Understand yourself: What am I? (1)
Edition 8: The YMCK+ model connects different fields of science - philosophy, psychology and physics - to an integrated view of humanity, offering a different perspective on personal and social issues
Thinking in boxes. Sometimes it drives me crazy, and sometimes it makes me very happy. Gifted, woman, anxiety disorder, small, mother, nerd, artist, thinker. Boxes help a lot to understand who we are, and at the same time it is not a law of the Medes and Persians (and measuring and pressing). We must always be willing to let go of the boxes if there is a better arrangement.
I think everyone agrees on that. As long as it concerns boxes that you would rather not fit into. Because are you also willing to let go of your own boxes? For yourself, or for someone else? To what extent do you hold on to the identity you have created for yourself? Would you really dare to let go of all certainties and beliefs, if circumstances demand it?
If there's one thing I've learned from psychotherapy, it's that human development is one big process of conceptualization. Conceptualization is organizing the world into things with meaning. What is the same and what things are different? The psychotherapeutic terms differentiation and integration were eye-openers for me and formed the guideline in my recovery. What things make you feel the same, but have your brain kept separately?
I always found it unnecessarily complicated when people linked all kinds of events from their lives together: why would you include your own history in everything? Why couldn't you just see each event as an isolated fact, and just make a fresh start each time? But it does not work like that. You always take yourself with you and unconsciously react to what has happened before.
This insight came as a shock. I suddenly saw the similarities between events in my life, between people, and accordingly in my behavior. I saw history repeating itself, right under my own nose. It seemed as if the universe wanted to teach me a lesson and continued to kindly give me new opportunities. For generations.
But the fact that I now saw the connections was not enough. My brain couldn't solve this for me, at least not on its own. The problem was not only in my head, but also in my body. It reacted very strongly to everything and I had no idea what to do with it. I now understood that it was 'fear' I was feeling and that bothered me enormously. There seemed to be nothing to be afraid of, so why do I feel this way? What was the meaning of this signal?
Conceptualization
We like to think that meaning is only in our heads, but it is also in our bodies. And more importantly: your head and your body can have different interpretations of the same event. They can become asynchronous. To understand how this is possible, I would like to explain a little about the process of conceptualization.
Let's start with a simple example: How do you know that a chair is a chair?
If we were to do this with our heads alone, we would get some kind of symbolic representation of it, like: 'a thing with four legs, a seat and a backrest.' But I think you already feel that you can also recognize a chair without a backrest, or with armrests, or with three legs. This means that you also have a general idea of the concept of 'chair', regardless of specific characteristics. We call this concept the 'type', and all the different events we call 'tokens'. Sometimes these specific examples are also called 'instances', which I like because it seems to refer to a snapshot. I'll get back to you later.
But how do we arrive at the general definition of the term 'chair'? How do we arrive at a perfect definition? You cannot achieve this by understanding all the features of a chair, you just get a long list. You then do not understand the essence of a chair. After all, even a tree trunk can function as a chair. And that perhaps results in the common denominator between all chairs, namely: you can sit on them.
According to embodied cognition, this is how we arrive at the concept of a chair. We use action-perception loops to use on a chair. When we see an object and we are tired, we make a sitting movement until we feel pressure under our buttocks and can rest. When someone uses the word “chair,” we hear it and associate it with what we have seen, felt, and aligned our actions with. The concept of a chair is therefore stored in our sensorimotor system in our brain.
This creates what we can call a kind of symbolic representation. Our motor cortex does become active, but we inhibit its actual execution. We are capable of 'offline' cognition: we can think about a chair, for example comparing chairs to choose one, without actually using our body. This has made us intelligent: we can postpone actions and think about them first. We can time: adjust our behavior for the future based on past actions.
But if the situation calls for it, we can also respond immediately without thinking about it. In musical chairs you sit down instinctively, without first wondering whether it is a chair, whether it is sturdy and whether you can sit on it. And so you can end up on someone's lap, even if you didn't want that.
This means that we can see the brain and the body as different units: modules that can attune themselves to the world. But as you will now understand, this can also cause major problems if synchronization does not happen on time. When an event occurs that is too big for the brain to process, such as trauma. Or if you don't get any rest for too long to process. Or simply because life stages pass in fits and starts.
If the synchronization between brain and body is delayed for too long, the unity that is 'you' can be lost. After all, when the brain and body respond to different information in the world, inconsistency arises. This can lead to a conflict: with others, because you do not do what you say. Or within yourself, where enormous tension can arise. Something has to change if the unity within yourself is to continue to exist.
But it is even more complicated: I think that not only your 'brain and 'body' are independent units. All organs, heart chambers, brain parts, cells, and molecules in your body are modules that operate independently. They adapt to the input and output they receive, in real time and over time. Your heart can start pounding when you think about a dangerous situation that is no longer present at that moment. And just as an action-perception loop is a process through the brain and body, many more processes can be distinguished: metabolism, blood circulation, menstrual cycle. Processes also represent concepts: they have meaning.
To understand this, you could briefly consider the word 'instance'. See every event as a snapshot, as a freeze in time. A kind of photo that is stored in your body as a memory of that moment. Every time you sit down on a chair, an internal picture is taken of your internal processes, in context. So if you often sit while eating, the chair will also become meaningful for you in that specific state of your metabolism. If you see a dining room chair, it can be a trigger to eat, sometimes even before the feeling of hunger tells you to do so.
Who or what?
In the previous newsletter I showed how we process information: we grind everything that comes in into smaller units, and how these form our new frontier like the qubits in the Hertog-Hawking cosmic disk, as you see in figure 4.
Now let's look again at the perpetual anime, the conceptual building block for meaning. This is a quantum entanglement whose feedback loop creates a gravitational field, the loop of energy through spacetime that represents both particle and process (see the previous edition for a more detailed and less technical description).
If we link the figure below to the process of conceptualization, you could say that the numbers 1-14 are all the tokens of a chair, i.e. all the different variants you have ever seen. The big perpetual anime around which the membrane has formed captures that generalized meaning: the concept (or type) of 'chair'.
So this process represents a ‘thing’ and is a filter at the same time. When a new object arrives (shown with number 15), it falls into a mold, as it were, and based on that the chair is linked to one of the tokens. Chair 15 is stuck at number 11, and therefore resembles chair number 11. This means that there is a natural order in everything, like a semantic network that organizes itself. I will discuss this spacetime order in more detail later.
I imagine you're a little confused right now. Why is a chair also a perpetual anime? Wasn't that meant for consciousness and living things, not inanimate things? That's right. But it is also not the chair that determines the meaning, but us. We make the organization, not the chairs.
After all, we stated earlier that you have to sit in a chair to understand it. You have to have experience with it, and that makes it an experience of yours. The chair literally becomes part of you.
That's not so strange in my opinion. We attach ourselves to chairs: your grandfather's old armchair that you can't get rid of or your feeling of recognition of your own favorite chair. Boundaries between us and the world are not that hard either: a shopping list is external memory, and you drive a car by feel as if it were an extension of your own body.
Does a chair live with that? Yes, in our minds, and in our bodies. We are a 'who' and a 'what'. Perhaps you now understand how we bear reality together, and we not only live in a conscious universe, but we are it ourselves.
Differentiation, synchronization and integration
But what is the difference between non-living things and living things? That lies in the degree of organization: life is built up from the very beginning, the origin. And that makes it possible for us to recover. We can go back into spacetime to fix what's broken. And that goes a long way: some reptiles can regrow limbs, and scientists think that even humans will be able to do this in the future.
Life is designed to keep things together, whatever the cost. Survival means trying to maintain unity. The different modules always try to coordinate the information with each other. This may mean that information is added, but also that information disappears. If the attunement fails, unity is sought at a deeper level, back in spacetime. After all, further in there is the same amount of information, but with less detail (see previous edition). This is the basis you fall back on if there is too much conflicting information.
And that's how it went for me. The brain and body had been seriously out of sync for generations. Too many things came along that had not been processed and that had long been resolved through a strong will. My head took over, I think I owe my intellect to that. But the strategy of 'don't name it and just do it' no longer worked, the feeling could no longer be ignored or pushed away.
If we look at the figure above: my brain was on ring 14, but my body was on ring 8. My brain knew the details: I could tell my life story and now saw all the connections. My body no longer. This meant that in my feeling everything had the same meaning. I could no longer close myself off to stimuli, simply because there were no boundaries anymore. I felt the vibrations of floors in my body, the waves of water washed through me, I heard sounds that were not mine and I saw everything spinning around me. This is what unity also feels like: there is no more distinction, you no longer have an ego in the great all. And everything was a trigger for this feeling.
And then came my therapist's magic words: differentiation and integration. I had to cut experiences into smaller pieces (differentiate), give meaning again (synchronize), and then put them together again (integrate). Burst the membrane of the perpetual anime to adjust the qubits. We carry meaning, and you have to drop your self – your ego – to change.
I understood that to recover I had to follow my body. I also had to take my brain back, way back in spacetime, to re-establish the connection there. What you experience there, and what you see so deep in your cerebral cortex, I hope to be able to tell you one day. Fascinating, for sure. But also terrifying.
To teach my body meaning again, I had to take each experience one by one, preferably in as small pieces as possible. Based on experience, I estimated which qubits were involved, so that I could estimate what the effect would be. Only when I had gone through the processing cycle (see previous newsletter) and new boundaries had emerged could I enter the next experience in the queue.
This way I could restore myself to reality. And because I recorded each step in a poem, I could follow how meaning developed. My experience as a Linked Data expert came in handy here, as I was used to creating semantic networks. And that's what I want to address next time: How do you know which things have the same meaning? How is meaning organized, from the inside out? And how do you relate this to the processes in your own body? And what about the predictability of experiences? And when we talk about the 'who': how are others represented in us?
I would be interested to hear if this edition brings you much new information. I suspect that few people are familiar with the principle of integration and differentiation from psychotherapy, and that conceptualization is mainly a philosophical theme. Is that right? Or did you already know it, and if so, what is your expertise?
The YMCK+ is a dynamic systems model that describes human interaction in terms of energy through spacetime.
The 6 main questions on the way to a better understanding of yourself:
1. Why do I do it? What do I say and what not? What do I feel, and what not? What do I see or miss in others?
2. Where am I? How do I relate what I feel to where I am? How do I connect different places, and thus meanings? What is my position in relation to others?
3. When am I? Where am I in time, and what are the consequences? How do I go through my memories? Do I speed up, or do I slow down?
4. What or who am I experiencing? What does what I see or experience symbolize? How is meaning organized in space, and what do I notice about it?
5. How much am I? How great are my feelings, and do I mobilize strength to achieve my goal? How are my feelings going?
6. How does the process work? How can we understand our interaction based on physics, and what does this mean for our view of our own development, and various disruptions thereof, and syndromes? How can we better tackle social problems?
This model connects different scientific areas and shows how a common language can lead to new insights. In this newsletter I describe how an integral view of humanity provides a different view of personal and social problems: from meaning, climate, healthcare to AI.