(2024-07-31) Guinn We Are Losing Our Minds

Rusty Guinn: We Are Losing Our Minds. This essay includes excerpts from my book Outsourcing Consciousness: How Social Networks Make us Lose our Minds, set to be published in mid-2025.

What a stupendously stupid month it has been.

A lot of liberals convinced themselves very quickly and actively promoted the view that the attempted assassination of Donald Trump was staged.
More than a third of Democrats, which is a bit more than the popularity of Q-Anon theories among Republicans.

Meanwhile, mainstream conservatives continue to do their best Columbo routines, zooming in on President Biden’s watch as if it were a new damned Zapruder film, all to conjure explanations for why the White House might be lying about how live his address to the nation really was.

It is almost as if – in a matter of days! hours! – we transformed them into symbols, imbued with all manner of other beliefs, statements, ideas, relationships, and associations.

Are simple statements of fact uttered in a public setting all now destined to be post-processed into complicated symbols we are hopelessly incapable of unraveling without the Rosetta Stone of a political tribe to translate them? Are we losing our minds?

Yes

The reason for both is the same.

Symbol is one of those words that can mean a lot of different things. Most of the time, I think we use it to describe a thing which stands for another thing to somebody

the idea of a symbol I mean in the context of the bizarre cultural moment we are enduring is just a bit different. I mean a thing which stands for another thing to somebody, the meaning of which is derived from cultural reinforcement

The best book ever written about symbols in this sense isn’t really about symbols at all. It’s a book about the co-evolution of the human animal with human language. The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon is not an easy read, but it is extraordinary with far-reaching implications

Deacon’s text is also especially useful in that it (correctly) frames language as a symbolic system

cannot be understood in isolation and cannot be acquired from the bottom up through brute force. Their meanings are functions of a network of relationships with other symbols

propose an alternative to the “universal grammar” so beloved of Noam Chomsky and others. He suggests that humans are uniquely capable of acquiring language not because hard rules of recursion and syntax are literally genetically coded into our brains, but because the plastic childhood mind is uniquely capable of perceiving the structure of a network of relationships among symbols that would be unlearnable by brute force memorization of rules and conventions.

A lot of things which represent other things don’t really need cultural reinforcement for us to understand them. It doesn’t take cultural reinforcement to know that a nude statue of a voluptuous woman – a figure which unsurprisingly accounts for almost all of humanity’s oldest discovered symbols – means “a woman”

These signs, as Charles S Peirce called them, will survive us no matter how blithely we waltz into the indifferent buzzsaw of nature.

On the other hand, the signs which require human society to mediate their meaning – symbols – are always a single generation away from dying forever.

One of most powerful results of the co-evolution of your brain and human communication, for example, was a disproportionately influential prefrontal cortex relative to other apes. The prefrontal cortex is one of the most important brain structures responsible for executive function, working memory, and inhibitory control.

Your brain evolved to be shaped and influenced by a functional region which imagines the possible meanings of things, and the systems of symbols, abstractions, words, and stories to which you are subjected every day evolved to be as easily acquired and spread by that brain as possible.

(rest paywalled)