Thread by @meekaale

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

@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?

see also @Meaningness

much of his work treats depressive nihilism with bottom-up immersion

"As your vision penetrates the depths of the colors, they may come to seem intense and vivid. How could you have ever have seen ravens as black?"

metarationality.com/perception

@Meaningness here's an older thread of mine that's relevant:

https://twitter.com/meekaale/status/1351244166840406019

https://twitter.com/meekaale/status/1351426062551572485

actually I was searching for this other thread; here a tweet from the middle of it that links up nicely

https://twitter.com/meekaale/status/1422899312296607751

the geometric foundation of Christopher Alexander's work is the "field of centers"

as a field of centers, Carney's three pictures (the grid, the horse, Einstein) would be ranked in the opposite way

Einstein is a real field of centers; the grid is noise

https://twitter.com/meekaale/status/1422899300057681922

sitting down by the campfire after chopping some wood is "low-entropy", while driving in a rectilinear grid of traffic lights is "noisy"

the campfire is a friendly being; the grid is an alien invasion

https://twitter.com/meekaale/status/1422899313580158983

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:

https://twitter.com/meekaale/status/1471772726264274944

narrative is a foundational way for humans to make sense of events and actions; actions are intelligible insofar as they partake in narrative:

https://twitter.com/meekaale/status/1467227996876685317

Carney wants to do experiments on how abstraction and entropy in narrative are relevant to "bibliotherapy"

here's a post I wrote about ethics, narrative, ADHD, MacIntyre, and The Big Lebowski

goula.sh/days/2021-02-2…

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

https://twitter.com/metalulie/status/1477996587964145666

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