1/9/2022: The Second Post
Psych!
Every time I go to write this, I think “nothing happened this week! How could I possibly write another one?” and then I look at my tentative notes and realize that, actually, too much happened this week, so I should get it out now before it disappears into the abyss of memory.
What Kind Of Thing Is The Mind?
I started out the week thinking about psychology, jumping off QC’s thread:
My little response:
This is a bit mysterious. Let me unwrap it:
First question: what is psychology’s object of study? It’s psyche-ology, “the mind".” Okay, but what kind of thing is that? Better question: in what way can we know the mind? We can’t observe a mind with our sense of sight, hearing, taste, etc, especially because we presuppose that the mind is already the thing doing the knowing.
Oh wait, so, if the mind is “the thing that knows”, then psychology is “the study [by the thing that knows] of the thing that knows”, or “the mind understanding itself.” And how does something understand itself? As it’s reflected back on itself through another thing. Such as a mirror.
So the study of psychology is a practice of mirrors, and there’s no one true mirror. We can’t treat psychology like physics, where there’s a single object of study accessible to everyone. It’s more like an optics, where we use certain base facts to produce lenses that we can use for different goals. This is what I was getting at in my blog post about astrology. And Freud laid out those base facts a long time ago, in a paper I wrote a summary of, and then tried to put in my own words.
Oh, and what about egregores, since we were talking about those around the same time? No comment. I was responding to how the twitter timeline uses it, not how it’s used in Actual Magic™, and that’s not what this blog is for (it’s what the timeline is for).
A Brief Take On SSRIs
Someone asked me what I thought about SSRIs (feel free to ask me anything on Curious Cat btw, I like the attention answering questions), and here’s a slightly elaborated response:
I went on them for 18 months in high school. Phenomenologically, they seem to flatten one's range of experiencing, making the lows less low but the highs less high, and they also reduce libido. My guess is that much of the sense of “improvement” is related to the change in the “lows”.
Mechanism wise: I fall with Friston in seeing Serotonin as stimulating shifts in top-down priors. So the ideal use case for SSRIs in relation to unwanted mind effects is: (a) in a context where one can adopt ecologically with some satisfaction, and (b) strictly time limited, to allow changes in priors to occur, after which the drug is no longer necessary. Think of it like a low-key acid trip stretched out over a couple of months.
I think long-term SSRI use is bad, and is an abuse of psychiatry, acting as a system of control. I recall describing my experience as “zombified”. Similarly the notion of serotonin as "happiness chemical" is absolutely fake and I cringe when I hear it. I personally would never do them again.
Lacan Again… Or Not?
While we’re on the topic of psychology, I was going to post a lot of stuff I wrote in a DM to a friend, but I figured this section would be better if I just pasted in some quotes from the new TLP book (TLP = The Last Psychiatrist, a blogger who disappeared in 2014 to "write a book about porn” which only now got published), which is also the best “intro to Lacan” I’ve ever read, despite not using any of his jargon or really even referencing him at all.
From the introduction:
I’ve tried to make this book as simple as possible, so if there's a part that you can't understand-- not agree with, understand-- then you should ask whether the problem is your own resistance. If at the end you conclude I'm wrong, then either you will be right or you will be a liar. That's a big difference and there are no other possibilities, you should take your time and double check your math. In this book you will find one sentence that will engage you and one sentence that will enrage you, and if you tell both those sentences to anyone else they will have all the information necessary to determine whether to sleep with you or abandon you at a rest stop.
“Will this book help me learn more about myself?” Ugh. The whole earth is sick of your search for knowledge. In here you will not find explanations, I am not offering you information, this is an attempt to destroy the wisdom of the wise and frustrate the intelligence of the intelligent. “But is this book accurate?” Your question is meaningless, in America we divide our books between fiction and non-fiction, not fact and non-fact, the standard is the fiction, the standard is the green. This is not a “deconstruction of the text”, it is the interpretation of a dream, I am not looking to explain the meaning of pornography in general, only how it’s used, by you. Let's face it, you're the only one you really care about anyway.
He’s very upfront here about the point of the book. If you don’t want what he’s doing, if you don’t want to be trolled (forced to confront yourself), then don’t read it. You can still see hints of his “narcissist” writing, but clearly something has changed. He moved away from Christopher Lasch’s analytic techniques, with Lasch’s somewhat vague term “narcissism” acting as the only real interpretive tool, and toward the far more technical yet powerful Lacanian frame.
The following is from footnote 1, where he lays out the book’s thesis, which leads us straight to Lacan’s point about the superego’s injunction now being “enjoy!”:
You are living through the product recall of Freud's steam driven invention: the obliteration of all unconscious fantasy, thus locking us down into the existing reality: someone else's unconscious. At first the fantasies were encouraged because advertisers could use them to draw us in. Well, we're all inside the walls, and we're not going anywhere. So now the fantasies are at best superfluous and at worst a threat.
…
A demonstration with pornography’s own logic, take Rule 34: if you can imagine something, there's a porn of it. If this is a valid logical proposition we should be able to make the contrapositive to our horror: if there’s no porn of it, you can’t imagine it.
Even attempts at fixing Rule 34 solidify the logic. Rule 35: if there is no porn of it, then it will be made. Which means even when the porn is made to exist, it still does not follow that you will be able to imagine it. Sorry, you’re the one who wanted porn to have rules, I’m only showing you why.
…
You need to rethink how you use porn, stop listening to people who hate you, stop listening to people who want to parlay about its meaning, or lack of meaning, damn to the depths whatever man what thought of meaning. So much of the satisfaction-- not interest, not pleasure, but satisfaction-- of watching porn is not just from seeing the sex act, nor a laziness to pursue sex, but from not having to generate the fantasy. Not as “an escape from reality”-- if anything, reality sex is becoming much more like a staging of porn-- but an escape from fantasy in to reality. If fantasizing is daydreaming-- a semi-conscious elaboration of the unconscious-- then avoiding fantasy is a way to avoid the terrible truth that we will never get our wish fulfillment-- it is a way of not ever wondering what our wish fulfillment might look like, and the sad reason for this is that our wish fulfillment doesn't actually contain us-- it's impossible. “I don't really want to interpret my dreams.” Then your unconscious probably doesn't bother to obfuscate them, so you can take them literally. “Well, I don't remember my dreams-- I'm not even sure I do dream.” Could be the alcohol or they reveal too much, are the results the same? Then it worked. You never want to know about your unconscious so you're obsessed with learning about your conscious-- information, studying every detail, to guard against what you are doing.
So rather than fantasies that risk failure but at least clarify our real desires, we find it easier to want things that we are told to want-- that we don't want, but that there can be no guilt in wanting because they were commanded to be wanted. Since it's too painful to fantasize what will never come to pass-- or shouldn't come to pass-- we drown ourselves in other people's visions and are lead mechanically to the end, see also politics, economics, love.
…
Today we masturbate to porn-- out of obligation.
What follows this is a 30 page long “hot wife cuckold” porn fiction, about which he says “my purpose wasn't to elevate the genre but to capture it, by which I mean photograph it.”
My claim is that the rest of the book is written to analyze various features of the little porn story, and demonstrate how and why it “works”, or at least why it looks like it does. Chapter 1 takes a few steps into this: he critiques Freud’s use of Oedipus, saying:
What does reading Oedipus “through” Freud defend against? You have to wonder why so many people went all in on the Oedipus Complex despite it sounding more bananas than black bile or demonic possession. “King Oedipus, who slew his father Laius and married his mother Jocasta, merely shows us the fulfillment of our own childhood fantasies.” --Yes! the people cried, which is to be translated: Phew! We fantasize about our mothers!
Look at the 20th century’s materialists, they were relieved: someone had saved them from Sophocles.
In the footnotes, he critiques Bruce Fink’s dream analysis (Lacan’s classic translator into English), talks about the “rival” (a topic very relevant to the cuckold story), and drops a hilarious analysis of the following “internet test/meme”:
Are you a psychopath? Answer this question!
A woman, while at the funeral of her own mother, met a guy whom she did not know. She thought this guy was amazing, the man of her dreams, and she fell in love with him immediately. However, she never asked for his name or number and afterward could not find anyone who knew who he was.
A few days later the girl killed her own sister.
Question: Why did she kill her sister?
You get the idea. I won’t keep pasting quotes, unless I find something so exceptional I have to share, but now you have a taste and can decide for yourself if it’s worth reading.
“A Secular Age” Book Club Updates
Speaking of books and trying to limit how much I shove into these posts, I’m not going to try to keep you up to date with Charles Taylor’s “A Secular Age” on a chapter-by-chapter basis, although I’ve been taking detailed notes. Instead, I want to highlight some of his more general theses, which might be more useful than my summaries of his historical summaries.
One of Taylor’s goals is to try and destroy what he calls “subtraction stories”:
Concisely put, I mean by [“subtraction stories”] stories of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge. What emerges from this process—modernity or secularity—is to be understood in terms of underlying features of human nature which were there all along, but had been impeded by what is now set aside. Against this kind of story, I will steadily be arguing that Western modernity, including its secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices, and can’t be explained in terms of perennial features of human life.
The tl;dr: a subtraction story answers the questions of modernity’s origins as “we were stupid before, and now we’re enlightened.” Here’s an example from the text:
The modern principle seems to us so self-evident: are we not by nature and essence individuals? that we are tempted by a “subtraction” account of the rise of modernity. We just needed to liberate ourselves from the old horizons, and then the mutual service conception of order was the obvious alternative left. It needed no inventive insight, or constructive effort. Individualism and mutual benefit are the evident residual ideas which remain after you have sloughed off the older religions and metaphysics.
I see this kind of thing a lot in reference to science and technology, as well as in the New Atheism world (which is the area he focuses a lot of energy on, even though “New Atheism” the movement hadn’t quite emerged yet, back in 2007).
Rather than interrogating subtraction stories like Taylor does in the book (read it if you want to find out!), I want to make a lateral move, and connect subtraction stories with Žižek’s idea of ideology. Žižek’s theory is that an ideology is really a way of producing knowledge (or more accurately, explanations) grounded in a special word, a “master signifier”, a term he cribbed from Lacan. From IEP:
The strange but decisive thing about these pivotal political words, according to Žižek, is that no one knows exactly what they mean or refer to, or has ever seen with their own eyes the sacred objects which they seem to name (for example: God, the Nation, or the People). This is one reason why Žižek, in the technical language he inherits (via Lacan) from structuralism, says that the most important words in any political doctrine are “signifiers without a signified” (that is, words that do not refer to any clear and distinct concept or demonstrable object).
Further, he argues that these master signifiers are “exceptional”, akin to a tautology: they are true even when presented with an exception, using a logic of “the exception proves the rule”. We might call this a “constitutive exception”, e.g. “God”, who both created the order of the world, and yet is himself exempt from it, or in Atheistic Materialism, where the fact that the world is only natural or material is itself exempt from questioning on this basis. “Of course” it’s true. Why wouldn’t it be?
Each subtraction story relies on a master signifier in this sense, a tautological concept that banishes any question of the inevitability (or correctness, or goodness) of the modern era. In the Taylor quote from earlier, we can point to the term “individualism” as a master signifier, because even in prior eras where they “weren’t quite individualist”, the subtraction story claims that, actually, they were, deep down, if only all the cruft were stripped away. The exception proves the rule. Now think about this in terms of “social progress” and see where you end up.
Web3 And Me
Speaking of technological progress, I had an interesting conversation about “web3” that I wanted to share. Skip this section if you don’t care about web3 and tech stuff. As a side note, I’m a web3 developer professionally, so I have the possibly unfounded belief that this gives me a privileged stance on the issue.
There’s an article about web3 going around, in which the author claims:
web3 is a somewhat ambiguous term, which makes it difficult to rigorously evaluate what the ambitions for web3 should be, but the general thesis seems to be that web1 was decentralized, web2 centralized everything into platforms, and that web3 will decentralize everything again. web3 should give us the richness of web2, but decentralized.
My stance is that this thesis is absolutely wrong. Web3’s “decentralization thesis” is a product of venture capital fantasy. The concrete advance of web3 is at the level of online identity, specifically the question of “what is a user?”
The web2 model goes something like: you sign up with your email and password. Your email gets stored on the website’s server, and you can go log in with it whenever. The “web2.5” model switches over to OAuth: you sign in with Facebook, Google, Twitter, whatever. One fact about these massive “identity providers” is that they are very invested in the “one person = one account” rule. I think the online dating app Bumble has the most advanced enforcement of this rule, requiring you to take a photograph of yourself in a certain pose, which they verify with what I assume is machine learning.
Web3 turns this on its head. In my mind, the ONLY defining feature of web3 is: your public-private keypair is your identity. Thus web3 is “crypto” in the sense that it’s based on asymmetric cryptographic principles, but there’s no inherent element of decentralization. In this sense, the direct precursor of web3 is, like, attending a PGP key signing party and putting that signature in your email footer.
Blockchain comes in when we ask “who is the identity provider?” In most cases, it’s a wallet extension like MetaMask, which is an entirely separate application from whomever is “using” that identity. And MetaMask is built for Ethereum, so your identity is ultimately an Ethereum keypair. But there’s no reason you can’t use that keypair on another chain, assuming they accept the same address format. Main point is that identity becomes disconnected from the couple of massive websites that currently manage (read: own) all of our digital profiles.
I can hear the bluechecks screaming: “what about the sock puppets?!! And the bots and scammers?!! One person can have as many accounts they want!” And web3 answers “Yes.” But because addresses tend to be associated with blockchains, you can query their token balances. This opens up potential to prove membership with token ownership, whether something like a threshold of fungible tokens proving a certain amount of buy-in, or a distribution of community NFTs which prove membership.
Anyway, none of this is new, plenty of crypto guys have written about this before. I just wanted to toss my take into the ring, especially since you guys probably don’t read crypto newsletters.
Miscellania
Thank you to a kind friend who helped me update my Xbox controller! Now it connects to Linux without getting into a connect/disconnect loop… But all the mappings are fucked up for Binding of Isaac. So I’m still playing wired for now. Alas.
Etymology is crazy:
I got hit with some main-character fallout today, as a result of my tweet which put me right in the line of fire:
great case study of what happens when a tweet that makes total sense relative to the "local" discourse escapes the containment field -- legitimately terrifying stuffwhile I don’t want men to completely avoid it, seeing a man cry does turn me off I’m seeing the pendulum swing from “men shouldn’t cry” to “a man crying has zero effect on his attractiveness” and neither of these are true
ev is unravelling @evelynharlow_I’m not ready to post my full thoughts yet, but I got to see a fairly wide range of ways that various people interpreted both the original post and my response to it. This was usually through the filter of their ideology, and usually through attacks ranging from “sneaky” (“I’m just curious”) to personal (“you’re never gonna fuck her bro”).
For what it’s worth, the author of the thread herself falls victim to a “subtraction story” (her use of Evo Psych seems like a justification against feeling guilty for expressing an “unsayable” desire — something like “it’s not my fault, it’s evolution’s fault! Don’t blame me for saying it!” — which is cope), but so did the vast majority of people participating in the pile-on. I recommend reading through the replies and quote tweets using these idea of ideology and subtraction story as an interpretive lens (main question: “what tautological truth belies their critique?” although the interpretive levels of “what is their desire?” or better “of what are they trying to remain ignorant?” are also fun); maybe I’ll elaborate next week when my thoughts settle.
I also wrote a personal thread about having a close narcissist friend:
good piece. my "closest" friend in college was like this. i was on the receiving end of a lot of these tactics, over and over again. i want to discuss a little how that affected me during that developmental period...I wrote about the games you lose by playing this one has generated the most response so far. h/t @Aella_Girl for her excellent frame control essay https://t.co/GJ0BbGA3iw
jamie ryan @self_bewareSong of the week (I am a sucker for well-produced ballads):
Thanks again for reading, hope you have a great week!