How many aliens are among us?
How many humans, while having the visual appearances of standard humans, have an alien, inner-human?
Fortunately, we do have a definition for the "standard" human. Psychologists have come up with Maslow's Ladder of 5 Basic Needs and a list of 5 Basic Emotions: guilt, hate, shame, revenge, love (Source).
However, there must be human emotions and needs that are unnamed and even undiscovered. For I'm skeptical that all these 6 billion humans only have combinations of these short five generalities.
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My recent observations on people have also given me hope that there is an emotional frontier unexplored within ourselves.
Today I was walking through campus during 11AM rush-hour. As I was walking near people, I picked someone out and got a good look at their face. After I passed them by, I then mimicked their expression. Simulating their physical mannerisms also simulated their mood. After my emotions were in sync with my target's, I then tried to label what I was feeling.
After a few attempts, labelling became difficult. The mannerisms I was mimicking and the subsequent feelings I had were foreign to me. I frequently felt this when mimicking girls. The only way I can describe their emotions is as a "floaty sense of tripping over daisies combined with hope, earnestness, and desperation." I can't relate what I was feeling to any previous experience.
I then ceased trying to describe how I felt; my words and their associated connotations were ruining my observations. I tried, instead, to really feel feel their emotions. Instead of simply observing joy, which is just three letters, j-o-y, I tried to traverse the continuous mountain of information packed into the feeling itself.
After walking for five minutes with this perspective, I got the sense that the landscape of emotions out there is diverse and unlike what I've encountered personally. 5 Basic Emotions and 5 Basic Needs felt like an insult to the richness of our inner architecture.
If I were to continue doing this in earnest, my hunch is that I would discover aliens among humans. I would find emotional creatures living inside us as diverse and as strange as the animal kingdom. And when I stumble upon these unfamiliars, the Philosophist will have his fun.
Woah, what does that word mean. Identity crisis? What is your identity? What is identity afterall?
Okay, identity is like the sum of the ornaments that hang on the Christmas tree of your message body that broadcasts unique traits about yourself. Right? Then what is an identity crisis? Is it something more than changing, but rather the shaking of the tree and then the subsequent falling of the ornaments? Or is it rather when the broadcast that you give to yourself feels inauthentic, almost like a simulation or a confused matrix of lies you've lived yourself to be under. Would this must be an affliction common to introverts? I think it would be difficult to just internally broadcast your own identity to yourself without some sort of grain of salt, right? I may think I'm the Adonis Maximus, but if I take a physical mirror and open my eyes, I'll get the accurate body of my identity.
But which is the right identity?
In the film Empire, John Leguizamo says, "See, Women want you to change into something right? But then, when you become that person, they don't like you no more cuz you're no longer the person they fell in love with"
But what is this "person" construct? Who is being fallen in love with? It's not you. It can't be you, you're nothing but another bag of flesh and flash. It can only be your identity, that which you broadcast.
I wonder what life is like to people who present a completely different identity from what they are on the inside.
I know a guy at Stanford who seems to ALWAYS be hiding something. He's always got this look, this shake, this nervousness, this arsenal of half-complete sentences and withheld dreams. Anyways, only me and one other person seem to notice this trait. Everybody else just kind of likes him. He's friendly, nice, solid, etc. Chicks dig him as well sometimes. What's my problem with him, then? What difference does it make? The identity that he's broadcasting stays consistent and he has predictable responses to things.
Is predictability a prerequisite for having an authentic identity?
Okay, well, if you had a changing personality, your identity would be constantly changing it seems, but then you'd have this predictable "changing personality." Probably, most people can't fully escape some basic features of their identity except during puberty or through really traumatic experiences.
But anyways, yeah, people just fall in love with the identity you broadcast.
But, how much of YOU, the YOU you, is actually broadcasted? I bet there are couples who don't have deep conversations. And they're perfectly in love with eachother it seems.
And now, we move on to me.
What was kind of interesting about this whole blogging experience was in revealing identity. After I started blogging like crazy and letting my friends in on it, a couple of times, people were surprised that I had thoughts that ran the gamut of what I post here. In a few instances, people treated me differently after seeing what was on here. I kind of found this confusing, or rather surprising. Almost like a revelation of sorts. See, I had always walked around under the impression that the impression I was giving people was a complete picture of me.... I mean, what other evidence would I have that I wasn't?
Sometimes I walk into rooms with a conception of who I am which is about a googl-sized fruit tree of data, but then if I mentally transport myself into the minds of strangers I'm like, "wow, I'm just ANOTHER kid walking into a room, with x haircut, y clothes, z gait" nothing else.
Maybe that's why people, or at least the landed gentry of times before, placed so much on things like "reputation." Reputation is like a safety for people. It's a back-up copy of your identity floating around in the substrate of people's gossip. Through reputation you can exert a control over the identity that is handed to people. Reputation is strong too because when many people uphold a particular conception of one's reputation, many people just believe it outright based on popular endorsement.
Now, there are people that live out their lives IN their reputations. Their own internal broadcast of identity is confused, even threatened, by the identity of their reputation, of how they are perceived. This curious feature of the human code leads to things like wearing the latest clothing trends, getting that nice house up in the hills, going to a good school, and getting a degree. These trinkets confirm to us that we are truly the identity that our trinkets claim we are.
Which brings me back to Blogging and an interesting thing Chaz told me once. "I love it when my friend's do art, it really reveals so much more about them"
Personal blogging is another personal art of self-expression. What makes this curious is that the depth of my identity in the virtual world, the one of the Internet, is starting to be deeper and more interesting that the depth of my Identity in the real world. I may be jumping to conclusions too fast, but people who have read my blog word for word have so much more insights into what I'm all about than a good portion of my closest friends who don't read it.
Other people may claim, and semi-rightfully so, that they "know me." Sure, they've seen a lot of my visible external behavior, and patterns emerge, and then a judgment about my character is solidified.
But, is my identity just the story-like course of activities I publicly participate in--playing racquetball, telling stupid jokes, eating dinner and being halfway between a socialite and a hermit. Sure, these model my "behavior" that is written on the dynamic of these flesh parts connected to my mind.
But something speaks to me that the closer I am to the source, the closer I am to my real identity.
Writing's a great insight to the mind, but never a complete insight. Even the dialog of my own thoughts are not a completely accurate picture of what's going on. Like I kind of gestured at earlier, my stream of consciousness is influenced by my own prejudices, and will give me a blurry perception of myself.
Then, what becomes real and what becomes virtual? Is my online identity more real than my identity in physical space? Shouldn't real be determined based on what's accurate or as close to what's really there? But what's really there? Everything is kind of a Russian doll sequence of simulated identities within simulated identities.
Anyways, back to blogging and the Internet. The first chapter in the DARPA days laid the groundwork for the technical infrastructure of the Internet. The second chapter was the very rapid commercialization and popularization of that structure with humans who then exploded onto the scene like a deer in the headlights--can you believe it, we're already post-dot-com-boom already?
It's the third chapter now, and this is where things are going to start getting really interesting. I think certain program spaces have only touched the tip of the iceberg. But take something like IM and compare it with walking on the street.
Right now, I can walk around and hit on somebody, and bank on some nice features about my identity that I can broadcast: my nice clothes, lack of bad smell, decent haircut, and generally amicable personality. But online, in IM, I can broadcast a link to my blog, and bam, so much more infinitely interesting information can be transmitted. Now, current IM constructs don't lend themselves, or rather, don't seem designed for identity broadcasting.
Pretty much the only knobs for transmission are your nickname, your away message/status, and this little matchbox space for your profile.
Blogs provide a way for extending that, but it's still in a webpage form. The two need to be melded together such that my identity explodes online in a way that trumps the amount of identity that can be sent in the physical world.
Right now, there are ways to broadcast, but they're all just hacks.
I'm not looking for customizable avatars in everquest or whatever, I'm shooting here for something more unknown. I'm looking for a system that brings out untapped areas of human identity that have never really come to the forefront.
If general happiness is on the x-axis, shouldn't there be a y-axis of how interesting that happiness is?
This is why I got excited one day when I went to weblogs and just kept opening up random blogs. I was like, "Woah! People actually are waking up." The question came into my mind, were these people this interesting before they started blogging? Well, it must have been stored in there somewhere, just never realized, and therefore never manifested into a substance to become part of an observable identity.
I wonder what other "waking ups" have yet to happen, and how much further the human race is going to advance. Fortunately there's popular movies out there like the Matrix that at least attempts to shake people enough to start pursuing topics beyond their usual popcorn life.
Or.. is this decadence? :-)
(from e-mail to Roberto)
Yeah, the West is so ubar-individualized. Everybody gets this feeling of ownership and being. The ego's inflated while as the hyperego is de-flated here in the West.
Of course, it's just an illusion that we are our own selves and composed of only what we make. For me, I can look at every thought I have and I can draw, to some degree, a causation map of things that I've encountered by luck that influenced that thought.
RE :religion, it's hard to form a religion around individuality. Sartre did it, but he's like the only one that I know to do it effectively. Developing a cult of the self, at least in my personal practice, descends one into vanity and egotistical behavior. In addition, it's hard to develop a _sense_ of purpose when everything is all for the raising and glorification of one node. i.e. If your goal is to amass lots of money and achievements, it'll be sad to know that when you're dead, all of those just become vaporware. While as if you see yourself as connected to others as "one" then, then your efforts seem to work for something bigger than yourself. I think most of us have this ascetic trait and so limiting your realm of interest to oneself will lead to unhappiness.
Now, not to say that selfish people don't serve a "purpose" in this world. Every thing serves a purpose, but I think if one is to walk around and be able to say to themselves, "Man, I feel like my life has meaning" then I think it has to extend to things bigger than the self.
In the standard normal curve of people, there are outliers and exceptions. In many cases the exceptional are those that are born with some natural quality that makes them stand out from the norm. Upon being distanced from everybody else, they get used to being extraordinary and develop deeper into uniqueness.
Recently--like this past century--a new kind of exceptional class was born: the average hero. These are born with all features so boringly "normal." Upon crashing into the still water of society, they make no ripple, and subsequently invent ways to compensate. This explains the phenomenon of how easy it is to discover hidden talents and interests in the not-ugly people of large cities. (those in small town lack the social pressure to gain attention).
Now, with the Singularity and all, I would like to define a new kind of exceptional person. A super-exceptional person would be one who was symed with qualities that are two standard deviations above the norm. This person would be beautiful, interesting enough, physically fit, emotionally stable, etc. If this person, despite all of that, could spontaneously develop a desire to become unique and to stand out, that would be truly exceptional. This would help break the "misfit" look that has now become commonplace in the "sophisticated" circles of youth.
Killing Banality(TM), the new fragrance from the 21st Century.