Relationships And Mediums: Habits, Historical Knowledge, and Self-Creation

This is the introduction and the first section of an essay I have been working on. Things are changing in it. So I'll be updating it as I go along. But here is the tentative table of contents:

I. Of Minds: Empathic Versus Linguistic Interaction

a. simulation, or empathic interaction

b. theory-theory, or conceptual interaction

c. The need to historicize theory of mind

II. Of Mediums: Inclinations And Habits In Relationships

- So, we start out with mediums in general.

- I believe the notion of layers of mediums, and of almost everything down to the five senses being a medium is coherent.

- I think the best way to start the talk on mediums is Nicholas Carr.

- Talk about Gandhi and means as ends in the making - same idea.

- That stuff will establish the issue of medium as message, then we should give some real examples. Like the economic system, like Foucault and Claxton on the control of space and time and stuff.

III. Of History: The Creation Of Mediums As The Creation Of Human Nature

- In this section I think it would be wise to talk about implosive rationality. Because historical study would be a way of creating new habits, and thus a form of implosive rationality.

- We need to talk about choice and about compassion as they relate to history. Or do they relate to mediums? Maybe even the 4th section

- We need to talk about retroactive freedom too

- Human self-creation is the operative idea.

IV. Of Choice And Compassion

In this essay I am really trying to be free. In so much of my writing I think I am trying to be free.

Seeing as how this essay is supposed to be about relationships in general, I need to say a few things, and ask myself a few questions. When I say relationships I am trying to mean it in the absolute broadest sense. In one way or another, every person I have interacted with I have ‘had a relationship with’. I have a certain relationship with myself and my own thoughts and emotions. I have a relationship with my material surroundings and how I understand them. In many ways I am talking about relationships the way that Foucault talks about power relations: as omnipresent interactions with things, people, and myself. So, given that I’m talking about relationships in such a broad way, I have to ask myself: What is it about the quality of my relationships with things, people, and myself that makes me feel so unfree? What is it about me and my relationships that troubles me so much?

Well, right off the bat I’ll just say that my relationships often feel out of my control on a couple different levels. On the first level is my own thoughts, emotions, and reactions to people. I don’t really mean to think the way I do or feel the emotions that I feel. I just react. I just think and feel those things. I do my best to examine and understand my feelings after the fact, but in the moment it is too immediate for that kind of insight. Furthermore, I find that I have a huge amount of unquestioned assumptions, a huge amount of concepts that interfere with me just interacting with people.

These issues of my mind as an individual object, and the issue of mind to mind interaction in relationships, the micro reality of minds, will be the topic of the first section. I’ll be using the distinction between simulation theory of mind and theory-theory of mind to guide the discussion. But I hope to avoid those terms and talk more about the way that they point to a problem in relationships that I have experienced. This problem is that my interactions with familiar people feel very comfortable, empathic, ‘simulative. But my interactions with strangers, on the other hand, feel very distant, very theoretical, very conceptually-driven. It will turn out, I suspect, that this issue of minds and their different interactions cannot be handled through reflection or any phenomenological method. From here, therefore, the discussion will move to more macro issues.

The first macro level that contributes to the world of micro interactions that I’ll look at is the issue of habit. By talking about habit I want to try and hone in on the things that make my mental interactions problematic. I think that habit is one thing that potentially compromises our ability to be free in our relationships. We sometimes, I sometimes, default to my habits and then I don’t make actual choices. I don’t make conscious choices. I just run with the ideas and behaviors that are intuitive and habitual for me.

Raising this issue of habit, however, prompts more questions. Where do these habits come from? How do they develop in people? Why do they appear to be more or less uniform in certain times and places? These questions will bring me to the issue of mediums. I will be using the word medium in its most general sense as a means of doing something. Furthermore, I will be using Nicholas Carr’s work to discuss how medium’s implicitly contain certain inclinations, medium’s encourage us to behave in certain ways, they implicitly contain certain habits. I believe that the issue of habits and mediums will shed some light on the problem of relationships that I described above.

Asking questions about mediums, however, prompts further question about their origins and the possibilities for changing them. This is where the philosophy of history will come into play. Using Foucault, Collingwood, Smith, and others, I will claim that an understanding of history would provide us better knowledge of our own mediums and habits and thus give us a greater possibility of understanding and changing ourselves, thus hopefully improving the quality of our relationships.

I see this writing as collaborating with John Searle, and with my own work on the notion of the genealogy of the modern mind.

In his book Making The Social World: The Structure Of Human Civilization, John Searle argues that philosophy needs to create a sub-discipline known as the philosophy of society. He says that just as many contemporary disciplines did not exist in the past, we need to create a branch of philosophy that does not exist yet, known as the philosophy of society: “But the sense in which we know regard the philosophy of language as a central part of philosophy, Immanuel Kant did not have and could not have had such an attitude. I am proposing that ‘The Philosophy of Society’ ought to be regarded as a legitimate branch of philosophy along with such disciplines as the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language” (5). So, one concern I have in this essay is this idea of a philosophy of society. I think it is fair to say that if we are to have a philosophy of society we would need a philosophy of relationships. Searle’s work is a starting point for me in many ways.

I also see this essay as picking up on a line of thought that I initiated in August of 2010. In my essay ‘The Genealogy of the Modern Mind: Theory of Mind, History, And Self-Directed Neuroplasticity’ I tried to argue that theory of mind ins inadequate if it is ahistorically conceptualized. I tried to explain how Foucault’s method of genealogical history could be used to augment conventional theory of mind. My whole purpose for this historically augmented theory of mind was to try and explain how Foucault’s idea of personal transformation could be actualized. Or, as I put it then: “I believe that if we are to construct a theory of mind that is useful we need to draw both on scientific evidence to discover the universalities of the mind, but we also need to draw on history to illuminate the contingencies of the mind. Only through genealogical history could we create a theory of mind that could diagnose the present state of our own minds, and thus allow us to enact meaningful changes on ourselves through the study of the humanities.” I was unable to say, however, what types of historical information would be necessary to help us understand the state of our own minds and thus take a step towards changing them. That is one place where this essay is picking up. I think that by focusing on the issue of habits, and the way that mediums create those habits, and by claiming that habits and mediums can only be illuminated with historical study, I will be able to show how history is a necessary part of an adequate and useful theory of mind.

In short, I want to show that contemporary theory of mind is inadequate because it lacks a historical orientation and thus ignores the issue of habits and the way that mediums create those habits.

Onward to the first sections on minds.

I. Of Minds: Empathic Versus Linguistic Interaction

I want to begin this whole discussion with the issue of individual minds because it is the ground floor in which I (and everyone else) experience people. The level of minds is therefore the level of experience. And this can be the only level that truly matters to me. I want this type of thinking to make a difference in my actual relationships. I need my experience to change if I am to regard this writing as useful.

So what is the problem that I am having in my individual relationships? If I am writing about this issue of relationships, then clearly I see a problem with how my relationships function. I stated the problem above: there is a huge disparity in the quality of my relationships. With people I am close with I am (hopefully) friendly, caring, curious, interested, and involved in their minds. Ideally, there is a very serious engagement and give and take between minds. I feel that when I am close to someone I really enter into their mind, into their world, and I enjoy it. And hopefully when people know me they truly enter into my mind, get a sense of me as a person, and enjoy that immersion in my mental world. In short, with close relationships there is a serious attempt to enter the mind of another person. When I don’t know someone, on the other hand, interactions can feel curt, distant, and utilitarian. The perfect example of this is my interactions with customers. As a barista, people are interested in getting in and out of a cafe with the coffee and treats that they desired. This isn’t always true. There is a gray area. Some people are vaguely interested, or are simply polite. But there are definitely people that interact with me simply to get something from me. It seems that some people are interacting with me on a purely conceptual level. It seems that the only thing standing between me and them is bits of knowledge: they know that I have a defined role, and that if they tell me what they want that they will get it. That is roughly the problem. My close relationships feel empathic: they involved intimate mental exchanges, and a genuine understanding of the content of each other’s minds. While many of my relationships feel purely conceptual: there is no genuine attempt to access emotions or thoughts, but only an interaction that is meant to produce a certain result.

I would like to say again that this is by no means a clear dichotomy, it is a very gray and blurry area. Sometimes I have customers that are super fun to interact with, we joke and talk about stuff, but I might not know their names or anything about them. But there is still some sort of genuine engagement. Other times I talk to someone I’ve know for a while and things can proceed along these conceptual lines. So this is by no means a clean divide between empathic and conceptual interactions. But I think it is there enough to justify the analytical distinction.

So, this is the moment where I try to make hay of this problem. I need to try to parse and explain this qualitative divide in my relationships. I plan on doing this by drawing on two major schools of thought in American theory of mind: simulation theory, and theory-theory. I will generally be identifying this idea of empathic interactions with simulation theory, and the issue of conceptual interaction with theory-theory. I think that a quick summary of these two schools of thought will make this divide in my relationships more understandable.

I think that an understanding of simulation theory will make it clear that human beings have the potential to mentally interact in intimate and empathic ways. In philosophy of mind it is assumed that human’s are fundamentally minded creatures, meaning that we experience the world as one full of meaning, intentions, obligations, relationships, etc.. Further, philosophy of mind assumes that human interaction and relationships are always a matter of mindreading: of understanding each other’s mental states through different means. So the central question that theorists of mind grapple with is how do humans make sense of one another’s minds? How are we able to understand one another even though we only have access to our own thoughts (and perhaps we don’t even have that).

In Simulating Minds Alvin Goldman argues that humans understanding one another through empathy and extended forms of empathy, which can all be referred to under the umbrella category of simulation. This claim is justified primarily based on the existence of mirror neurons, and the existence of what Goldman calls the Enactment-imagination (E-imagination). Mirror neurons are motor neurons that are activated not only when an action is performed, but any time that an action is perceived. So when we see someone making a facial expression our brain activates the same neurons that are necessary for making that same facial expression. The brain then understands what emotion is being expressed based on what mirror neurons have been activated by the perception of a facial expression. Mirror neurons are also activated anytime we see someone grasp something. But the crucial point here is that mirror neurons are essentially the brains way of simulating the actions that it perceives, and thus its way of understanding other people around us. This is very similar to what Wolfgang Prinz called the ‘common coding theory’, which claims that “there is a shared representation (a common code) for both perception and action” (Wikipedia for common coding theory). Mirror neurons are the part of our brain that allow us to feel empathy for other people. So, mirror neurons demonstrate that simulation is one of the crucial ways in which we understand other people. The E-imagination is another neurologically documented phenomenon that shows the importance of simulation in social interactions. The term Enactment-Imagination refers to the fact that when we consciously attempt to imagine a certain experience we can enact certain qualities of that experience. When we try to imagine the pain we felt when a loved one died, for example, we can in part reconstitute the emotions that we felt at the time when that event actually took place. Or if we try to imagine what it would be like to have a spider crawling on our skin we can in some ways feel it on our skin. The existence of the E-imagination is evident not only in phenomenological accounts, but is also neurologically verifiable. Goldman does a good job drawing on the relevant science to show that there is neurological overlap between an experience and the imagination of that same experience. In any case, this notion of the E-imagination probably sounds very abstract. But think about when you have met a new person and they tell you about the time they broke their arm, and suddenly your skin crawls with the pain you imagined they felt. The E-imagination has the potential to be a very powerful component in our relationships with people. With both mirror neurons and the E-imagination we are engaging in forms of simulation. Both of them are a means to simulating and thus understanding other people’s thoughts and feelings.

These are two of Goldman’s major analytical pillars. But the heart of his theory is much more humane and emotional than I am able to convey in this short space. He wants to show that people engage with one another by really deeply entering into each other’s minds. That empathy is at the core of what it means to be a human, and that without it we have no hope of truly engaging with another person. And that what we are doing with all of this empathy is simulating other people’s thoughts and feelings in our own mind.

So this account of simulation theory is probably too brief, and probably too abstract. But I can’t bring myself to give a really good summary of simulation theory. I’ve written on it too many times. But what I want you to take away from this brief account of simulation theory is that there is empirical evidence that humans can engage in very empathic relationships. That there is a very real form of human interaction that is personal, empathic, and in technical terms, simulative. I believe, however, that there are other ways that people engage with one another. And I think that this other mode of engagement is captured in the notion of theory-theory.

I am very uncomfortable with my understanding of theory-theory. I have never read the work of a theory-theorist. I have learned about it primarily from Goldman’s summary of it in Simulating Minds. So I’ll just say that I am not confident in my references to it. But that I think that what I have learned about it, even if my understanding is misguided, will shed some light on the qualitative divide in my relationships that I am trying to address.

So what do theory-theorists claim? Well, they generally argue that mindreading is accomplished by the existence of tacit psychological theories. People supposedly use these tacit psychological theories to make inferences about other people’s behavior. In other words, theory-theory maintains that people understand each other much in the same way that scientists make sense of the natural world. The only difference is that we theoretically mindread people in a tacit or implicit way, and that science uses the same methods but in an explicit matter. Goldman quotes Fodor arguing that “When such [commonsense psychological] explanations are made explicit, they are frequently seen to exhibit the ‘deductive structure’ that is so characteristic of explanation in real science” (Fodor, 1987, quoted in Goldman, 2006). Goldman continues: “Fodor’s account of commonsense psychology posits an implicit, sciencelike theory featuring generalizations over unobservables (in this case, mental states). People are said to arrive at commonsense mental attributions by using the theory to guide their inferences” (Ibid., 96). So, as you can see, theory-theory believes that people operate like unconscious scientists, using tacit psychological theories to make logical inferences about what people behave the way they do. And, according to Goldman, these theories are presumed to be an innate human capacity. This ahistorical approach to mind is one major problem I have with theory-theory. But, again, I’m not at all comfortable with my knowledge of theory-theory. But at first glance it seems crazy to me.

I don’t want to dwell on the technical issues of theory-theory. Instead, I want to use it as a way to transition to the problem of relationships that I am trying to address. And I think the best way to do that is to use some personal reflections and anecdotes.

When I’m at work I worry about how people engage with me. Sometimes people will come up to me and will just mumble something and throw a dollar on the counter. Sometimes people will ignore all my attempts at saying hello or making small talk. People just spout orders at me, spout numbers at me. When this kind of thing happens I feel as though I have been denied some basic part of my humanity. I feel hurt when I go completely unacknowledged as a person. So how is it that people are able to engage with me in this way? How is it that people can approach me, buy something from me, and feel no concern or interest in who I am as a person? And how is it that I am able to interact with people in this way? This seems to conflict with the notion of simulation theory. There seems to be no attempt, or even need, to simulate one another’s thoughts. It seems that all me and my customers need to interact is labels and concepts.

And this is what it is about theory-theory that worries me. The Fodor quotation above shows that one of the crucial things about theory-theory is that it supposedly works in terms of generalizations as opposed to particulars. I have a big problem with generalization, categorization, and labeling. I think that they make things understandable by simplifying them. Once we have a label for something, once we have generalized it, there is no need for us to think very hard about what it really might be. This is especially true with people. Once we label someone ‘insane’, or ‘a criminal’, or ‘a barista’, for that matter, we don’t have to wonder about them. Their role, their essence, is already defined for us. And in the case of baristas, or any other service worker, they are functionally or economically defined. In short, I think that humans understand one another not simply through simulation and empathy. We can also understand one another through language, through classification and labeling. Both of these things, empathy and language, are innate properties for humans. And I think that they conflict with one another. I think there is tension between these two properties of the mind. In fact, I wrote about this in my essay of December 12th 2010, ‘Empathy And Language’.

I think that Zizek’s notion of the ‘violence of language’ can shed some light on the tension between language and empathy (between theory-theory and simulation theory). In Violence Zizek explains how there is an element of violence that is inherent to language. He refers to it as symbolic violence. He claims that every time we label something we disfigure it, we remove it from its natural and nuanced state and we reduce it to something else. He takes gold as an example. When we call gold gold we change it from being an ordinary mineral and we imbue it with all our economic notions of greed, desire, value, beauty, et cetera. I think that this notion of the violence of language holds true in many situations. When we label a certain group of people an enemy we do the same thing. We dull our sense of empathy towards them, because the label is enough. As long as we know that someone is ‘an enemy’ we don’t have to think very seriously about their thoughts, about their feelings, their experiences. The same thing holds true in more mundane examples. When someone is labeled as a barista, a server, a doctor, etc., we don’t have to think about them as a person. All we need to know is captured in that label.

This is what I worry about myself and my interactions. I worry that people just think of me as a barista, and if I don’t make them think of me in other ways, then they would be content to let me remain a mere barista. That is why I value small talk so much. It is an opportunity for me to assert myself as a personality, as a unique person, and not just as a barista. I resent those economic and social labels that make people think of me in those ways. I try to do my best to defy people’s labels for me and assert myself as a real mind that they have to think about. I refuse to be generalized about, I want to be thought of in particulars.

I’m grasping for straws trying to speak about this divide in the quality of my interactions. I am trying to understand how it is that with some people I have very nuanced and empathic interactions, and with other people my interactions are governed entirely by social and economic labels. This is why I chose to turn to the debate between simulation theory and theory-theory. It seems as though they do represent this divide within the human mind. Clearly we are capable of engaging with people in terms of simulation, in terms of empathy. But there is another side to our interactions with people that is characterized more by labeling, by concepts, by generalizing, by theorizing about people. And when I look around me I often feel as though this theoretical or linguistic interaction is far more common.

I’m not sure if it is entirely appropriate to frame this as an issue between simulation theory and theory-theory. I guess one thing I am suggesting is that simulation theory and theory-theory are both correct. That the human mind possesses both of those capacities, and that they interact with one another. It is possible for one to triumph over the other. In other words, it is possible that labeling could complete extinguish our capacity for empathizing with someone, or that our sense of empathy could completely negate our need to generalize about someone.

I’m really not happy with the way I have explicated this. But so far I have sloppily laid out the major problem them I am trying to address. I tried to use the divide between simulation theory and theory-theory to explain the divide in my relationships. Sometimes I have wonderfully empathic and simulative interactions with people, and sometimes I have interactions with people that are governed entirely by labels, that are completely lacking in a genuine connection with people. So the question from here is how to make sense of this divide. Why is it that my interactions are divided like this? How can a theory of mind possibly account for this contradiction? I propose that these questions can only be answered if we are willing to think about minds in their concrete historical actuality. I find theory of mind to be remarkably ahistorical. Goldman and others speak of minds as if they are completely ahistorical, totally generalizable things. But thanks to Collingwood, I believe that minds are only what minds do. There is no mind at rest, no mind beyond the flow of history. Theory of mind, therefore, needs to be augmented by historical study. Furthermore, I think that there are types of historical study that can help me answer this question about the qualitative divide in my relationships. This is what I now want to try and do. I have chosen the notion of ‘mediums’ as the central analytical concept for the next section. I believe that by focusing on the issue of mediums I will be able to explicate a historically informed theory of mind.

Nihilism and Novelty: Identifying the Negative and Positive Steps Towards Buddhist Mindfulness

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction

2. Zen and Novelty: The Positive Component of Mindfulness

3. Nihilism and Novelty: The Negative Component of Mindfulness

4. Seeing Like A Child As Seeing Without A Cultural History

5. The World As Encouraging Detached And Theoretical Social Engagement

6. Nihilism And The Destruction Of Theory-Theory: Reclaiming Empathy And Simulation

7. Nihilism’s Violent Ideas As A Battle Within Our Own Minds

8. Conclusion: Nihilism and Mindfulness: Violent Thoughts as Enabling Attentive Living

1. Introduction

Since at least February I have been working hard to articulate the relationship between Nihilism and Zen Buddhism. My reading in both fields is simply inadequate. But I will continue to explore both bodies of literature. Regardless, I have written several different pieces either explicitly about Nihilism and Zen, or it is a theme that I have incorporated the larger picture of my thought. So right now I want to continue to extend and elaborate the connection that I see between Nihilism and Zen.

The main claim I want to elaborate is this: That Nihilism’s attacks on modern values and morality do not simply leave us in the cold without any way to feel good about our relationship to the world and to other people. But on the contrary, Nihilism’s seeming negativity is in reality a way to reinvigorate modern experience by reacquainting us with its novelty and dynamism. It seems to me that modern life has the potential to be infuriatingly monotonous. If we were to accept things as they are, if we were to accept all the terms and categories that flood our lives, the world would appear terribly established and boring. But I think the reality is different. I think that the world and my experience is quite novel and exciting. But the world’s novelty and dynamism can be hard to access through the guise of concepts that life is built around. Nihilism’s attack on modern moral categories, therefore, is not about the destruction of pleasure or happiness. But is rather an attempt to access the novelty and dynamism of our experience. In other words, Nihilism’s attacks on morality are meant to enable a mindful perspective in which we are not limited by the inadequate set of concepts that the modern world has given us.

One of the crucial things about Zen, according to Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, is to abandon all of our preformed concepts and to simply pay attention to our mind and the world. Because the most important thing is to perceive reality accurately: “All we want to do is to know things just as they are. If we know things as they are, there is nothing to point at; there is no way to grasp anything; there is no thing to grasp” (Suzuki, 150). But to perceive reality accurately is very difficult. And I think it is made doubly difficult by the overwhelming number of ideas that circulate in our world. So in order to perceive reality accurately, in order to be mindful, we have to find a way to get past all of these ideas, these concepts. Or, as Suzuki says: “As long as we have some definite idea about or some hope in the future, we cannot really be serious with the moment that exists right now.... To be independent in this true sense, we have to forget everything which we have in our mind and discover something quite new and different moment after moment” (Suzuki, 137). If we can’t get past our sense of concepts and ideas we will never be able to mindfully observe the constant novelty of life.

Now if mindfulness is contingent upon the abandonment of preformed ideas, then doesn’t Nihilism’s attack on the dominance of modern ideas have serious implications for mindfulness in modern America? Doesn’t this mean that Nihilism’s historical attacks on modern morality are merely a way to attain a blank and mindful point of view? Doesn’t this mean that Nihilism is simply a way to rescue our minds from the monotony of our conceptual apparatus, and a way to be mindful about the novelty of our experiences? Doesn’t this mean that true Nihilism, the state “of enhanced spiritual strength” that Nietzsche calls “active Nihilism”, is really something akin to Buddhist mindfulness (The Will To Power, 12)? The answer to these questions is yes. True Nihilism is an active appreciation for the novelty of our experiences that has been achieved by using history to break down our inadequate conceptual apparatus. I believe this is what Nietzsche means when he says that pessimism exists “as a preparatory state to Nihilism” (7). The pessimism that people mistake for Nihilism itself is nothing but a step towards true Nihilism. Pessimism is simply a way to prepare for mindfulness. Pessimism is a phase that should lead to Zen Nihilism.

So that is the argument I will be elaborating. That Nihilism is a way to live a mindful life by attacking the inadequate conceptual apparatus that the world has given us. I will be doing this in seven sections. First I’m going to discuss Zen and Novelty. Then I’ll discuss Nihilism and novelty. After that I’ll talk about the famous Buddhist idea of ‘seeing like a child‘ and how this relates to Nihilism. Then I’ll talk about the way that the world inclines us towards overly theoretical and detached thinking, and I’ll connect this to the debate on theory-theory of mind. Then I’ll further this idea by claiming that Nihilism is really an attack on the modern over-reliance on theory-theory. I’ll then connect all of this to metaphors of war by talking about how Nihilism is a battle with our own minds that has to be waged in order to achieve mindfulness. I’ll then bring all of this together in the last section ‘Nihilism and Mindfulness’.

The last thing I’d like say before I get underway is that this is very personal for me. I find Nihilism to be such an appealing philosophy. Yet I’m so very afraid of being hurt by it. I think that the Nihilist conclusions are hard to avoid. They are probably correct about the nature of modern morality. But I think that Nihilism is far too confused with simple pessimism. I need to find a way to philosophically vindicate a positive Nihilism. For quite a while I have been battling myself, trying to find a way to make my Nihilist tendencies into something positive, something happy, or just something mindful. What I’m doing with my writing on Nihilism is fight myself, battling my own mind, battling my tendencies towards frustration and anger. I hope that my writing on this issue will provide me with conceptual ammunition that will help me wage this war against negative Nihilism, and will help me find a calm and mindful form of Zen Nihilism. Which is paradoxical: I am elaborating concepts to escape concepts. But that is what I concluded on April 7th in my post “Resisting Nihilism’s Arrogance and Abandoning Understanding.” I think it makes sense, even though it is paradoxical.

Onward to the subsections.

2. Zen and Novelty: The Positive Component of Mindfulness

This whole essay is about connecting Nihilism to Zen. At the end of the day, I would prefer it if Nihlism collapsed into Zen, as opposed to the other way around. So I want to begin by explaining how Zen is closely connected to the perception of life’s novelty. I fear that in my introduction I used some of the strong quotations from Suzuki’s book. Perhaps I’ve already made this point clear.

But the main point of Zen is that life is in constant change and transformation. Everything is in constant flux. Nothing stays the same. And the purpose of Zen is to be mindful and aware of this state of constant transformation. The point is to be in touch with the worlds dynamism. As Suzuki says: “That everything changes is the basic truth for each existence.... When we realize the everlasting truth of ‘everything changes’ and find our composure in it, we find ourselves in Nirvana” (122). By accepting the transiency of all experience we bring ourselves closer to a mindful point of view. This is the point of Buddhism: “To understand reality as a direct experience is the reason we practice zazen, and the reason we study Buddhism” (102). The goal of Buddhism is simply to perceive reality as it is without a whole slew of concepts or ideas.

Unfortunately, however, our world is already saturated with ideas. This means that we do not enter the world with the ability to be mindful. But rather we enter the world with the tendency to generalize and to regard things as static. So, in order to get in touch with the world’s dynamism we have to overcome thought and concepts. Although everything exists in a dynamic and novel way, we have nothing but static words to identify them with. This plethora of concepts means that “usually our mind is very busy and complicated, and it is difficult to be concentrated on what we are doing. This is because before we act we think, and this thinking leaves some trace. Our activity is shadowed by some preconceived idea. The thinking not only leaves some trace or shadow, but also gives us many other notions about activities and things” (64). Knowledge prevents us from observing reality accurately. Knowledge and ideas are impediments to mindfulness. But Suzuki believes that “We should be free from out knowledge” (98).

The goal is to attain an empty state of mind that will allow us to appreciate the novelty of our experience. The goal is to be mindful about how our experience is in constant flux. By practicing mindfulness we can gain this emptiness: “When we have emptiness we are always prepared for watching the flashing” (97). When we have attained an empty state of mind we will be prepared to watch our experience in all of its dramatic flux, in all of its dynamism. Or, as Suzuki says: “A mind full of preconceived ideas, subjective intentions, or habits is not open to things as they are. That is why we practice zazen: to clear our mind of what is related to something else” (104). Zen is about appreciating the novelty of our experience. Suzuki recognizes that the main thing holding us back from observing our experience is language and concepts. Concepts generalize things, yet life is not general, it is dynamic and particular. Everything is new all the time. Life is endlessly novel. The point of Zen is to put us in touch with this truth. The point of Zen is to overcome the reign of concepts and to become mindful. To always become. To always transform.

Now, let me explain how Nihilism has a similar goal of putting us in touch with the novelty of our experience.

3. Nihilism and Novelty: The Negative Component of Mindfulness

Seeing as how Zen’s fundamental concern is awareness of the dynamism of experience, I think that the connection to Nihilism is easy to make. Because I believe that Nihilism’s main purpose is to help us perceive the dynamism of our experience.

The difference between Zen and Nihilism, it seems to me, is how this appreciation of our experience is achieved. The difference is how mindfulness is attained. It seems that Zen tries to reach this goal positively: Zen tries to put us in touch with the dynamism of our experience by stressing the things that we need to do. It stresses that we need to practice meditation in order to clear our minds of preformed concepts. It stresses the things that we can do in order to clear our minds and observe reality accurately. Implicit in this process, however, is the negative component of abandoning ideas. It would be impossible to have an empty mind unless we forgot or negated the ideas that fill our mind.

It is this negative component of mindfulness that Nihilism deals with. As I said, it would be impossible to attain mindfulness if our mind were filled with concepts. The major issue, however, is that at this point in history we have a plethora of concepts and ideas to label the world with. It is easiest to simply exist in the world of concepts. We are in what Foucault calls ‘The Age of History’. We exist in a time where everything has a name, everything has been labeled, and therefore appears mundane and ordinary to us. It is very easy to let these concepts blind us to the novelty of the world. It is Nihilism’s task, therefore, to use history to break down these categories and ideas. This breaks down their self-evident nature and reveals the world as novel. It reveals that the world is not as simple and mundane as we had believed. The world is not concepts. As Nietzsche says: “we have measured the worth of the world according to categories which can only be applied to a purely fictitious world” (Will to Power, 9). Nietzsche believes that our moral categories have developed slowly over history, and that people have mistaken these historical developments for some kind of universal morality. The point of Nihilism, therefore, is to break down the ‘naturalness’ of our moral categories and to show us that we can observe reality without them. The point is to no longer be determined by historically constituted categories. The point is to observe reality accurately through a negative process of historical criticism. Nihilism discounts moral categories not to destroy morality, but to destroy the conceptual apparatus that prevents us from perceiving the world accurately. Doesn’t this sound like a Zen like goal? Doesn’t it sound like we need to perceive the world accurately? The only difference is that the Nihilist’s are more concerned with the things to be overcome, the negative component of mindfulness, while Buddhist’s are more concerned with the end result, the positive component of mindfulness.

Zen and Nihilism, therefore, are like the yin and yang of mindfulness. Zen stresses the positive component of blankness and mindfulness. While Nihilism, on the other hand, pursues the negative element of overcoming ideas. It is crucial that philosophers like Nietzsche use history to break down our conceptual apparatus. For without this negative component we would never be able to attain mindfulness. Without embracing the Nihilist goal of breaking down concepts we would be blinded to the novelty of the world. In the next section I want to discuss history in relation to mindfulness a bit more directly.

4. Seeing Like A Child As Seeing Without A Cultural History

One very famous and interesting way of talking about mindfulness is the example of a child watching a ball roll across a floor. Seeing like a child is a very interesting way of talking about mindfulness. Think about what babies are like. They don’t have any words or concepts to gauge the world. They simply pay attention to everything. Their minds are naturally blank, and their awareness is therefore unencumbered. They have no words preventing them from simply observing reality.

So what is the difference between a child watching a ball roll across the floor and a grown person watching a ball roll across the floor? Well, the answer is that a grown person is prevented from simply watching the ball roll because what they are really seeing is their idea of a ball rolling across a floor. It is very to easy to say ‘oh well I know what a ball is and what a floor is, so I know what a ball rolling on a floor looks like’. But those concepts prevent us from simply watching a ball roll. Because in reality it isn’t a ball and it isn’t a floor: things are not words. Things simply are. And if we want to observe them accurately we need to prevent ourselves from relying too much on words.

This is where I think a little bit of Slavoj Zizek’s idea about the violence of language. I wrote about this recently. Zizek believes that language pulls things from their natural state and disfigures them in our mind. Language changes the way that we identify things, the way that we perceive things. Norman Doidge confirms the idea that culture effects what we do and do not perceive. Language changes the way that we perceive and engage with reality.

Cultural history, therefore, often comes down to the history of language and the history of thought. So the relevant question for me right now is, If language and concepts prevent us from observing reality accurately, then how do we overcome this linguistically induced blindness? The answer should be obvious: cultural and intellectual history will allow us to gain a new perspective on our most familiar things and allow us to pay more attention to things. Understanding the history of our most familiar concepts allows us to put some space between them and ourselves. We realize that we don’t have to identify things with these ever so familiar words. We realize that it is possible to regard things not simply as concepts, but as dynamic and novel parts of our experience. By engaging with the history of thought we can break down the familiarity of our concepts and begin to see the world like a child. We can start to see the world as endlessly novel if we can only use the history of thought to destroy our affinity for categorization.

This is why seeing like a child would be like seeing without a cultural history. If we remain trapped in our cultural history then we can only see with the limited set of concepts of the culture that have been born into. But cultural history can show us the contingency of our concepts, and allow us to escape those concepts. We can begin to see the world with a blank mindfulness if we are willing to plumb the history of our thought.

In the next two sections I want to tie all of this to the debate between simulation theory of mind and theory-theory of mind. These are the two major schools in philosophy of mind. I have written extensively about both of them and therefore won’t spend a lot of time explicating their basic arguments. I am just going to jump right into them.

5. The World As Encouraging Detached And Theoretical Social Engagement

Now over the last few months I have become more and more worried about the dangers of theory-theory. Theory-theorists believe that interactions between minds are facilitated primarily by the existence of tacit psychological theories. They believe that we are all equipped with a set of naive theoretical understandings about humans and minds, and that we rely on these theories to make inferences about other people’s behavior. I think that tacit theories do exist. But I don’t believe they are universal. I think they exist because of historical processes that produce conceptual understandings. Furthermore, I think that we live in a time in which there are far too many theoretical concepts that unconsciously structure our interactions with other people.

What I mean is that I am troubled by how easy it is to engage with the world and with other people simply on a conceptual level. I am troubled by how easy it is to just identify things with words and leave it at that. It is far too easy to just think of people in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, so on. We have so many terms to identify people with that we don’t need to have a very nuanced understanding of them. We can simply generalize about people and place them into nice little boxes. Moreover, I think we are encouraged to think in these general terms. I think we are encouraged to reduce people to these simple classifications.

Doesn’t this seem troubling? Recall what I said about the violence of language, how language disfigures things, simplifies them, pulls them from their natural complexity and nuance and shaves them to fit into over-simplified categories. When we regard people with over-simplified categories we are hurting them and we are hurting ourselves. We are preventing ourselves from mindfully engaging with their nuance, with their reality. When we unconsciously rely on theoretical understandings of people we are inhibiting our ability to be mindful.

I believe that what Nihilists are doing is attacking the theoretical ideas that unconsciously structure our social interactions. I think that Nietzsche so adamantly attacked Christian morality because people were blind to its historical construction. People simply believed that the notions of good and evil propagated by Christianity were universal and immutable. But Nietzsche saw their history and believed that there was another way to engage with reality. If we let them, the Nihilists can show us that the world is not made up of universal concepts, and that our engagement with reality does not need to be filtered through these theoretical lenses. If we are willing, Nihilism can take us to a mental space in which we don’t need concepts to engage with reality. If we are willing to see Nihilism as the negative component of mindfulness then we can begin to perceive the world without a conceptual apparatus.

This idea of Nihilism as attacking the proliferation of theory-theory is the topic of the next section. Further, this will allow me to connect Nihilism to simulation theory.

6. Nihilism And The Destruction Of Theory-Theory: Reclaiming Empathy And Simulation

Now, if our historical moment can characterized by an over-reliance on theoretical concepts, then it would therefore be fair to frame Nihilism as a revolt against these historically constituted tacit theories. As I said, Nietzsche seems to have believed that Christian morality had simply been accepted as reality, that people simply believed that the notions of good and evil were universal. But Nietzsche’s observation of history revealed that these ideas were far from universal. On the contrary, they had been constructed through historical events. They were mere ideas, and not the universal reality of humanity. I think that theory-theorists have mistaken the existence of tacit theories as a universal form of mindreading. I believe that tacit mental theories are, in reality, historically contingent functions of the mind. The theoretical concepts that people use to identify people and things (race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.), are not universal. They are historically contingent.

Seeing as how Nietzsche’s task is to break down the perceived universality of Christian morality, I think that the Nihilist project can be extended to other tacit mental theories. I’ll go ahead and say this: When Nietzsche was writing Christian morality was probably the most prominent tacit psychological theory. It was the set of ideas that people unconsciously relied on to structure their interactions with themselves and others. If this is the case, then I fairly claim that Nihilism is essentially about breaking down the theoretical ideas that unconsciously structure social relationships. By this definition, I think that Foucault’s work can fairly be identified with the Nihilist project. Foucault’s main concern was always to historically analyze the theoretical concepts that unconsciously structure our relationships. That is why he studied medical, mental, penal institutions, scientific, and social institutions. He was trying to historically break down our most familiar concepts so as to reveal their contingency, to reveal their novelty.

Nihilism is thus about the destruction of theory-theory. I feel a little bit baffled by the ahistorical nature of theory-theory. It gives no credence to the historicity of thought and social interactions. It assumes that humans have a universal, static, and unchanging set of tacit theoretical ideas that structure our interactions. But as John Searle says, there is no such thing as a state of nature for creatures with language. As Zizek says, language always disfigures things, changes them, makes them different. It would be impossible, therefore, for tacit theories to be universal, to be the same throughout time. The Nihilist project is about revealing this historistic nature of our tacit mental theories. It aims to destroy the unconscious structures of our relationships. And remember, this destruction of theory-theory is nothing but the negative step towards mindfulness. We are in the age of history, we have become trapped in our own history. We don’t realize that things don’t have to be this way. So this is what Nihilism is trying to do for us. It is trying to remind us that our tacit theories are not universal. It destroys them to show us the novelty of the world.

But next, I have to ask this question: if Nihilism is destroying tacit theories, then what is it destroying them to get to? Is it possible that it is destroying them to reinvigorate empathy? Is it possible that the destruction of theory-theory means a return to simulation theory? Simulation theorists believe that minds engage with one another primarily through empathy and extended forms of empathy. We engage with other people by internally simulating their thoughts and feelings for ourselves. I think simulation theory is pretty compelling. But I also think that tacit theories have the power to overwhelm processes of simulation. I think that if we rely too heavily on general concepts then we run the risk of bypassing empathy and simulation. If we can easily identify someone as a ‘criminal’ who hasn’t exerted enough ‘will power’ to ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’, then we have no need to empathize with them. If we can use the violence of language to simplify their situation then we have no need to appreciate the novelty and nuance of their circumstances.

So what I’m suggesting is that the Nihilist project of destroying tacit theories might imply the reinvigoration of empathy and simulation. The problem with theory-theory is that it places the emphasis on generalization, on simplification. It identifies things with words that distort their complexity and nuance. It prevents us from being mindful because it paints things in broad strokes of black and white. I believe that empathy and simulation, on the other hand, place the emphasis on particulars, on nuance, on novelty. Each person has a complex situation that has to be carefully and creatively empathized with.

Nihilism, therefore, fulfills the negative step towards mindfulness by destroying theory-theory so as to reinvigorate empathy and simulation theory. If we want to have mindful interactions then we cannot rely on overly-generalized concepts that simplify people’s situations. We have to be sensitive, creative, and empathic. We have to try and be simulative in our interactions so that we can recognize people’s thoughts and experiences in their full complexity. I think that this in turn will allow us to appreciate the complexity and nuance of our own experiences.

Nihilism thus destroys theory-theory and favors empathy and simulation theory. Now I want to connect this with metaphors of war, and explain how this process will be an individual process.

7. Nihilism’s Violent Ideas As A Battle Within Our Own Minds

To me all of this seems easily connectible to war and violence. Nihilism does battle with theory-theory, it destroys it. In my ‘Society’s Implicit War’ essays, and especially in chapter six, I advocated the idea of intellectual insurrection. I claimed that we needed to wage a war within our own minds. I claimed that we needed to think of our minds as a struggle. And I think that Nihilism confirms this idea. Because we were born in this age of history that is overrun with theoretical ideas, we have to do a good bit of struggling with the ideas that we have unconsciously absorbed.

This reminds me of an interpretation of Albert Camus’ The Stranger that I thought of. The basic idea is that it is very easy to go through our lives in an unreflective state. In the first half of The Stranger the main character simply drifts through his life with little reflection or concern. But in part II, after he undergoes a tragic incident, he is suddenly compelled to be more reflective. I believe that it would be fair to say that each of us has ‘a stranger’ within us: a part of us already believes a wide variety of things that we have unreflectively internalized during the early years of our lives. By the time I reach the age of reflection I have already experienced so much, I already have so many ideas about how things work. So when I really begin to reflect on myself it is like I am learning about someone else. It is like I am discovering things that I already believe. It is like my awareness of myself is different from my convictions. It is as if though I have a stranger within me that I have to learn about. I am not my thoughts, it just turns out that I already think so many things before I had a chance to reflect on them.

It is this part of myself, it is this stranger within me that I have to do battle with if I want to be mindful of myself and of my world. I have to battle my stranger if I want to appreciate the novelty of the world and my experience in it. My stranger is essentially the tacit theories and mental models of the world that I internalized during my pre-reflective years. So, the Nihilist project, therefore, is about waging war within your own mind to break down your tacit theoretical understandings of the world. The only way that we can attain a mindful perspective on the world is to attack the unconscious structures of our thought.

So does Nihilism seem violent? Does it seem warlike? Does it seem angry or upsetting? Perhaps it does. But I think that struggle is inherent to this process. We are not singular or unified individuals. We do not have some coherent identity to maintain. We are filled with contradictory notions. Society gives us such conflicting ideas. It is up to us to take charge of this struggle within our own minds. We have to be willing to go to war with our own thoughts and feelings. And I think that the main enemy to battle is the prolific amounts of tacit psychological theory that we are given. As David Harvey says in The Condition of Postmodernity: “through the experience of everything from food, to culinary habits, music, television, entertainment, and cinema, it is now possible to experience the world’s geography vicariously, as a simulacrum. The interweaving of simulacra in daily life brings together different worlds (of commodities) in the same space and time. But it does so in such a way as to conceal almost perfectly any trace of origin, of the labour processes that produced them, or of the social relations implicated in their production” (300, italics added). Harvey is describing the way that our minds are crowded with over-simplified conceptions of people and places. We have all these ideas of nationalism, race, gender. Categories categories categories! They flood our minds and make us generalize! They disfigure and disguise the nuance of this world and our experience! We have to fight this. We cannot be passive recipients of these mind numbing tacit theories. We have to be active nihilists because we want reality. And the bottom line is that words are never reality and tacit theories, therefore, can never give us access to reality. They can only generalize. Empathy and simulation, on the other hand, can get us close to the reality of experience, the reality of emotions, the reality of nuance and complexity. There is no doubt in my mind, this is a struggle that is worthwhile. This is a contest against ourselves, a battle against our own thoughts, a war against our own culturally instilled tacit psychological theories. I want reality. And these words are not reality.

Nihilist conclusions about the meaninglessness of life are not painful, because they are not the end in themselves. They are a means to mindfulness. They are a means to perceiving novelty. Not a means to sadness. Not an end in themselves. But a way to realize that the world is not simply words, but is a dynamic and novel flux of emotions and sensa. Nihilism is nothing short of a mental war. It is nothing but the attack on theory-theory: nothing but the negative component of mindfulness. The destruction of theoretical ideas is the way to understand our own experiences as endlessly novel. Nihilism offers a way to attack this supposed monotony of our experience and becomes a way to pay attention.

8.Conclusion: Nihilism and Mindfulness: Violent Thoughts as Enabling Attentive Living

This is the conclusion section. I just want to wrap up. I have been trying to talk about how Nihilism should lead us to mindfulness, and an appreciation of the novelty that is life. Life is not a monotonous or boring experience. Every day is different. Every moment is different. I will never be the same. I want to always be different. I want to always transform. I want to perceive reality for all of its novelty and dynamism. I think these are the conclusions that both Zen and Nihilism lead me to. I believe that both Nihilism and Zen should be ways to live attentive and mindful life. But I am now seeing that Zen and Nihilism are the ‘yin and yang’ of mindfulness. One offers a positive route to mindfulness, while the other offers a negative route.

Zen offers a positive route to mindfulness in that it tells us what mindfulness is. It is a blank state of mind in which we can perceive reality without any kind of conceptual apparatus. Zen tells us to forget our preformed concepts because they interfere with our ability to perceive reality accurately. To perceive reality accurately we have to empty our minds of preformed concepts and just look. Just learn to be. This is what I mean when I say that Zen offers the positive component of mindfulness. But the comparison to yin and yang also goes further. Nihilism is contained within Zen. Because Zen tells us that we should have a blank mind, it implicitly recognizes that the mind is often full. So Zen implicitly carries the negative component of mindfulness, which is Nihilism.

I am calling Nihilism the negative route to mindfulness because it places more emphasis on what we have to overcome in order to achieve mindfulness. Nihilism focuses on the inadequacy of modern categories. It tells us that morality, science, religion, etc., are all limited and flawed ways of understanding reality. It tells us that these modern concepts interfere with our ability to really perceive and understand reality accurately. It is thus the negative component of mindfulness because it tells us what is preventing us from being mindful. But the comparison holds true for yin and yang. For Nihilism also implicitly tells us what it means to be mindful. Implicit in the claim that all categories are inadequate is the idea that to see without categories is good. It is good to be able to have a blank mind in which we aren’t impeded by a conceptual apparatus. Furthermore, I think that the Nihilist project of attacking our conceptual apparatus can be connected to what I call the dangers of theory-theory. When our mind is overrun with concepts we are subject to our tacit psychological theories. We are in effect dominated by our mental models of reality. The Nihilist project, therefore, fulfills the negative component of mindfulness by destroying our tacit psychological theories and allowing us to get closer to reality.

I am pleased with the conclusions that I have reached. This was a very productive and powerful session of exploration for me. I know understand that mindfulness cannot simply be a simple positive project of ‘paying more attention’. It isn’t something you can ‘just do’. It also has to involve a negative component. We have to learn how to pay attention by undertaking the negative project of attacking our tacit psychological theories. We live in an age in which we are saturated with tacit theories of reality, and these inhibit our ability to perceive reality accurately. In order to mindful, therefore, we have to attack our tacit theories. We have to fight ourselves to overcome our culturally embedded understandings of reality.

Zen and Nihilism are therefore two sides of the same coin of mindfulness: they are the yin and yang of an attentive life.

Implied Degrees of (In)humanity in Social Interactions, Or, In Defense of Small Talk

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1. Introduction

2. The Implied Inhumanity of the Working World

3. The Implied Humanity of Small Talk

4. Theory- Theory and Implied Inhumanity

5. Simulation Theory and Implied Humanity

6. Zen as an Antidote to Mindless Theoretical Interactions and a Path to Mindful Simulative Interactions

7. Conclusion

Introduction

So I want to spend a little time essaying on an issue that I have already worked on a little: small talk, chit chat, and politeness. From the start I have been in favor of small talk. I am a huge advocate of politeness. To eschew small talk and politeness because it feels ritualistic or phony is to miss a crucial point, I think. I had a very interesting moment at work today in which I had a very compressed/dense moment of thought in which I thought of some new ways to frame this issue. I engaged in some small talk and found it very satisfying, and then as soon as I walked away my mind swirled with some new ideas. I pulled out my notebook and I wrote down ‘capitalism and vague inhumanity. small talk and vague humanity.’ That was around 4pm. Since then I have decided that instead of talking about vagueness I want to talk about ‘implied degrees of humanity’.

The basic idea is that when we interact with people our behavior implies a certain degree of humanity or inhumanity. When we approach a store clerk, for example, and tell them what we want without looking them in the eye or attempting to make small talk we imply that we regard them with some level of inhumanity. On the other hand, when we approach someone with a smile, we look them in the eyes, and we genuinely engage them despite the inherent superficiality of our interaction, we imply that we regard them with a certain level of humanity. In short, how we treat people implies the level of humanity that we see in that other person. I will just personally say that when people order things from me like I’m a robot and just sloppily throw money at me it makes me feel like my humanity has been ignored or affronted.

This sounds awfully dramatic, I suppose. But at the same time I think it a serious issue. I think that small talk and politeness is an important issue. I think that the stakes are higher than we might realize. But I’m not sure if I can say why at this moment. Perhaps this essaying will clarify.

In any case, I plan on handling this in five sections. In the first two sections I’m going to keep it straightforward and just talk about my experiences and thoughts on the working world and small talk. Then in the second two sections I’m going to connect these ideas to the contemporary debates in theory of mind, in particular the debate between theory-theory and simulation theory. So, first, I’m going to talk about the working world and how ‘business’ like interactions imply a certain level of inhumanity. Second, I’m going to talk about small talk and how it implies a certain level of humanity. Third I’m going to talk about theory-theory and how I think that the implied inhumanity of the working world has to do with the proliferation of theory-theory in people’s minds. To put it differently, I think people’s minds are often overrun with concepts and categories that prevent them from really engaging directly with people, thus leading them to implicitly treat people inhumanely. Fourth, I’m going to talk about simulation theory and how engaging with people with this theory in mind means that out behavior is implicitly humane. And lastly, I’m going to talk about Zen and the importance of being present and mindful during every social interaction. I think that Zen offers a powerful antidote to the inhumanity that is implied in some social interactions. So then, now I can say that with the issue of small talk the stakes are nothing less than subtle humanity. Onward.

Brief disclaimers: First, I’m not completely satisfied with the language of humanity and inhumanity. It doesn’t feel quite adequate. But I’m trying to find ways to talk about how people interact, and what it implies about how people regard one another. But I’m going to let my analysis center around these terms for this essay. Second, forgive me if any of this sound hyperbolic. I am also entertaining the idea of writing an essay called ‘Finding The Moderate Truth Within Hyperbole’. Perhaps sometimes I swing really hard to one view, but that is only because I suspect that things, or my own mind, is stuck on the other side. I swing the pendulum hard to the left because it has been on the right, and I want it in the middle. Hyperbole is not meant to communicate an absolute truth, but is meant to serve as a counterweight to an already distorted view.

The Implied Inhumanity of the Working World

So, the example I gave above is a good starting point. When someone comes up to me and rattles off some ridiculous order and throws a credit card at me I go crazy. But why do I go crazy? Why does it bother me so much? Because I feel like when they look at me they don’t see me as a person. I feel like I exist as some kind of robot in their world who is there simply to get them coffee and pastries. It just makes me think that these people are so wrapped up in their own minds that my presence doesn’t mean anything to them. They don’t realize that I woke up that morning and thought about how I had to go to work and how I find my life confusing. I just feel like my sense of myself is squashed somehow. Since they seem to have no interest in really interacting with me it makes me feel like I don’t matter to them. I then sort of imagine what it would be like for someone to regard me as simply a coffee robot. And that makes me sad. It makes me feel like I am being treated inhumanely, or ahumanely, which isn’t a word. But still. I’m just using that word ahumane to communicate that it isn’t so much an inhumane treatment as a treatment that doesn’t acknowledge humanity. It isn’t the existence of inhumanity but rather a lack of humanity.

In my journal I had written that it had something to do with capitalism and the way that the working world is structured. Perhaps this has something to do with it. Maybe I just exist as a cog in this cafe machine, which is a cog in a larger bookstore machine, which is a cog in a larger economic machine. Perhaps what I am experiencing is the mechanization of social interaction at the hands of the economic system.

I am starting to have more curiosity about Marxism and economic analysis in general. I think this is because I am currently reading David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry Into Cultural Change. Harvey is a geographer who has written a good bit on economics, cities, and cultural change. He talks about capitalist modernization and how it effects relationships between people. In the part of the book I am currently on he is analyzing Marx’s depiction of capitalist modernization. The thing that stood out most to me is the idea of fetishizing commodities. I really want to read Marx. I haven’t yet. But anyways, the basic idea (as I loosely understand) is that the products that we buy seem to magically appear in front of us, and we thus experience an alienation from how they were created and how they got there. Why this is called fetishization I don’t really know.

But think about it in the context of the present example: people are used to coming into my cafe and there being tons of pastries and coffee drinks and all that and people don’t think about where it comes from and how it got there. So perhaps people can think of me in the same way. They have no idea where I come from or why I am the keeper of their pastries and absurd coffee treats. All they know is that this young man with glasses can get them a treat if they tell him to do so. So my humanity doesn’t have to enter the picture. People are inherently ignorant of and thus alienated from my experience and the process that led me to become the keeper of their treats.

I think that this idea of alienation from the process of production (in which I am a product of sorts that people are disconnected from) is useful in talking about why people sometimes interact with me as if though I were just a robot. People just want the things they can buy, and they don’t see the need to be polite or engaging when just buying these things.

So I guess what I’m saying is that it seems like when people interact with me they are engaging mindlessly. They are just unreflectively going through that moment, desiring their coffee treats, and not stopping to consider the young man that gets them their treats. But this mindlessness is a bit disconcerting to me. I think it is perhaps something to do battle with. But perhaps I’ll get to that later.

I didn’t use the term inhumanity super explicitly in this section. So let me make it explicit: when people mindlessly interact with me in the professional/capitalist world it seems to me that a certain level of inhumanity is implicit in their behavior. By not looking me in the eye and throwing your crumpled money on the counter you are implicitly regarding me as lesser, as inferior, as inhuman. Perhaps they don’t mean this, and would be upset to hear it framed like this. But it seems to me that it might be reasonable to say that their behavior implies this. Perhaps because our political and economic system imply this lack of humanity and they have simply internalized this tendency to ‘fetishize’ someone, or to ignore someone’s humanity. Now let me turn to small talk and how I think that it implies a certain level of humane regard for others.

The Implied Humanity of Small Talk

So when people don’t look me in the eye I feel that my humanity has been implicitly denied. But when someone comes up to me and talks to me about how my day is and how their day is I feel so much better. When I walk past co-workers and we simply take the time to smile at one another or to say hello I feel so much more invigorated by that. At my last job someone said to me ‘Riley, you don’t have to say something every time we walk by’. But honestly I don’t like walking past people I know without somehow acknowledging them. But I find that people do it. And unfortunately I now find myself doing it. I feel shy because the general climate sometimes seems to be one in which people don’t say hello to each other, don’t acknowledge one another. This essay marks the beginning of my polite insurrection: I am now going to be forcibly interactive and friendly with people. Tactfully, of course. But if someone sees me and then avoids eye contact I will say hello to their diverted eyes.

Because today I was in a hallway and me and this guy had a brief interaction that was really nice. We said hello, I asked him how it was going, he said it was good, asked me how I was. I said ‘ah pretty good, the day is winding down’. He said ‘yeah, finally’. I laughed a little and said something positive to affirm the feeling of a long day. And you know what, it made me feel great! It feels fun to identify with people on any level. It feels good to share experience in almost any way at all. It makes me feel like saying ‘Yeah buddy! You and me! We are in this human existence together! Our lives don’t make any sense and we live in some state in some country and that doesn’t make any sense to me! But I like that we can smile and commiserate about how we work and live together’.

Perhaps these people wouldn’t identify with these feelings of confusion and helplessness. This feeling of ‘Why do we live this way? Why do I speak this language and root for these national priorities? Why do I do anything that I do?’ Being the history lover that I am, I always come back to something like historical determinism. I always grapple with the quality of my experience by thinking about how history has structured my life, placed me within a determined political-economic environment. This is what I would like to do as a thinker and an artist. Talk about the quality of contemporary experience and help myself (and maybe others?) grapple with the confusion of this overly-structured life. That is what my new big essay I’m working on is addressing, which I am excited about, and hope to finish by the end of November.

But the point I’m making here is that life is confusing, and that it makes me feel good to know that other people share my experiences. When people come up to me and toss their money at me I feel like they don’t want to share in my experience. They don’t want to share in the commonality of our lives. The commonality of our pain and confusion is lost on them in that moment, it seems.

But small talk is a way to show each and every person that you share their experience in some way. All talk is a way of sharing experience. Experience of thought, experience of emotion, experience of any kind. Language is always about experience. Unfortunately, language also has a darker side. It has the tendency to abstract things, to remove us from the emotional part of our experiences. It can make things cold and automatic.

So I am promoting emotional and engaged small talk. And yeah, it can be hard to talk about the weather or the day of the week and enjoy it. But at the same time it can be so fun. Just to feel lives that are like mine in any way at all. I just love empathy. I talk to someone and I suddenly feel like I exist in their mind and they exist inside mine. Go ahead and look at my profile picture. Minds encase other minds.

I am willing to hold you inside my mind if you are willing to do the same for me.

I think that is why I enjoy small talk. It is mutual regard. Mutual interest in sharing experience. Which alleviates the frustration of my experience. It always feels better to have confidants, to have comrades. With small talk everyone becomes my comrade. The people who throw their money at me don’t seem to want to be my comrades. They seem to want me to be their treat machine.

I’ve known some people who have explicitly declared themselves to be anti-small talk. Poppycock, I say. To be anti-small talk is to be anti-tact, anti-politeness. To be anti-small talk is to deny that we have something in common with everyone. It is to deny that there are people that you simply don’t care to share your mind with. It is to believe that there are certain minds which you just don’t care to know. This is too hyperbolic. But I do think that to be anti-small talk is somehow bad. I am trying to come up with some philosophically defensible view of politeness and small talk.

So now that I have roughly and ramblingly laid out my stance on the different approaches to small talk, and how they implicitly communicate a certain view on the humanity or inhumanity of other people, I want to connect these ideas to the contemporary debates going on in theory of mind. First, theory-theory. Second, simulation theory. Lastly, Zen.

Theory-Theory and Implied Inhumanity

So one of the major contemporary schools of theories of mind is known as theory-theory. I have extensively written about theory-theory, so check out any of my posts between May and August and I will likely talk about it. But to roughly rehash: theory-theorists argue that human’s understand other people’s minds by drawing on tacit or naive psychological theories. They believe that we are equipped with an unconscious psychological theory that allows us to make inferences about the mental states of other people.

I’ll say first and foremost that I think tacit psychological theories do indeed exist. That our minds are equipped with certain understandings about the world and minds that allow us to intuitively think certain things. Tacit theories can in some ways be likened to our assumptions about the world. We assume that gravity will keep us on the ground, that dogs can’t talk, that most people see colors the same as us, so on. Tacit theories can also be compared to mental models that neuroscientists speak of. Our brain models our own bodies and the world around us. We have intuitive models of the rooms we live in, of the size of our bodies, of the way that we move. That is why phantom limb pain is possible, and why we find it startling when someone suddenly moves when we turn our back. Our brain works by modeling the world around us, by creating the tacit theories that theory-theorists speak of.

But to assume that theory-theory can account for all relationships between human minds seems absurd to me. For one thing, many of the things that we assume about other minds come from language and culture. When we see a young person dressed a certain way, for example, we automatically assume that they like certain types of books, music, conversation, or things like that. The tacit theories that we have about people are socially constructed, they are not essential or innate in our minds. Tacit theories likely work with what John Searle calls ‘status functions’: things that work only because a group of people has declared them to work in that way. Obama, for example, is only president because he has been declared president and because our social system makes it so that people agree on this declaration. The conclusion I am leading myself towards is that if tacit theories are based on social facts, then theory-theory mindreading cannot be the most primitive, basic, and essential form of mindreading.

If theory-theory requires status function declarations, and thus language, then how would theory-theory mindreading have functioned in our pre-linguistic ancestors? What kinds of tacit psychological theories do apes possess that would allow them to accomplish the types of mindreading that they need to perform? Similarly, I think there are a lot of things that happen in our lives, like emotions, that don’t revolve primarily around language, and thus couldn’t be handled by something like a tacit theory. I’m preemptively refuting theory-theory so that later on I can talk about how simulation theory (also called empathy theory) is a better way to think about mindreading and small talk. But nonetheless, theory-theory exists. Tacit theories are real, and people unconsciously infer things all the time.

I do need to say, however, that I think theory-theory can be dangerous. That if we are to rely too much on tacit theoretical models of the world and of minds we run some risks. In particular, we run the risk of treating people like automatons, and we run the risk of implicitly denying people their humanity. Earlier I hinted at the darker side of language. I said that it has the tendency to abstract reality, to remove us from it, to make it seem alien. I was alluding to theory-theory and how I see it as dangerous. When we rely on theoretical models of things we run the risk of simplifying them, of alienating ourselves from them. When we use nothing but society’s rigid sets of concepts we pigeonhole other people and ourselves. We get used to things being what we call them. We think, ‘oh this is just a cafe where I can get treats, and this boy is just here to fetch me treats’. We run the risk of identifying people too much with categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality. We think ‘oh that asian person’ or ‘oh that girl is just blah blah blah’. Theory-theory can blind us to the nuance and dynamism of life. Because the truth is that people defy categories all the time, they bend them, they move within them. But when we only identify people with familiar concepts we deny ourselves the chance to experience their nuance. And sometimes our actions implicitly deny them their humanity.

This rhymes with what Slavoj Zizek refers to as the inherent violence of language. He talks about how language disfigures reality, how it takes things from the outside world and perverts them inside our mind. Language changes the way that we perceive reality, and, as Zizek argues, it “simplifies the designated thing, reducing it to a single feature. It dismembers the thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as autonomous. It inserts the thing into a field of meaning which is ultimately external to it” (Violence, 61). Language has the danger of perverting our perception of reality, and of alienating us from the things, and most importantly, from the people around us. So when someone comes up to me and tells me they want this ridiculous coffee drink and throws their money at me their mind is probably saturated with a tacit theory that says ‘oh this is just a barista who will get me my latte because I have this money and I want to buy myself a treat’. I am not a barista. I am not fucking words. Only that is certain. But people have quite a lot of words to identify me with, so it is much easier for them to engage with my in a way that they can bypass any engagement with me as an actual person. By calling me a barista, or thinking of me in that way, people are given the freedom of just approaching me for a product. Then they get it, and they go and interact with other words. I don’t want to interact with words. I want to use words to interact with ineffable minds.

So this is the danger of theory-theory, and I think this goes somewhere in explaining how it is that for some people small talk is a non-reality, something they don’t engage in and don’t want to engage in. Our modern culture is so overrun with words that it can be easy to engage with the world only in terms of words. And I think this is why people can interact in ways that implicitly deny each other their humanity. People interact as ‘customer’ to ‘barista’, ‘boss’ to ‘employee’. All these status function declarations constitute our tacit theories that allow us to engage with others in inhumane ways. Language is dangerous, and we shouldn’t let it govern our perception of other people.

I wonder if this is at all clear to an outside reader. Because to me it makes sense, but I doubt my writing is coherent. But to try and summarize: theory-theory cannot be thought of as the only way that people interact with other minds. Mindreading has to be traceable to a time when individual’s lives were not structured entirely by language. But our society does indeed have an enormous amount of ‘theories’, so much has been said that our minds are flooded with preformed categories. It is the excessive application of these categories, I believe, that allows people to engage in anti-small talk behavior that implicitly denies people their humanity.

Now, let me talk about simulation theory.

Simulation Theory and Implied Humanity

The other major competing theory of mind is known as simulation theory of mind. It has also been called empathy theory. The basic argument of simulation theorists is that human beings understand one another’s mental states by ‘putting ourselves in their shoes’, so to speak. They argue that whenever someone else communicates to us, through language, facial expressions, or otherwise, we use these signs as evidence for their mental state, which we then use to internally simulate their thoughts in our own mind, and then finally project those thoughts and feelings onto that other person. So the process of simulation has three stages that blend in practice and feel intuitive. First we perceive the expression of mental activity in another person, we then internally simulate the state we believe that person is having, and then we attribute that state to that person and project it onto them.

I find simulation theory compelling because it has some pretty convincing neurological evidence that I haven’t seen from theory-theory. One of the most important pieces of evidence is the existence of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are a class of neurons that are active both when we make and witness an action being performed. So when we perceive someone making an angry face, all of the neurons we would use to make that same face become active. The facial muscles then communicate to the limbic system which makes us feel the appropriate emotion. The existence of mirror neurons means that empathy is a real, direct, and unconscious process in which our brain literally simulates the facial expression and emotion we see in another person. The other convincing piece of evidence is known as the enactment-imagination. This refers to the fact that when we imagine an experience we experience the same neural activity that we would have if we actually underwent that experience. So, if we imagine a spider crawling on our skin, we experience neural activity that corresponds with the actual experience of a spider crawling on us. Our imagination actually enacts the experience in our brain. So, this parallels to mental activity as well. When we imagine how a person is feeling we create that feeling in our own brain.

I’m cutting this short because I’ve written on simulation theory so much. Again, look at anything I wrote between April and September and I likely reference simulation theory. But I find it very compelling. And I think those two brief things, mirror neurons and the enactment-imagination, should make it clear that empathy/simulation is a very real thing in the interaction of minds. Also, because simulation theory doesn’t rely on language I agree with Alvin Goldman that it is probably the most basic and important form of mindreading that humans possess. I, however, think that simulation theory is in danger of being overrun by theory-theory. I think that our society’s plethora of concepts has dulled people’s sense of empathy. I think that when people have too many words they don’t need empathy as much.

This is relevant because I think that by placing more emphasis on empathy we would be more inclined to engage in small talk, and thus more inclined to implicitly recognize people’s humanity. What I described above as an excitement at sharing experience with people, even just through small talk, is an excitement for empathy, an excitement for the simulation of other people’s thoughts. Today when that guy told me that he was glad the day was ‘finally winding down’, I felt more excited because I understood that his day had felt really long and now he was feeling good that it was almost over. I was happy for him because he was happy, and I thus became happy myself. It feels good to engage with other minds, it feels good to simulate other minds.

I think my tendency to empathize/simulate other minds also explains why it hurts me when people throw their money at me. When someone comes up to me and doesn’t look at me and just throws stuff at me it forces me to simulate a mind that regards me as not worthwhile. I find myself imagining a perspective that doesn’t care to say hello to me. And it hurts me to bring that perspective to life within my own mind. But I can’t help doing it. My knowledge of simulation theory, and my analysis of my own mental habits certainly helps me. But it still doesn’t feel good to empathize with someone who doesn’t want to empathize with me. In essence it means that by empathizing with them I am not empathizing with myself.

So I really feel like this section doesn’t have to be as long or elaborate. To explicate simulation theory isn’t as hard as explicating theory-theory because I think it intuitively makes more sense. Doesn’t it seem to make sense that empathy would be our primary way of understanding other people? Wouldn’t we draw on our own experiences to understand other people’s experiences? And doesn’t that thus mean that it is helpful, fun, and supremely human to share experience? I think so. And I think that if we were to regard our minds as functioning primarily in terms of simulation/empathy, we might take a positive approach to small talk, and we could realize that when we engage in small talk what we are doing is implicitly acknowledging that other people’s experiences are worthwhile. I think that by thinking of social interactions in terms of simulation we can see that small talk is a rewarding way to share our experiences, however small, however mundane we believe them to be. The alternative is to regard small talk and superficial interactions as not worthwhile. But when we do that we implicitly deny people the worth of their experience, we implicitly deny people their humanity.

So that is all I want to say about simulation theory I suppose. I think that small talk should be thought of as simulations, as an empathic process of sharing experience. Experience of the working world, of the social world, of the absurd 21st century world. Small talk is worthwhile, and I think that simulation theory helps make this true, and that theory-theory helps me see why it can be dangerous to try and bypass or condemn small talk. All you theory-theorists, look out, because I think what you are saying is dangerous and is expanding the gulf between people. Simulation theorists, look out, you need to get aggressive with your empathizing, you need to get active.

Lastly I just want to talk about Zen.

Zen as an Antidote to Mindless Theoretical Interactions and a Path to Mindful Simulative Interactions

I think that Zen is surprisingly compatible with simulation theory, and also conveniently exposes the dangers of theory-theory. The key thing in Zen is awareness and mindfulness. The goal is to perceive reality accurately by being grounded and aware of every single moment. Interestingly, one thing that Shunryu Suzuki says is that we need to abandon all of our preformed concepts. He says that these concepts get in the way of us perceiving reality accurately. Does this remind you of theory-theory? It should. Because what I was telling you was that theory-theory is about our minds reliance on a series of preformed and unconscious concepts that guide our interactions with others. I told you that theory-theory was dangerous because it alienated us from the world and because it prevents us from perceiving reality accurately. As Zizek claims, language is violence, concepts disfigure reality, it paints them in a new light and changes the way we perceive them. So, both Zen and Zizek believe that we need to give up on theory-theory: we can’t continue to identify everything with words because it causes us to treat people differently, it causes us to implicitly deny people their humanity by giving up on the idea of small talk. Lol, that last sentence was a bit too much, but you get the point. We rely too much on language and it gets in the way of genuine empathy and interaction.

Zen also lines up directly with simulation theory and my defense of small talk in two ways. First, mindfulness, the key thing in Zen, might be possible because humans have brains that are inclined to simulate other people’s perspectives. I just wrote a post called ‘Mindfulness and Simulation Theory’, about Guy Claxton’s argument that mindfulness is possible because humans evolved to have brains that are capable of shifting to and simulating different perspectives. So simulation theory in many ways may end up vindicating the idea of mindfulness.

Second, I think that Zen lines up with simulation theory because of their emphasis on perceiving things and people as they are, without a set of concepts. Simulation theory implies that people can be perceived on a pre-linguistic level, on an emotional level. Both Zen and simulation theory also believe that accurate perception depends no the individual. In Zen we are supposed to work on our own minds, our own perception, only by focusing on ourselves as the perceiver can we hope to come close to an accurate perception of reality. The same goes for simulation. Because we are the ones responsible for simulating and projecting other people’s minds, it is up to us to try and do it accurately, it is up to us to take control of the way that we are simulating other people’s thoughts, and to make sure that we are empathizing with people as much as we possibly can. So both Zen and simulation theory stress that we are the ones responsible for how we perceive reality. And that we have to exert effort to overcome our set of concepts that blind us from accurate perception.

So this section won’t be as long as the others. I frankly have quite a lot of reading and thinking left to do with Zen. I don’t know how to integrate it into all my other lines of thought. But this is a start. Zen corroborates both of my major arguments in this essay: 1. Zen warns against the ways that language and preformed concepts can prevent us from accurately perceiving reality (i.e. Zen warns against the dangers of theory-theory that I described in section three), and 2. Zen tells us that we are responsible for monitoring our own minds, and that it is up to us to understand how our mind constructs reality for us, in essence confirming the claims of simulation theorists who believe that we are responsible for bringing other people’s experiences to life for us.

This means that if we can embrace Zen we can embrace a world in which small talk is important and worthwhile. We can embrace a view where people are not just ‘baristas’ or ‘cashiers’, but are honest to god ineffable minds that deserve to be empathized with. By embracing Zen we can overcome all of the words that tell us that these people are this or that, that they are ‘poor’ or ‘crazy’ or ‘irrational’. By embracing Zen we can realize the project of simulation theorists by taking empathy seriously, by getting creative with empathy, by monitoring our own minds and changing the way that we bring other people’s minds to life. In short, by embracing Zen we can overcome the mindlessness that theory-theory encourages and live the mindful life that simulation theory gives me hope for.

Conclusion

My main task was to vindicate small talk as worthwhile and important. I tried to do this both negatively and positively. I tried to do it negatively by talking about how the working world leads to a certain amount of alienation from other people and fosters a disdain for small talk, and how this is a reflection of our over reliance on theory-theory. I’m calling this a negative defense of small talk because I was trying to discount the views promoted by the economic system and corroborated by theory-theorists. I tried to do it positively by talking about how small talk was an exciting process of sharing experience, how simulation theory confirms that we can engage with people on a direct and emotional level, and how Zen confirms the importance of being mindful and sensitive towards other people.

The major axis for this analysis, which I fear I lost at times, was that our stance towards small talk implicitly communicates a certain regard for other people’s humanity. If we don’t regard someone as worth our small talk, we are implicitly stripping them of their humanity, we are implicitly telling them that their experience isn’t worth our time. I feel this way sometimes, as I said, when people throw their money at me. I feel like people don’t talk me seriously and don’t feel me worth their words or thoughts. But when we think people worthwhile of their small talk we are implicitly acknowledging their humanity and the worthwhileness of their experience.

This was about two hours of non-stop writing. I’m glad I did this. I think that I have managed to present a somewhat convincing, albeit hyperbolic defense of small talk. Furthermore, I think I successfully connected it to the ongoing debate between theory-theory and simulation theory, showing that theory-theory has the danger of further corroborating the alienation between people that our political-economic environment encourages, and demonstrating that simulation theory has the potential to make us more empathic and aware, bringing it in line with the Zen philosophy that I also feel vital to the task of vindicating small talk. From downtown, he’s on fire, boom shakalaka. Over and out.

I wrote this because I love people. I want to say hello to all of you. I wish I loved you all. But sometimes I know I can’t love everyone. But I want people to forget their words and remember to feel their minds. Because the mind can be so loving. I want to find out how the mind becomes loving. Because I don’t want it to be trapped by the violence of theory-theory. I don’t want the beauty and importance of empathy to be drowned by the overwhelming power of generalizing words. Cause I sure as hell am not words. And neither are you. So lets stop thinking of ourselves as words so often.