When reality morphs from personal to political

"...slavery might be profitable or politically expedient, but it was not moral. (Lincoln) had to choose the future of America."

By George Templeton

Gazette Blog Columnist

Becoming Brain Synchronized, 1322
Internet gossip is emotional, but it isn’t you. You interpret your engagements. You manufacture the meaning of their symbols. Even icons like the cross have changed their meaning.

The Symbolic Us
We elect our government. Our happiness requires the “right” choices. Our laws give us moral guidance.

Supreme Court Judges, policemen, and leaders are more than themselves. They represent principle, ethos, and tradition. We build tomorrow on yesterday. Like a tree that grows from a seed to eventually produce fruit, we expect to harvest a tasty delight.

Yesterday we respected our honest leaders because they educated us instead of misrepresenting our choices. Leaders took a position and stood by it even if it meant their job loss. They knew that they had more than a duty. They had an obligation to their authentic selves. The good of the American people was most important.

If we lost the election, there would be another and there would be additional facts to base our decisions on. We would be the rational deciders. We would come together, for a while, to support our leader. We can understand the social nature of democracy only by having imagination and empathy.

Some of us are unaware of how they are socially shaped. Do they know the difference between not knowing and not caring? Are they acting for a purpose or with a purpose? Knowing what we have done in life is not nearly as important as seeing what we should have done.

Our Constitution made a nation. It served the purposes outlined in the Declaration of Independence. How could collective unity avoid dictatorship?

There comes a time in leadership when you realize that you are responsible for everything but have authority over nothing. Like Gary Cooper in the 1952 movie “High Noon” you have no higher authority to exculpate you. Like President Lincoln, slavery might be profitable or politically expedient, but it was not moral. He had to choose the future of America.

Religious fundamentalists say, “Just believe” thus ignoring the ridiculous. But they are right. Belief does matter, as long as it recognizes that there is more than one’s self in the universe, as long as it recognizes that this self is responsible. It does change things. And so, you may not agree that you can make a difference but believing does make a big difference, especially when reality has morphed from the personal to the
political.

Emotional Vision
In America, the informed democratic electorate is more adaptive than rational. Leaders ignore their symbolic duty. Things will change, but do we first need to tear them apart? If we investigate our motives we will find that emotion helps us make better decisions.

We have decided long before we even realize it. We don’t consult Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason before acting, even when we think we have.

We live in an illusion. We don’t exactly remember. Our evolutionary mental scaffolding knows that the pieces have to fit, and so we construct our personal story around the remaining fading guideposts in our brain.

We locate “real space” in a frame of reference (x, y, z, t …). Our “world space’ is where our friends meet (social media). It is as much mental as physical, mindful as concrete, and subjective as objective. We cannot leave our engagements behind.

Can You See?
We find that people suffering from Wernicke’s Aphasia speak normally but cannot comprehend what is said to them. People with Broca’s Aphasia understand spoken language but cannot produce it. But do things have to be black or white, all or none?

Psychology studies find that there can be vision without sight. Although a subject claims to see nothing, they later accurately identify what they were shown. We communicate with language and images, but we gain subconscious information about things that we cannot see. We are like scientists, trying to see that which cannot be seen. Our brains interpret senses which we are unaware of.

Your Mind Controls Your Body, but Can You Train Your Brain?
Are you a mind or are you a body? These were separate things according to Descartes. Your mind wills your leg to move. Can the physical alter the mind?

Cognitive behavioral therapy asserts that there are techniques for retraining your brain. They include interventions for smoking, weight management, and drug abuse, coping with stress, depression, anger, and fear.

Our reality changes us genetically. That is how we pass “us” on to future generations. PTSD and COVID will have long-term consequences. Now studies are showing that traumatic experiences can cause immediate genetic changes in the next generation. It does not take millions of years.

Brain Metaphors
A metaphor is something other than the literal truth.

Absolute belief is the opposite of creativity. It leads to a lack of flexibility and imagination. Trial and error, subject to consciousness, leads to intuition. Overthinking kills the message.

It is like playing the trumpet. First, you have to learn some rules, build muscles, and learn reflexes. After that, it is about letting go. If you have to think about it, you are not communicating.

Metaphors bridge the gap between reason and logic, between the ridiculous and the rational, between the actor and the audience, between the affective and cognitive, between the subjective and objective, and between the spiritual and secular. This is their power.

The philosopher, Wittgenstein explained that all meaning is social, contextual, and grounded in culture. It isn’t mathematical or computable.

Words can have many meanings. They are also part of a story. Many ways can take us from point A to point B. Neurology calls these threads neurons and synapses. Our brains are "meaning-making" machines.

Today’s interconnected world requires more than our personal feelings. The basis for truth is boring and often complex.

Measuring Love
N.C. Barford wrote a book about precision, error, and truth in 1967. The title implies that there is something different about these three. The book was about making measurements, but the truth can be hard to grasp.

We can’t get our fears and dreams out of our experiences. Feelings have strong qualitative content. We make them concrete although they cannot be measured and quantified.

How accurate is your love? Does it have an external standard like the meter and kilogram? We cannot measure love directly. At best, we have only proxies. It remains mysterious.

Twentieth-century philosophers like Heidegger wrestled with the problem of human consciousness seeming to change the things we come in contact with. Our engagement molests the very thing that we are trying to measure.

Brain Washed or Brain Synchronized
The Communist Party knows how to brainwash. They call it vocational rehabilitation.

Brain synchronization is much more powerful. It is like a metaphor because we bring ourselves to it. It has no dominant over-arching belief.  Perhaps our desire to be praiseworthy instead of deplorable has something to do with it.

Meshed gears in a machine allow for the transmission of power. They have to “fit” for the machine (MAGA) to operate. Will the next tooth to attempt engagement jam the transmission? We don’t know. Our synchronized brains are like this.

Multiple brain scanning techniques reveal that our brains are joined together socially. They are not independent.

Scientists found that the geometric pattern of neuron firing is drastically different between transmitters (politicians) and receivers (us).

The measure of successful synchronization is a high correlation between our symphonies of brain waves. Waves have amplitude, timing, and shape (harmonic content). When people think similarly, their brain waves are nearly identical.

A political rally can indoctrinate thousands of people. Not all people synchronize, but those that do become as fixed and permanent as the mountains. But educators cannot teach synchronization. There are far too many interacting variables for that.

This is the neurology of synchronized brains. It appears on the “like button”, in entertainment news, in confirmation bias and with the moral individual living inside an immoral collective.