hmm this is very interesting mh.bmj.com/content/medhum… cc @nosilverv@magicianbrain I should write some threads about it because it links up super generatively with the theme of adhd, theology, hierarchy, narrative, etc
@nosilverv@magicianbrain it's about a research field that emerged from the insight that we experience abstraction as a kind of distance: if something is abstract, low in detail, then it's probably "far away" in a more general way than just in visual perception
@nosilverv@magicianbrain so he's linking that with Ratcliffe's "Experiences of Depression", viewing depression as a kind of abstraction of psychological distance
@nosilverv@magicianbrain "there is a small (but growing) body of evidence that exposing the depressed and the anxious to stimuli that exhibit a construal level opposite to that which characterises their condition yields positive therapeutic results"
@nosilverv@magicianbrain "prompting depressed and recovered individuals to recall an autobiographical memory in abstract and concrete modes yields a positive impact in the concrete mode"
@nosilverv@magicianbrain "complementing treatment as usual (TAU) for depression with concreteness training ‘seems to be an efficacious treatment for mild to moderate depression in primary care"
cc also @Meaningness; nihilism as an inflammation of the abstraction gland
@nosilverv@magicianbrain@Meaningness he moves on delightfully to propose Shannon entropy as a quantifiable proxy for abstraction level of different artifacts and media, with the goal of being able to evaluate experiments in treating anxiety and depression
I'm already excited to think about this in connection with Christopher Alexander and the pursuit of healing architecture, living geometry, etc; consider also how ADHD and depression can be alleviated with immersion in the entropic fractal of the natural world
oh, hmm: the simplest definition of image entropy will consider the photo to be "almost purely random", and while this metric may be useful to some extent, Carney suggests we really need a "cognitively thick" notion of entropy: a face is far from noise!
that struck me as salient because Christopher Alexander's books are full of such juxtapositions of images, and "The Nature of Order" is all about finding a way to describe and rank patterns in terms of some kind of "non-Cartesian" entropy: which of these patterns are more alive?
back to Carney's paper, he moves on from image to narrative—which is fascinating for me because I've been yearning to connect this Christopher Alexander stuff about centers with narrative
here, narrative is about a golden zone between entropy and abstraction
ok, I think here's a direct link to Alasdair MacIntyre's critique of modernity: the basic tendency of modernist storytelling is to disrupt narrativity, which demonstrates the disruption of the world itself
MacIntyre, in his book about virtue ethics, which is really more about the narrative structure of personhood, says:
Carney's framework suggests that if you're depressed, you should read stories that are rich in detail, that describe the world as a flourishing field of specific information and diverse affordances
while if you're anxious, you might want to read mythic, archetypal sagas
in architecture, Christopher Alexander would suggest that helpful environments should provide both lush complexity and unifying abstraction
imagine a Zen temple grounds: living rural entropy dotted with coherent timber-framed jewels of tidy abstraction
Carney goes on to discuss film; I appreciate this point about the antihedonic cognitive load of cinematic plots and how "movie stars" are like the jewels of abstraction that suggest a comfortable ordered cosmos
the star system as an "entropy reduction grammar" that helps us understand the actions of the agents—of course drama is all about acts, action, agency, actors
my ADHD definitely feels related to my difficulty with following cinematic plots
depression can be like the film of life appearing predictable, dumb, clichéd, boring, devoid of resonance despite its furious plots and idiotic action
while anxiety is an avante garde work of modernist alienation where nothing makes sense
of course they're usually mixed
this all seems even more relevant to autism which in the predictive processing framework is described as a disorder of normal perceptual abstraction such that the world appears "constantly surprising", an overstimulating kaleidoscope of entropy
perhaps depression is also a reason to consider moving to a city with a climate that generally encourages rich sensory immersion
when I've visited warmer climates, especially when snorkelling in warm lagoons I've felt my brain healing in real time as if I'd quaffed a neural rejuvenation potion🤿
the article ends with a pointer to predictive processing and cognition as the harmonization of surprise
this business of low-level sense data being reciprocally attuned within hierarchies of learned abstraction, fuelled and driven by desire and reward, really seems fundamental
going back to abstraction as distance, that invites speculation about theology
why would you want God to be infinitely distant, without portrayable form, an abstract monolith... while also reaching down into the guts of human experience?
e.g. Christianity as a social architectural treatment for depression and anxiety?
if you're depressed, God is near, specific, alive, tender, complex, detailed, a "son"
if you're anxious, God is also distant, profound, mysterious, unified, coherent, structural, a "father"
if you have ADHD, God is an anchor of intentionality, a supersalient symbol of inspiration, the grandest of all narratives, the order underlying the story of the cosmos—and a personal coach who loves you agapically especially insofar as you suffer from your agentic incoherence
see also the thread about joint attention and Aquinas which @PaulVanderKlay read and talked about in this video
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my dream of building a timber-framed cabin with sturdy joinery is like a desire for a good skeleton, a safe body, peace, boundaries, stable structure, interlocking frames of intelligibility, deep rugged coherence, unpretentious unquestionable beauty, fields of strong centers
embodied embedded enactive extended cognition: it seems to me that to participate in life is to be perpetually dissatisfied with the state of the surrounding environment and continually work on it as if refactoring and optimizing a computer program or editing a book
it's almost like Hegelian idealism: the physical world is part of the mental world, though for me it's been easier to imagine that I live inside of language ("the house of being") than to realize that I live inside of nature and the city
“Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water.”
—Wittgenstein
“I will now describe the experience of wondering at the existence of the world by saying: it is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle.”
“Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science.”
I feel pretty strongly affected by nonalcoholic beer so I guess a lot of the effect of beer isn’t actually due to alcohol. Basically it makes me tired and sleepy. Is it just because of grains or carbs or whatever
Oh, it’s the HOPS?!
“On the basis of this investigation, administration of non-alcoholic beer would be recommended due to its hop content and consequent sedative action, which would be an aid to nocturnal sleep.”