Where meaning making happens

 

I discovered a new author that I hope to study further in the near future. He crosses many of the disciplines I am interested in and applies them to the issues I care about, like polarization of views and how it affects us daily, and the changing face of religion. There are some time stamps for the parts I cover here.

This interview begins with many terms. As it progresses, they get sorted out. About halfway through they apply the ideas to the polarization happening today. It’s a battle of nostalgia vs utopia. Each is a vision of perfection. One looks back at how far we’ve fallen and the other is claiming some wondrous world is just around the corner.

28:00 The question is posed, how do we square this human desire for perfection, our need for transcendence, with all the side effects that come with it. The answer, which he then elaborates on, is that we need to reconfigure transcendence. People will continue to have visions of something larger than us, either hallucinated or extrapolated. And we will want to bring them into reality. This is the well-studied idea of “peak experiences”. People can have them at church, or a Grateful Dead concert.

29:32 We need to stop thinking of these as perfection, as something to complete. Instead, see them as a process of optimization. In our normal existence, we are doing this already, striving to fit ourselves into whatever reality is throwing at us. We might see that in a context of maximizing some value, but we don’t always reach those goals.

The idea that we can move beyond who we are is how transcendence has been traditionally viewed, but in the last couple of centuries we have begun to understand how we came to be what we are. The Theory of Evolution has provided a framework for seeing ourselves as part of a long process. This differs from transcendence in that it is not a story of a quest for a final form. It’s an impersonal story of natural processes, not something that has desires or goals. It is continual change.

The sacred connection to the universe is continual change. Reality in-exhaustively changes, and life evolves to fit it. Vervaeke quotes Ursula Goodenough (citation needed), You’re constantly trying to transcend into reality as it constantly discloses unexpected and unpredicted possibilities. When we connect to that complexity, we have perpetual self-transcendence.

32:00 How does this relate to today, and our problems with democracy in America? There is no final answer to the “best” political system. Democracy should enable us to adapt. The next proposal, the next President, the next removal by an ethics committee will not solve our problems. We have a Right that emphasizes a call to personal responsibility and a Left that emphasizes how we’re subject to fate. What we need is an understanding that the two need each other.

We are bound to our finitude and capable of transcendence. If we only pursue transcendence, we get hubris and inflation. If we only see finitude, we get servitude, despair, and tragedy. We can acknowledge both and focus on one while allowing those who see the world differently to remind us of the other perspective. This is where meaning making develops.

We’ve lost shared meaning and even the idea that those who see the world differently than us can even have shared meaning. With that, we lost the ability to hear each other. We try to replace it with proposals for resolving the tension between the worldviews. There is no resolution in the reality of constant change. The tension is where meaning is created.

I’m still researching “Opponent Processing Theory”. I think it started in biology but is finding applications in other systems. https://www.simplypsychology.org/opponent-process-theory.html

Here, it's applied to addiction. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258900422100095X

 

I coulda been a millionaire

Mike Lindell offered five million dollars to anyone that could prove that the data he had was not from the 2020 election. He went on to say, the data proved China had helped to steal the election from Donald Trump. This is conspiracy theory slight of hand. It takes a little bit of specialized knowledge to figure out what he did, but someone did and he is in the process of getting the courts to award him the money. Just to make it interesting, the data security specialist that did it is a conservative. 

Above is from the rules of the challenge. This was obtained by the Washington Post. 

I'll pull some quotes from the Post article, but if you can get to it, here's the story

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/04/20/mike-lindell-prove-wrong-contest/

It really didn't take that much special knowledge. First, you had to go to the conference that Lindell put on to get the "kit" that he challenged anyone to review. Then, you need to understand what was in it. 

The data he planned to reveal, he said, were “packet captures” that would demonstrate Chinese government interference. Packet captures, or “pcaps,” are a specific file format that is an industry standard for archiving internet traffic.

I know what those are, but I would have needed a little more knowledge to take the next step. When I first heard about someone winning this challenge, I wondered why it took as long as it did. The reason for that is probably the wording of the challenge. Most people who were there and understood it, probably noticed the slight of hand, and didn't even look at the data. Only one person went through the arbitration process.

All Lindell needed to do was put any random data from the 2020 election in there. Then it would be true that he had that data. No one could win the challenge, and he could have gone on to use that as proof that he is right about China's involvement. 

This is how conspiracy theories work; Get someone to argue against you, claim something minor that is true, get them to say the minor claim is true, go back to saying your bigger claim is true and keep talking really fast, throwing in new claims and bad logic until everyone gives up even trying to argue with you. Anyone witnessing that who wants to believe your theory but doesn't want to do the work of thinking about it, is now on board. 

That's when they'll tell you to "do your own research" even though they have not. The 4 hour video of Mike Lindell does not count as research, BTW. Or, they'll tell you not to listen to the experts, like the news or the courts or the government, while also claiming to be experts on the issue. 

The contest winner, Robert Zeidman, calls himself a "moderate conservative" and voted for Trump twice. At the arbitration hearing where he was awarded the prize, he said, 

Zeidman testified that he wanted the money and wanted to push back against stolen-election claims. “Mr. Lindell has a lot of followers,” Zeidman said. “He’s making a lot of statements to people that I know, people that are good friends of mine, people that are influential. And they are claiming that he has the data that shows that this election was stolen.”

What was in the data Lindell provided? A flowchart of how elections work, a list of IP addresses, and some other files that appeared to be random data. No packets, Chinese or otherwise. I can only imagine the series of conversations that led to this blunder. I imagine Lindell was advised on how to setup the challenge so he could not lose, but somewhere along the line, the advice was bad, or it was horribly executed. Having worked on a few computer projects in my life, I've seen what happens when managers think they know better than their technicians. 

Lindell's response is in the record now, and it's the next step of the conspiracy theorist. He says he actually has the data, but he can't show it to you. It would put him in danger if he did. This is exactly what those who want to believe him want to hear, that he is the real victim, that there are forces out there that are trying take away our rights, and silence our voices, and even to kill us. And Mike knows who they are. But it's too dangerous for him to show you. 

Lindell testified at arbitration that he did not share what he had described as his key data to support the foreign intrusion claim during the conference. He held off, he said, after a man seeking a selfie poked him in the side as the symposium was nearing an end — an act that Lindell called an assault and said he took as a signal the government might tamper with his central information if he made it public.

Lindell told the panel that, after the incident, his “red team” advisers warned him against making that information public. “They said it could be a poison pill put in the data and we really shouldn’t release the China stuff,” he said.

Regardless of his lose in this fight, Lindell will no doubt carry on as if he won. What will come next are claims that no one is addressing the China vote tampering, even when offered $5 million. Explaining how no one was ever offered that kind of money to address it, takes a few minutes. Time that most people don't take in this busy world of ten second video clips.