We took a ride up to Golden Gate State Park and continued on CO-119 on Saturday. It was a day with really clear skies the color of blue you only see at 8000 feet or more. The wind was blowing the snow off the peaks creating the only clouds in the sky. Tis a priviledge to live in Colorado.
David Brooks asked people over 70 to write “life reports” and send them to him. He has posted several on his blog. I find them fascinating.
The stories document our culture over much of the 20th century (at 70, the youngest were born in 1941) as much as they do the experience of living. Their values, challenges, triumphs and observations are rooted in what it is to be human which is a process of continually becoming, not a static goal achieved once and put on the shelf like a trophy.
Those in their 20′s and 30′s may think folks over 70 are near the end of their lives. But none of the writers seem focused on the end as much as they are on the living process of becoming who they are. Despite the bad behavior some confess to, none of them are static, unchanging, nor accepting of the ultimate end, their deaths. Instead, they are actively engaged in writing the next pages and chapters of their lives.
Their stories underscore what I hear in Dylan Thomas’s poem, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night“.
I started a project in 2010 to rebuild my BMW R75/6 motorcycle with 103,000 original owner miles. I wanted to get back to tacit knowledge derived from doing it myself as most of my working day is spent in what has euphemistically come to be called “Knowledge” work.
Prior to that, I was reading articles on the hand/mind connection, the plastic brain, learning and the value of tinkering . Tinkering for kids comes in two varieties. you can tinker with stuff (inanimate objects) and you can engage in unsupervised play (animate objects), and both seem to be missing for today’s children. I’ve come to separate learning into two kinds: abstract, or “Knowledge” learning where the animate and inanimate objects (people, things, materials, etc.) are purposely left out, and “Experience” learning where the objects are kept in and you are confronted with the cussedness of inanimate objects and the irrationality of motives.
I ended up subscribing to a magazine, Make which has a number of do it yourself (DIY) projects. I stumbled across articles in The Denver Post about a tool lending library that operates like a public library, and an inventor’s workshop where you can pay a flat fee for access to a large variety of tools and shop space to work on projects. And just today, I came across a video from TED about Marcin Jakabowski, an ex PhD in physics who decided his formal education as a Knowledge worker was “useless” and became a farmer. From the hands on experience, he identified the 50 basic machines that support our civilization. Then he decided to build them in a DIY fashion publishing the blue prints, material list and cost estimates so others can do the same. An additional goal is to store all the information on a single DVD. Very interesting.
I see the beginning of a movement back toward experience-based tacit knowledge that comes from DIY thinking. In many cases, the people who are DIY evangelists were fully invested in the mythos of the knowledge worker as the highest and best use of humanity but in practice found it to be hollow.
This raises a question about living a good life and if abstract knowledge alone really provides it. I’ve had a growing sense that the lack of wisdom evident in many sectors of society may be correlated to the growing number of people who never tinkered with real things as part of their education. I use “education” in the broad sense so it is not unnaturally constrained by what happens to you in school. I see resumes in the tech sector from people who spend 1-2 years doing something and then move on. How can you really have experience, let alone wisdom, from that short a time doing anything that is meaningful? You hardly had time to fail spectacularly and figure out how to assimilate that experience, and its those kinds of experiences from which wisdom comes.
I have another perspective on knowledge workers vs. experience workers. I think there are two important contributors to the global problem of sustainability and throw-away culture (aka, things). I’m interested in how to change the throw-away “things” pattern underpinning the first world economy.
As a kid growing up in the 50′s, products were built to last a long time and ease of repair was an important part of industrial design. For those of a “certain age”, remember Sears and the spare parts available for just about everything they sold? They did that because DIY was alive and well in the 50′s due to the shared experience of the Great Depression by the majority of their customers.
I suspect that if we looked in detail at the difference in “carbon footprint” between a “design to throw-away” (DTT) and “design to repair” (DTR) economy, the DTR model would demonstrate a dramatic reduction. (I’d be interested in references to any research along these lines.) I wouldn’t be surprised to find that a DTT culture reinforces an education model that teaches a rubric where an abstract knowledge worker is superior to a pragmatic experience worker. In fact, I think nothing could be farther from the truth.
This could be a long post due to the depth of this topic. However, I’m going to keep this one short.
I suggest that our mind abstracts what our senses perceive to create context. The context is dynamic as our senses measure change both in our bodies and in the surrounding “non-body”, aka the “world”, and both are in flux.
When the mind abstracts, it chooses an abstraction model. We have a large number of them based on our experiences, and we can make more when needed which is often what is meant by the word “creativity”. I use the term abstraction in the sense that it is a filter obscuring some sense input and some thought processes while focusing on and amplifying others. This is common in our experience and easy to demonstrate. Look out the window. Make note of what you see. Now, look at the wall of one building or a single tree or flower and focus on the colors, lines, cracks, texture and shadows. This adjusts your abstraction model and allows information of this kind to be particularly noticed, but now you are not focused on the larger scale context. In your first look out the window you did not see these details as the abstraction filter at that time was tuned to the scale of the entire landscape in front of you. Scale, context, sensing, emotions and abstraction models are important parts of what the mind is doing. I think these processes are what we mean when we describe what conciousness means. I’ll not dwell on them in this post, but they are important, in constant flux, not static, and go unnoticed unless we take some effort to direct the mind’s attention to them.
There are a variety of optical illusions that demonstrate that once an abstraction filter is selected, we tend to keep using it unless we are confronted with a problem for which the filter is not useful. The one I always use to illustrate this is the picture that can be seen as a beautiful woman with elaborate hat, or an old women with large nose and white bonnet. If you see one image you can not see the other. In fact, the first time you see this image your mind will select one context and associate image. You will not see the other image until you are told there is another image and you should try and find it.
Optical illusions are a demonstration not only of how the mind processes sensory data, but at a deep level, of the way thinking is performed. We think with abstractions (filters) and without concicious effort, we do not immediately search for an alternative abstraction so long as the current one is “suitable”. Here, suitable means self-consistent and satisfying. We sense when the information we are thinking about, filtered by the abstractions we are currently using, don’t make “sense” of ourselves and the world in the current context. We emotionally feel what “don’t make sense” is as an uncomfortable feeling of inconsistency, or lack of wholeness, or completeness. I suggest that sensing inconsistency is part of what Pirsig draws attention to when he focuses on Quality and its role in his Metaphysics of Quality. High Quality contains consistency, while lack of consistency lowers Quality.
Okay, now for a practical application of abstraction filters. You may have been keeping up with the current political debate about the budget. President Obama published and reviewed his proposal for the 2012 budget (note, we currently don’t have a budget for 2011 and continue to operate on “funding resolutions”, but that’s another story). There is wide agreement on the necessity to reduce the deficit. This agreement is at the scale you saw when you first looked out the window. The arguments are over the details and methods of achieving deficit reduction. That shifts the scale of your thinking, so you should be open to shifting you abstraction filter.
To help you decide what is an appropriate abstraction filter for this scale of thinking, take a look at this diagram and direct your thinking to how you would create a consistent (higher Quality) path toward reducing the deficit.
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/newsgraphics/2011/0119-budget/index.html
In closing, its important to understand how systemic and instinctual the use of abstraction filters is for our mind as it makes sense of us and the surrounding world. Once filters are selected we tend to continue using them, even when the context (scale) has shifted. If you are more aware of the mind’s tendancy to keep using a filter, you can more freely look for other abstraction filters (or even create new ones if we want to) that are better suited to the context so the consistency of your thinking (Quality) is improved.
PS: I just bumped into this article from O’reilly Radar and the accompanying video about the magazine business. I think this illustrates the role of abstraction filters (in this context, the abstraction of a profit model in the magazine business) and the need to change them when there is dramatic shift in “scale”.
Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QRtWGnNPTc4
I noted last night on the News Hour on PBS, a report on the IBM Watson computer playing Jeopardy. And this morning, I happened across this note on “Trends to Watch, Formal Relationships Between Governments and Hackers“. I could summarize that article as, ”How the next world war will be fought and what the battlefield will be”.
If we combine these two articles, we get an interesting notion of a potential future. One where computing can analyze human conversation, and act, and where the power of networks to connect, are used to disrupt a nation in war time.
An unseen risk is the fact common components and software (think Intel chips and Linux for example) are becoming ubiquitous. Exploits to hack these components can have wide ranging application. Said differently, and in a biological way, if we develop a computing based species (as the Watson story hints at), it would be a good idea to have enough gentic diversity to prevent an infection in one species from overwhelming the entire “biosphere”. We have seen this in the PC market where infections of Intel+Microsoft Windows “species” don’t carry over to the Apple, or RIM species.
For some time, science fiction has provided stories of many futures where computing becomes sentient. Isaac Asimov in the I Robot series in 1950 explored this notion. Perhaps its time for a modern version of his three laws of robotics to be applied to computing in its broadest sense as we seem to be heading down a road where world-wide agreement on the “rules of war” in a cyberage, before we wage that war, might be a good idea.
I’ve been doing some reading along a particular vein of thought that is rooted in metaphysics and which I first encountered in Robert Pirsig’s book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“. After a conversation with my friend Pete who just read the book, I quickly created a post, Everything is Connected, that tried to blend physics (cosmology) with Zen. I like the 1st part of the proof, the Big Bang, but not the second part, “YOU” are reality. So, I decided to reread Zen and the Art which I hadn’t done in a while.
I had commented in my post on Minds, Knowledge, Well Being and Education about the need for deeper theory about how the mind works, how we acquire knowledge and well being (IMHO, you need to strive for both) and how these are influenced by the formal education model in the United States. That lead to me to some observations about brain plasticity courtesy of Rachel who provided me a book on that subject.
As often happens when you focus your mind on something, serendipity occurs. I ran into an article in this month’s Scientific American, How Language Shapes Thought, about a study of how language affects the understanding (knowledge) of time and space. And then, of all places, I ran across an article, “Etiology of the Motorcycle Phenomenon”, by James Smith, February 2011 issue, pg 82, of the BMW Owners News, published by the BMW Motorcycle Owners of America, with references that led me to “Wholeness and the Implicate Order“, by David Bohm.
My, that was a lot of background wasn’t it? Sorry about that, but you need some context for what comes next.
So, here’s the train of logic that’s growing out of all this.
Knowledge defines your Reality (aka, worldview, mythos, truth, certainty, etc.)
Language defines your Knowledge.
Words define your Language.
Humanity has a LOT of languages around 7,000 or so, so on a cultural level, there could be about 7,000 classes of reality going on at the same time. All of them “real” by the way.
Pirsig tackles the question of what “reality” is (hint, it’s not a thing, more like a process, so it’s dynamic, not fixed), illustrates what insanity is (by personal experience) and along the way talks a lot about two fundamentally different ways to acquire knowledge, loosely defined as eastern and western. He talks about how at the beginning of the western way (at the time of the Greek civilization) there were two branches of how to become knowledgeable about reality, one of which was like the eastern way. He shows how one eliminated the other, and identifies Aristotle as the archetype of the winning side, now known as “western thought” or civilization. He hints at the roll of language in defining what is “knowable”, how it is known and ultimately, how it fixes reality into the mythos and logos. (loosely, culture and logic), ultimately leading us away from a workable understanding of reality in today’s western culture.
I’m reading Bohm’s book, which I haven’t finished yet, and he provides in the 1st 60 pgs or so a concise discussion of the problems in western society, the role language has played in creating them and proposes a new set of words to overcome the limitations of our existing language so our knowledge of reality is more complete. Pirsig and Bohm are amazingly complimentary in their writing and the confluence of the two is very thought provoking.
To sum it up, both agree that unbounded fragmentation is the root cause of much (all?) of the dysfunctional behavior of western societies (Pirsig identifying this dysfunction with a growing inability to recognize the role Quality plays). Both draw attention to why “flow” is important and how it gets overlooked — in part, due to language that doesn’t adequately convey its meaning and so, keeps its value and importance out the conversation.
Now, it’s the focus on ”flow” that got the article published in the BMW ON magazine as a metaphysical basis for the reason MC riders do what they do. One of the references cited lead me to Bohm’s books. It’s the pursuit of flow and corresponding reduction of fragmentation that motorcyclists seek. (That could explain my posts on 1,000, and 2,000 mile rides 
)
If you let that one soak in for a bit, you start drawing some conclusions about why we avidly pursue the things we do, what makes some of us hate our jobs (or life in general), and even why Egypt and Tunisia are engaged in the changes going on today. I think its “flow” that balances knowledge with well being. Humans need flow to achieve that balance, and both Pirsig and Bohm’s metaphysics are based on flow as the unifying principle of reality.
Just thought I’d share … I can hear you chewing, but am waiting for the sound of swallowing.
I’ve had a number of incidents in the last week, starting with my first ski trip of the season, which caused me to scratch my head in curiosity … after being annoyed.
As I am starting to get into the line to get on a chair lift, a young man on a snow board slides into me at the entrance to the line, unbuckles his boots, and proceeds to get in front of me. He looks right at me, and says not a word. So, I engage him in conversation. Nothing, absolutely no response, and he is still looking at me. So I continue to try and get his attention with “Yo, do you speak English?”. At that point he removes the ear buds from his ears and says “What?”. I apologize for having bumped into him in the lift line. He stands staring at me with his mouth open. Yes, he bumped into me, not I into him, and his reaction clearly shows he knew that he did.
I’m working on a project with a short deadline that includes about 10 other people in different departments. I get Emails that don’t even contain my name at the beginning. They just start with a demand to do something. It’s been my experience that time pressure leads to short fuses. So politeness is more, not less necessary. Is this a generational thing? If so, I’m glad I’m a member of “my generation” and not the ones addicted to rushing and using it as an excuse for rudeness.
I’ve been on far too many conference calls lately where no one wishes to plan anything, or be thoughtful about the consequences of their actions. Attempts to have a published agenda, keep on track to the topic or raise questions about complex issues are met with “Well, we don’t have time to boil the ocean.” The inevitable result is “scrap and rework” at the 12th hour when there is even less time to think through the implications of last minute, rash decisions, and the deadline often slips as well. How does this deliver value, profit or any sense of pride in one’s work?
Just thought I’d share. Are you as curious as I am, or am I the only one without a clue?
Really, is that true?
As background, I had lunch on Friday with a long time friend and fellow motorcycle lover, Pete Mathews. He had just finished reading one of my favorite books, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert Pirsig. I mentioned to him some time ago it was a great book and he should read it some time. As I worked on the build of my 1975 R7/6 into an “S” model, I also wrote about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Rebuilding, because I found myself living quite a number of the examples of “gumption traps”, which lower quality quickly, that Pirsig describes in his book.
Pete was … “captured” is the word … by the scope and premise of the book and the life of Mr. Pirsig. I mentioned that I had reread it about eight times since I bought the book in 1975. He asked, “Why?”, and I had to stop and think about that question. I said something to the affect that I reread it when things got too fragmented and confusing and I needed to revisit the cohesive beauty of Pirsig’s world view. The book was written in the early 1970′s at a time when the country was very fragmented, and in part, Pirsig wrote the book to illustrate a way to remove that fragmentation and the needless animosity and misunderstanding it fostered. I felt that Prisig wrote the book so he could focus on the question of what can unify technology and its adherents with the arts and their adherents. He came up with a simple ”grand unified theory”, which is quality and its pursuit.
As an aside, I suspect Pirsig believed that as the pursuit of quality unifies art and technology, it also unifies the individual and keeps him sane. He himself achieves a unification after he went insane, partly due to electroshock therapy and partly due to the his refusal to stop pursuing quality. For the rest of the story, you should read the book.
Now, I want to offer a demonstration, if not prove, that everything is, and always has been, connected. That’s part of what Pirsig wrote about, the connection of seemingly disparate things by discovering easily overlooked connections.
Let’s start at the beginning, The Big Bang, as science has pretty convincing shown, was the start of it all. You will find that the Big Bang is a point – literally – and as such, contains everything that is evident (and not so evident) in the universe. For the not so evident part, look into the subject of Dark Matter and Dark Energy (not related), both of which were “not evident” until recently. If the Big Bang contains everything, then at the moment of the Big Bang, there was only one thing, the point. Since then, and from that point, in both time and space, all the diversity of the universe evolved, including you.
Hmm … So Everything WAS connected at the FIRST moment of the Big Bang.
Now, let’s move from the Big Bang, where quantum physics and cosmology are unified, to living things: to be specific, YOU and only YOU. Let me ask a simple question, “What is reality”? That question and it’s answer, of course, is not something entirely within the realm of science, but bridges over into metaphysics, philosophy and religion. There are paradoxes and conundrums deep within that question, and Pirsig digs into them to a certain extent in his book.
One view, which I am growing to accept, is that reality can not be defined as something distinct from your existence. Without your existence, there is no reality. Said differently, YOU connect everything together based on how your brain creates patterns out of the simulus it constantly receives. The system that you call reality always consists of the world around you AND more specifically YOU, and YOUR brain’s mental patterns: its all inseparable.
Trying to separate YOU from the rest of reality introduces the conundrums and paradoxes I referred to a moment ago. Pirsig shows in his book that when you artificially separate things: for example separating YOU from what you are working on, such as a motorcycle; or separating art from technology; then you miss out on quality, which is what connects YOU with everything you do. And, should you create two realities, one for the world around you and another one for YOU, well, that way lies true mental insanity, at least it was the start of his insanity.
Hmm — so Everything IS connected, at this very moment, by YOU.
Now, I said that everything WAS connected at the Big Bang which contained all time, space and everything within it, including YOU. I also said that at this moment, everything IS connected by YOU, your brain and its patterns. The Big Bang started it all, YOU are a part of it all, and YOU are what defines the present moment. Therefore, everything is connected, and has been, for all space and time.
Ipso Facto, Everything is Connected.
What do you think?
Recently, my wife and I took a two week vacation driving from our home in Colorado to the upper pennisula of Michigan to a “traditional” music festival. The tempo and meter of life was different. Instead of the cadence of a work day, we had the cadence of a driving day. Instead of keyboards, cell phones, marketing videos and conference calls, dictating my attention span, my mind was engaged listening to the CD player and having conversations with my wife. Time was measured by conversations about random topics and the rythmic hum of miles accumulating on the odometer. The screen in front of us was Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota … big sky and rolling land. We didn’t tune in to the news, web or blogs. We tuned into driving, thinking idle thoughts, and listening to music. Decompression.
Upon our return, I noticed the rate of content bombardment went up … way up. I plugged back in to — email, news papers (yeah, I’m one of those), blogs and very limited TV (The News Hour). The transition was stark. Time was now measured by the pace of electronic connectivity rather than scenery passing by. And if I was in my 20′s and totally connected, the rate of input would have been much higher.
It dawned on me that compression not only has to do with how time is metered out, but how information is concentrated. News of events now is worldwide. I can see in 20 mins a range of events that covers most of the surface of the Earth and reflects the pain, anger, anxiety and hatred of 6 Billion folks. 40 years ago, I couldn’t read about more than what was happening in my local community and a small amount of national and even less international news due to the size of a newspaper printed once a day. That constrained the content I was exposed to enormously, and even more, the culture and norms I was exposed to.
So, what happens to your sense of balance, happiness, well being and confidence about how the world works when compression includes not just time, but the events of the entire world updated every 20 mins? We know that the majority of the “popular news” is about pain, anger, anxiety, hatred and conflict, rather than dull, non-emotional stories. What happens when you get that kind of input, world-wide, updated every 20 mins? Does it change your perceptions, attitude, and outlook on life?
I wanted to draw attention to the fact the negative things people do to each other, they have always been doing. But, you didn’t see very much of it since the scope of information you could access was pretty small. Today, that scope is global. Is the world and its people more, or less, aggessive towards each other? Hmm …
I started on this project last October and have been chipping away at it as time permitted. Last week, I had a four day weekend and spent time preparing for painting, aka, priming and sanding. This has taken much longer than I expected, and I’ve been recalling Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“. I’ve experienced several personal “gumption traps” and found that “being in the moment” is not easy to accomplish in a consistent manner.
The paint preparation phase has exposed a couple bad habits I have. The first is hurrying, the second is not thinking it through and the third is pushing to complete when I should take a break. These are related, and if I recall, are called out by Pirsig as examples of gumption traps that impede attaining quality.
Hurrying usually results in getting “behinder” due to mistakes and the rework they require. On top of that, you’re attitude is not postive due to your inner voice of self critisim getting pretty loud. The fun factor goes way down.
If you don’t stop and visualize getting from what you have to what you want, you can find the path you take is the wrong one, or you aren’t taking the shortest path to do the work. This is more the case when I have been working on disassembly and assembly of the Grey Ghost, but I find it happening in paint preparation as well. For example, I’ve forgotten to clean spray nozzles, not had the gloves on, forgotten to clean the parts with Windex prior to priming and each of those are the result of not thinking about how to get from what I have in front of me to where I want to end up BEFORE starting the work.
I also find that “getting done” is a slippery gumption trap. Getting done, of course, has value and does provide gratification. But, the journey also has great reward, and a journey done well has an even greater sense of accomplishment. I’m starting to figure out when the “let’s get done” motivation is out of control. And every time I don’t listen to that inner voice that says “Hey, you’re getting tired of what you are doing, take a break”, and keep on working, inevitably s&^%t happens.
I think there are days when you should not work on a project. This past Monday was one of those. I managed to break the coffee pot, assemble something backwards and put my finger prints in wet primer … all in about an hours time. I quit for the day at that point. It seems that Monday was not a day where I was “in the moment”; perhaps I was distracted by thoughts of a family get together later that day, or thoughts about the impending return to work drowned out “being in the moment”. For whatever reasons, the Zen state required for good quality was not in evidence.
Here is an observation about our ability to recognize the qualityof our work. Paint preparation (the mundane) really shows how quality (the sublime) is achieved: many small things done well result in high quality. I’ve sanded several areas and had to refill them because the surface was not the right contour or small defects were evident in the body putty. Each time I re-primed those areas, I’d think “There, that’s got it”. And then I’d re-sand it and see another small defect I had missed, and I’d say “Well, that’s not enough to make any difference”. But, the next day, I’d look at that area again, and it was clear it wasn’t up to snuff. So, I’d go back and put more body putty over it, prime it and sand it again. In one area of the tank, I’ve had to repeat that process 4 times.
My point is we see quality, or the lack of it, in an instant. But, we also have built-in “reality filters” that allow us to pretend we achieved it when we really haven’t. The pursuit of quality demands an ego-less perspective on our own work, which for me, isn’t easy to achieve. There is an absolute ego-less honesty required about your work if you want it have high quality. Achieving that honesty is worth the journey, and in no small part, it is what Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is all about.