New blog post on 'the darkness that comes before', the concept that our current thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are determined by a trillion of complex processes we are not equipped to understand — and challenges this causes in my work. eiko-fried.com/the-darkness... - ThreadSky

eikofried.bsky.social • 11 days ago

New blog post on 'the darkness that comes before', the concept that our current thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are determined by a trillion of complex processes we are not equipped to understand — and challenges this causes in my work.

https://eiko-fried.com/the-darkness-that-comes-before/

Comments

mkarhulahti.bsky.social•11 days ago

Nice read as always, reminds of many things in the embodied cognition & phenomenology literature! (citing this book just bc the pic resonates w the complexity you mention) https://global.oup.com/academic/product/ecology-of-the-brain-9780199646883?cc=fi&lang=en&

anne-urai.bsky.social•9 days ago

Beautiful post, I may have to read those books. Heard of Joanna Macy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joanna_Macy I'm currently reading A Wild Love for the World, there is also a podcast We are the great turning.

Her doctoral thesis linked Buddhism with systems thinking: https://archive.org/details/mutualcausalityi0000macy

anne-urai.bsky.social•9 days ago

Have been thinking about this a fair bit in the context of our response to climate and environmental issues, and how we can reconnect more and find our agency in these complex societal systems

anne-urai.bsky.social•9 days ago

And I also like the short essay that starts here https://archive.org/details/karma_and_chaos/page/108/mode/2up on page 108

anne-urai.bsky.social•9 days ago

Would love to grab lunch/walk and discuss more :)

eikofried.bsky.social•9 days ago

yesssss lets !

friederbinder.bsky.social•11 days ago

We are indeed not equipped to understand these processes but we are equipped to have experiences that make us feel as if we do. Whether these experiences are valuable or mere illusions is another question. This is me trying to "say it without saying it" 😂

stigsp.bsky.social•10 days ago

Somewhat similar struggle here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_can_model

stigsp.bsky.social•10 days ago

Perhaps a chatbot is an accurate description of how human consciousness works - vast amounts of data and a next word predicter. Would fit fine with buddhism and motivated reasoning too, I presume.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731931044X

yalexos.bsky.social•11 days ago

I’ll have to read. Haven’t had a chance. But I’m reminded of the difference between the reason for a particular thought, and the reason for the capacity for conscious thought itself.

ioanaacristea.bsky.social•10 days ago

What a beautiful post and what a meaningful, dense concept. Here to to give the <3 emoji for real, not just by ticking a button.
(Fiction writing, any time soon?)

eikofried.bsky.social•10 days ago

Aw thanks for taking the time to write this Ioana, means the world :)

mgroeneveld.bsky.social•11 days ago

Buddhism is essentially the same thing. Then they suggest that to get over the discomfort/dissonance of this knowledge you do lots of insight meditation to internalize this no-(separate)-self model of you into your own predictive model.

mariakalan.bsky.social•11 days ago

This is excellent and makes me spiral thinking about it too much (in a good way 😅)

faridanvari.bsky.social•11 days ago

Very similar to Buddhism, and Zen in particular, the idea that the self is an illusion, that there is no self that is distinct from all that came before and that comes after. Similar to descriptions of mystical experiences of “oneness” or the interconnectedness of all things.

faridanvari.bsky.social•11 days ago

very interesting read. thanks for sharing.

tailcalled.bsky.social•11 days ago

The trouble with "dynamical systems" is that the mathematization abstracts away the meaning and scale of the variables. If you consider it from a more embodied perspective, then e.g. the moon is real far away which makes it hard for it to affect your sleep.

tailcalled.bsky.social•11 days ago

Per Piranha theorems, most things can't strongly determine most other things. Instead only a few things matter a lot, in the cases where there's anything that does matter a lot. Those things tend to be bigger, more proximate and longer lasting than other things.

tailcalled.bsky.social•11 days ago

Actually sleep makes a strong example because the overwhelming majority of variance is determined by the planetary motions. Things are always highly predictable once you refactor to think biggest-first.

eikofried.bsky.social•11 days ago

"Actually sleep makes a strong example because the overwhelming majority of variance is determined by the planetary motions."

Can you elaborate on this?

tailcalled.bsky.social•11 days ago

"Day" and "night" refers to when a side of the earth is facing towards or away from the sun, so when we say people are usually sleeping at night, what we mean is that the earth's spin determine their circadian rhythm.

tailcalled.bsky.social•11 days ago

(The earth is closer than the moon and the sun is bigger than the moon, so it's a priori a more legit theory than the moon doing it. Also obviously empirically better supported.)

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