The important message: On Beginning New Things Over Things

The problem

How do we start moving forward with our limited understanding?

It has been quite long since my last blog post. Some of it is due to being too preoccupied in some work assignments and some due to taking a short break recently for a few weeks to refresh my thoughts other than from my usual daily routine perspective. I promised on my previous blog post to continue providing a more elaborate plan on solving the issue of black box thinking. I mentioned two important aspects that must be addressed due to that topic: 1. understanding 2. protecting those values that can undermine such understanding.

However, in order to move forward to those two issues, they must be addressed within a "strategy plan" in some form, even minimal, before it can transcend as a universal way of doing things.

Let us think how the inception of scientific thought became a visible thing. It was all attributed mostly to the the invention of the printing press, where written books could be copied without manual labor, allowing many to gain knowledge not from their families or neighbors, but from experts on a specific domain, living miles away from their home. The individual access of experts knowledge through books was able to scale in levels that was not possible before. However, another turbulence came aside. Religions, which had political powers at that time, was threatened by its own core mental networks (or beliefs to say the least) from the books over others that either brought doubts, contradictions, or drove interest down on the traditional fundamentalist views of the church. Instead, books were driven a lot in the pursuit of some form of scientific thought and scientific adventure. A lot of the books that gave a bad word to the church where banned. In addition, authors of such books where placed behind coffins, and many scientific and philosophical books where converted "by any means" to be placed by the "light of god". Of course, people realized at some point that secular religion, with or without it, scientific thought would still output well by using only scientific thought. Coupled with the immersion of people among time with the inventions of our modern time, such as the train and the telephone, people found out that secular religion thought as it was, was not compatible with objective rational thought and added literally zero value. You can see that there was indeed a space of time for religion to prove worthy on its part, but most likely its timing was not correct at that time as religion could not correlate human behavior with neurology. In addition, people did not have enough "space within their time" to think abstractly (thanks to scientific thought, as most innovations came to cater the needs of the average person recently, the individual has the option to focus more in abstract stuff and less forced to meddle on the concrete stuff of the world). More specifically, religion, on its own, had nothing to offer at that time as there was not enough drive to enable people to build content, resulting in content that was not enough to bridge the gap of what of current religion secular thought was and what it was actual supposed to be. And although there was enough philosophy at that time of age in the renaissance world, it was not yet ready to contest and have enough political power to face the challenges of the secular religion. In contrast, scientific discoveries from the past expressed within books were able to extrapolate the individual in mass to create objects within scientific vigor. The reason why science lead to its glory from superstition/pantheism to a rational concept while religion remained to its mystery/mysticism is due to the nature of our physical world governed only by the cause and effect of the so called "empirical world". In contrast, our emotions, beliefs, characters, or to say them within a set, mental networks, are immune to any natural laws, in the same way like a "computer program" is being "contained" within a "computer" where imagination is its own limit. In other words, we can be anything or anyone we want, as long we respect the premises of the physical world, its people, and its limited resources. In contrast, the physical world is governed by cause and effect which is to large extent inescapable. The only way to skip tasks of manual labor is to create concepts out of rational scientific thought that can explain concisely through roots of cause and effect, the mechanisms that combined can explain a theory which can partially or fully automate a task away. Again, I have to entertain the thought that science must be transparent and explicit and it cannot avoid shortcuts as it inescapable lives in the external world where the obvious is very obvious and it will be futile to warp minds around it (if for instance, a rocket crashes onsite or a software takes more manual labor and delivers less tasks than another software, then it is futile to be negligent out of it as we will create cognitive dissonance out of external evidence that is in front of us).

Moving on, when science was the movement of enlightenment, religion secular thought was marching literally on its graveyard as what most profoundly the old German philosopher Nietzsche has once said "God is dead".

Right now, we live in a world where every physical body is free to do whatever they want to do "as long" we don't intrude the other physical body in any way (both physically and even mentally). We have constitutions and rights such as the right to keep our privacy from the hands of others, as well as battery charges if someone touches us, and physical/verbal abuse that can be applied on petty cases at the same level of degree of scrutiny in terms of punishment as an actual physical verbal abuse. There is a fine line between crossing one individual over another, but "how long that line should be" and at what costs we are paying ourselves to that big line we sacrifice almost everything for it? Let us first entertain the thought of why all of we are "forced" to be "professional" in these days.

The reason or the coin termed "professional" did not come at hand until "post-world-war 2" white collar jobs came at hand. Because if you aren't professional, you are more ought to sue others and others sue you over petty things, and then you are on a dead cycle, a never ending spiral of death, for replacing unprofessional people to professional people. If its not suing, then people treat hyper pain as a negative energy and as a negative outcome and take immediate strong repercussions out of it. If someone yanks my hand then maybe it is, but if my body signals me a pain over and over again and again while being idle, then maybe that pain is a sign that I should do a corrective action to myself, which represents, a natural response, to a positive outcome? This priority within society is becoming more attentive, as people are giving recently their privacy (even when they want their privacy - I know, that sounds schizophrenic) at the sacrifice of "protecting" themselves. If you didn't notice, we live in a world where every physical body is free to do whatever they want to do "as long" we don't intrude the other physical body in any way is the current paradigm we embrace today as our main religion. "Professionalism" helps us getting more closer to such paradigm (and probably the one in the current world that followed the most today has created the most rational objective technology ever in the world). Due to these practices in labor and life of all sorts, urban areas naturally created an alienated environment to "strangers" because they are "strangers". Only friends and strong acquaintances can speak more freely because there was an element of trust created beforehand, even if that element of trust was not honest, sincere, lack commitment, all due to allow other individual to speak something with greater confidence where in the past you didn't need to go through such forms of loops that required to such extent to create courtship to every individual you meet (A newspaper article recently suggested that customer service jobs with a fake smile over their face within clients brought more workplace organizational problems than without it). In result, we can see such forms of communication can either be expensive or damaging, as if you commit, it needs a lot of time to build a trusting relationship, and if you don't commit, you break your own values and principles when you say something that really didn't mean or do. Furthermore, if society uses these "polite" words as a tool to meet the demands of the current paradigm that was pointed out before, then these words become cheaper and lose meaning as I have described in one of my articles. The most damage of all is that we are inescapable of delving the personal realm if we are not allowed to poke on it, to be driven in this world through a rational bases within ourselves.

We are starting to see emerging trends of rational thought being applied on the internal realm boldly, such as black box thinking, but they are not a true success yet by current society living still with paradigm described in previous paragraph. We can see black box thinking budges in some way pass through "not intrude the other physical body in any way". For indeed intrusion we do in order to make our living compatible not only on what we specialize, our own self and social group, but also to the rest of the world and people. Of course, we are starting to see the tip of the iceberg on this, but at the end of the day, we are reminded that among these insights, customer service and customer experience is the ultimate paradigm within the current context of our business world, that whatever the customer, which represents the individual, is right, and we must carter to his needs. "The customer is never wrong", we say, "and making their life easier they can continue in their leftover time to do what they can do best". I certainly do applaud the innovation of things making our world eliminate tasks to think more abstractly. However, eliminating tasks did not lead to people to make their life more delved to abstract concepts. Instead, it lead life to even more focus on eliminating manual tasks in order to lead a life with more time on entertainment. I don't blame entertainment, as it is a stress reliever, a stress reliever that it wouldn't be required so much if our purpose of our work had more important topics to embrace aside making our life more efficient and effective within our menial routine life. Placing scientific thought as the ultimate paradigm, has made life more inhumane. To elaborate, we ignore the concepts of human behavior to allow every individual do what they want, making individuals focusing on anything they want as a strategy path (even the bad strategies black box thinking discusses about).

However, we have to grasp that secular religion thought did the same thing at that time: Influencing scientific thought to be under religion instead of integrating and balancing religion. Religion was incomprehensible and a mystery at that time, so whatever the natural childish mind was programmed, scientific thought would execute its orders. Of course, the consequences of it were a complete disaster. Scientific thought was used to eliminate people instead of replacing manual labor with automation. The result was the creation of advanced weapons, ships, and tanks for the purpose to wage war. Religion was also used as a form of rationalization, but with an incomplete theory, with results such as treating blacks as slaves and the eugenics program in world war 2. The world wars were devastating and the outcome was to put a freeze on christian secular thought and also the person itself to not poke any more on personal matters except of their own self being. Maybe because of this trauma, people do not want to drive the car of personal transformation in order to experience the same incident happening again.

If we compare secular religion influence, we can see objective science is currently influencing the current personal rationalization in the same way. Here is the epiphany if you haven't seen it: human behavior has been accepted, but it is under the paradigm which anyone cannot interfere with the values of others. For instance, there are a lot of algorithms and concepts that can predict the human behavior needs when the individual is immersed in the external world and identifying his existing habits. Changing their habits into something else that contradicts their existing values for the general good is something the government usually does with tax paying money and private institutions abhors it for there is no profit under such demographics if they followed such campaign. A best example to explain that is by the illustration of smoking manufacturing companies never had any social responsibility on the means of changing the habits of people to less smoke while the government did so  by increasing the taxes of such products and by applying labels of images above the carton package of cigarettes that disturbed instead of bringing pleasure within the mental networks of the act of smoking.

Although this paradigm we live in today's world may seem a futile life, it is not as bad when religions was influencing scientific thought, and that is why many want to still keep it. Before medieval times, we didn't improve our concrete life, we were stuck miles away to a lot of mundane manual labor, and so many disadvantages that if these people instead lived today's life, they would have felt they were given a blessing. Regardless, people feel "too blessed" or too immersed, "too professional", to keep the current paradigm be frozen and in a stall state. People these days want to keep and accept that the human condition is a mystery and we have to live with the existing habits of other people that may not be potent to life. The main reason we avoid this is due to the hyper pain of changing a paradigm shift and that pain is more stronger than ever before as our current paradigm dictates us that  we can assume we have the privilege to play our world in any way we want it to be. The second reason is the recent personal trauma of the childish mindset theories that religion created before the world wars ended. So ultimately, as society is trying to self satisfy themselves as best as they can with the least manual tasks as possible and as the rate of the growth populating is decreasing (especially in developed nations), their expectations of how their life should be is interacting in the social world with other people in order to satisfy their habits and the habits of others without in disregard whether those habits they live or influence whether they are potent or not.

What we have to do is to extend whether those habits are potent or not in a rational way (just like weapons were replaced with inventions that eradicated a lot of manual labor tasks). In other words, to interfere within the personal realm and be a part (along objective rational thought) of the new economic system.

So to put it briefly, historically:
1. The world was void of personal transformation and objective transformation.
2. Objective transformation emerged, but it was under the influence of the void of personal transformation, guided by a childish mindset that created the two huge world wars, the biggest slavery and eugenics program we have ever seen in the world. (Anybody can do anything in here)
3. Objective transformation emerged to automate manual labor (We added a law where we cannot interfere with others individual space)
4. (Currently where we live in) Personal transformation was emerged but it is under the influence (instead of both having a balance of both powers) objective transformation. What we see is people can have any habit they want and they do not have any competitive advantage/disadvantage as they are protected and nurtured of their personal space within the capitalistic world.  What matters is only our skills that bring objective transformation to the desired habits that are currently or expected to be in demand. The economy (supply and demand) is driven by habits of people, or to say, by the capitalistic system, the "invisible hand", the "invisible contract". According to capitalism, human behavior is a mystery and it cannot be explained by rationalization what is and not is a potent habit. Instead, any habit is good. This model is how most current organizations work and are driven by.

If we have to make an analogy with point #2, it is like objective transformation uses personal transformation as a product to itself instead of being a mutual channel exchange of communication. The assumption is personal transformation as we have seen in the past, was childish, is childish (obviously I can't deny), will be childish (that is a wrong statement, it is just an expectation that the personal is impossible to be rationalized). Like in the old times, secular religions thought or assumed that science could not overcome the challenges itself without their "own version" of god's help, so at the same token, science in here concludes that there is nothing beyond the objective realm that can bring order of the personal world (the current paradigm we follow is focus only objectively, do not delve in subjective matters, their "source" is a mystery).  Paradoxes, the objective vs. subjective split,  mysticism are all the "personal products" created within our current paradigm to keep focus on the objective realm only. It is a cognitive dissonance due to being too much immersed on the objective realm.
5. Personal transformation becomes independent and extends itself to influence and add value to the habits of others. For petty stuff (in terms of bad habits), personal development should be encouraged instead of strict punishment so people can have a more corrective action to their self instead of long self serving systems that punished behavior to such extent that motivates people instead to hide their bad habits away instead of being transparent. The value and the quality of the world will be more involved in the internal component instead of the external component, adding quality to the communications and relationships of people.

What science was once upon a time a research and development program that was only funded by the government ended up being part of the capitalistic market manual guide for private companies to emerge wide to accommodate the personal needs of the world.

Similarly, since population is stabilizing and people have longer times to spend on leisure, at one point in the past (like point #4), such personal transformations will not be seen as the ultimate value and will be funded instead only under the influence by the objective world of the old capitalistic systems. However, a some point, people will be in a dead end with their easiness in the way of life it is given to them and instead focus on investing and spending money (yes, literally money, in a sense as much people in medieval days will feel absurd anyone would spend money on education in order to avoid manual labor working on a farm) on "personal transformation innovations" that create a better quality relationship with people. What better this way can be done other than through rationalizing the subjective world the correct way?

And indeed, we do have so many philosophies that discuss about personal transformation. We do have neurology that helps us to see how habits emerge and how they are aligned or misaligned with the environment depending on how we react. Mental Symmetry by Lorin Friesen may be the closest best model so far that can break apart the current paradigm that we breathe to instead a more better one.

I can visualize in the future that something similar or exact to mental symmetry will be the basic mental blocks of basic education that children will learn.

I also assume that there will be a next Facebook, but instead of photos, it will be taking habits of a person, with the ability to scrutinize and praise the habits of an individual through rationalization, such as how we analyze common literature in traditional classes, but in a more profound way with mental symmetry. The point of scrutinizing people will be on the means of correcting people to better modes of thought, scrutiny will be a norm , in such a way, that it will not be felt as a threat or as much punishing as it will be done in a rational manner and done within close proximity of time. The reason for that is because habits take essentially long to be built and wired. If they can be fixed at early stages, the pain will be less to bear and hold. The book revolutionary feedback discusses that specific topic in very detail. Long will be the times "only" praising others with only gut feelings.

I assume the quality of relationships will be improved in an iterative approach as well. Compared to the present world where relationship tools are for dating (mostly for short term and few daring for long term), there will be tools that will create genuine relationships not only for dating, but for friends, acquaintances, and more. How those tools will start is like a bicycle in the first stages and in later stages it can be sophisticated as a bullet train.

This is the glimpse of how the new world people yearn for and want to flock right now, but all of this, I sense it will be a somewhat slow, yet continuous transition.

The solution

So I asked before how can we embrace black box thinking. Similarly, how did science embraced to triumph over religion secular thought? 1. The scientific thought was became wide adopted. 2. Scientific thought added value to the world and when people started to compare which element added better value at their "current situation", scientific thought was the winner (It all comes down to the end - the battle of mental networks - which can triumph over the other). Similarly, if 1. we embrace the model of mental symmetry 2. people understand the difference between the two paradigm shifts the individual has to leap for 3. apply products or services that add value to the personal self, then by all means: people in the "current situation" will prefer to invest or add value to personal rational transformation instead of "objective rational transformation" as there is already plenty of demand for such with few supply within.

There is already a billion dollar entertainment industry that is not the most important thing we need to spend our life. If there is anything more important to spend on, is to spend our time that adds value to personal transformation. I hope my blog and Lorin Friesen mental symmetry may help in the initial starting points for this engine to keep on running more loudly.

Another great thing that will emerge out of this personal transformation (and I think most likely it will be the most beautiful thing in the world) is that for the first time people will work on personal transformation initiatives that they will be in deep "love" on the "content" that it delivers. In to such extent, such work environments, will have less of a split of the objective versus subjective, or in other words, there will be less work on content that does not self fulfill us.

So in conclusion: What do you want to be doing: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" said once Steve Jobs. But here, I do not suggest to change the world, but transform the world into a different paradigm than what it already is. What Steve Jobs did was only shake the existing world, the existing paradigm, such as Mega Alexander did when it conquered a big part of the world. But it is a different set the world that was void of scientific thought (Mega Alexander times) and the one with scientific thought (Steve Jobs times). In a same sense, the world that we live right now is within an implicit personal transformation that will totally be different or a "past of the past" when explicit personal transformation emerges in our world. Both face the same challenge though: We cannot await the people who sell "sugar water" to be social responsible as much as the smoking manufacturing companies did in the past. For that reason, it is all up to us to bring not just a change this time, but a transformation, a challenge that may be the most challenging leap the world will ever make.

We live in a simulation. Assume we create artificial intelligence in our own simulation. Would we want them to live a life that their work routine is more complete or keep them living in a life that their work routine is continually incrementally good, but still incomplete?

It is great that at start we are all born by not having directly the answer to life in a form as a "cheat sheet" where we all type it in our exam sheets, pass the exam, and have no clue what it was all about. No motivation, no understanding, no vision to the matter of topic. If we had directly the key, we wouldn't be able to understand it, but if we find the key ourselves with our own initiative, the more embedded and in faith we are that the key is the path for everything. What can be more exciting? An artificial intelligence that follows rules or an artificial intelligence that figures out the rules through pattern of observation? How can an artificial intelligence have confidence that a rule is and is not followed if that rule was not generated and instead given by hum? And in so, I say that the concepts of mental symmetry alone cannot give immediate faith and confidence to follow. They must be tested, experienced, correlated with other findings (such as I did in my blog). Once you are on a point where you have enough confidence that you can make yourself not feel a sense of loss even if you sail "this ship" in the middle of the ocean in the search of new continents, then definitely you are sure that you are not guided because someone told you, but as a choice of your own self.

I have to be bold that Exhorter Contributor and Facilitator modes are what makes the whole engine run or the pillars that keep us on stand functioning effectively in our daily stuff. A lot of my emphasis on my previous blog posts where about Contributor mode because it seems leadership books focuses a lot basically on that, but Exhorter and Facilitator modes are very critical as part of the start and the end of the contributor process. Exhorter drive is need it in times of peril to bring out new ideas while Facilitator mode is the one that sees the ending and sees the start, the cause and effect, or just to say simply, experimentation. Their observational skills can be a critical point as an intersection to not warp our mind and also to adapt to new information we receive for every step we take on a strategy plan. Regardless, it is topics that I would love to discuss more  

Anyways, I have enough confidence that this path will aid in the progress of personal transformation. If personal transformation through rationalization is educated and applied in the context of social life, workplace, communities, software tools, relationships, it will definitely will make our life more better and richer than it was before.

As my social responsibility, it is a path that I will take and contribute as much as I can, but another important message that I want to share is that it is also a part of all of us that we can and should follow as well such path too, as we all have our own unique strengths and context that can add value others that have missed or didn't have enough time to do. I hope that this is a general draft anyone can start and plan this exciting journey, as there is plenty of space to explore in such field.

I have to also thank Lorin Friesen last 3 big essays he has written recently that give a more clear picture of our current situation. Now that the biggest challenge is fixing the current situation and that is no more than just getting your hands dirty in the mud.

Expect more blogs later (whenever I have the time of course) about discussing in my own point of views about other mental symmetry topics and any initiatives on my journey that can add value on "new things" over existing "things".

Notes
As far me as contributing in such field, I do not have much neurological knowledge as much Lorin Friesen does due to being very work-alcoholic on my past work environments due to peer pressure or due to duty of fulfilling requests of abandoned assets. However, another reason I didn't delve to neurological knowledge was because I am more interested how neurology can apply its concepts to society instead of only how they interact with other modules of the mind and with the body. I have done one neurological class, but it only provided the basis of me knowing how the different 5 senses work within our brain, as well how the basic chemicals can enable or disable neurons. If you wanted to compare with learning a language, it is like we only learned how to pronounce, write letters, and make some words, but lack vocabulary to form some basic full sentences. I also have experience with neurological disorders for several years, such as Parkinson Disease, as one of my close direct relatives had such type of disease. In addition, I know much of human behavior through several fields on my life: My major Business Administration described elements of human behavior from different perspectives within how the current business organizations works. Mental symmetry was probably a thing that I got into the early ages of my adulthood and it was a thing that kept me stuck still ever since. Since it was consistent in so many aspects, I started using it to analyze my work environment, my personal relationships and post it within my blog. I then tried to correlate this theory with three other books: Executive Paradox , Feedback Revolution, Black Box thinking. That was more than enough correlation to feel that this mental symmetry is indeed the real thing. All people come to the same conclusions, yet they don't know that those conclusions are so vital and so important that we must embrace them more than just a book, but as a paradigm, or as a way of life.