understanding the world apparently

Our brains are story-telling machines and they really like a protagonist with a concrete identity. A prominent example of this is how we see ourselves. The “default mode network” is a linked system of brain regions that lights up when your mind wanders and thinks about itself, like a continuously running loop. Your brain keeps telling itself who it is, and that story helps make it who it is. A lot of your traits are not as physically fixed as they feel. It’s what neuroplasticity is all about: you don’t have to stay the person who is late to class; it is the illusion of “who I am” in your head that allows you to slip into certain tendencies so easily. Your brain cherry-picks data and emotions to stitch a manufactured story about you that it tells you to make you you. An interpretation of this has also been creatively explored in the movie “Inside Out 2”, which shows how the same memories and emotions can be stitched together totally differently to give someone an altogether separate identity (it is fictional but the allegory stands). The point is that this process of stitching a story has way too much power over you. The same experience can be dealt with in so many ways when different perspectives (filters) are brought in. The process of stitching holds so much power because it gets to cherry-pick data and dictate the processing/interpretation of the data. Raw information supplies no meaning, so we filter out some stuff to work with our filtrate. An interpretation of this has also been thoughtfully discussed by Varun Mayya in his Cero Season 2 podcast. Sometimes different experiences, professions, languages or skills bring in new possible filters to work with. The coolest way you can realise this live, by yourself, is the use of metaphors that are brought about when you learn something new. Like how a CS student can see their laundry management as managing cache in computer memory, like how the mathematician Jim Simons could think of the stock market as a point in an n-dimensional complex space.

Our brains are story-telling machines and they usually really like a protagonist with a concrete identity. It is how we like to personify collectives and groups of people, giving personality traits to a nationality or culture or sneakerheads to have a mental shorthand to make sense of them in your head. But when you assign a trait to a group, people in that group and people entering that group who identify as being a part of it, subconsciously or consciously imbibe that trait to fully feel their belonging to the group. A boy can grow up hearing certain ideas about masculinity and grow up to have certain beliefs and tendencies but not because he chose them; instead because it genuinely naturally occurred to him as a man in this society. Sometimes it can take the form of campism, with people aligning their political beliefs with others on something because they agree on something else unrelated. And this group identity is truly a burden. A kid hears that everyone in the family keeps the TV remote covered in plastic, so he has his kids keep the TV remote covered in plastic. But that’s so absurd; normally the kid would question the norm and learn from it to have his own rules in the household he lives in, right? Mostly yeah, except when questioning authority is a sensitive matter, when challenging a trait that might be even externally attributed or misinterpreted over time. This holds true with a lot of religious and cultural practices. And the more sensitive and static we treat the group identity, the more it starts implying determinism at scale. When evolving an identity is seen as a threat, fundamentalism takes over and people in it become suffocated and suffocating. It limits and controls individuals (who could redefine and create new wonders) to fit into something that is defined for them. The process of stitching the story holds so much power because it gets to cherry-pick data and dictate the processing/interpretation of the data. Not only that but it gets to also influence new data. The narrative carries inertia; it is self-validating and reinforces itself through action and evidence that exist because of the narrative in the first place. This is what politics and advertising try to capitalise on.

Our brains are story-telling machines and they usually really like a protagonist with a concrete identity. A quote popularly attributed to Hegel, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history”, is often interpreted as Hegel saying that humans are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. But what he meant was far from that. He meant to say that every historical era is strictly unique, and the past cannot be used as a guide or template for solving modern problems. Hegel still believed that from a bigger-picture view, history follows a necessary direction, and that is where Karl Popper, in his “The Poverty of Historicism”, argues how bankrupt the idea of historicism is. Historicism is described as some form of determinism in the progression of humanity based on theories extrapolated from history. I interpret it as making up a story, a narrative, based on historical data points, giving non-human entities a personality of sorts in the process. And I argue in favor of Popper that you can’t predict the future from the past. You can’t pretend to have a sort of “objective” “prediction” in the chaotic stories of identities. It often happens that people characterize nations, markets, industries and even fields of research as operating in a predictable manner under a set of character traits used as objective truths. Political leaders repeat this logic in deciding their policies and communicating them. In the 1800s Western world, the idea of democracy (where every person could have an equal vote) was seen as absurd, since people were ill-informed and uneducated, and the idea of education reaching a layperson seemed out of a fairy tale. A stable economy without slavery was impossible for most people who looked at the thousands of years of histories of great civilisations, until it was abolished. The idea of a united India in its diversity was seen as a fantasy by so many in the 1950s and yet we see something else today. And when all things work out the other way, one counters by saying that they did not account for other “important” factors or else they too could have predicted what happened. This, I would argue, is cherry-picking data retrospectively to fit a narrative. That’s how the process of stitching the story holds so much power because it gets to cherry-pick data and dictate the processing/interpretation of the data. It gives us a perception that is never an accurate representation of reality, because you cannot account for all factors ever; all such attempts are just different versions of Laplace’s demon, except that here parameters are quantified by proxies and measured by proxies and then we assume that a good enough prediction will be close enough while even physics is still tackling chaos theory, where determinism and predictability are very different words.

Our brains are story-telling machines and they really like a protagonist with a concrete identity, and we do that with individuals, collectives and even abstractions. Yet this is also what I have been doing through this essay, where I pick anecdotes I have learnt of (which are loosely tied to my points, pretending to be evidence), to stitch a story justifying a thesis about reality that claims that stories with an identifying reality are always incomplete. People learn to get better at telling these stories through training in academic writing and critical theory (which I am clearly untrained in), but these all inherently rely on the assumption that rules or patterns of reality first exist and second can be devised by us. But learning this should not push us to stop writing stories, for that is self-expression, for everyone is a story-teller, for everyone is a philosopher, yet these stories that define a structure or identity or solution limit people to thinking under them. My solution for better stories is to write stories that provide a conflict, not a solution.