Silverknife - Philosophy and Spirituality

I've been thinking again about this issue of putting people (and ourselves) in categories, and using those categories as a way of not thinking any more. Because it seems to me that this is a massive potential problem in how we deal with the world, ourselves and other people.

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Psychological research indicates that our minds work on a principle called the "cognitive miser". That means that we naturally try to find the way of thinking about things that requires the least effort. We tend naturally towards shortcuts, heuristics, rules-of-thumb.

One of the biggest jobs for the human mind is building models of the objects we encounter - from furniture to people, people being pretty much the most complex and therefore the hardest (in terms of discrete objects). In a sense, we deal with the world by simulating it in our heads. This is why the idea of experiencing a "real" object is kind of problematic philosophically and psychologically - as soon as we first catch sight of, for example, a chair, we build a model of it in our head based on the evidence from our senses.

When we interact with a chair (ie we sit on it, pick it up, paint it purple), we are really interacting with our mental model of the chair, making adjustments according to the input from our senses (we might have a mental model which shows that the chair is very light, but when we pick it up we find that it is made of a different material than we thought, and is heavier - but until we get that information, the chair is a light object to us).

Simulating people is far more complex, but our minds do an amazing job of it if they have enough information. If you have just met someone, you might have no understanding of them at all and be surprised (in a low-key way) by almost anything they do. But once you've known someone and spent a lot of time with them for several years, you can almost predict how they'll react to any situation. With a really close friend you might be able to finish their sentences. What has happened is that your mental model has become complex enough to be very much like your friend's brain - the simulation in your head will actually act and think very much like them. That's pretty incredible.

The problem comes at the other end of the scale, when you have relatively little information about a person or thing. Your mind is always looking for the easy way, the economical way of thinking about something. So it's going to use the simplest way to understand that thing and begin building its model. It does this by building big overlapping groups, often called called "schemas" by psychologists. They're sort of a loose template for one of those models or simulations. The schema called "furniture" would include characteristics like "not alive", "smaller than an elephant", "solid" and so on. The overlapping schema "things you can sit on" might include things like "has a flattish surface lower than one's head", "solid" and "not on fire".

Of course, we have schemas for people too, and we start building our model of a person by (subconsciously) figuring out which of those overlapping groups the person fits into and putting the schemas together. Those schemas might be "Male", "Adult", etc. And of course they also include schemas like "Black", "Straight", "Hippy", "Manager", and so on.

On the surface of things, this paints a pretty sad picture. We seem to be pre-programmed to tend toward racial prejudice, assumptions and categorising people into little boxes. Even the most enlightened, thoughtful and open-minded of us can't escape the subconscious functioning of our own mind! But like pretty much any theory of predestination, it's flawed.

This isn't some kind of immuteable fate, it's a tendency. It's just like genetic predestination - we are genetically driven to reproduce as fast as possible, act selfishly towards everyone else if there's nothing in it for us (or at least for our genes), etc. etc. But that doesn't mean we have to do it! We're not unconscious animals ruled entirely by these genetic or subconscious tendencies, we have a conscious mind which works over the top of all of these models, and can make choices based on much more complex and worthwhile factors.

It's like the genetic differences between men and women - it's unpopular to recognize it, but men and women are significantly divided by genetics to be better at certain activities. Men are built for action, heavy labour and violence, and women are built for nurture, nesting and practicality, right down to inherited mental structures which haven't changed in thousands of years. That doesn't mean that we have to accept those roles, or that they are somehow the "right thing" to do with our lives! It just means that moving in a direction contrary to those tendencies is a bit harder than it would otherwise be. And isn't human achievement and greatness characterised by fighting against our weaknesses and pushing upstream?

To me, achieving true balance in one's life (which to me equates to greatness) requires that we fight all these tendencies - I test myself equally against stereotypically/genetically "female" abilities and goals as against "male" ones in order to decide if I'm satisfied with my life. To do otherwise would be literally sub-human - denying the higher consciousness and ability to choose which makes us human.

A lot of people (particularly those who would describe themselves as "liberal" - and isn't that just another box to put yourself in, with it's own schema?) are afraid to recognize the existence of these tendencies, because they see it as opening the way to prejudice. I think that unless we're aware of these tendencies, we can't effectively choose because we can't understand what's making us want to choose a certain way.

On the other side are those who are "less conscious", and just accept the tendencies as predestination. It's why I taste bile when I hear comments like "Oh, that's just something guys do", "A woman's touch", "Just like a student", all that rubbish. Most despicable of all, obviously, are those who commit terrible acts based on those assumptions and categories, like beating up Muslims because "they're all in Al Qaeda aren't they?". But we all do it from time to time, those schemas don't go away just because we can see them.

I hate being categorised, or put in a box. I've spent my life trying to break down the walls between all my boxes - I'm a technology geek (I'm always at risk of going broke buying useless little gadgets) but I love low-tech solutions. I cook, I love working with and learning about people. I feel proud when I can cry over something worth crying for, and proud when I can be strong and unemotional in a difficult situation.

I'm afraid of heights so I try and climb on things, I'm terrified of needles so I got a tattoo. I've spent just over half my life learning about and practicing the spiritual path of the ancient shamans, practices which may predate language, but I organise my notes and ritual plans using a personal wiki on a Linux PC. I spent two summers helping build a Quality Management system, and I put every bit of my passion and ability into making that work, to the point of working 11 hour days of my own free choice, but I hate corporate culture and established management structures of all kinds.

And when people ask what I do, and I tell them, they invariably say "Oh, so you're a bit of a hippy are you?". Or "a computer whizzkid". Or in extreme cases "a nutter". Because I'm a shaman and therefore an "alternative therapist", it's assumed that I'll believe in chrystals, homeopathy, acupuncture and probably bloody phrenology in a completely unquestioning way.

Sometimes I get angry at the people who try to put me in boxes. But mostly I just feel sorry for them, because I know they're trapping themselves in much smaller and more painful boxes than they're forcing on me. The builder who can't learn to use the web to find work because he's "not a technical sort of person", the web designer who can't deal with her rocketing stress levels through meditation because "it's for hippies, isn't it?", the client of a homeopath who thinks scientific studies are irrelevent to his choice of treatment because they "don't understand alternative medicine". Those are things worth crying about.

We may sometimes wish we had the power to reach out and break down all the categories, tear out all the divisions and let everyone find out who they actually want to be. But none of us can do that. All we can do is set an example by always being open to new experiences, trying not to act on bad categories or put people in boxes, and doing little things to shake up somebody's experience and make them question their role and assumptions, or just nudge others toward thinking about these issues for a few minutes.