A Practical Illustration of Layers

Why did you watch the movie?

Hedonist Layer: I wanted to feel excitement.
Escapist Layer: I wanted to forget I exist.
Seeker Layer: I wanted to see the world through the director's eyes.
Philosopher Layer: I wanted to see an argument illustrated.
Sentimental Layer: I wanted to relive the memories associated with this movie.
Critical Layer: I wanted to see whether the film met my criteria for a good film or not.
Commentator Layer: I wanted to be able to talk to people about this film.
Social Layer: I wanted an event to center my evening around.
Sexual Layer: I am attracted to the actors/actresses in the film.


There is one phenomenon: that of watching a movie. I say that these layers wrap around that phenomena in a way. If you ask why you watched it, you can appeal to the layers. If asked why anyone watches movies, you can appeal to the layers. But these Layers co-exist, there is not a proper Layer.

To each Layer exists different value judgments that would be valid or invalid. To each Layer are different things that are reasonable and things that are unreasonable.

A Brief Note on Layers

I have lately been thinking very much over an idea that I would currently like to call "Layers." This is, of course, a terrible name. I need something hard to pronounce to put in front of it, but for the time being, "Layers."

I do not yet entirely know what it is that I mean by Layers, but maybe I can illustrate it with a few examples.

Let us suppose that we observe a man giving away a sizable inheritance from his father, leaving him almost completely impoverished. Suppose that his father worked in one field his entirely life and the father groomed the man to work as he did, then the man goes to work in a different field. Suppose that we saw the man leave his homeland. Now suppose someone comes along and offers the theory that we are observing a man who is compelled to reject paternal authority.

By Layers I mean something like responding 'yes, that is the full and complete explanation. That is the best possible explanation you can give. At least according to certain criteria and certain context. In another context, according to another criteria, not at all.'

Perhaps what I mean is something like this: suppose our primary concern was the relationship between children and parents. In this case, saying that we are observing a man who is compelled to reject paternal authority is the only sensible answer. Any other answer is irrelevant and therefore inappropriate. But if we had a different primary concern, then this answer would likewise be inappropriate.

Why do I call it "Layers" though? This sounds more like what I frequently bring up with epistemic lenses and vantage points. Well, with epistemic lenses, the world is filtered through your axioms and your values. My talk of epistemic lenses has to do with the fact that all we have is perception, no direct apprehension of truth unfiltered, and the fact that the rules that we use to form beliefs are derived from our values. By Layers I mean we should see in all phenomenon multiple Layers at work.

I grow frustrated with my inability to think clearly. Let me give one more illustration.

Suppose a Gentile family gave birth to a boy who was switched with a boy born to a Jewish family at the hospital. The boy was raised by Gentiles lived like a Gentile: he ate pork, he kept his genitals intact, he referred to the first part of the Bible as 'old.' The boy raised by the Jewish family was raised as a Jew, culturally and religiously.

Was the boy raised by the Jewish family Jewish?
Layer 1 (all numbers assigned are arbitrary): No, he has no ethnic reason to be identified as Jewish.
Layer 2: Yes, he holds the propositions that we say constitute Judaism to be true statements.
Layer 3: Yes, he performs the rituals and actions that we say constitute Judaism.
Layer 4: No, he was not born of a Jewish mother.
Layer 5: Yes, he identifies himself as Jewish.
Layer 6: Yes, his behavior most closely resembles those that he grew up around, meaning that he behaves like his Jewish friends and would be grouped culturally with those Jewish friends.

Genetics, dogma, ritual, lineage, self-identity, cultural identity. They contain different answers to the question, and they are all true at the same time. All this is just to say, in some senses it is one way, in other senses it is another.

But this all leads me to a psychological statement. Even if someone has a vast vocabulary, they only say one word at a time. And even if someone has seen the world, they only have one visual field at any instant. That is, even if we exist in different places according to a multitude of different layers, maybe we only have one primary layer that we recognize at a time. We see the world according to one primary concern, perhaps.

If a man commits a crime and you ask him why he did it, he may tell you, and he may speak honestly. This still may not scratch the surface of the reason he did it. Maybe there was a long list of different Layers that he exists in, and in some layers it was rational to commit the crime and in other Layers it was irrational. When you ask him, he will describe the situation in terms of his preferred Layer. But there are, of course, other Layers and those other Layers had their say too.

Where It Lies

We must be able to see where a thing can actually lie, to know what we say can actually be modified by a predicate and what is only modified by a predicate as a kind of metaphor.

Suppose I said, "that is an angry mob." In a way I have spoken plainly. We understand what a mob is and we understand what it means when a mob is angry as opposed to, say, a rushing mob at Christmas time. In another way, though, I have actually used a metaphor. I have assigned an emotional state to a group of people, but there is nothing that it is like to be a group of people (if there is then it is an experience that is forever closed off to us because we only experience what it is like to be a person never any kind of aggregate consciousness). Only individual human beings experience the emotional state of anger, mobs do not experience anything they are just collections of human beings that do. In this sense, using the term "angry mob" is a metaphor.

We must be able to see where things actually lie to avoid falling into confusion. When we speak of aggregates having emotions we may be able to speak very usefully: companies lacking morale, countries in despair, families that are vengeful. We might say that we are speaking on a macro level for handling macro situations. But how does one improve a company's morale? Such a thing is not directly possible. You must improve the morale of the individual employees.

It appears to me that in statistics and sociology it is easy to forget that in a very real sense the whole enterprise is metaphor. You describe on a wide scale a story for a people group. But in the actual world there is not a wide story for a people group, there are stories for individual people and those stories happen to resemble each other.

A Distinction of Note

Divide the joys of life into two camps: joys which are dependent upon the state of the world and joys which are only dependent upon one's own will.

The result of pursuing the first sort of joy is despair and frustration. That is not to say that there will not be happiness as well, but it will almost certainly be intermingled with life refusing to provide what it is that your will is demanding.

The result of pursuing the second sort of joy is numbness. One will be able to please oneself whenever it is wanted and consequently feelings will lose their dimension. Like soaking a canvas in blue or flooding a room with bright light: the details fade away and depth becomes impossible to perceive.

Mythology

Suppose we instead viewed all philosophy, all theory, all theology, and all metaphysics as being creative acts. Indeed in this age we already typically view theology as a creative act, and more and more philosophy and metaphysics seems relegated to that category, but theory endures. Suppose we added theory to the bin as well. Where would that leave humanity?

It would be a return to mythology. We would see a theory not as a potential explanation, but instead as a creative story that allows us to make sense of phenomena. But then, we could not really believe those myths, could we? How could one live in such a world? It seems as though there would be too much irony to even breathe. You would speak, but mutter under your breath, "not that any of this is true."

I suppose the question becomes: how could one live authentically in a world without truth in theory. What is the man prior to the word? What is there prior to the explanation?

In the Face of a Mystery

In the face of a mystery, I can not give an answer. Before a dilemma, I can not choose one horn or the other. It seems that doing so misses the truly remarkable point: that a mystery exists here.

If I understand Wittgenstein, his position was that mysteries occurred from the misuse of language, of applying concepts incorrectly and looking from the wrong point of view. The correct answer was to look at the situation differently until one found a perspective where the mystery dissolved into thin air and one could move on.

I am not there yet with Wittgenstein, either because I shall eventually regard Wittgenstein as wrong or because I have not yet fully seen the merit of his method. For me, at least at this moment, mysteries are places to stop and stare and wonder why we can not advance knowledge there. The method that I would use there is to stop and jot down the different possible positions one could take in the face of a mystery, and then consider why it is that one of them is not clearly true.

Mr. T, a Tall Height, and a Wide Horizon

I have wondered before which is better: devoting your time to one pursuit and reaching a height, or devoting your time and effort to several different directions so as to be a well-rounded person. I usually choose not to provide an answer to the question and try to always affirm that both possibilities are desirable and that the key lies in finding a balance between them.

Well, today I read this.

A T-shaped man has two characteristics. First, he has a depth of knowledge and a focused expertise in one skill or discipline. This characteristic is represented by the vertical stroke of the T. Second, he has an interest in and a willingness to use a broad range of skills and disciplines outside his area of expertise. This characteristic is represented by the horizontal stroke of the T. A T-shaped man is, in short, a jack-of-all-trades, but a master of one. (See what I did there?)

This is one possible balance to strike when considering which direction to go in. He advocates (putting it into the terms that I typically use) reaching one height and then having a familiarity with the surrounding landscape. This allows for mastery and versatility at the same time: ensuring that you can collaborate easily with others but also ensuring that you have a valuable skill that you can be considered an expert in.

Writing With the Pretentious Dial Turned Way Up

Oftentimes I will write something and, upon reading it, realize that the style in which I write is completely inappropriate for the setting that I write it in. Blogs are conversational, they aren't meant for proclamations from the mountaintops (I proclaimed from the mountaintop).

I try not to ever write in a way that is unclear to me, which I take as what pretentiousness essentially is. When your writing escapes your own understanding, then you are being pretentious. Also a shit.

Yet upon reading my writing sometimes I get the feeling that I naturally think in somewhat obscure statements. In fact, I do not think that this is particular to me, but is in fact how most of us think whenever we think for ourselves. We usually have to do some light translation to make our meditations fit for public consumption. I rarely actually go through this step, instead posting it while it is still written in the language of a private writing. It is for this reason that I think there is a disagreement between my style and my substance.

My writings are blogs written half in the style of doctrine and half in the style of personal explorations and inquiries. At the same time a blog is essentially written for other people. This is where the disagreement lies. The result is a blog that comes off intentionally obscure - therefore pretentious - therefore shitheaded.

Well, shitheadery happens.

Here's a video featuring the words "vagina blood fart."

The Persistent Self

Where is the self? Upon asking this, you will want to look for something persistent and unending. Hence we come to Theseus' Ship. With all of our parts shifting and changing, in what sense is there a true me?

I say, only in passing, that the relation between what you are in this moment and what you were in the past is different from, say, what you are in this moment and what a rock sitting in your garden is or what you are in this moment and what Socrates is. There is a lineage that your present flesh sits in that also includes your past selves: they are more self in the gamut of self than, say, other people or inanimate objects. To say that your present self is identical to yourself at age five, though, I must say is incorrect; I suspect that any search for some enduring part of you that has endured over the years will result in disappointment.

Rather than searching for a self by checking the past and then checking the present for some commonality, instead I say that the self endures by being ever-present. Where is the self? The answer is always "here." When is the self? The answer is always "now." You will never find the self "there" or "then."

To illustrate this, I merely ask that you re-experience a moment from your childhood. Immediately you will either conjure up a memory from childhood, if you do not see through the trick and immediately say that it is impossible. Memory is a kind of scar; you can never re-experience the past, all you can do is examine a scar that exists in the present. The experience is past and is gone because there is no self in the past to perceive the events that took place, without the scars of the experience it would be as though the experience never occurred.

Some have said that it is memory that gives rise to the illusion of self. Memory-phenomena gives rise to the illusion that there was a commonality that existed in the past that continues to exist today. I say, rather, that memory provides a much more modest illusion: the illusion that we experience the past rather than experiencing only the present.

Self is perception; perception is now; now is always.

At the Crossroads of Dissatisfaction and Sloth

There exists a particular kind of despair in the world: not a very intense one nor (usually) a very long lasting one, but one that crops up from time to time in life. That despair is the feeling of lacking the energy to do anything challenging or requiring ones attention, but also being unable to get any significant stimulation or satisfaction from the old and familiar. Moments of this kind of despair are moments of the most pathetic feeling boredom: you're bored because the old stuff ain't interesting and you can't be bothered digesting any new stuff.

I'd like to offer a reasonable solution to this problem: perhaps the answer is to muscle through the lack of energy and force yourself to learn something new (this has never worked for me); perhaps the answer is to take a deep breath and put on an old movie and force yourself to appreciate what you already know (again, this has never worked for me). Frankly I've never found a solution except to wait until either the jadedness passed or you get some vigor back.