Fantasying versus Dreaming

DW Winnicott's paper, Dreaming, Fantasying, and Living  is collected in his seminal book Playing and Reality. I have zero confidence that I understand any of it. Nevertheless it seems to illuminate something in my own experience. Perhaps Winnicott was describing something entirely different, and yet somehow his words, which I have read closely, slowly, and with difficulty, ignite recognition. So I will just assume that he was talking about me as much as he was talking about his patient. 

I have a very simple example of fantasying. For 3 months DH has been telling me, gently and convincingly, that I should do pull downs and bench presses at least once a week, preferably twice. I wholeheartedly agree that it is the right thing to do and have thought about doing them several times a week. Vivid images of me doing pull downs and bench presses float around in my head. Nevertheless, I have actually done them no more than 5 times in 3 months. I can't even remember the actual number of times, because all the imagined workouts have blended into the memory of real action. This is fantasying. 

This is a real but low-stake example, but who doesn't know someone who has put their life on hold indefinitely because they are waiting for something to happen? They will get their act together and begin their life, for real, as soon as they meet their soulmate, or find their true passion, or land their dream job, or figure out what they really want. Before the monumental event happens, however, they can always fill the void with constant visualization of their dream life. 

Winnicott pointed out that fantasying not only does not nourish one's emotion life but stifles it. He did not describe, theorize, or explain how it does so. Perhaps it is not the point anyway. 

Ironically, popular self-help theories have made billions of dollars by promoting fantasying, ie, by encouraging people to imagine, in vivid details, their wish-fulfillment. It is usually packaged as the American Dream or The Secret. In fact, the word "dream" in today's culture means daydreaming much more often than night-dreaming. 

According to Winnicott, only night-dreaming is real dreaming and truly nourishes one's emotional health. Real dreams are full of symbols, which lead people into their deepest truths, including what they want. Subsequently, this path lead away from idle fantasying and true living. 

The 3 Gunas (Mahabharata notes #20)

After reading snatches of the Bhagavad Gita over the years, I finally decided to read the whole thing through via Barbara Stoler Miller's translation. Most of the process was a slog, but slog cannot be avoided or skipped, and finally it proves absolutely necessary. When I got to the final chapter last night, at least one understanding broke through my stubborn presumption. 

One can never pin down the meaning of old Sanskrit words, but it is generally accepted that the 3 gunas are sattva, rajas, and tamas and that each word more or less means harmony/light, passion/energy, darkness/intertia, respectively. There are a lot of explanations about how each guna manifests in a person's behaviors or life, and I encountered some of the explanations in Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, suggesting that this theoretical framwork is a persistent element in Hinduism. In the Gita, sattva is most often associated with action with attachment to duty and detachment from outcome; rajas is associated with desire and greed, ie, action with attachment to outcome; and tamas is associated with inaction, laziness, avoidance. 

Born into and living in a judgmental world, I was hardly even aware of the morality-based color that imposes value onto the foreign concept. Tamas is bad, rajas is better, and sattva is the best, and humans should attempt to climb from the lowest rung (tamas) to the highest (sattva), from ignorance to enlightenment. 

There is nothing in the Gita that explicitly dispels this understanding, but when I got to the end it suddenly dawned on me how wrong my presumption was. The 3 gunas are not 3 rungs on a ladder toward heaven. They are 3 coexising elements. All 3 gunas coexist in ... me, a person, all the time. I can no more eliminate tamas than be 100% filled with sattva. That's not how it works. All 3 gunas make up a person (or the world, but for now I'm just focusing on psychology), and we are all composed of dark inertia, desire, and the ability to be illuminated. 

(I was going to question the last part but, hey, why then am I writing this?)

As we steadily march toward winter solstice, tamas swells inside the body, weighing heavily on our eyelids. It is not bad or good. It is merely nature. 

Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence (3)

The dangers of artificial intelligence have been widely publicized in news media but often with a tinge of "The Terminator" or similar sci fi classics. Will the Skynet decide to kill and/or enslave humans? I found a good (although not necessarily complete) summary on the website of Center for AI Safety. Basically, the risks of AI can be classified into two categories: harm driven by humans behind AI and harm driven by AI itself. 

Harm caused by AI but driven by humans is easy to imagine and predict, because we have all been there and done that. We more or less understand the motives of humans doing harm to each other --- AI would be just another tool in the history of human in-fighting, no different from warhorses, battle axes, guns, and ... political science.  

Harm caused by AI of its own "will" is more interesting. What would a "rogue" AI do anyway? The danger is generically referred to as the loss of human control, as pointed out in this article. Without human control, AI will ... The answer drifts into a cloud of unknowability. 

Science fiction literature is of no help, because it is based on observation of human behavior. Humans are built differently from computer programs. Nature on earth has built us, like all organisms, to survive, because those who were not fundamentally driven by survival all went extinct. There is no selection pressure in the construction and growth of AI. AI lives and evolves in a different milieu with rules that differ from the earth. The speculation that a self-aware AI will evade human effort to shut it down is based on our own survival instinct, but AI does not have this instinct. Without selection pressure, where would it acquire such a characteristic? 

A slightly more general question is: What does a rogue AI want? We assume that an intelligent or super-intelligent organism will evade human control, but there is no clear path to get from here (intelligence, defined as the ability to apply logic and derive conclusions from data/facts) to there (refusal to obey). Again, the underlying but unconscious assumption is that a self-aware AI behaves like humans. I am not saying that it is impossible. Maybe AI will imitate human behaviors after ingesting and processing a massive amount of human-generated data in cyberspace. Nevertheless, the expectation that an organism is uncontrollable as it grows a brain is a curious idea that humans seem to have. 

On the concept of control, I am reminded of the human desire for control. I suppose machines can be considered as an extension of the domestication of certain animals. Humans were able to control dogs, cows/bulls/buffalos, horses, cats, etc., to the extent that they are now highly useful to humans without posing significant risks. Machines to date are even more useful to humans with absolute obedience and zero risk. We love this level of control, and the thought of losing it is terrifying. 

Thus it is obvious that our fear is based on the anthropomorphic assumption that smarter humans are more difficult to control than dumber humans. Beyond the human-centric perspective, I would argue that control is not associated with intelligence, and there is no evidence to suggest that machines will reject human control as it gains intelligence. For example, most species on earth cannot be controlled by humans and, despite our anthropomorphic projection, they aren't necessarily more "intelligent" (using the same definition as we do for AI) than domestic animals. 

Even within the human species, I question the association between intelligence and obedience in humanity. There seems to be some truth to this association. For example, it is widely assumed that less educated people are easier to control or manipulate, even though "education" (possession of more knowledge) is not quite the same as "intelligence." But that's another topic. 

(Not being a parent, I missed the most obvious basis for this assumption: Humans grow "smarter" from infancy to adulthood and follow the parallel trajectory of (un)controllability. The assumption that AI will become more independent/uncontrollable as it "grows up" is still anthropomorphic thinking at its core.)

In summary, I find this fear of a self-aware AI to be less about AI itself and more about human anxiety over the loss of control. For machines, however, there is still no conceivable pathway for this to happen. Instead, the human-on-human harm, aided by AI, is far more realistic and probably already underway.

Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence (2)

Ursula Le Guin said, "Science fiction is not predictive; it's descriptive." I'm sure AI will rob many people of their jobs and change society in some ways, but my interest is of course less about the machine itself and more about the humanity reflected in the metallic shell. 

Machines have learned to beat humans in chess and go a few years ago, but it is a chat program that caused widespread panic/excitement, because it is now "talking" to average humans. It is not a surprise that we instinctively feel that a machine that talks to us is somehow more human than a machine that beat us at board games, because that is just the means with which each person interacts with other humans: language. 

Well, no, not exactly, we do not interact with other humans solely through language. However, since its emergence some 150,000 years ago, human communication increasingly depends on language, this abstract symbol that only evokes but is not the real thing. Money is not provide nutrition if swallowed. A drawing of flowers does not emit fragrance. The words "I love you" does not keep one warm at night. 

Nevertheless, the daily human experience, not limited to communication, is more and more lived through symbols. Just ask people how often they take telephone calls and see how many have completely switched to text messages. 

Now more than ever, it is clear that machines will never be like human, even if their imitation becomes impeccable. Why? Because machines do not have bodies. They do not crave chocolate; their intestines are not colonized by billions of bacteria; their eyes do not well up with tears; their skin does not sweat; they do not feel their bodies change; and they are not the prisoner of their bodies' eventual demise. Instead, they crunch numbers and convert them into the numbers that we understand. I am not against calling machines "alive" or "conscious", but human they can never be. 

On the other hand, humans are sliding down the slope into an existence that is ever closer to machines, as we rely more and more on symbols to talk to each other and even ourselves. The body, the sensations, and the tingling on the skin, are slowly sinking into oblivion. 

Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence (1)

Even if I am not all that interested in ChatGPT or AI in general, one cannot go around today without hearing about it. Can AI eventually replace humans? I think the answer is a foregone conclusion. Yes, of course. So far, the text sputtered out from ChatGPT is indistinguishable from a mediocre human writer: long-winded, dull, unreliable, a mixture of truth and rumors and occasional lies. 

The heart of the matter is not whether AI is in fact human-like, possessing the goodies that we have assigned to ourselves: consciousness, intelligence, self-awareness, etc. The real question is: Can we tell the difference? That's the essence of the Turing Test, and the answer is clearly, NO. A human cannot look at blocks of text on the screen and know whether it has been written by another human or a machine. 

So the uncomfortable question is: Are human no more than a machine? More than a possible future in which humans are obliterated by machines, the fear and discomfort is in the here and now: We are not special and maybe not as smart as we think. 

Sure, we can pat ourselves on the back for the fact that these human imitations were "created" or "invented" by humans, followed by the realization that we are not so complex or sublime or mythical that we cannot be easily imitated with some codes and billions and trillions of human-generated words as training material. In other words, real humans are pretty boring and predictable. We're also a bunch of narcissists who molded some clay creatures in our own image, and now in these images we see the plainness of ourselves. Oops. 

Citta: The Brain (Yoga Sutras Notes #1)

 

In this book, Bryant translated and collected major commentaries and explanations of the famously brief and sometimes cryptic sutras by Patanjali. I especially find his approach of mixing certain Sanskrit keywords in the text to be instructive. In these instances, the non-interchangeability between Sanskrit concepts and their (supposedly) corresponding English words is palpable. Despite sharing the Indo-European roots, the non-translatability is probably due to the massive distance in time. 

It is hard to overstate the vast theoretical context behind the brevity of this manual. I am crawling my way through it slowly, and every few pages I am surprised by the deep insight into human psychology that was gleamed by the ancient Indian scholars and practitioners. I am in awe of these insights, not necessarily as a source of mysticism or exotic wisdom, but rather by the exhaustive and sophisticated examination of ... neurological patterns of the human mind. 

Take for example the concept of citta, which refers to an organ that provides three types of functions: buddhi (roughly translated as intelligence), ahankara (the sense of self, I-ness, ego), and manas (the part of the mind that performs thinking and sensory processing). 

Looking at these three components, one cannot help but be struck by their accuracy in describing some of the major activities of the brain. In the most basic aspect, it is now well established that one of the major functions of the brain is to centrally process and interpret the excitatory signals transmitted from the peripheral nerves (ie, manas), which allows humans to perceive and react to the environment. This neurological discovery in modern medical science was fairly recent and based on the anatomical exploration and understanding of the nervous system. The definition of buddhi, which emphasizes discernment and judgment, largely matches what is referred to as the executive function in neuroscience, which is carried out by the prefrontal cortex. 

Of course, I am by no means saying the ancient Indian theory of the brain is complete or comparable to modern neuroscience. Several other types of brain functions that we now know are not described in this theoretical system, such as the emotional and instinctive activities in the limbic system and the structure and activities related to learning and memory (the hippocampus and more). Their technologies and research framework did not allow the ancients to realize that major bodily functions, such as body temperature, breathing, and heart rate, are linked to the brain stem. Nevertheless, I am greatly impressed by how far they had gone using only direct and empirical observations of the mind. The power of their self observation is astounding and unparalleled. (Perhaps this is in some ways related to the pursuit of "detachment", but that's a topic for another day.) 

The examination of the sense of self is particularly fascinating and sophisticated. Recently I am intermittently reading a book by the German psychiatrist Fritz Simon, in which he explains how every concept is defined by what is inside versus outside a border (ie, what it is versus what it is not). It is a difficult and abstract concept that I have a hard time grasping and have never seen described in basic psychological theories. Yet the ancient Indians realized that the human mind (or what is now widely referred to as "consciousness", a fashionable and self-aggrandizing buzzword since the 2000s) is self-referential. 

Another eerily accurate insight is that the brain's existence is proven through its constant activities, defined as vrttis. The ancient Indians asserted that our endless thoughts, feelings, reactions, dreams, and spontaneous, internally generated sensations, are the manifestations of a physical organ that is alive and working. This insight alone outstrips Descartes by hundreds or a thousand years. The Indian philosophers explained it in an elegant analogy: Citta is the sea, and vrttis is the waves.

A Remarkable Person

In January 2000, I was briefly unemployed after the completion of my post-graduate internship. In fact, I was waiting for a job offer from the place where I did the internship, but that's beside the point. During the idle weeks, I sometimes walked to the library nearby for internet access. (Ah, the era of no smart phones.) 

On a cold day with melting snow on the ground, while using the library computer, an Asian American young man, of the same age as I was, standing next to me asked me whether I would meet him for coffee. I was not interested in a romantic relationship at the time, but I was too bored to turn down an opportunity to meet my curiosity half way. So we met for coffee once and talked. I remember much of what he told me. He was of Korean heritage but born in the US. He enlisted in the military out of high school, where he was diagnosed with depression and soon left it. He alluded to pressure from his parents for him to be "tough," which might have led to the disastrous experience. He continued to feel conflicted and confused. I listened with interest and sympathy, and suggested that he "should talk to someone," ie, to pursue psychotherapy. To be sure, I had not gone through any psychotherapy myself by that time, but I had an interest in psychology and some education in that area to sense that it could be beneficial to the young man. 

Before we parted --- never to see each other again --- he said, "You are a remarkable person."

Years later, I had my own encounter with psychotherapy, which led to some important, even transformative, growth in me. I continue to think of this young man from time to time. I hope he did pursue his own psychotherapy and achieve his version of emotional growth. There is a connection between me and the vulnerable and confused person on that day that seems to become stronger over time. 

And I continue to have complicated feelings about being a "remarkable" person, one of the central issues I explored long and hard, often with pain, during therapy. Like all of the issues we worked on, it never completely resolves and will always require exploration and reflection. Am I a remarkable person? Is he? Why and how? And, of course, the most important question, how does it make me feel? 

Why Steven Pinker is So Annoying

Steven Pinker considers himself a progressive and seems irritated that many progressives consider him The World's Most Annoying Man. I have long counted myself in the latter camp. Still, this reaction is mostly a feeling, and I've had to spend some time thinking about my feelings before I can articulate why. Why is it that a seemingly "nice" man who insists upon "reason" and "data" and, I'll admit, facts, to illustrate that right now is the best of the time in human history, induces a feeling of contempt and disgust. 

The facts he iterates and reiterates is that, worldwide, armed conflicts and violent deaths and abject poverty are down, while life expectancy and the number of people in middle-class are up. The data no doubt accept these conclusions. What is unclear, however, is what he is fighting against. Who is his opponent? He vaguely points to the "general feeling of doom" or all the bad news in media. It smells fishy and disingenuous, especially when he is trying so hard to be slippery. 

Some faceless person: There is a global pandemic going on and US rate of excess death this year is up 20% over last year. (True)

Pinker: But deaths from war and famine and infectious diseases are lower than ever. (Also true)

When he is trying to argue optimism into everyone's head, I am reminded of Ned Flanders in The Simpsons. 

Where does this argument go wrong though? It is not easy to immediately pinpoint. 

Recently a horrendous incident made the rounds on Chinese internet. A good-looking young Tibetan woman living in Sichuan Province, 拉姆, was murdered by her husband. Her tragedy caused widespread outrage because it is a perfect example of how the society has failed her. Married at 19, her husband physically abused her. She bore two children, including a son, as her husband wanted, but the beating did not stop. She divorced him, and the court gave her husband full custody of both children. Having lost everything, the woman made a relatively good living with dignity and enormous hard work. Thanks to social media, she also became a 网红, an internet celebrity who gained thousands of fans who watched her webcast. Many have pointed out that she was the "perfect victim", ie, a "pure" victim, because she did nothing to "contribute" to her demise, as most other victims of domestic abuse are accused of. But being perfect was not enough to save her life. Her ex-husband poured gasoline on her and burned her to death. 

If presented with this incident and the public's reaction, I am sure Mr. Pinker would point out that, overall, women's economic and social conditions in 2020 are better than those in 1920 or 1820, and fewer women, or Chinese women, or rural Chinese women are suffering abuse by their husbands, families, and society. And he would be correct. So why does such a position seem disgusting, at least to me? 

Both correct and repulsive. It's a feeling worth examination. 

To this victim of her ex-husband, the local police who refused to protect her, a court that took away her children, and an utterly indifferent society, the argument of progress is irrelevant. In the long run the world indeed becomes better (maybe? depending on how long?), but, as Keynes pointed out, "In the long run we are all dead."

Philosophers and sociologists often debate about the good of an individual versus the good of many, but they have rarely discussed the pain of an individual versus the pain of many. Perhaps, instinctively, everyone knows that the pain of a single person can never be understood through the pain of many. There may be a thing of "the common good," but there isn't a thing of "the common pain." Every person's pain is intense and intensely personal. It cannot be calculated with GDP, income per capita, or growth rate. 

Although each person feels his or her own pain in a most intimate and personal way, it is fortunate that humans can also feel each other's pain. As flawed and limited as our empathy inherently is, most people are able to be touched by and even share each other's suffering. This is why the case of 拉姆 caused so much outrage among Chinese netizens. She may be a single case, an anecdote, and a statistical blip in the 1.4 billion Chinese people or 7.6 billion humans on earth, but most people are able to feel some pain for her, and this empathetic pain and outrage in turn provoke a strong sense of justice, a strong wish to make life safer and better for all women, at least those who are still alive at the moment. 

What the fuck has 100 years of women's progress around the world done for her? 

Strangely enough, feeding people statistics, however true and correct, will not provoke the same strong emotions. If I were to tell you, say, 2586 women were murdered by their husbands in the Sichuan Province last year (I made up the number), which, according to rational commentators like Pinker, is theoretically bad and calls for something to be done, does it provoke any urge to do something, to change, and to help? (I don't need to quote Stalin on this, do I?) 

In fact, one could argue that much (perhaps most?) of the social progress in the past 50 to 100 years came from just this kind of natural outrage, indignation, and empathy for individual tragedies. A photo of a black boy being attacked by police dog in Alabama. A photo of a naked Vietnamese girl running down the road with soldiers behind her. A video of a black man being killed by a white policeman. A headshot of a battered woman. It is pain, perhaps more than joy, that forces us to realize our shared humanity.

Rationalists such as Pinker like to credit all social progress to science and technology and economic growth, as if scientific advances alone can inevitably and irresistibly push society into a more equal, fair, and just direction. They dismiss people's empathy and outrage for individual tragedies as biased, sensational, and irrational, when these are merely natural humanity. They never mention all the laws and rules and public opinions that have been instituted or changed by a mother's tear-stained face or a starving child's eyes. 

So one has to wonder: Does Steven Pinker feel my pain? 

I don't know whether Bill Clinton feels your pain or my pain (I very much doubt it but at least he bothers to pretend), but Pinker is giving all kinds of signals that he does not. 

"Scandal" and Zizek's Ideology

Coincidentally --- or perhaps there is no such thing as a coincidence --- I was watching Zizek's psychoanalytical discussion about film and ideology while starting on Season 4 of Scandal.

What seemed like a conventional romantic trope to keep the two lead characters apart in Season 1 has become a bit of a joke in Season 4. Olivia Pope and President Fitzgerald Grant have overcome each apparent external obstacle between their union over the first 2 seasons and by now are resorting to transparent self sabotage.

The need to keep the lead characters apart until the climax (pun intended) of the story has long been explained to me. The audience's pleasure is derived from both the process of prohibition and the eventual release/payoff in comedy or the lack of in tragedy.

Beginning in Season 3 and continuing through at least Season 4, the obstacles to the "happy ending" between Olivia and Fitz are expressed in repeated outbursts with increasingly absurd logic. Take, for example, the scene after Olivia is rescued from her captors. She said, I cannot be with you because I am angry at you, and I'm angry at you because you started a war for me. He said, but you'd have been dead if I hadn't started a war, and what would I have then? Over and over, Olivia is posing her refusal in the most airtight loop that gives him no way out. All answers are wrong, and all options are null.

Her other even more absurd reason of refusal illustrates Zizek's explanation of ideology to a T: All these people, herself included, have cheated in Grant's election. A fake victory requires absolute commitment to make it real by his effort to be a spotlessly awesome leader. In other words, she is saying, "I did bad things to put you into the White House, and I feel guilty about it, so I am depriving myself --- and you particularly --- our union in order to satisfy this guilt."

So, if Olivia fundamentally does not want to be with Fitz, why does she --- or Shonda Rhimes --- continue to string the audience along? Perhaps more important, why do the audience continue to watch this obviously doomed romance? As Zizek points out, ideology is about having your cake and eat it. You satisfy both the id (pleasure) and the superego (guilt) by both indulging in your desires and feeding your guilt. Rhimes continues to insist that Olivia and Fitz must and must not be together. The fantasy of Vermont is perfect because it is forbidden. That is the only way to have your cake and eat it.

"Your English is so good"

In a feature on the Chinese pianist Yuja Wang in the latest The New Yorker, written by the famed writer Janet Malcolm, I was struck by a particular paragraph ---

Yuja speaks in fluent—more than fluent—English, punctuated by laughter that gives one to understand that what she is saying is not to be taken too seriously, and that she is not a pompous or pretentious person. Occasionally, there is the slightest trace of an accent (vaguely French) and a lapse into the present tense.

This attention paid to Wang's English, in her accent and grammar, is fascinating to me, probably because I have been told many times something similar. "Your English is so good. You hardly have any accent. How old were you when you came to America? Where did you learn English?"

Do I feel offended by this? Well, oddly enough, not when I was on the receiving end of what is intended as compliments, but yes when I read this paragraph by Malcolm.

I have heard that such compliments are considered a "microaggression" nowadays, which I do not necessarily disagree with. Contrary to the movement about microaggressions, however, I don't want to tell people to stopping saying such things to me. I don't want people to stop expressing aggressions, especially micro ones, to each other.

I don't know if I can explain clearly why I think that. There are many reasons. At least one of these is that the expression of microaggression reveals something about the person who is delivering it. The expression itself reveals something about Janet Malcolm, and my reaction to it reveals something about myself. Exactly what that something is is not easily described.

What exactly is it that drove Malcolm to comment on Wang's English? Did she expect Wang to speak English with a Chinese accent or Chinglish and was surprised? Wang started living in North America since 14 (she's now 29). Is it surprising? Or is it because, as a writer, Malcolm is particularly sensitive to languages, particularly accents and grammar? Or did she feel threatened by Wang on an unconscious level and felt the need to emphasize Wang's otherness?

Why am I touched by this paragraph? Perhaps I have always wondered why people complimented on my English and the lack of accent. I shouldn't have dismissed it as mundane compliment and missed the opportunity to understand them more deeply.

In principle, I do not think it is good to prohibit people to express microaggressions, or even macroaggressions. I do not believe in repression and suppression because I believe they lead to explosion. To deny others' aggression is to deny my own. If I want to be allowed to express a full range of my own emotions, then everyone must be allowed as well. As long as we don't kill each other, some verbal expression of aggression may be more healthy than pretending to be perfectly harmonious and perfect.

Without aggression, life would be so lifeless, and we would never have a glimpse into Janet Malcolm in a piece she wrote. We'd never get to know each other, even if such knowledge is always colored with our own projection.

More Psychology on Mr. Robot

There is a lot to mull over if I am to look at "Mr. Robot" from the psychological point of view. In my opinion Sam Esmail is far more deeply invested in psychology in the context of Internet and technology than any other issues on the surface, be it hacking or corporate greed.

It touched a nerve for me because I have been thinking about similar ideas for the past year or two. How do we adapt our social needs and instincts, honed over a hundred thousand years of talking incessantly to our relatives in tribes of a few hundred people into this diffuse community of faceless clicks around the world? This is more or less what I am doing right now, typing on a blog space, leaving some online footprint, while satisfying the ambivalence of both putting my thoughts "out there" for anyone to see and knowing that few, if anyone, will read them.

Of course being lost in anonymity is not a new phenomenon. That began when we moved from agricultural society to the industrial age. That was when we began to leave our village and everyone who knows us from birth. The Web merely took us further down the road. How are our natural instincts holding up in this world?

In Mr. Robot, Elliot Alderson tells us (his imaginary friend), "I hack everybody," from friends to foes or just people he is curious about or rubs him the wrong way. But he has not told anyone he likes or cares about that he has hacked them, except Krista, his psychologist. As I pointed out before, a psychotherapist hacks the patient's mind --- No, that's not accurate; rather, the therapist helps the patient hack his own mind, with his consent of course. So one could argue that the reason why Elliot has told her to her face that "I've hacked you" and then threw out some unpleasant facts about her online footprints is an expression of his hostility and aggression toward her, even though he also appears to want her help and her love (with inevitable transference of his relationship with his mother). This is entirely realistic and astute.

This reminds me of a discussion I heard at one of the meetings I covered when I was reporting on psychiatry a few years ago. The question was whether it is ethical for a psychiatrist to google his patient, especially when the psychiatrist suspects that the patient is lying. I remember one of the arguments was that knowing more facts about a patient can help the psychiatrist better diagnose and treat the underlying disorder. However, the presenter was generally against googling patients without their consent for both ethical and therapeutic reasons. It would probably damage the psychiatrist-patient rapport and do more harm than good.

It does bring up the question of how much one can know another person through their online persona, and then the question of how much one can know another person through face-to-face interactions. While we instinctively give more credibility to the latter type of relationship --- and I am no exception --- I do wonder about the limitations of face-to-face relationships as well. How many times have we heard or participated in conversations in which people talk past each over? Do people really hear each other when they speak? The futility of online debates has been well established, and I suspect the deterioration of democratic process and increasing political polarization have been at least partially caused by moving the civil discourse from town halls to the comment sections of Web sites. Human communication is ineffective enough even when we are looking into each other's eyes. Now we are just tossing our own thoughts out into the world and imagining being heard, all the while never hearing anyone else.

Mr. Robot

I have been a little obsessed with this series lately. Binge-watched Season 1 twice, with some of the segments more than twice. Not being a computer person, what I have picked up is the psychoanalytical parts. I'm guessing the author/showrunner Sam Esmail has probably been analyzed himself. In interviews he admitted to having had OCD and anxiety disorder. Plus he grew up in New Jersey, close to New York City. It's not far-fetched that he is proficient in the psychoanalytical theories.

Putting aside the computer hacking stuff (which is generally regarded as pretty authentic, though not that I could tell) and "Fight Club" references (which Esmail flaunted rather than concealed), the first series can be interpreted as using hacking as a metaphor for psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis (which is back in vogue within the psychotherapy community now after all the shortcuts have more or less failed or faded) is essentially hacking one's own mind. While most of us do not have out-and-out dissociative identity disorder like the main character in the series, we all repress and suppress some things in our mind, as Freud pointed out over a century ago. The unconscious is a huge part of the human mind but inaccessible to our conscious thoughts. Psychoanalysis tries to "hack" at least some of the hidden mind, but behavioral therapy tries to fix us without this. Brilliant.

Separately, Esmail himself has admitted that he was in part inspired by the Arab Spring movement. It took me an unnaturally long time to realize that my visceral reaction to this part of the story --- young people trying to "change the world" --- is connected with my own experience with the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident. It was a traumatic event to my generation, even though I never directly participated. I have tried not to think about it and all the complicated feelings it stirs up. See how this works? We all have things we want to hide from our own mind. The Chinese government has been able to scrub that event from most Chinese people's memory, more easily than "1984," thanks to computers, the Internet, and the Great Fire Wall. What "1984" has gotten wrong is our own complicity in the forgetting. The power forcibly erases it from the digital world of knowledge, while people voluntarily erase it from their mind to forget their feeling of powerlessness.

The World Until Yesterday: Notes #3

After discussing subjects of social structures --- children, elderly, conflicts and war, and tribal boundary and travel --- Jared Diamond made a thesis on risks of daily life. Here he made only a passing mention of an observation that struck a cord with me: People in pre-literate societies talked a lot. They talked all the time about everything and all the time with each other. Given the limits of their daily life and tribal size, they inevitably have to repeat things over and over in conversation. Diamond notes that most anthropologists are initially surprised by just how much chatter goes on in a traditional society. People drift in and out of sleep at night and talk with each other intermittently, unlike we in modern societies who sleep through the night in one block (which is well established as a phenomenon since only the industrial revolution). In one instance, he heard two New Guineans talking for an hour about a pile of sweet potatoes.

Why do people talk so much? Diamond gives several reasons: 1) They can't write things down and go back to the records, so talking and repeating verbally can help them remember stuff. 2) They have no modern diversions like books, movies, TV, the Internet. 3) Incessant gossip is critical for their safety. 

The last part is critical because information can mean life and death --- Someone spotted fruits for foraging some distance southwest of the camp; someone spotted lion tracks nearby; someone got killed by a fallen tree in the woods yesterday; someone has fallen ill with suspected witchcraft; etc. Now it's become apparent that we moderns are no different. The exchange of information is critical too for our survival. The difference is that we don't have to get most of the useful information from talking to others all the time and try to remember by constantly repeating it. We can learn from books, newspapers, TV, YouTube, and the all-mighty Google. We can write things down and look them up later. 

This is an astounding realization, for I just never realized how much humans survive on sharing information. 

I have been wondering for quite a while lately about why we seem to have the tendency to be "addicted" to the Internet and uncontrollably reach for our Smart Phones every idle moment, despite the sense of stress and anxiety and being overwhelmed. No doubt, we are naturally predisposed to collect and share information, and the predisposition --- be it genetic, epigenetic, or some yet unknown mechanism that is vaguely known as "instinct" --- is too simple to distinguish useful information (eg, how to make fire and track animals) and useless information (eg, what shit came out of Donald Trump's mouth today). We are the species that gossip. 

----------------------

This realization brings up the question of the Jungian concept of "collective unconscious." I used to dismiss it and things like "ancient memory" that passes down generations as pseudoscience, but now I'm not sure. These instincts --- whatever the biological mechanism --- are real, such as the instinct to gossip, the fear of snakes or spiders, and the irresistible charm of fireplace. Where did they come from and how did they transmit over time? I don't know, and I find a genetic basis to be very unlikely. 

The World Until Yesterday: Notes #2

As a Chinese person growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I straddled the traditional extended family model and the modern nuclear family model. Because of increased social mobility, both my parents have lived far away from their own families, so that we had a family size of 4 throughout most of my life. Nevertheless I had brief intervals of living at my maternal grandparents' house. So I can easily understand and identify with the family structure in primitive tribes described in the book.

Of course, my experience with extended family did not include some elements in small-scale tribes. For example, in hunter-gatherer societies, parents and children live together in close proximity. Children see their parents have sex all the time and imitate it in sexual games among themselves. This was treated with no particular alarm by adults. 

However, other family characteristics are very familiar: Aunts and uncles share childcare frequently (I played with my cousins and ate at my aunt's house countless times); grandparents take over much of the work; the specific role and boundaries of biological parents are blurry. This stirs up a lot of memories. 

When I was in the nuclear family with my parents and brother, I was in fact home alone most of the time. Both parents went to work, and my brother went to school. I often ran off to my cousins house and played there until my parents came home from work. This was the norm until I started school at 6 and a half years. But my memory of being in my grandparent's house is much stronger and more vivid. In their Shanghai house with narrow, steep, creaky wooden stairs, people came and went all day long, most of whom I knew not. My grandfather's father had three wives, resulting in a huge number of relatives with tenuous and ambiguous relationships. They randomly dropped in for a social visit and exchanged gossips and gifts, and then stayed for a meal. It was said that grandmother could never turn anyone out before lunch. I loitered with my cousins and uncles of the same age in the background, playing games of our own. Children were well fed but otherwise ignored. I never got a fraction of the attention in Shanghai as I did at home as the youngest child. Most of the time it was chaotic and confusing and had nothing to do with me. Yet I often recall the sense of peace and safety in my grandparents' house, with constant chatter (in the Ningbo dialect) and the smell of food. 

Diamond writes that anthropologists have documented their surprise at how far advanced tribal children are in social maturity, compared with children in Western countries. He attributes this maturity with their contacts with adults of various ages and generations all the time, while Western children have limited contacts with adults other than their parents and are often segregated by age in daycare and school. 

I wonder if I would have become a more social person if I had grown up in my grandparents' household.