Welcome to Physically Insane

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Entry tags:cognition, control, life, watch your languageDue Diligence Structure is the essential component to flourishing which is most conspicuously absent from my life. I've managed to shut off some persistent sources of distraction, but this is unsatisfactorily ad hoc and doesn't strike at the root of the problem; I need better heuristics for keeping distractions from appealing to me in the first place. A good routine is such an antidote: you train your nervous system to seek certain perceptions, and other environmental disturbances consequently slide off unnoticed (if small) or get reclassified as special emergencies (if large). In a sense, having "the ADD nature" means living your life as if you're always going from one emergency to another. This provides a lot of short-term rushes but is unsatisfying in the long run. My experiences to date with finding a structure to my life that works for me have been mixed, to put it mildly. Part of the problem comes from an awareness that structure can't be imposed at the level of behavioral programs (if this, then that) because life is too richly complex for that. The answer seems to reside in looking at the process that generates and evaluates those programs, modifying them as necessary. In connection with the Book, I've been thinking a lot about medical and scientific ontologies (more on that subsequent), and becoming even more aware than I already was of how the everyday vocabulary we use is not just inadequate but positively detrimental. That "will power" as naively conceived was a myth I've known for some time; only recently has it dawned on me that "attention" is also in this category -- not the least because it gives no hint at the rich structure underlying what it refers to, other than perhaps the fact that Latin root means "to stretch toward". What we have is a hierarchy of perceptual control systems that select actions to minimize the error between expected and actual intensities of signals. (That's a dense sentence on which much that follows depends. Suggest re-reading until grokked.) Our attention centers on what we intend to obtain; it's no accident that dopamine strongly regulates both addiction and attention -- at bottom they're two ways of looking at the same process. As is so often the case, You Know Who got there first: I might quibble with his description, but exposing the roots of craving as defects of awareness is a masterstroke of psychological insight. I've said before that you don't really know something until your whole body knows it; less poetically, this means that the set points of lower-order control systems have to harmonize with higher-order ones. Otherwise the result is that the rest of the body just rejects the feeble attempts of the rational faculty to direct it. If you find yourself persistently failing to act in accordance with what you're supposed to be doing, the answer is usually that there's a conflict between two systems, each pulling a lower-order system in two incompatible directions. As tends to be the way with persistent conflicts, the result ends up being an unhappy medium: the conflicting systems "agree to disagree" within certain bounds, wandering outside of which results in a violent reaction to pull the whole system back into a standoff. The cardinal sign of internal conflict is behavioral vagueness: your actions, while individually reasonable, collectively resemble Brownian motion. That is, *until* something pushes you outside the DMZ and exposes the latent conflict: then suddenly you find yourself acting irrationally, and at this point it takes a peculiar kind of self-awareness to halt the impulse to rationalize. There is a difference between wilfully standing in a threshold because that's the place you want to be, and finding yourself in one because the places on either side are equally appealing and terrifying. For someone who flourishes in the cracks and crevasses, recognizing this difference is crucial. Cultivating a taste for open crisis over latent conflict has more than once been a saving grace for me. A little over a week ago I did something that could be metaphorically compared to stretching out a large rubber band to the point of maximum tension, and twanging it back into my own eye. (Actual details withheld out of respect to other parties.) After my nerves stopped jangling, the whole episode seemed insane; its cause was readily identifiable as a three-way conflict between a commitment to honesty, an impulse to be kind, and a desire for human connection. An outcome where I got Physically hurt ended up satisfying all three -- made a circumstantial sort of sense, even though from a wider perspective it was stupid. This is why the integrity of your principles -- and at a deeper level, your *concepts* -- is critical. The specific contents of your moral code may matter less than its consistency. We still don't have good, practical methods of systematically checking for potential conflicts among heuristics: emergencies will always happen, but they should be minimal; conflicts between elemental polestars like "be honest" and "be kind" shouldn't be that hard to foresee. And yet. So I find myself looking for more elegant life-design principles. Prowling the thesaurus leads me to "diligence", a word with an interesting etymology:mid-14c., from O.Fr. diligence "attention, care," from L. diligentia "attentiveness, carefulness," from diligentem (nom. diligens) "attentive, assiduous, careful," originally prp. of diligere "value highly, love, choose," from dis- "apart" + legere "choose, gather" (see lecture). Sense evolved from "love" through "attentiveness" to "carefulness" to "steady effort." Love, attention, care, and steadfast effort. Yeah, I could do with more of that.