become baked into how we all view the mind,

Whether or not we agree with Freud.

It's kind of just like our cultural assumptions because before that,

No one had really laid down a way of thinking about,

Say,

The subconscious.

Krosinski argues that the way that we perceive reality,

Especially in the Western world,

Is largely due to the ideas of Aristotle.

A lot of the inaccuracies we have are due to Aristotle.

This is not a dig at Aristotle.

Krosinski had a lot of respect for Aristotle,

But the fact is Aristotle existed,

Lived at a time when technology was not very advanced.

Most of his ideas were based on immediate five senses observation.

So it's totally understandable why he had the ideas that he had.

There's no way he would have considered something even as an electron or a photon that could behave as a particle or a wave.

So Aristotle,

All of his ideas were based on the framework of what Krosinski calls essentialism or elementalism,

Which is that everything can be broken down into a compact unit,

Right,

Into an element essentially.

More modern science has recognized that this is actually true,

But this is how most of us view things.

Krosinski argued that if we didn't have Aristotle,

If we weren't all influenced,

I mean,

And it's not just Aristotle,

It's his contemporaries,

It's people who come after him.

You know,

The idea,

We'll speak a little bit about Cartesian duality in the next episode about the mind-body split,

But a lot of this,

You know,

He's assigning to Aristotle.

The way we think about things has given us certain assumptions about reality,

Which is why when we're presented with something like the double slit experiment or the reality that a photon or an electron could behave as a particle or a wave,

It seems trippy.

Krosinski argues if we didn't have those perceptions,

If we were taught about the double slit experiment early on,

Let's say childhood,

And didn't have any other conceptions,

We would all,

It wouldn't be trippy.

Just be,

Oh yeah,

Okay.

Things can appear in different ways based on how you observe it,

Right?

Now you might be thinking,

Okay,

That's great for,

I can see how that's useful for a quantum physicist,

But for me,

A regular guy who's just engaging with the world,

Why not use the verb to be?

Why not just assume things are static elements,

Right?

Like what's the harm in that?

So we can look at a non-scientific example,

A common sentence that we might use,

A common type of sentence where we say a person has a certain quality or a person is a certain quality,

Right?

My friend Joe is funny.

The abstract statement,

Joe is funny,

Leaves us to the same confusion,

The same opportunity for inaccuracy that leads to racism,

Right?

Like we're abstracting a person to equality and generalizing and taking away nuance as opposed to,

Let's say a statement that doesn't use the verb to be,

Which is Joe made me laugh at his standup set yesterday,

Right?

One uses action verbs.

It refers to an instance.

It refers to the subject.

It also refers to the receiver,

Right?

There's implied subjectivity.

Or if I want to make a more general statement,

I can say,

I perceive Joe to be funny.

Joe can be funny,

Not funny,

But the statement I perceive it takes basically subjective responsibility for what's going on there.

So to use the verb to be,

To overuse the verb or to use it in a way where you're not recognizing this,

Which I know might seem nitpicky,

But it greatly affects the way you think because to rely on the verb to be and not recognize that you're being vague with your orders of abstraction,

It reinforces this assumption of static absolutes.

You know,

What Krositski could call Aristotelian essentialism,

Which is that things have an identity and that is static and that should be perceived as always true.

It's an abstraction.

It's a set of abstractions that don't allow for nuance or fluctuations,

Which is what real reality involves.

So for a final example that relates to a topic more commonly spoken about on this podcast,

Masculinity,

I haven't been on social media much,

But I do check on the Masculine Underground Group on Facebook periodically because I am the moderator.

Something I see often when I do log in is this kind of trend where young men's coaches are all kind of doing the same thing.

It seems like they're following the same copywriting script.

Well,

They'll have a picture of them looking handsome and doing something manly.

They'll tell a mini hero's journey story and at the end is like a call to action DM me if you want coaching type of thing,

Right?

And you know,

There's a time where I deleted those posts because they were spamming my group.

I don't know.

I mean,

I'm kind of over Facebook,

So I almost don't care,

But I posted something just as a question,

Which is like,

Why is everybody doing this?

This ended up sparking like a debate in the comment section over whether men's coaching ideology is beneficial to men or not.

It ended up getting into kind of this idea of semantics and assumed values.

There are some guys arguing about the value of perceiving masculinity or preaching masculine norms.

It was actually a pretty intelligent set of comments,

I thought,

Going back and forth.

I put in my two cents,

Which is a lot of what the issue is in the men's coaching world,

Where things are sometimes beneficial but not always beneficial or things become dogmatic.

It comes down again to this error of abstracting,

Where even this abstraction of masculinity,

Which obviously I talk about and find useful to men specifically for various reasons that are covered in other episodes,

There's a confusion of masculinity as an identity,

Which is static,

A static absolute of commandments,

Of undeniable traits versus a role,

Which is a set of functions or set of actions,

If you will.

This word identity has caused so much trouble in modern culture with gender identity politics,

Of course,

This gender identity stuff.

Again,

Identity is getting confused with roles.

Identity requires everyone to see you a certain way because just like the way people fight over their ideology,

If someone comes across someone,

If someone is super attached to identity and is buying into this,

Again,

Aristotelian essentialism that if I say that something is that,

It is absolute and is always that way and there's no room for nuance,

Of course,

They're going to get.

.

.

And their reality is based on that,

Their emotions are invested in that,

Of course,

They're going to have what,

Of course,

Zipsky might call a semantically disturbed reaction when they don't get the right pronoun.

This is not.

.

.

I'm not knocking anything trans or changing identities fine,

But when people don't realize that identity is not a static absolute,

That it's not something that needs to be taken so seriously,

It's something that you choose to.

.

.

Or really actually,

Identity is not the best way to look at it,

You can choose to change your role or change your expression in society and that's great.

I mean,

I don't care what pronoun a person wants to be called or what someone wants to be.

.

.

What proper noun someone wants to be called or how they want to show up,

But to take on this idea that identities are these static absolutes,

One,

It doesn't match up with reality and two,

It leaves a lot of opportunity for needless conflicts.

Whereas someone who,

Say,

Wants to change how they express themselves in society or what they want to be called,

But recognizes that what they're doing is changing their role,

They're choosing to change their role,

Change their expression,

And it's not a static identity,

Such a person can maybe not have semantically disturbed reactions regardless of how people perceive them,

Which kind of ties back to this more spiritual truth is that you make your reality.

So what I commented on this thread in the Facebook.

.

.

On the Facebook thread was that people.

.

.

Yeah,

People are confusing.

.

.

When it comes to masculinity,

People confuse identities with roles.

They confuse.

.

.

They maybe resubscribe to like this set of absolutes of like,

Oh,

If I'm a man,

I have to do such,

Such,

And such,

Rather than recognizing that there's a role,

There's a set of functions,

There's a reason why,

You know,

The abstraction of masculinity is useful.

I often try to ground it in relating it to hormones.

Like typically when I use the word masculinity,

I'll throw in parentheses testosterone-driven characteristics so that we can stay away from confusions and abstraction.

But to take an E-prime look at things rather than saying masculinity is something,

Rather trying to define,

Oh,

What is masculinity,

We can look at what it does or why it's even useful as an abstraction,

Which means looking at its functions.

You know,

If you've caught my episodes on gender dynamics or sexual dynamics,

I've said some version of this,

Which is in a survival unit,

There are certain functions needed,

Right?

Whether the survival unit is a tribe or a couple or a family,

There's certain functions.

There's certain functions that lend itself to testosterone.

There's certain functions that lend themselves to other hormones like oxytocin and estrogen.

From a utility standpoint,

All masculinity is,

Is a set of actions that we could put into a role that correspond to testosterone.

It's a useful abstraction because those functions are useful to individuals,

To couples,

To families,

To societies.

An individual,

Man,

Woman or other,

Can choose to fulfill those things if they give them the benefits that they want.

It's a conditional thing.

It's not an identity thing.

It's not an absolute statement.

So I actually think this question that's thrown around in men's forums very often,

Mainly on Facebook that I've seen is like,

How do you define masculinity?

I think almost all the answers to that question is silly because they're confusing orders of abstraction.

They're mixing up identity with roles,

With functions.

And it demonstrates semantic disturbance.

So our takeaway action with all of this to improve your abstracting ability,

Something to play with is this idea of English Prime.

Can you practice thinking without the verb to be?

Can you re-translate your perceptions instead of saying it is to what's an action verb?

Instead of saying it's cold,

You can say I feel cold.

Instead of saying something or someone is a certain quality,

You can say I perceive or you can mention an action.

It's actually,

It leads to good writing.

Whether you are writing for the internet or you write creatively or whatever,

If you could practice writing in E Prime,

It'll actually help you think in E Prime because writing is clarified thinking or refined thinking.

And it'll prevent you from having confusions on order of abstraction.

And it might clarify a lot of things.

Personally,

I don't always write in E Prime,

But when I journal to myself,

I mean,

I don't write in E Prime because sometimes when it comes to like casual writing,

You know,

It can just lead to clunky sentences or you have to use a lot more words.

But when I write to myself,

When I journal,

I always try to use E Prime.

I always try to not use the verb to be because my journal is where I clarify my thoughts and I don't want any confusion in orders of abstraction in there.

So that's our episode on abstraction.

That's part one of what might be a series on general semantics and semantic consciousness.

I hope you enjoyed this first episode.

The next episode won't be as heady.

I promise there'll be more examples.

There'll be more actionable how-tos.

This episode is really important in laying down the frameworks of,

Yeah,

The framework for how semantic consciousness works.

Next episode,

We're going to speak about sanity,

Which is how we model reality.

We're also going to touch on,

Of course,

Insanity and creativity and how insanity and creativity follow very similar processes.

But we're also going to bring it down to some more actionable things you can do to create what Korzybski called an efficient nervous system,

Which is someone is basically the difference between an insane person and a creative person,

Which comes down to kind of what we might call reverse abstracting.

So that's going to be in the next episode.

I hope you enjoyed this one.

If you think someone else will enjoy this podcast,

Please share it.

All right.

See you in the next episode.

Goodbye.

I'm going to tell you what drives the country.

Now to talk about life hardMath.

You´ll never know about yoga so you will have to learn English in your proper language.

You