Thread by @jposhaughnessy

1/ Another reason to keep journals--A thread

I've been going through many of my old journals which stretch back to 1979, when I was 19 years old. As I've said elsewhere, our memories are often unreliable narrators, and it can be illuminating to see the many ways this is so

2/ for example, someone asked me recently if I still remembered and practiced anything I learned from studying neurolinguistic programming (NLP) which was developed and popularized in the 1970s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. I said I thought not, but wasn't really sure

3/ but would check my notes. I found them, and realized that a lot of my later work on understanding systems thinking and structures actually began when I read the book "The Structure of Magic, Vol. 1: A Book About Language and Therapy" by Bandler and Grinder.

4/ Absent the journal, I really don't think I'd have connected this early rabbit hole dive with my current thinking about mental maps, deep structure and how we can literally either blind ourselves to something obvious to someone with a richer model and how important these

5/ sometimes (oftentimes) hastily constructed and not very well thought out models of how we see the world can either keep as deluded or inspire great insights. For example (from notes):

Each of us create a representation of the world in which we live,

6/ we create maps, models and structures which we use to generate our behavior. This determines, to a large degree, our experiences, our perception of the world, and what choices are available to us. Goethe's “all that is factual is already theory “ shows that philosophy

7/ we are *certain* of blinds us in many of our searches for truth--we literally can't see what we don't believe exists.
Our nervous system systematically distorts and deletes whole portions of the external “real “world, which is only recreated by the structures our nervous

8/ internally created within our brain.

What's more, it appears that many of our "first filters" come genetically installed to help distinguish real world territory from our representational map.
This “Mind at large“ appears to help us to focus on staying alive

9/ on the planet.

As Huxley points out in the "Doors of Perception" language is the key to perception. Social constraints--agreed-upon social conventions are formed by language and individual constraints source the richness of an individual's model which largely determines

10/ ability to bring success.

Conversely, people in pain are making the best choices from those of which they are aware, but the deficiencies of their model may make additional insight nearly impossible .
The internal limited model optimized for finding "pain" signals, and then

11/ feeds the signal back into the model, which becomes self reinforcing.

If we understand that these systems are merely semantic and can be manipulated, we can chunk things together and form symbols. Creating manipulatable symbols allows us to think and assign meaning.

12/ It is this same ability to manipulate symbols which leads to either to joy or sorrow, with our mental map and deletion of addition by our nervous systems we might avoid the error of mistaking the model for reality:

13/ Some caveats: First, when we generalize by refusing to make distinctions based on context, we severely limit choices-- i.e. not expressing your feelings may be an excellent choice and save your life as a prisoner of war, but is potentially deadly in a marriage.

14/ Secondly, deletion selectively pays attention to certain dimensions of experience while excluding and ignoring others.

A man convinced that his wife doesn’t care about him may dangerously delete ALL of her messages of caring, leading to an erroneous belief of her feelings

15/ In other areas, discretion within the mental model makes shifts in sensory data that are impossible without it. Van Gogh's "Starry Night" is *only* possible if it is distorted by his perception of time and space. "Creativity" could be considered a delineation of the

16/ internal disposition of the mental construct.

Also--Positive/Negative Feedback Loops--a person's expectations filter out and distort his experience to make it consistent with his expectations. We "perceive" what we expect to and miss that which we don't expect.

17/ Idea--Study the structure of language and how we use it to represent our experience, reasoning, thinking, fantasizing and rehearsing to to communicate our model of the world to each other. Complex, richer models potentially lead to ability to "see" and understand more.

18/ Idea--by destroying the structure of a sentence it ceases to make sense it no longer represents a model or any experience that's understandable.

Example “I’m not good enough“ change to “good time enough not I" can alter internal and external meaning.

19/ All systems have structure: If you change the structure, you change the meaning. language is a representational system for our experience All of us have consistent and continuing intuition about our language. If asked if a sentence makes grammatical sense will offer the same

20/ response today and next year because language is rule-based with three major categories of linguistic intuition..."

Back to now: The notes go on for some time, but the reason I'm on this is they remind me that even if we have little active memory of learning something in the

21/ past, I see that we continue to synthesise these ideas with new ones as they come up in the regular course of events. I wonder if we all have a kind of memory not currently loaded in our conscious mind but nevertheless available to use while working on such problems?

22/ I think another great thing that access to long term journals allows is to remind us that many concepts, ideas, models, etc. that we think of as "new" have been around for a lot longer than we might guess. These notes are a good example, but I've also found others covering

23/ ideas--for example, many of the quantum physics hypothesis I think of as "new" are, in fact not, and the only way I know that is finding notes in my journals from sometimes 35 years ago with speculations on ideas that are very similar to the ones making the rounds now.

24/ By starting and maintaining written records of your thoughts and ideas, and rereading them often enough to spark the memory, it might help us as we continue to attempt to refine our thinking and build and synthesise better models by ongoing error-correction. I'm finding it

25/ very helpful as I explore some new additions (and deletions) to what I find to be very useful ways of getting the clearest picture of what's actually going on. Try it, I think you'll be pleased.

In the meantime, I bet this 👇🏻will make it a lot easier. 😎

26/ The Twitter Overlords seem to think I should be limited to 25 tweets in a thread, but thought I'd tag these last notes on from my earlier journal:

Logical semantic relations, viz-- completeness, a kiss implies a person kissing and being kissed

27/ Ambiguity looms large--for example, "investigating FBI agents can be dangerous" can mean "FBI agents conducting an investigation can be dangerous [to those being investigated] OR "for YOU to investigate an FBI agent is possibly dangerous" mean VERY different things

28/ and might have very different consequences for you.

We also create Referential Semantic Indices that help us determine whether a word means one object or another class of objects by putting it into context. Without such a matrix, you could misunderstand a great deal.

29/ Transformations allow comparison between "surface structures" [meaning]that may or may not have the same deep structure meaning. You learn this by the paraphrase test:
"It is easy to scare Barry." and "Barry is easy to scare" are substantially similar, sharing deep and

30/
surface structures, but may differ from deep structures in several ways, the most important being if the surface structure is unclear, it often does not get included in a referential index within your mind, which can allow more noise and miscommunication.

Fin