In this short video, Lord Martin Rees—the British astrophysicist and cosmologist–gives a brief and elegant statement of the problem Gabriella Blum and I have been writing a book about: the dissemination of radically-empowering technologies to small groups and individuals. Highly recommended—particularly if you want to spend the day scared:
The Keys of Enoch®teaches us that a greater unity can and must occur between the scientific and spiritual pathways in order for the problems of Earth to be solved. Its ultimate purpose is the advancement of humanity, with the goal of changing our orientation so that we are prepared for a higher spiritual attunement and a quantum shift that will move humanity and the earth forward into the next step in our evolution. In this process an ultimate interaction is foretold, as we discover “greater families of intelligence in the universe who share the same Higher Evolution and the same Divine Source.”
R D Laing came up with an amazingly creative way to express complex cognitive processes in a very simple and concrete way, so that the truth beneath them is revealed.
We understand so many different social constructs and their cognitive basis. But I suspect that if we could convert them into the same kind of format that R D Laing used in “Knots,” we could explain our insights in far fewer words and at the same time be far more clear. So I hope we will experiment with converting our knowledge of complex, cognitive social dynamics into brief “poems” like R D Laing did. They are not poems, exactly, but they are written in that form. But that's what makes the complex cognitive dynamics to clear.
Cognitive psychology is the most influential and productive branch of contemporary psychology by far.
The point of this post is that all of the negative social dynamics that humankind suffers from are the result of skewed and irrational thinking. They can rightly be called cognitive knots. And that's what R. D. Laing's book “Knots” was all about. We have internal “knots” because we have the world inside us. Inside each of us is a representation of our known universe filtered through the lens of our subjective experience, which of course alter our “reality.”
Some of our knots are conflicts within ourselves (our subjective self and objective self), but they're all tangled up in we, because we are inextricable from society because we are a social species. So some of these knots are both internal arguments between aspects of ourselves and arguments between us and other individuals, or between our group and their group. But the dynamics are the same at every level, just like a fractal.
It may seem like a pain in the ass to negotiate, at first, but it becomes simple if you look at the little square with the page number. All you have to do is keep typing the next page number. It's easier than scrolling.
Laing made a study of schizophrenics and their families. It was a long term study and he interviewed these families over a long period of time. What he found was that most of the families of schizophrenics engaged in double-bind communication. The most common example is, “You don't love me; you only pretend to.” The reason it's a double bind communication is that it's a demand for a demonstration of love, but at the same in makes it clear that no demonstration of love will ever be sufficient.
The central feature of cognitive psychology is the idea that most of our thought processes are below our conscious awareness. And it is because they are below our awareness that they have such control over us. It is only when they are unearthed that we can gain control over them. These cognitive “knots” come from his journals. In other words, he didn't invent them. They are schematics that he drew up to represent actual cases.
The reason I think they are important is because I have never seen a technique that can make complex cognitive knots so vivid and understandable. And that was exactly why he developed them, as a tool that he could use to untangle the cognitive knots he encountered so that he could understand them. In other words, this book is the expression of a teaching technique that he used to teach himself, so that he could untangle otherwise impenetrable social, cognitive knots.
And I think this technique could be used as a great tool for making complex social dynamics vivid and graspable. For example, I think I could work one up for the conflict dynamics between Palestinians and Israelis. And I think I could make the self-destructiveness (on both sides and interactively) clear to everyone.
That's why I think there is such genius in this book.
Collaborative consumption: Technology makes it easier for people to rent items to each other. But as it grows, the “sharing economy” is hitting roadblocks
WHY pay through the nose for something when you can rent it more cheaply from a stranger online? That is the principle behind a range of online services that enable people to share cars, accommodation, bicycles, household appliances and other items, connecting owners of underused assets with others willing to pay to use them. Dozens of firms such as Airbnb, which lets people rent out their spare rooms, or RelayRides, which allows other people to rent your car, act as matchmakers, allocating resources where they are needed and taking a small cut in return.
Phi Beta Iota:The Economist is the first mainstream media source to open up to the emergent possibilities. There are three major changes being facilitated by the Internet and the related applications, generally those that are NOT proprietary, NOT owned by a major corporation, and NOT predatory:
01 Collaborative Sharing of products, services, and places
02 True history of products, services, and places (e.g. “my fish today”)
03 True cost of products, services, and behaviros.
It is the last one that is awaiting a major breakthrough that combines the open source crisis making and global diaspora translation and posting, with the still missing heavy lifting of research such as was done for a single cotton T-shirt.