Introduction

Why are things funny? I've been wondering about this question for a while. Discussing it with my friends, we guessed that it must have something to do with being surprised. After a lot of pondering it was still very vague and it was difficult for us to get a grip on it. We all know when something is funny, but we can't easily define and model it and bring it into the territory of manipulation. Like driving a car without understanding what's under the hood.

I started searching online about this topic, and discovered a book that answered a lot of these questions for me. It's called "Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind" by Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett and Reginald B. Adams. Great book, highly recommended. A bit dry and academic, but very interesting and well thought-out. I'll explain some of the theories from the book in this post.

Imagined worlds: the world of narrative

Let me first begin with the fact that we have world-building faculties in our minds. To give an example, when I say "Tom throws the ball to Rick", some kind of conception of this world pops into your mind automatically. This can be called the world of narrative.

Now, what would you say if I ask you what kind of ball Tom threw to Rick? Maybe you would say it's a generic ball, maybe it's some kind of ball you would expect to be thrown, like a beach ball, or maybe your world didn't even really have a clearly defined ball in it, and has now been extended to include a type of ball. Let me say that the ball was in fact a soccer ball. Your imagined world made out of this narrative is now changed to reflect that.

If you imagined specifics, like the type of ball, or maybe the way Tom or Rick looked, what is the cause of that choice? Throughout our lives we collect certain beliefs about the world. They can be seen as general patterns of knowledge. Like knowing a ball that gets thrown is likely a beach ball, based on what we have experienced, or knowing someone called Tom who would be a likely candidate to put in this scenario. These ideas are stored in our mind, and remain dormant until they're activated in an imagined world.

We have beliefs that are passive - they are just there, and beliefs that are active. I mean, you know that grass is green when I say it, but you weren't thinking about grass until you just read it. I just activated your previously inactive beliefs about grass for you using my narrative. Ha!

You can see the activation of beliefs as a branching out. We start by the word grass, and our mind extends it with the fact that it's green, maybe the fact that it's a plant and that it grows in the soil. Maybe a general image of how grass looks. Our mind branches out to some close associations and brings them into the imagined world.

Another interesting point is that the fact that beliefs can be passive means that contradicting beliefs can co-exist in our minds, and until they get activated into the same imagined world, they don't get resolved. When contradicting beliefs clash in an imagined world, this is often a source of either insight, confusion, or humor.

Let me just shortly explain insight and confusion first before getting deeper into humor:

• Insight is essentially when multiple beliefs are activated in the same imagined world and a new connection is found between them. This gets rewarded.
• Confusion is when multiple beliefs get activated in the same imagined world and they fundamentally contradict each other. Confusion then is essentially motivating you to look for a solution.

The formula for humor

There are specific circumstances in which this clash provides humor. Humor often has a type of setup and a punch line, and this is for a reason.

A belief first needs to get activated in an imagined world, and the humor happens when this activated belief is suddenly shown to be wrong. A key fact is that the activated belief needs to enter covertly, without you realizing in any way that the belief is wrong in this context, and it should be a belief you're sure about. If you're not that committed to the belief, there's no humor. It's also crucial that the belief is actually active, it should already be present in your imagined world.

Two fish in a tank, one turns to the other and asks "How do you drive this thing"

Sorry for killing all the humor, but what's happening is that you see the words about fishes in a tank, and you assume that the sentence is talking about an actual fish tank. Your idea of a fish tank has now covertly entered an imagined world you've built specifically for this sentence. It's now an active belief, and it's a belief you're commited to. It's the default "fish tank" for you. Later in the sentence, it's revealed that the fish tank is actually a vehicle, shattering your commited and active belief about the fish tank. Boom, we got humor.

I know this is just a stupid pun, but try this theory out on other types of humor. So far it has held up well in my personal life. Also read the book if you can get your hands on it, it has way more detailled information, a lot more than I can put in this post. There's a lot of things I'm not explaining here that are important, but it would make this post too long.

So, humor is actually a faculty of the parts of our mind that process beliefs and narrative. It can be seen as a reward for succesfully preventing a wrong belief from getting stored in your mind, where it could stay for a long time. Humor is a lot more, but this functionality is an important part it.

Weaponized humor

Humor has some properties that make it very interesting. First, it's pretty difficult to surpress humor. People can get caught by it by surprise. Second, humor can betray people's beliefs and knowledge.

Some people say that the true display of a man's character is what he laughs at. This is completely true. How funny something is, or if it is even funny to us, depends entirely on our knowledge and what our existing beliefs are, and this could potentially be exploited. An adversary could actually design jokes to make you betray the fact that you have certain knowledge or beliefs, which is an interesting thing to think about.

I'm not sure if there's even a defense to this attack. The only thing I can think of is to be careful of what you laugh at, haha. Luckily this should not be a big threat.

Conclusion

I hope you've learned something new from this post, as reading the book has been very interesting for me so far. I thought this topic would fit nicely here, as it's about one of the emotions that are involved in the process of forming our beliefs.

I'd like to learn about the other epistemological emotions sometime as well, as I have a feeling they're highly involved in the formation of echo chambers and other false belief systems.

If you have any in-depth questions about this theory or other ideas, feel free to leave a comment.

Through the years I've found out that you can't get rid of your emotions without losing everything else that gives life its sparkle. That was one unwelcome discovery, but I'm glad it eventually happened. Castles built on foundations of sand are not meant to last. It's simply against natural order.

Well then, that meant I had to face the fact that I had feelings, and the fact that all my actions and habits I had built over the years were against those feelings. In fact, even designed to surpress and avoid them. My ideas of how the world and other people worked needed a complete revisit.

The prospect of having feelings and passion again is terrifying. At the same time, it's the thing I crave the most. Making its awaited return, it feels odd not stopping it in its tracks when it comes around. Like there's another person in my head that I've grown unfamiliar with over the years. Eager to finally be welcome again, and whispering ideas in my ears with its small and silent voice.

I must admit, they are some good ideas, even if they don't appear so at first sight. Angry ideas, fearful ideas, creative ideas, ideas of music and of images, ideas of love and freedom. Ideas that I will never be able to produce by myself, not in a million years. I was an idiot to run from them for so long, but what can you do. I had my reasons. There truly exists only fight or flight.

What seemed like an unwelcome guest at first is now slowly becoming my greatest friend. Still fragile and weak, its ideas seemed invasive at first. I didn't know how to handle it. Now that we're back together again, I can only see my emotions as my playmates. Your fears can be endeared, and your angers can be resolved. You can have the most beautiful dance with them when they come around. So-called "negative" emotions have an important purpose and need to be listened to. They don't necessarily need to be acted out, but they need to be investigated and given attention, they have their roots. They are from a part of you that gives you your life, and you can not run away from them forever.

Forgive my language, but fucking hell, does it feel great to feel anger and passion. I love being able to cry again. I love music, I love dancing, I love writing. All things that give me life. My cold eyes are slowly warming up again. Inverted living-death, the doors are opening, the core re-engaging. The world runs on emotions.

Self. What is self? Well, some people say the self, or the ego, is really bad and the cause of our troubles, like some christians, and which needs to be fully surrendered to God. New Agers also take this stance, but include the idea that there's also a real self inside of us that needs to come into the foreground. This is similar to the ideas of some eastern religions. Others say that the ego is a valid part of us which needs to be embraced.

So, which one of these is it? There are some big contradictions, how could this be? Let's first start out with explaining what is meant by the ego and the real self, that seems like a good starting point.

Often, when you think of the word ego, you think of the word egotistical. Words like "Me" and "Mine" come to mind. It's the "I". The ego has quite a bad reputation in a lot of groups. Having a big ego is not seen as a good thing. It's often seen as the force in us that takes from others for its own gain, the side of us that loves competition, conquiring and domination, to its own and others' detriment. It's said that it's never satiated and always wants more. More power, more money, more of everything. It wants to be king of the world, but that would not even be enough. It has its own ideas about who it is, and will defend this idea against anyone challenging it, often making up lies for it.

The ego is not all "I want to take over the world!", it's also ideas we keep about ourselves to our own detriment. Think of low self-esteem, the ego is the part of us that has the idea of itself not being worthy, and rejects all evidence that that is not the case, keeping itself stuck in its own faulty ideas. It can act as an internal echo chamber, like I've spoke about earlier.

What about the real self? Discovering and empowering the real self is often seen as the ultimate liberation. People speak of it as Nirvana, or ultimate freedom. They experience their spirits soaring high, and expanding to contain the whole world. Whole religions are built upon discovering the real self. They speak of being in a complete flow with the whole universe, even becoming it. They speak of every singing bird being a heavenly song, and every sight a beauty. Some people see the real self as an innocent child, that needs to be nurtured and acts as our source of creativity.

I've had some experiences with this so-called real self people talk about, at least to a certain point. When I was more active in meditation, I sometimes found myself in a curious place. It was a place where my mind was completely still and all my actions were fluid. All was the present moment, future and past simply didn't exist at that moment. I was fully absorbed into my senses, my thoughts were gone. Every sight had a spark of magic to it, the grass blowing in the wind was the most magnificent sight. Everything had life, even the dead stones in the ground.

It's like I was in another world, I had finally found myself in the real world. It was just the most complete flow, without a care in the world. Everything I was already familiar with looked entirely new, I had a fresh perspective. I was perspective itself. It's similar to some people's descriptions of taking LSD, but I was completely sober. These experiences were pretty scarce, and I sometimes long to always exist in that world.

When I first started meditating, I had never experienced that world before. It completely shocked me to know that there was another way of being in the world, and ever since I've been exploring it.

To bring the story back, I currently believe these two ways of experiencing the world are because of our two split hemispheres in the brain, with the ego reciding in the left hemisphere and the real self reciding in the right hemisphere.

The left hemisphere is concerned with language, models, predictions and tools. It receives information, and breaks it up into parts to find out how it ticks. All with the goal of making the information manipulable and useful. It categorizes, plans, and makes things orderly and explicit. It's concerned with our survival and competition. It's our specialist, and a very useful friend, even if it sometimes has its flaws.

The right hemisphere is concerned with new information, connections, and social experiences. It takes information as a whole and passes it on to the left hemisphere to be deconstructed. It sees things in wholes and relations, in connections. It's the part of us that best understands facial expressions, body language, humor, art, and all other implicit things. It's our generalist, and it's our source of life, allowing us to escape our preconceptions.

One sees all the details in neat order, and the other sees the bigger picture in all its glory. The left hemisphere contains the model, and the right hemisphere brings the new information that evolves the model.

In this perspective, it makes sense that our sense of self is also split into these two faculties of our mind. The two hemispheres are almost completely separate. The biggest channel of communication between them is the corpus callosum, which is a small strip of nerves in the middle between them. Our brain is dual-core, and both hemispheres are able to contain consciousness on their own.

The left hemisphere, concerned with categorization, survival, and usefulness, sees ourselves in neat labels and categories. "I am Tom, I'm a firefighter, I like pizza, and I am a funny guy". It really likes these labels, and therefore it tries to make sure these labels remain consistent, sometimes in the wrong way, by lying to itself. It sees things in separation, causing it to see things in either/or, in black or white. If I am funny, I am not unfunny. It sees things in generalizations. It's concerned with our survival, and therefore it tries to make sure our needs are met, sometimes going a bit too far. It's the ego.

The right hemisphere is very experiential. It's focused on new information and living in the world, from all the senses, which is its sense of self. It sees things in their individual wholeness. It doesn't think in "I am this" and "I am that", it doesn't even think in words because it doesn't know how to use language. Surprisingly, language is not even a requirement for thinking, I've found out. You can still think perfectly fine without language. It thinks implicitly. It's very manual and conscious, because it doesn't have the capability to automate. Remember, it's the generalist, so it doesn't specialize. It sees things in their wholeness, and sees life as it appears. It sees everything in connection to everything else, it even sees itself as being connected to everything, and not separate. It's the real self, as many people call it.

So, to recap, from my research and from my own experience I've come to the conclusion that our senses of self, the ego and the real self, both recide in a different hemisphere in our brains. The hemispheres both do the same things, they just do them in different ways. The same is the case with our sense of self.

In that case, a lot of religious experience and practice is actually the process of going from a predominantly left-hemisphere perspective to the right-hemisphere perspective, which is a good thing, because the right hemisphere is the bringer of the new, and without it we get stuck in our preconceptions and lose our life.

We are severely crippled if we miss any hemisphere, and therefore we need both the ego and the real self to have a complete experience. Still, a lot of people depend too much on the left hemisphere, which means we need to bring ourselves back to the right hemisphere perspective in order to restore the balance again.

To end this post, I want to share a video that perfectly conveys the idea that was lingering in my mind. I discovered the video a couple of days ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU

Expect a future post about all the books and other sources I used as my research, as you might also like to take the intellectual plunge. It was a completely crazy time for me. I hope you enjoyed reading this.

We can't always be the best versions of ourselves. This is simply unsustainable. Sometimes, things happen that throw us off our paths and block us, often out of our control. Dead ends. There are times where everything moves too quickly for you, where you're dropped in a new territory and you feel unprepared to deal with it. A sense of hopelessness falls over you, and you feel disconnected from life. You want to cry, but you can't produce any tears. You're in the desert now. A familiar place, but not a place you like to be.

You wander, go through the motions, and all you see is the bare sand. You're desperate to see the grass, to feel normal again. You might not know how you got here, but you want to get out. You might fall back into habits you wanted to leave behind. You might drop habits you've built up. Cut off from life, you don't see their value anymore.

In these times, we need to hold on, and focus on finding our way out of the desert. We need to take it one step at a time, how difficult each step might be. We need to look for insights, our way out. Try to keep your self-corrective habits intact, they are the key to your escape, how difficult they might be at the moment and how useless they might look.

In the meantime, be kind to yourself. Comfort yourself with some nice music to listen to, give yourself some rest, and be patient with yourself. You don't need to be harsh. We're all humans, and we aren't perfect. How eternal these times might look, it will come to pass. Treat yourself nicely, because you deserve some comfort. We can't love others as ourselves if we don't even love ourselves.

You will reach the other side.

Worked out Adaptable ideology, so far. If you have a better name, please suggest it, as I don't really like it currently.

The core of the ideology is a highly adaptable and evolving lifestyle. In the broadest sense, focused on finding the truth trough testing existing and new beliefs using contradicting knowledge. The ideology can be compared to a living organism that evolves based on its environment.

What are echo chambers?

Many existing belief systems are very fixed, unchanging and too simple, which causes them to lead to contradictions. Some of these belief systems even have mechanisms in place to prevent their members from finding out just exactly how incomplete they are. These belief systems that try to keep contradictions away from their members are called echo chambers, and they are not pretty. They use certain censoring mechanisms to mask their implicit contradictions to keep their members in the dark. Sometimes, they are even worse, and actively teach lies to their members, using these same mechanisms to keep their members from finding out these lies. They can ensnare innocent victims looking for answers, infecting their minds and making them a new member. You could see them as idea-viruses, and they are very dangerous if not careful.

These echo chambers are often completely incompatible with each other, which I believe to be the reason strong polarization exists in so many places of the world. We could just throw away every echo chamber's teachings, but a problem is that many echo chambers contain a portion of truth next to their lies, and the baby should not be thrown out with the bath water. We need to extract the truth out of echo chambers somehow, without falling prey to them.

This requires us to know how echo chambers work, in order to identify them so that they can be neutralized. All echo chambers have certain principles:

• They have an agenda
• There is a clear danger
• The echo chamber always dismisses information that comes from this danger
• The echo chamber becomes increasingly stronger in its beliefs

See https://unilem.org/post/120862 for more details. In essence, be very careful of anything banning certain types of information, or classifying certain sources of information as dangerous. This technique is the foundation of all echo chambers.

Echo chambers are not always in the outside world, echo chambers with the same properties can even form in our own minds. These are internal echo chambers, using fear or shame to keep you from discovering and engaging with contradictions. This is a big part of how certain irrational fears come to be and sustain themselves, like social anxiety. Someone has bad experiences with people, and therefore will always assume that all people are out to hurt them. Because they now think that all people are out to hurt them, they will actively choose to avoid encounters with other people and remain stuck in that idea because of a lack of contradicting experiences. Trying to overcome this will be very shameful and fearful, which are some of the preferred censoring techniques of your mind, but this needs to be overcome to become free.

How to discover echo chambers

The Adaptable ideology tries to tackle both internal and external echo chambers. I assume many people that read this are already in both external and internal echo chambers without their knowledge, including myself, so we first need to establish some tools and practices to identify them. The problem is that both types of echo chambers actively try to hide from us to keep themselves alive, so it's required to do some digging. These tools also help to check if you're not being lured into a new echo chamber whenever you're learning new things. I've succesfully used and am still using the following practices to discover echo chambers:

• Morning Pages
• Meditation
• Actively searching for contradictions in my learned knowledge

See https://unilem.org/post/392635 for more details

There might be more tools, I can imagine that different tools work better for different people, so you'll need to experiment. I can definitely recommend Morning Pages for a starter, as they have been my corner stone in this whole process. I'd like to have a more comprehensive list at some time, but I personally haven't had the need for more practices. Essentially, the tools are ways to reflect on our thoughts and on our day-to-day behaviour, to identify certain patterns.

When trying to discover hidden things in your mind, be aware of teachings that try to categorize certain aspects of your mind so that you can find a balance between these aspects. Think of the 16personalities test and the four male/seven female archetypes. These are very similar to Zodiac signs, in the way you identify with them, but at the same time also try to actively fit into their non-existant categories in your own life. It's half truth, half lie. These categories often don't actually exist, but they will skew your perception because you will try to fit your personality into them, and they will compromise your work. For a detailed explanation of the dangers of categories, see https://unilem.org/post/120849. Often, these teachings first present you with certain categories of your psyche that don't actually exist, and then they say you need to find a balance in them.

The work of discovering echo chambers is extremely similar to Jungian Shadow Work, but be very cautious about those teachings. In Jungian Shadow Work the idea is taught that we need to integrate our shadows to become whole. The problem with this teaching is that some parts of ourselves can't be safely integrated, as they will try to overtake us. Remember, echo chambers have their agendas, and they will try to suck us into them to keep themselves alive. They are malicious and need to be broken down. We can bring them into awareness to extract their truths and to discover how to break them down, but trying to fully integrate them is very dangerous. We're looking for objective truth here, not a "balance" in the sense of being half evil half good, because that's still just evil. I almost fell for these ideas, but discovered their lies when I researched these beliefs critically. We need to be very careful.

The core

The core of this ideology is testing beliefs by actively looking for contradictions, and extracting truths from echo chambers while shielding yourself of their lies. This core needs to be protected from outside influences. Because this core might be flawed initially, it's necessary to also test if it causes any contradictions or has any pitfalls, because if it does, it also needs tweaking. It shouldn't be perverted into another echo chamber. When testing the core, be extremely careful, because you don't want to accidentally encapsulate it and fall into another echo chamber, but do test it. The core is vital to this whole ideology and needs to be strong, and once it's strong it needs to be protected.

There are some other truths we need to establish. There is an objective reality that everyone is part of, and which has the power to provide us with new information to discover faulty beliefs. It's true that we experience reality based on our knowledge. We experience reality subjectively, but reality itself is external and objective. There's a reason our eyes and ears can be compared to measuring devices. We measure the objective world, even if our brain does all its magic on the received information. We can't escape the fact that contradicting information keeps coming our way. We can't shut the real world out, as the real world is external and always there. I've tried to live in a subjective reality, to brainwash myself, but it's impossible and unsustainable. The best thing we can do is to accept these contradictions as gifts, as our liberation. To align our perceptions with truth, which is the objective outside world.

I'm a believer in God. For me God is whatever is outside of my knowledge, the saviour from our wrong ideas in the form of contradictions. The great question mark, destroying our preconceptions left and right. The great creative force, always bringing a fresh light to the things that are dull and fixed. I pray for contradicting knowledge to set me straight. We entirely depend on the outside world to bring us new knowledge, even if we seek it out ourselves. Things just don't exist in our perceptions before discovering them. God helps us discover our contradictions if we're open to His help. Being a believer in God is optional. The belief system is entirely compatible with atheism, as long as you understand that the outside world is the key to our freedom.

Closing words

This is my proposed belief system so far. I've been working for quite a while to test it rigorously and to find out all the pitfalls. Still, we'll definitely find more, so I've made this document alive. It will change from time to time to become more robust. I might also have missed anything, or made certain things too verbose. If you have any feedback to improve the Adaptable belief system and this document, please leave a comment down below. I hope this can be useful for you, because the belief system certainly has been for me.

In my quest to get rid of all echo chambers affecting me, both internal and external, I've discovered some habits which have been immensely helpful. They all have to do with bringing the things that don't get too much attention in ourselves to the foreground. It's about bringing to light parts of ourselves that are there but that we don't acknowledge, for whatever reason.

Maybe these are parts which we don't like about ourselves and which we actively suppress, to the point it's become an automatic behaviour. Maybe we keep ourselves ignorant to these parts because the ignorance benefits us in some way, or maybe they are parts that were hurt in the past and hurt too much to actively bring to light. Maybe it's just a faulty idea that's been unexamined, or anything else. Who can say what's hidden in you waiting to be discovered.

The problem with the hidden parts of ourselves is that we don't see them, but they still influence our lifes without our knowledge. Often, we can only see their effects, but not their causes. Like wind blowing through the trees, you only see the leaves moving, not the wind itself.

Don't underestimate how much the unconscious rules our lifes. It may seem like our consciousness is big and wide, but there's still so much we can miss if we're not careful. Consciousness is a pretty scarce resource, and mechanisms can be created in your mind to actively keep things away from your view, even by yourself.

What can we do? I'm not looking to scare you of big scary monsters lurking in your own mind, I often look at discovering hidden parts of myself like a treasure hunt, like finding treasures and digging them up, that's how it feels for me. To bring the unconscious into consciousness, we need to look at the effects of our hidden parts, and question these behaviours to find out what their origins are. Like looking at moving leaves to find out how wind works.

We don't necessarily know what behaviours of ours are caused by hidden parts, so we need to do a sweep, find patterns, do a little exploration. Often, thoughts that go on inside of our heads do give indications of our concealed parts, but we are quick to dismiss them as thoughts are very transient.

We need a way to make our transient thoughts more concrete, so that they can be examined more closely. The problem is that our thoughts go everywhere, and that mechanisms might be in place to actively surpress certain thoughts. This brings us to our first habit: Morning Pages.

What are Morning Pages? Essentially, it's writing three pages of text, or about 750 words, first thing in the morning after you wake up. Either with pen and paper or on the computer, whatever way you prefer. What do you write about? You write down everything that comes to mind, without censorship. The words are a stream of thought. Just literally everything you think about at that moment, you write it down.

What do you do with them? Nothing really, you don't have to ever read them anymore, if you want. You don't even have to keep them after you wrote them. They work by you writing them, and the most important thing is that they remain completely private. Nobody else should read them, ever. They are completely private, and that's why they work their magic. You can write about anything you think of, no matter what it is, because nobody else will ever see them anyway.

Because you write them first thing in the morning, the mechanisms in your mind that suppress certain thoughts are not awake yet, allowing you to write more freely. I'm not sure why this is the case, but I've noticed it for myself. You will suddenly bring into awareness things you've never had in your awareness before, and you can begin to examine them and see how they influence your life, and take appropriate action if needed. Trying to resolve them somehow, or maybe make a compromise.

These completely changed me in the time I've been using them. They are the absolute cornerstone of my habits and lifestyle now, no doubt. We complain on the Morning Pages, and when we've complained for enough days and get bored of complaining, we start making plans to change it. Writing it down throws us out of loops and keeps us straight, just so we don't have to write any more about it. We get irritated of our own complaining.

It's like exploring the terrain of our minds and mapping it, eager to discover more of the landscape and everything in it. Highly recommended. Keep them every day and always write all the words or pages, even if you have nothing to write about. They will truly change you. It costs about 15 minutes every day, but that's completely worth it for the freedom. Don't expect immediate changes, discoveries often happen sporadically, so be patient when you begin.

The Morning Pages come from the book "The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity" by Julia Cameron. Originally a book to help artists suffering with problems in their creativity, the habit is also a beautiful tool for self correction in general. I can highly recommend the book, even if you're not an artist at all. This was also the case for me.

Another great habit is meditation. I'm not exactly sure how it works, but it did help me quite a lot. Consistenly practicing sitting down and keeping your focus while thoughts are trying to distract you keeps you centered, and this center is very useful when wanting to look at certain behaviour in yourself throughout your day-to-day life. You get better at spotting them in yourself and in others while they happen. I personally use a mantra, but you can probably use other methods as well, as long as you try focusing on something. I do it every morning and evening, for about 15 minutes each.

I have no idea how it works, but a side effect of meditation was that it made me seek out nature and the natural world more, just by itself, over a course of about half a year. I didn't really intend on doing those things, it just happened. Meditation leads to some very slow, very gentle changes. I can definitely recommend it.

These have been the most important habits for keeping myself alligned. If you have anything you'd like to share as well, please let me know in the comments. Time to find some hidden treasures!

Morals and virtues are very important, but make sure to pick the right morals. Be extremely skeptical about them. They can trap you if you're not careful, and bad morals even caused me to completely lose all my love and passion. About four years ago I was curious about the big questions of life, and wanted to find answers. Questions about what makes someone happy, what the meaning of life is, why we are here, questions like that.

I stumbled upon the New Age community, which actually dared to speak about these topics! Previously I was atheist, and didn't really dive too deep into these questions, so people speaking about these kinds of topics were completely new to me. They were actually considering that there was more to life than what met the eye. They made points that what people sense is way more confined than what actually exists in the universe, and that we might not even know the full scale of what exists out there, which made a lot of sense to me.

I learnt about the way the whole universe was made out of frequencies, how the ego worked, what crystals did, symbolism, angels. I got answers to my questions, and a lot more. Apparently, I came here on a mission to help the earth reach a higher level, and I liked the sound of that a lot. I was now initiated and had special knowledge, I finally got to know my predetermined "purpose". The universe had reached me, so I was told, and now I had to play my part.

What did this mean? I had to look out for evil, had to keep myself protected from their influence. I needed to develop my energy systems, because it might've been unprotected! I had to purge and purge and purge bad habits. They might've been demons trying to possess me! I even had to learn good magic in order to protect myself.

Well then, that's what I did. Proud of my newfound purpose and identity, I got to work purging all bad things from my life. I wanted purity, to transcend myself. I was told that was my goal, and that approaching that goal would give me happiness. I started wearing crystals, started being extremely helpful for others, started having daily habits to "keep my chakras clean" and to develop my energy body.

I got into the purge, purge, purge mindset, and anything about myself which I didn't see as part of my identity just needed to be purged. My irritations about others? Purged. Wanting to buy something cool? Purged, it's material pleasure after all, which was bad! I learnt that money was like energy, and that I needed to keep my energy to myself, so I just didn't spend any money on things I liked. Nice food, a piece of candy? Purged. All material pleasure, so it was bad. All things material were shunned, because I learnt that the spiritual was better, and the material would only hold me down and give me misery.

I eventually got the feeling that I was missing something, something completely vital to my experience, something I was completely starving for, but I just couldn't put my finger on it. It felt miserable, like a gaping black hole in my heart I couldn't close. Looking for that missing thing, I thought that maybe I just hadn't cleansed myself enough, and I looked at my diet.

I became vegetarian, because eating meat could also be infecting me, because I was eating death energy. Made a lot of sense at the time. I also had to say to others that I was fully behind that decision, and that I was not just pretending to not like meat anymore, because I needed to be strong, as that would develop my willpower.

This lasted for years, and eventually my taste for meat subsided. So did my taste for all other food. Eating became completely pleasureless. I was eating from a distance. I could see the taste, but I didn't feel pleasure from eating at all. Social interactions, even with friends, were also performed from a distance. Always laughing at their jokes, helping them with their problems, trying to appeal to them, making it look like I was the perfect person. All my encounters were tactical, planned, and cold. I could lay in the grass looking up at the starry night above, and feel completely nothing. I would see stars, but only stars. I felt like a zombie inside. Living, but actually dead. Life was stripped away, and I was just performing the actions. I was just a spectator, and the sense that I was missing something only grew bigger and bigger. Not necessarily depression, but just emptiness. I couldn't feel anger, passion, and love anymore. All pleasure was gone. Those were taken away, while my fears still remained.

Next to the gaping hole, the everlasting hunger, I kept having the sensation that my whole psyche was built on foundations of sand, which could crumble at any moment. In retrospect this was completely true, but at the time I just said to myself that I could hold on, that at some point it would get better and I would finally find the dear, dear life I was scrambling for. I would find what was promised to me.

Well, I didn't, and I considered going down dark paths in order to get my needs met. I had to fulfill my hunger after all, because I felt like an anorexic, a martyr, and I've felt like it for so many years. The thought didn't even occur to me that it was of my own making. The worst part was that I was physically completely healthy, so there were no illnesses I could point at.

Eventually I got interested in the way echo chambers form, because I wanted to find out how people could become so overtaken by them. By this research I made the ironic discovery that I was myself trapped by them, and have been working on escaping them for about half a year now.

I've made the discovery that discipline, in its extreme, has the potential to completely wreck all your love and your feelings. I just focused on purging habits by brute force, New Age style, and purged everything that made me human.

If you have strong morals and virtues about certain things like alcohol, or sex, or what foods you should be eating, diets, anything that involves material pleasures, be extremely critical of them and assess them with a lot of skepticism. Don't make my mistake and kill all your love with your discipline. Material pleasures are good, they are part of being human, and should be embraced in proper moderation. Enjoy them in their fullest, but don't become addicted.

If you want to get rid of copes, addictions and bad habits, don't do it by sheer force, do it with self-love. Try to find out why you are engaging in those practices, try to find the source of the problem. Purging the habit by force won't help in the long run if it's caused by a problem you have. The forces we're working with are stronger than our willpower. Be kind to yourself, and try to resolve whatever is causing you to do those things first. The parts of us engaging in bad habits want to be heard, not supressed. Removing the behaviour itself is less important to focus on.

For all my critique of the New Age movement, I must admit that it taught me a lot about symbolism, magic and the big questions of life. It did open me up a lot to those things, which I appreciate, but still most of it is lies. It appeals to your ego and says you are special, so you believe their lies. It twists the fact that humanity knows nothing in a disgusting way to justify anything and everything. They use it to push their explanations of the unknowable things onto you. They give you flawed methods to fix your problems. New Age is not it, sadly. Following it directly kills your love. At least, that's my experience with it. It's probably different for each, I couldn't tell you.

Currently I'm in the process of recovering my love using a new belief system, based on a lot of existing ideas I've encountered and am trying to bring together. A new set of morals and virtues, focused on embracing new experiences and questioning our existing beliefs. One where we know how our minds get hijacked by ourselves and others, in order to stop them straight in their tracks. It's in the prototyping phase, but I'm having some great results so far.

If you've made it this far, I hope you've found some value in this post. I don't really feel qualified to write about this kind of stuff, but hopefully it could help someone, maybe with similar experiences. Please leave a comment down below, as I'd love to hear your perspectives.

Hidden treasures,
buried in the sand.
How do I hold them,
in my hand?

Who is writing these words,
I don't know.
Barely am I,
familiar with this flow.

Lying, so awake.
On a search,
a quest to find,
my own spring,
my well.
The hidden corners of my mind.

And as I search,
shine my light into the dark.
Around corners,
in the dark alleys.
The forgotten places,
where nobody dare wander.
There it is, I find,
renewed awareness and perception.
I smile and speak to these orphans in my mind.
Starved and alone, long abandoned.
"Let me help you", is what I say.
After all,
I have left them here for so long.
I am the one that let them decay.

I mourn for them.
Let me help you, recover you.
Bring you home, satiate your hunger,
Give you a warm bed and let you rest.
It is true.
After all this time,
I will once more care for you.

Done with all this madness,
shoved in closets.
So conscious I now roam.
These sources of self-denial and untruthfulness.
The undiscovered,
now discovered.
Close these faucets!
I will bring you home.

Seeking out contradictions in my life is having the curious effect of recovering my creativity that I've lost for years. I got spontaneous inspiration to write this, and that doesn't happen often. A good sign.

The last couple of months I've been on a journey to correct a bunch of wrong beliefs. As an unexpected side effect, I've come to discover more about the nature of love and fear.

Anything you think of, a fear of the deep, a fear of death, a fear of spiders, a fear of losing someone you love, all have in common that they are rejections of a potential experience. In all these situations there's the expectation of something undesirable, which you're actively looking to avoid. When someone is afraid of deep water, they can envision themselves drowning in it. When someone fears spiders, they see the spider crawling on their arm and biting them. They want to avoid it actually happening in real life.

Love, on the other hand, is something that pulls us to an experience. When love strikes us, there's a sense in which we want to be closer to the experience. We want to experience something, be absorbed into it. When we love cycling or hiking, or love someone else, we want to experience more of them. We may also envision the experience, like with fear. We may see ourselves climbing a mountain and feeling joy and love. Love pulls us to experiences. We want to experience whatever we love.

Fear makes us not want to experience something, and love makes us want to experience something. There's another way in which these two emotions are separate. Fear often has a sense of familiarity with it, a sense of "Oh no, here we go again". We often know what we are afraid of, and dread being in that state of mind again. We know what fear is like, it's something we might've experienced often, and it's familiar to us.

On the other hand, love is the complete opposite. Love is always fresh, revitalizing. Have you ever felt love that was boring or familiar? For me it always invokes a sense of newness and life. It's the opposite of fear. Where fear is always the same horrible stuff, love is always fresh and renewing. It makes us feel alive, it gives a sense of openness and possibility, whereas fear gives a sense of closedness and entrapment.

I've noticed something new the last couple of weeks which I've never seen before. Fear transparently switching to love. It's a really weird feeling, and now I'm convinced the two are actually really similar. They are like the two sides of a coin, but still the same coin, if you know what I mean. Like the way ice and steam are still both water, but just two different states. The way darkness is just absence of light. It happened multiple times over the span of weeks, but each time was just as weird. It always began as fear, and then it just shifted into love, just by itself. It's like fear opened itself up, and by the act of opening it turned into love, without any other change necessary.

I live terrified of the future because of the things I'm going to make myself do, but at the same time I feel love for the new possibilities that might open up, and the two mix together and transform into each other. I always thought they were separate, and it's not something I'm used to.

It's difficult to put this kind of stuff into words. I hope I don't appear like some intellectual that is trying to analyze his own emotions to look smart. I just wanted to share this, as I've never experienced something like it before. What are your thoughts, maybe you've experienced something similar? I'd love to know!

During my research I found some interesting things about the way echo chambers work. They all have the same patterns that make them what they are, which I will attempt to model in this post. Hopefully this model can be used to classify existing echo chambers of all kinds. An interesting thing I discovered is that echo chambers can form as groups, like a traditional echo chamber you would normally think off, but they can also exist in an individual. My research on echo chambers happened during a time when I was also overcoming my low self-esteem issues, and I discovered that the reason I had low self-esteem was that I had developed an echo chamber in my own mind. The principles are exactly the same, how wild is that!

What's the first thing you think about when you see the word echo chamber? Closedness? Stubbornness? Faulty reasoning? Those are the words that come up for me. Generally, echo chambers have to do with a certain closedness, but what kind of closedness? What happens when you show someone part of an echo chamber something that completely contradicts their view? Normally, they will completely dismiss it, for any reason. It's often not a good reason in your opinion, but it is a reason. You might get blamed for trying to influence them, or shamed. How could you think these things, are you stupid, uninformed?

In echo chambers there is also always an enemy, or a danger. Something that is coming for them to harm or influence them, something that threatens them. Think about some echo chambers you know, what do they perceive as their biggest threats? For the left it's the right, and for the right it's the left. Well, how do they respond to those threats? They attack them, reject them, ignore them, all of the above. They try to get rid of the threat somehow.

What does this lead to? When people are in echo chambers, all they see is more of others that are also in these echo chambers. If someone posts something that contradicts their view, they will dismiss it for any reason, as it is perceived as dangerous to them. This makes sense, because they have the idea that the danger, the other side, is actively trying to attack or influence them. When this idea exists, it makes sense that they actively try to avoid these pieces of information. They're just trying to stay safe, to their own detriment. The problem is that this idea leads to them remaining stuck in echo chambers, without them even realizing. This idea is incredibly good at hiding itself, as it appears very reasonable to the mind that contains it. After all, it's just perceived as a way to avoid danger. The fact that they now only see more of their own ideologies leads them to get pulled farther and farther into it. All their sources are from others that are part of their ideologies, and everything outside of it is dismissed. This is the core of the way echo chambers work.

To the readers of this post, please look at the sources of your news, other media you consume, and people you talk to. I want you to note how many of these sources are from like-minded people, people that are part of your own group and ideology. The idea that all other sources besides the ones of your own ideology are dangerous and untrustworthy hides itself extremely well, so please consider that you yourself may in fact be trapped by this idea. I'm not trying to threaten you or endanger you. If whatever I'm talking about in this post were true, wouldn't you want to find out? Wouldn't you want to know that you were potentially living in a bubble?

You can see it as an experiment, and if whatever I'm saying is false you can just go back to what you were previously doing. You have all the freedom to do what you want to do, you're not commited to anything. If all your news sources are from like-minded people, I suggest seeking out some completely contradictory sources and engaging with them, as an experiment to see if what I'm saying is true or false. Please don't dismiss them straight away, actually try to explore them, try to learn more about them, and their reasons for being the way they are and the reasons they believe what they do. You potentially have freedom to gain, and if what I'm saying turns out to be manipulation and lies, you will not be harmed in any way for just doing an experiment.

So, the general principles of all echo chambers are as follows:

• 💡 There is an agenda: This may seem obvious, but echo chambers always have a belief system which its members share, and its agenda is making sure this belief system is sustained. Often, in really big echo chambers, the agenda might also be to gain new members and to keep these members once they're in, but this may differ per echo chamber.
• ⚠️ There is a clear danger: There is the idea that something is trying to attack or hurt the echo chamber. The echo chamber reacts to this perceived danger by trying to get rid of the threat, by offense or by avoidance.
• 🥾 The echo chamber always dismisses information that comes from this danger: In echo chambers where gaining new and/or keeping existing members is part of the agenda, the idea is implanted into members that the danger is actively trying to influence the members to hurt them. This causes members themselves to reject contradicting sources, and this makes the echo chamber platform-independent. It's a form of self-censorship. Contradicting sources, including members, may also be hidden by censorship of someone within the echo chamber that has the power to do so. This is often the case with echo chambers that don't have keeping and/or gaining members as a part of the agenda, but not limited to them. In any case, the echo chamber always makes sure that contradicting information by the danger doesn't reach its members.
• 🕳️ The echo chamber becomes increasingly stronger in its beliefs: Because the only sources of information are now from within the echo chamber, the echo chamber falls deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole. The bigger the perceived danger, the more extreme the beliefs.

In all these principles, I'm talking about a perceived danger. This danger may or may not be real, and it may or may not be as big as the echo chamber thinks it is. It really depends. To not get stuck in preconceptions, there is a difficult balance to be made. On one hand the danger should be properly researched so as not to get stuck in an echo chamber. The scope of the danger needs to be properly assessed. On the other hand, this requires the researcher to expose themselve to a potential danger: a potential malicious influence, as the scope of the danger has not been assessed at this point, and may be more dangerous than expected. There is an inherent risk in exploring dangers, but there may potentially be a big reward: alleviation of fears, and thus freedom of mind. This requires some fortitude.

These echo chambers also form in individuals. If you have some bad experiences with people, this might lead you to believe that these people are dangerous. In the same way, these dangers will be actively avoided because of their perceived danger, which leads you deeper and deeper into your own echo chamber because you'll never get contradictory information. If contradictory information manages to reach your mind, there are all kinds of mechanisms at work which automatically make sure these thoughts get no foothold, mostly in the form of fear and anxiety bubbling up, or something shaming you for having those kinds of thoughts, or explaining the contradictory information away with faulty reasoning. Anything to make sure you don't engage with the thoughts. Isn't the parallel interesting?

In the same way these personal echo chambers need a fresh danger assessment, and this requires actively exposing yourself to the same dangers. This will spawn a lot of resistance by parts of your own mind in the form of fear, shame, or faulty reasoning. It will be extremely uncomfortable, but it gets better, and it's the road to freedom. It may also require reassessing contradictory experiences which have been rejected by your mind in the past, which requires some insight and awareness. The principles are exactly the same, and it all has to do with facing fears.

How do you detect if you're in any kind of echo chamber? This requires developing self-awareness and paying attention. Generally, things that make you anxious, fearful, angry or make you feel shameful are good indicators of dangers your echo chambers may be built on. When one of these is noticed as a pattern in your life, it needs to undergo a fresh danger assessment. The danger needs to be tested. This can be in the form of research and by exposure, maybe in the form of experiments. Of course, a fear of snakes is very reasonable, but a fear of other people might not be. This will need to be assessed.

There are some tools which make the detection process easier, which have been very helpful in my journey of detecting and destroying my own internal and external echo chambers. Expect a post about this soon. Thanks for reading. If you think a part of this post is incomplete or incorrect, please leave a comment below. I'd love for these principles to be completely coherent, so feedback is very welcome.

Edit: Thanks @bobman@unilem.org for the feedback in https://unilem.org/comment/536169! I've added the first principle that all echo chambers have an agenda, and changed the dismissing information principle to include censoring by someone that has the power to do so.

Have you ever had the experience of just minding your own business, when suddenly something in the corner of your eyes catches your attention? What’s that about?

This is something universal amongst many animals that have separate brain hemispheres. Imagine a bird sitting in a tree eating an apple, when it suddenly spots a buzzard approaching in the corner of its eyes, which alerts it to hide. The bird was paying direct attention to the apple it was eating, but at the same time a separate attention was working to spot any potential predators outside of its direct focus. You can see why this has an evolutionary advantage.

In humans this works the same way, we can focus on the task at hand, but if we spot something in the corners of our eyes we can rapidly change our focus to that point. These are two different types of attention at work.

What are the properties of these two types of attention? Most of us are the most familiar with the first type of attention, direct focus. We work on something, like washing our hands, and see our own hands moving around. We focus on the task. This attention magnifies whatever the current task is, and doesn’t take into account whatever is outside of it. Like a lens, this attention only sees whatever is in focus: the current task.

The second type of attention is a bit different. Usually it goes unnoticed, because it often works more outside of our consciousness, but not necessarily. This type of attention sees the things that are out of focus: whatever’s outside of the current task. It sees the blurry corners of our eyes, and can signal us whenever something interesting happens, so we can point our direct attention at it and see it clearer.

I like to give these types of attention a name. Let’s call the direct type of attention the depth attention, and the more vague type of attention the breadth attention. One of them focuses and can see the details, but can not see whatever’s outside of focus, and the other sees whatever’s outside of focus, but not what is in focus. These two are exclusive.

A proper analogy would be a microscope. Imagine you have a book. At first you can see it by itself and with its surrounding objects, but the only thing you can see are the objects themselves. Now you pick out the book and look at a page under a microscope. Zoom in, and you see each letter by itself. Zoom even further, and you will see every individual fiber the paper is made out of. If you would look at the zoomed in image, you wouldn’t even know that you are looking at a book, but look at the book outside of the microscope, and you wouldn’t even know that the paper of the book is made out of individual fibers if you hadn’t looked at a page under the microscope. Breadth and depth are mutually exclusive, which warrant the two types of attention. You can not have both at the same time.

To solve this mutual exclusion, your brain is divided into two hemispheres, each being in charge of one of the two types of attention, and they share information with each other to work together. Your left hemisphere is in charge of the depth attention, and your right hemisphere is in charge of the breadth attention.

This is far from the only differences between the two hemispheres, but this difference is one part of the general pattern that exists between the relationship of the two hemispheres, and in the way knowledge works. Expect more posts about these differences.

A useful analogy is that the two hemispheres work together like CPU cores do in a computer. They can both work on their own tasks, but they can also share information with each other. They function relatively independent from one another, but have access to information from the other, and need it to work properly.

This sentence is a lie.

Paradoxes: often funny, often baffling. What are they, and where do they come from?

Let’s begin with models. What are models? Models are essentially simplifications of principles and systems in the real world, and this makes them very useful, as we can use them to manipulate and predict the world. Some examples of models are language, maps, mathematics, music sheets, weather forecasts, and the laws of nature.

A model is essentially made up of recognized patterns in real life: they are representations of the real world, but not the real thing itself. When models are incomplete, they are extended and changed so that they become more accurate. The problem is that the more complex a model becomes, the less usable and understandable it is because of its complexity.

What often happens with complex systems is that the system is first broken up into smaller parts, and that a model is made for each part of the system, so that this model can be used to predict or manipulate only this small part. These small models can then be used together to predict the entire system.

What happens when someone tries to make a fully accurate model of an extremely complex system that cannot easily be broken up into separate parts? The model has to account for every case in the real situation, and will become as complex as the real system itself, making it a useless model. To make a useful model for an extremely complex system, it is required that some cases in the system are not considered, so that the model is simpler but less accurate.

Because models are made for separate parts, models can also clash with each other when they are used together, if they have different mechanics or have mismatching purposes. Think of using weather forecasting models and music sheets together, I can’t think of a situation in which they would be compatible, because they have a completely different use case. This means that some systems can not be used together, as they are too different from one another. This can even happen with specific mechanics in one model. Let’s call them submodels.

I suppose the whole universe could be seen as an extremely complex system that can often not be broken up into separate parts. Models for gravity work very well to utilize and predict gravity, but try making a fully accurate model of the human brain, and it will become way too complex. In this case the principle of gravity can be succesfully broken up from all phenomena into a separate part. The human brain is more difficult to break up into smaller parts, because it works more as a whole.

Well then, with that out of the way, what are paradoxes? I’ve never seen a paradox in real life, but always in the context of language or mathematics, or any other model. As far as I understand, paradoxes occur because a model is incomplete, or limited in other ways.

Maybe you’ve heard of the Sorites paradox (paradox of the heap). Imagine you have a heap of sand, and you remove grains of sand, one at a time. At how many remaining grains of sand will it stop being a heap? If it always stays a heap, will it still be a heap when only one grain remains? Because the concept of a heap in language is arbitrary, it cannot be quantified, leading to the paradox. I only know what a heap is based on what others have called a heap, not by how many grains of sand are in it.

There’s a mismatch in the arbitrary concept of a heap and the knowledge that a heap is made up of individual grains of sand. This means that language is also an incomplete model: it is arbitrary to an extent. Defining exactly how many grains of sand together is considered a heap would solve this problem, but that would make language too complex, so it’s left out. Imagine having to define exactly how many trees together is a forest. Nobody wants that, so we deal with paradoxes.

The first sentence in this post, this sentence is a lie, refers to itself as the sentence and negates itself. The sentence it refers to negates itself, so it negates its own negation, leading to paradox. This is also an example of two mechanics of language being incompatible, just like the previous example. In this case the mechanics are the referrence to the whole sentence and the negation. This is also an example of parts of a system not properly working together, where the subsystems collide.

So, to conclude, paradoxes probably don’t exist in the real world, at least not as far as I’m aware, but only exist in our heads, because our models have flaws. Discovering paradoxes is a great way to discover problems in our models and to make them better, both with our internal and our external models. Paradoxes have definitely led to great improvements in the field of mathematics from what I know, and probably also in many other fields. Contradictions lead to new discoveries, but I wonder if we’ll ever get rid of them, judging by the nature of what we are dealing with. All I know is, when you discover contradictions, go after them, because they are the edges of our preconceptions.

I hope this was a clear and coherent story. If you have opinions or feedback, please leave a comment, as I’d love to hear more perspectives.

Knowledge is like sunlight: it lets us see, but it hides the stars.

As humans, we have senses that allow us to receive information about the outside world. Very useful, but by default this is just raw information. When you see something, it’s just light-detecting cells in your eyes firing, and when you touch something, it’s just electricity moving up your spinal cord.

Your brain has all kinds of faculties to post-process this information to make a more coherent image, like stitching the twodimensional images both eyes separately receive together to create a threedimensional experience.

Another example, your eyes can only detect the signal strength of three separate color frequencies: red, green and blue, and these colors plus their signal strengths get mixed in the brain so we can experience different colors. This is fun and all, but this is still relatively raw information, and says nothing about what is actually being sensed. How does your brain even know what it is sensing?

Your brain is smart, and it can learn things about the outside world. Imagine a small child being given a grape for the first time. The child knows nothing about the grape, and is made to eat it by his mother. The child enjoys the grape, and this has created an association in his brain, something like this, with every arrow resembling processing done on the information:

My eye cells fire in this configuration -> I see a shiny green sphere -> This is a grape -> I can eat this grape and it will taste delicious.

This is knowledge, and without it we would be very dumb. This is a very abstract example, and this only works if your brain even has a concept of “delicious”, but luckily we are are already born with some knowledge about how to process the outside world, like that food is good for us.

This mechanism works for every sense, and taps on multiple senses at the same time: experience something, make and/or refine an association, and use this association in the future to predict and manipulate the world. This learning process is always going on when we are conscious, even if we aren’t aware of this.

Now then, this all sounds extremely useful, what is the dark side? I won’t deny its extreme usefulness, without it we couldn’t function at all, as everything would just be noise, but knowledge has some properties that can be problematic. What happens if the only thing we know about is grapes? With no other reference material, we will think that everything is a grape: it is advantageous for us to do so. Things that resemble grapes for us, which is everything because of our extremely limited knowledge, might be as delicious as the grape we had in the past. We don’t only use our knowledge specifically in the context of our specific past experience, we also tap into it in more unknown situations, in the hopes of having the same result.

Keeping this in mind, what happens to a specialist that has studied volcanoes for 40 years? He will be extremely knowledgeable about volcanoes, obviously, and will be extremely helpful if information about volcanoes is desired. What happens if you ask him about something outside of his own domain, something he doesn’t have knowledge about, like the question of what made the dinosaurs extinct? He might just say that volcanoes killed the dinosaurs, having been so immersed in this subject matter throughout his life.

Being confronted by an unknown problem, it makes sense that he will tap on the pool of knowledge that has worked for him in the past, but you can see why this is problematic. There is a certain difficulty with seeing problems in a broader context, as every experience is filtered through his knowledge, and it’s difficult to shake off. I’ve also been here myself.

Another problem with knowledge, categorization. Whatever’s a grape is not something else. Whatever’s orange is not red or yellow. Because knowledge creates categories, distinct borders can form between concepts. Can we really look at something orange and see either red or yellow? I know I can’t, because those colors don’t fit in what I define as orange. Categorization is incredibly useful to grasp the world, but it also separates, and might lead us to miss the things that bridge categories to each other. It creates a dividing line that might not necessarily exist in the real world.

The final problem with knowledge in this article: faulty experience. What happens if bad things are experienced, like a couple of people hurting you that happen to be bald? Because knowledge is used for future predictions, you might now think that all bald people are out to hurt you. Of course this is wrong, but because you now distrust all bald people so badly, you choose not to engage with them anymore, and you will never get the chance to learn that this knowledge is wrong.

It’s a deadly combo-wombo that leads to all kinds of problems and misery, and is something which I’ve began realizing and correcting in my own life recently, with some wild results. Not specifically with bald people, that’s just as an example. Stay tuned for a more in-depth post about this.

This is also the case with learning new things, learn bad knowledge that teaches you to seek out more bad knowledge, and you get stuck in a self-reinforcing loop. This is a big part of how echo chambers happen.

So, what can we do? I’d say that all these three problems also have a counter strategy:

⚔️ Specialism - 🛡️Generalism: Broadening our knowledge, getting informed about different domains than our own so we have more diverse knowledge to use for unknown problems. The more diverse the knowledge the better, as it allows us to make better predictions.

⚔️ Categories - 🛡️Similarities: Consciously looking for connections between categories, seeing if there are similarities, and nurturing these similarities. This one is difficult as it is more unconscious, and often already happens anyway when learning new things, it’s then a matter of not dismissing the connection because of other differences, as far as it is reasonable.

⚔️ Faulty experience - 🛡️New experience: This one sucks the most, we need to override our fears and put ourselves in situations that we think might hurt us, to see if our predictions are right or not. If not, they will slowly correct themselves based on our new experience. To cope with the fear, I like to see it as tuning myself, like you’d tune a car to work better, to make the experience more detached. In the case of knowledge, we need to expose ourselves deliberately to different views whenever we seek out new information.

Interesting is that all the counter strategies have to do with learning new information. If you’ve made it this far, please leave feedback below, as feedback is very welcome and helps a lot.

Hello and welcome! For about half a year I’ve been researching about the ways belief systems get built, and how new information can change and refine those belief systems.

It’s a bit unusual for me to set up a community. I essentially wanted a platform to discuss these things with others, and to share what I’ve learnt, as I think it is fascinating. Things like the way new information gets processed into mental systems, how these systems can have shortcomings and lead to bias, how these systems are challenged and refined, the way the human brain is structured to predict and manipulate the world, but also to refine these predictive models, and much much more, anything like that.

Expect posts from me about the relationship between synthesis and analysis, between generalists and analysts, between depth and breadth and the way knowledge works.

Please also post yourself, as I’d love to hear more perspectives!