axes of individuation with relation to value judgments (transcript):

[This section is an edited transcript.]

Okay. So I want to talk about sort of two separate axes of something like "individuation versus blending." And I think that these two axes aren't completely separable, but they can be distinguished. And I think that can be very profitable, because there's some stuff that is sort of emotionally charged around these sorts of things.

So the first axis is sort of cultural slash ideological. And there's this idea that, different cultures are sort of, the individuals in those cultures are sort of, more or less, blended or synced. Actually, there might be three dimensions, and I think I can break out all three without messing up the flow of this video too much.

But, first, some concrete examples, at least from ethnomethodological descriptions. I don't know how accurate these are, or how sort of colonialist/imperialist colored they are, but, there's descriptions of, let's say young men, of while they're hunting or something.

I've read descriptions of, how, the group of men, they're almost moving together as a single organism or a single entity without verbal coordination. And, maybe, without even necessarily necessarily looking at each other: one person is quietly pulling back the branches while the other person draws the bow.

And they walk, or are still, at the same time. And then, somehow, imperceptibly, pointing out various aspects of the landscape, to each other. And, there's some palpable sense, apparently, about how there's sort of, almost, romanticizing this a bit, and maybe blending different accounts, but almost a perpetual trance state or something. Where, the boundaries between different individuals are in some sense muted or absent.

From accounts like this, people are quick to point out things like, perhaps, a Western or modern kind of individualism or individuation isn't a foregone conclusion and isn't necessarily the best way for people to be. We, sociologically, talk about atomism or an atomized society, which is arguably facilitated by money and capitalism, etc., speaking loosely.

So, this spectrum between kind of blended versus individuated--people sometimes feel emotionally charged about that, if someone is seemingly advocating for one or the other. And so I sort of want to take this, and bracket it, and kind of set it aside, for a moment. We're modeling a complex thing as a spectrum. And, I don't want to put a value judgment on it, sort of at this time, and then we'll talk about the other dimensions, and then sort of talk about kind of how these dimensions can be related to each other.

And, so another dimension, and this is the new dimension that I'm adding, for clarity, is something like, how do the individuals actually think or feel about this from the inside? We can sort of observe the behaviors and note the synchrony or blendedness, whether homogenous or specialized. (I suppose atomization usually refers to social relations versus work relations. And I suppose there's maybe different ways to slice things when social relations and work relations are less distinct.)

In any case, we can look at what people are doing, behaviorally, and we can note the degree of seamlessness or unity, in some way. But, we could maybe imagine, on the inside people thinking and feeling about what they're doing in many different kinds of ways: "We are working alone, together.", "I'm working as part of a team.", "We are the same entity.", "All people have the same consciousness looking out from behind their eyes.", and so on. Some people might be working on a team, and some people might feel themselves to be sort of absorbed into a group consciousness, or agency, or will. People feel very strongly about these sorts of things, about what's desirable, what's allowed, what's impossible, what's primitive, and so on. It can be very ideological, religious, spiritual, emotionally laden. People care about what other people think and what other people think about what other people think. Some of these things, first-pass, might feel very profound, numinous, ultimate, or people imagine them to be. And some people find some of these horrifying.

And so again, not yet placing value judgements or whatever, at this time, let's put this second kind of spectrum aside.

Okay. And so there's another dimension. This is the final one of the three. And, this is dimension is kind of what the body, mind, brain system is kind of doing at the "bare metal," in terms of the prereflective, low level sensory processing, of self and other, of incoming sensory phenomenona, and that kind of thing.

So, this spectrum here, I will claim is something about, how well, how correctly, how skillfully--I'm sort of bleeding in "value language," here, or at least an objective-ish, scalar, fake measure, here, of how well any individual brain/mind system is identifying the type and origin of where various multimodal signals are coming from.

So, I think it's pretty uncontroversial, in neuroscience. I forget the technical terms and stuff, but it's a very big deal to the brain, whether the person's body initiated the action and attendant/caused sensory phenomena or whether something outside the person impinged on the body, for example whether a sound was because the person themself made the sound or whether the sound was because a tweig snapped, thirty feet away, in the forest.

Or, whether a person is touching themselves--this gets sort of factored out and ignored usually--or it's an ant, or a poisonous insect, or a snake is crawling on the person. So there's a huge, huge difference to the brain, whether the person generated a sensation, or, something, that was not the volitional will of the person, generated the sensation. And this goes all the way to did the twig snap thirty milliseconds before I put my foot down or thirty milliseconds after I put my foot down. Huge difference, survival-wise.

And, this goes into why people sort of can't tickle themselves and just a whole slew of really low level sensory processing stuff.

And, so, I have this kind of a metaphor, kind of not, where the brain is one percent hardware and 99% software. So I'll make the claim that, people not only vary, kind of, in how well they're making sense of incoming stimuli, and whether it's self or other, or self and environment. But, also, through training like meditation or etc., over long periods of time, thousands of hours, people can become massively better at incredibly deep, prereflective sensory processing and origin/cause determination.

(Side note: If people feel like they have a shaky or porous identity, or they have bad boundaries, this really does tend to correlate, with any individual being an exception, with causal/origin sensory processing. If people feel like they have a strong sense of identity and good boundaries, this really does tend to correlate with deep, preflective causal/origin sensory processing. We build our high-level ontologies and experience out of this low-level sensory processing. And meditation ultimately can refactor the entire stack.)

And, again, this is very physical, very fundamental--the system is relying on, the delta in transmission times between different path lengths in neural circuits, at an incredibly low level. But, even so, it's extremely, extremely malleable. Causality, timing, deconvolution, source identification are, deep down, just a really intrinsic part of what brains do.

Okay. So, now, all these three axes are interrelated, they're only weakly separable, and/but they can vary somewhat independently. So, a person can have really good, low level sensory processing, really good boundaries and identity, in the third axis sense. And, at the same time, feel really blended with a group, like they are an appendage of a supermind.

So, yeah, so the point, here, is something like, people sometimes get sort of upset when I talk about how there's this low-level axis of individuation that can be trained, or, better: de-confused. The value judgment comes from not just a sort of nod to "objectivity," which is very useful and powerful frame but also problematically entangled with authoritarianism, sometimes. But, the value judgment is especially because of a sort of "observational trend"--if you meditate, over time, you'll maybe find that your mind "wants" to make this third axis distinction more and more skillfully, that your mind is hungry for it, takes every chance to do it better. Somehow, this third axis is sort of just what a mind automatically, spontaneously does, when it's unimpeded, when nothing's in the way. (You certainly don't have to take my word for it, though!)

In addition, in terms of the "only weakly separable" thing, development along the third axis does affect people's experience and preferences along the first two axes. And development on the third axis improves people agency and choicefulness with respect to the first two axes.

Additionally, development along the third axis increases resilience to coercion, confusion, and exploitation along the first two axes, e.g. in cult (or cult-like) or charismatic environments or situations. Some types of coercive blending or charismatic influence fundamentally rely on self/other confusions of the third axis. (Modeling it more granularly, the third axis is more like a splash pattern, or layers of splash pattern, of relative confusion and relative "clarity," loosely speaking, all things being equal.) Charismatic figures, sometimes (whether they realize it or not) "reach for," exploit, third-axis confusions to create "exogenous" experiences of blending or to manufacture experiential evidence for particular metaphysical positions.

Again, a person who develops on the third axis, all things being equal, long run, will be more resilient and choiceful, and will be relatively less exploitable and coercible, all things being equal.

So I think that's a really important point to make.

So, the pastoral, romanticized, blended experience, caricatured, has both good and bad things to offer. And the western, modern experience, caricatured, has both good and bad things to offer. And, this is all a big simplification, but "third axis" development allows a person to move beyond caricatures and knee-jerk value judgments, about ways of being, and to choicefully engage in nuanced ways of being and to invite others to do so as well. "Third axis" development allows someone to draw their own conclusions about all three axes.