Authentic Living and Irrational Fear

I firmly believe that in order for me to live happily and with satisfaction, I need two things. First, to live with complete authenticity. Secondly, to systematically remove all illogical fear from my life.  This allows me to live the life that I design for myself instead of accepting what things with seemingly no control.

Let me describe what I mean by living with complete authenticity.  I think that there are four types of knowledge:

1. What you know that you know
2. What you know that you don’t know
3. What you don’t know that you know.
1. I.E. Although today you may say that you don’t know X, when put in a situation that required it, you would figure it out.
4. What you don’t know that you don’t know.

I think the first three are fairly obvious and self explanatory.  The final piece, “What you don’t know that you don’t know” is really the most life altering.  Essentially what it means is that everyone thinks that they are acting rationally, when in reality they are making decisions based on incomplete data.  

I imagine it to be a world where everyone is walking around with binoculars strapped to their heads.  However, they don’t know that they are wearing them.  They are viewing what they think is the complete world and making what they think are logical decisions based on this perception.  In reality though, they are only able to view a very small percentage of what’s going on around them.  I think that this explains why so often people who are good natured and have positive intentions disagree so vehemently over topics that they think are obvious.

The first step, in my opinion, of freeing yourself from your self imposed shackles and having complete mental control is acknowledging this principle.  No matter how hard you try, you are acting on incomplete data, and you don’t even know what data you are missing.  So is everyone else around you.  This creates many self imposed boundaries and irrational fears that everyone lives by.

In order to understand human nature and irrational, you need to look at evolution.  We evolved from apes who evolved from lesser creatures.  Even within the last 10,000 years of human existence our society and general livelihoods have changed beyond recognition.  Hunter gatherers had to legitimately worry about being eaten by larger and stronger predators.  Our limbic system, which controls our fear response, has evolved to be rather adept at responding to these threats.  We have a fight or flight for a reason.    If we didn’t fight or run, we would die.  

That is no longer the case.  We don’t live day to day with existential threats that legitimately threaten our lives.  Our limbic system which has evolved over millions of years can not re-evolve so quickly to accommodate this.  This means that our brains take things that previously would not have caused a reaction and created a fight or flight response.  Some people become non-confrontational, while others get angry and irate.  Obviously, there are still things today that require this type of emotional response.  With that being said, the vast majority of our fight or flight responses are irrational - ie. if our limbic system had evolved for today’s threats, it would not react.

The brain is essentially a massive biological computer.  On a micro and macro level the brain has feedback loops that help it process information.  On a micro level, an irrational fear can be created from an unexpected misunderstood reaction.  This reinforces the fear and makes it more prominent the next time.

These fears create cycles in our subconscious that directly affect how we perceive the world around us.  They essentially determine what type of binoculars that you are viewing the world through.  All perception - interactions with others, general day to day events, and even how things have panned out over time - is tinted through this way of perceiving the world.

For me to live with complete authenticity, I had to first accept the fact that I didn’t know what I didn’t know much of what was going around me.  Sounds simple, but to truly integrate that into my personal philosophy was difficult.  I found it was one of those ideas that made me very uncomfortable to consider.  However, you eventually have an “aha” moment the more you think about it.  

Once I understood that principle, I needed to understand the “tint of my binoculars.”  How were my conscious and subconscious fears altering my perception of the reality around me?  I found that many decisions that I made at that point in my life were rash.  I don’t regret them, but they had major life consequences.

Today I understand that part of being human is never knowing what you want to be when you grow up.  As soon as you decide on something, you learn more about yourself and the world around you (the what you didn’t know that you didn’t know).  This creates a life that requires living in constant ambiguity.  I think the trick to life, is learning how to be ok with this lack of ultimate control, while realizing what you actually have control over.

The Essence of Intelligence

I believe that one major problem of the neuroscience community is the lack of an overlying theory that is capable of making sense of the brain. It's obvious that our brain in incredibly complicated, and it is the basis for intelligence. I think that understanding intelligence is essential to understanding the complexities of the brain, what its function in, and why it operates in the manor it does.

I've talked to a lot of people who believe that intelligence is relative, and that depending on the way you measure it, people are more or less intelligent. This does not make any sense and it stems from the fact that I do not think that we have clearly defined what intelligence is and how to measure it. This is illustrated in the study of artificial intelligence, where researchers essentially try to make computers "smart." They have succeeded at making their machine better at the assigned task, but we have yet to see a machine that would be classified as intelligent. A uniting theory is essential to advancing technology and our current understanding of the brain.

I have been thinking about this problem, and I believe that there are four requirements to intelligent beings - whether living or non-living.

1. Necessity to survive, driven by a need to reproduce (I could foresee non biological intelligent beings not having a need to reproduce).
2. Ability to receive consistent inputs from the environment automatically (ie - have sensory systems)
3. Ability to store information
4. Ability to use stored information to predict future outcomes. In other words, the ability to recognize patterns in the past knowledge and be able to analyze current input information for these similar patterns.

Pattern recognition is really the basis for all intelligence. The better someone is at recognizing patterns from all of their sensory inputs, the better they will be at predicting future outcomes when they recognize similar patterns in their current environment. The need for survival is creates a drive to interact in the world and a drive to become the most adapted to your environment. This can only happen by getting "smarter." The necessity for sensory input arises because knowledge of ones environment is essential to being otherwise the being will have no basis of information for which they can detect patterns and no way applying these patterns to the current environmental situation (because they can't tell what the current environment really is).

Essentially intelligence stems from your interaction with the environment, and beings that have no way to receive sensory input - whether tactile or sensory - cannot be intelligent. You can clearly trace the rise of intelligence through the phyla as organisms gain better sensory systems and adaptation techniques.